By Jennifer Cooper, Assistant Director for Advising Professional Development
Much of what we read about wellbeing points us inward with questions like
- “How do I get well?”
- “How do I find balance?” or
- "How do I find happiness?”
While these questions are important, they don’t always paint the whole picture of what it means to flourish.
Flourishing exists on a continuum that shifts and changes as life and our communities change around us. The relational understanding of wellbeing or flourishing has important implications for advising and mentoring practices, and it positions advisors and mentors as contributors to wellbeing, not just supporters of it. It challenges us to consider student wellbeing as something that’s built between people rather than achieved alone.
What Does It Mean to Flourish?
Researchers in positive psychology, including Tyler VanderWeele and colleagues at Harvard’s Human Flourishing Program, have converged on a multidimensional view built around six domains. These six domains can be a careful way for advisors to check with students, and ask questions.
Happiness and life satisfaction
When a person experiences happiness or satisfaction over a period of time, they tend to view their trajectory of their life positively.
In an advising context, this shows up when we pay attention to how a student is feeling. Do they feel a sense of purpose and enjoyment behind their major and their coursework? Why? Does their life off campus contribute to their wellbeing so that they can feel engaged, connected and fulfilled during their academic journey?
Mental and physical health
Mental and physical health are deeply intertwined into flourishment—sometimes at the expense of other dimensions of wellbeing.
When a student is dealing with anxiety, a chronic illness, or exhaustion from overnight shifts, they are often not starting from the same place of wellness as students who aren’t facing these challenges.
Advising conversations can either ignore or consider that context when addressing student’s wellbeing, asking questions to listen and support students’ mental and physical health.
Meaning and purpose
While more abstract than the other domains, meaning and purpose is foundational to flourishing. When a student links a major, a course, or an experience outside the classroom to something bigger than their grade, they discover meaning and purpose.
An advisor can ask questions about the person they want to become or what they genuinely care about and connect students to meaningful experiences on or off campus like clubs, organizations, experiential learning, etc.
Character and virtue
Honesty, resilience, integrity, compassion, gratitude, and hope develop through challenges and relationships.
Advisors are often present at moments when a student realizes how they’ve grown. Reflecting on that growth with a student can be a powerful reminder on how they’ve adapted and persevered through their experiences.
Close social relationships
Loneliness is a well-reported issue on college campuses. Students who feel disconnected from peers, faculty, and mentors struggle to flourish regardless of how well they’re doing academically.
For many students, an advisor is a consistent relationship on campus who genuinely cares about how they are doing. Making this connection clear during your first advising appointment is plants important seed that support students when they struggle to find meaningful relationships and belonging—on or off campus.
Financial stability
Financial security, debt, and economic hardship shape the sustainability of a person’s wellbeing and flourishing.
Students who experience food or housing insecurity or work multiple jobs are trying to flourish within a fundamentally different set of conditions than their peers. Acknowledging this is part of seeing them as a whole person.
As an advisor, a deep familiarity with the financial resources available on campus is critical for effective referrals and in supporting our students to flourish.
Consider which of these six domains you frequently discuss with students, and which ones rarely come up—not because they don’t matter, but perhaps students may feel uncomfortable bringing them up. That gap deserves attention, too.
What Sustains You?
It’s worth turning the question to yourself for a moment.
Using the six domains above as a guide, what are two or three small behaviors or practices that sustain your own sense of flourishing? And what is one factor that makes those practices harder to maintain?
This simple exercise that can help advisors and mentors identify the roots of their own flourishing and better notice what helps or hinders flourishing in our students, colleagues, and even our communities. Learn more about flourishing and take the flourishing measure.
Practical Strategies for Advising Conversations
Moving from theory to practice, four evidence-based strategies stand out.
- Use strength–based language. Before addressing a problem, start with reflections on what is working well. This is not about being superficial or avoiding challenges; it’s about shifting the conversations from a deficit-based to asset-based framing. It can affect how a student hears and internalizes everything that follows.
- Normalize challenges. Helping students understand that struggling can be natural in life, and help is available. This can reduce the sense of isolation that comes with difficulty.
- Help students articulate meaning. When a student says, “I don’t know why I’m here,” it’s an opening for conversation. Try asking questions that explore what they care about or are passionate about. What has brought them joy in the past and how can they seek it out?
- Make warm referrals with a name. There’s a real difference between recommending the counseling center and offering to personally introduce them to someone who works in the counseling center. Relationship continuity matters, especially for students who are hesitant to seek help on their own.
From Personal to Relational
Flourishing isn’t something we achieve individually. Our health, our sense of happiness, our sense of meaning are all shaped by the conditions of the communities that we live in.
Social isolation has measurable consequences to our health. Economic inequality can predict health outcomes across entire populations. The neighborhood someone grows up in can shape life expectancy.
What this means for advisors is significant: we are not just serving individual students in isolation. We’re working at the intersection of individual lives and systemic conditions.
Some of the collective pathways through which people flourish include:
- Family stability, parenting, and social connectedness relate to health, happiness, character, meaning and even financial wellbeing.
- Work settings, workplace culture, and job conditions shape health, meaning, satisfaction, and productivity.
- Education and educational attainment shape long-term health and wellbeing. A student’s sense of connection while in school is itself a marker of successful outcomes.
- Religious or spiritual community offer shared practice, relationships, and meaning making, which have longitudinal ties to health and flourishing.
Flourishing isn’t something accomplished alone. It’s built into the quality of our attention, in our willingness to ask questions, to stay curious about the individual in front of us, and to see a student’s wellbeing as connected to the wellbeing of the community around them.
This post draws on the work of Tyler VanderWeele (2017) on the promotion of human flourishing, and the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's "Domains and Pathways" framework.