What does it cost us, and the people around us, when we reduce them to a role, a record, or a data point? Drawing on a physician’s powerful story of reckoning, this session invites faculty, staff, and administrators to reflect on the quality of presence they bring to every encounter with students, and with each other. Through narrative, guided reflection, and small-group dialogue, participants will explore the difference between transactional interactions and transformational relationships, and leave with one concrete practice to carry into their very next conversation. The session is grounded in UDM’s values of compassion, dignity, and service. 

Learning Objectives: 1. Articulate the parallel between systems-driven encounters in healthcare and the transactional interactions that can occur in higher education, with students and with colleagues. 2. Distinguish between transactional interactions and transformational relationships, and reflect on moments in their own practice when a genuine connection changed an outcome. 3. Identify at least one concrete practice – a question, a pause, a shift in presence – to carry into their next student or colleague encounter. 4. Reconnect with the relational dimension of their role at UDM, in alignment with our shared Mercy and Jesuit values of seeing and serving the whole person.

Presenter: Yvonne King