Dignity Stories

By Tom Rosshirt | Chief Strategist & Director of Research, Dignity.Us

The most popular segment in our last few Dignity Index workshops has been the session led by Karren Pyfer on telling Dignity Stories. We all love this part of the work.

“Dignity stories” is a tradition that Tim Shriver pioneered years ago in our staff meetings, always asking us at the start, “Does anyone have a dignity story to share?”

What is a Dignity Story—and how does it differ from an ordinary story?

We could debate this all day (and we probably will!), but I’m going to argue that a first-rate dignity story has three elements. The first is “intimacy.” The storyteller is opening up, sharing something personal. It may border on saying: “Here is something I don’t want you to know about me.” That level of intimacy commands attention and sympathy.  

The second element is “change”—the story relates an event that changed the storyteller, or changed the course of their life, or at least changed the moment. The third element is the moral of the story. In a good dignity story, the moral of the story is almost always a version of: “contempt tears us apart, but dignity can bring us together.”

That’s the lesson in most every dignity story.  

Left to Right: Tom Rosshirt, Manu Meel (CEO of BridgeUSA), Marianne Viray (Disagree Better)

A few weeks ago, Marianne Viray, a good friend who now runs Disagree Better for Governor Spencer Cox, told me about the book “Awe” by Dacher Keltner.

Keltner is one of the world’s foremost researchers into the science of emotions, and he has done deep work on the experience of Awe, which he defines as “being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.”

In Keltner’s research, he asked 2600 people—100 people each from 26 different countries—to write about an experience of awe. Keltner and his colleagues identified different experiences of awe, and ranked them by frequency.  

What was the number one cause of awe? It wasn’t nature or spiritual practice or physical beauty or listening to music. “It was,” Keltner said, “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. Around the world we are most likely to feel awe when moved by moral beauty.”

Moral beauty.  

What an exquisite phrase. I take it as a synonym for the act of honoring human dignity—treating another human being as valuable, precious, indispensable and irreplaceable, especially when it is difficult to do so. This gives us a mark and measure of the great dignity stories: They induce awe.  

Our Dignity.Us colleagues Stephanie Wallace and Haley Talbot have launched “Dignity Stories”—a campaign to get people to see the dignity stories in their lives, in the news, even in history—and send them in to us. We see two great benefits: 1) Looking for dignity stories helps us keep dignity and contempt top of mind; and 2) Telling the stories deepens the lesson that contempt can split us in two, but dignity can make us whole.

Please join us by sharing your dignity stories. Now, when we say at the start of a staff meeting: “Does anyone have a dignity story to share?” we mean you too!  

In closing, let me share a dignity story that changed history. It leaves me in awe every time.

When Desmond Tutu died, a number of the news articles announcing his death recalled his story of the time he was nine years old, walking down the sidewalk with his mother in his native South Africa. In those days of apartheid, if a White person approached from the other direction, Black people were expected to step into the gutter to let the White person pass and then nod their heads as a gesture of respect. On this day, however, the young Tutu and his mother were approached by a White man who stepped off the sidewalk to allow them to pass, and then tipped his hat as a gesture of respect to them as they walked by. This was the opposite of everything the young Desmond was used to, and the bewildered future archbishop of Cape Town looked to his mother for an explanation.  She knew the White man, and she said to her son: “He is an Anglican priest and a man of God.” At that moment, which Tutu later called “the defining moment of my life,” he said to his mother, “I want to be an Anglican priest and a man of God.”

Tom Rosshirt

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Watch Emily’s Dignity Story

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Several of our team members were in Salt Lake City last week, leading a 2-day workshop about both learning, and preparing to share the Dignity Index with others. The training was a deep dive into the Dignity Index, including exercises and tools to facilitate sharing the Index with others.

We brought along a film crew to capture certain elements of the workshop along with interviews with our team and others—-all things we will be using to build more robust online resources for the growing dignity movement! We can't wait to share!

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When Tom, Tami, Madeleine and Alicia headed to the University of Notre Dame last week, it was a reunion of sorts. Tom, a Notre Dame Class of '81 philosophy major, met up with long-time mentors and friends, including Notre Dame President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., President Emeritus Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., and Vice President and Chief of Staff Ann Firth. While there, the team was thrilled to deliver Dignity Index sessions to a variety of campus audiences.

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Alicia headed to Charlottesville, Virginia, in September to meet and share the Dignity Index with a group of Travelers Insurance leaders and partners. The two-day leadership session, led by Adrian Stewart, VP and National Practice Lead for Travelers Public Sector Services, included a great discussion on the Dignity Index—and a bonus for Alicia, who was invited to participate in their culinary experience in Virginia wine country.

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