The advice they leave behind

The part of our belonging work that moves me most is also the simplest. After new students had read the senior students' stories and reflected on their own lives, we asked them to do one more thing: write some advice for the first-years who would come after them.

There is good reason for that step. Researchers who design these brief, wise interventions have found that people often take a message to heart more deeply when they explain it to someone else than when they simply receive it. Joshua Aronson and his colleagues used this idea when they asked students to write to younger students about how intelligence can grow. Saying it, it seems, helps us believe it. A student who writes that it is normal to ask for help, or that there is more than one way to succeed, is also telling themselves.

The member who was welcomed becomes the one who welcomes.

But I think something else happens too. The moment you write advice for the next person, you stop being only a newcomer. You become someone with something to give. You join a chain of people who went before you and people who will come after, and that is a deep kind of belonging.

I see the same pattern in every healthy community I know. The member who was welcomed becomes the one who welcomes. The person who was helped through a hard season becomes the one who notices someone else in it. Communities that last are the ones that make room for this, and that invite newcomers to give long before they feel like experts.

So here is a small practice for any group you lead. Every so often, ask the people who joined most recently what they wish they had known when they arrived, and pass it on to the next ones. You will learn a great deal about your community. And the people who answer will discover that they belong in it more than they knew.

Dr Alten du PlessisFounder, BelongWell4Life

Further reading: Aronson, Fried and Good (2002), Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: doi.org/10.1006/jesp.2001.1491; Du Plessis et al. (2024), WEEF-GEDC, IEEE.

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