Celebrating “What Matters to You?” Month
It looks almost too simple to matter: “What matters to you?”
Four words. And yet, in senior living, those four words quietly do some of the heaviest lifting in care — for residents, for families, and for the teams who serve them. This June, Guide Path is celebrating What Matters to You Month: a global movement now recognized around the world, and a practice we believe belongs at the center of senior living.
We kicked the month off on June 3rd with a live webinar in honor of What Matters to You Day, and it was everything we hoped — interactive, honest, and full of the kind of questions that show people are ready to actually do this work, not just admire it. Now the conversation continues all month long. So whether you joined us live or you’re discovering this for the first time, here’s what the movement is, why it matters, and how your community can begin.
A movement decades in the making
The history of “What Matters to You?” isn’t trivia — it’s the proof. This question didn’t come from a marketing department. It came from clinicians and researchers who kept running into the same wall: care that was technically correct, and yet somehow missed the person in the bed.
For most of modern medicine, the organizing question was “What’s the matter with you?” That’s the diagnostic question — find the problem, fix the problem. It’s necessary. But notice what it does: it makes the clinician the expert and the patient the puzzle. The person’s own goals, fears, and values sit outside the frame.
Here’s how the shift happened:
2012 — A reversal in four words. Writing in The New England Journal of Medicine, clinicians Michael Barry and Susan Edgman-Levitan argued for adding a second question to care: not only “What is the matter?” but also “What matters to you?” It sounds small. It’s actually a reversal — it moves the person from the object of care to a partner in it. That single reframe is the seed of everything that follows.
2014 — Norway makes it real. A good idea dies without practice. Norway took the concept and operationalized it, launching the first “What Matters to You?” Day — a shared day when teams actually practice asking the question out loud. An idea became a habit you could schedule. That’s the moment it stopped being a journal article and started being a movement.
2018 — It crosses borders. The practice spread to more than 49 countries. Different languages, different health systems, the same four words. When something travels that far that fast, it’s usually because it solves a problem everyone has — and the problem everyone has is people feeling unseen inside their own care.
2022 — It becomes structural. This is the milestone we’d underline for senior living. “What Matters” became one of the four core elements — the 4Ms — of Age-Friendly Health Systems, standing alongside Medication, Mentation, and Mobility. “What matters” is now named in the same breath as medication and mobility. It is no longer the nice extra. It is a recognized pillar of good care for older adults.
2025 — Lasting infrastructure. The Beryl Institute — a major hub for patient and human experience — formally backed the global movement, in collaboration with WMTY.world. That’s the point where grassroots energy turns into something durable: shared tools, a global day, and a common language teams everywhere can pull from.
When someone in your building asks, “isn’t this just a nice question?” — here’s the answer. It’s a thirteen-year arc, across 49-plus countries, now built into the recognized standard for age-friendly care. It earned its place.
Ask. Listen. Do.
As the movement grew, leaders flagged a real danger: if “what matters to you?” became only a nice question, it could turn into performative empathy — asked, but never acted on. So the discipline became three parts.
Ask — pose the question with genuine intent, not as a checkbox on a form. People can tell the difference instantly.
Listen — for meaning, not just tasks. Hear what the person is really telling you underneath the words.
Do — act on what you heard, and close the loop. The follow-through is the respect.
One line is worth sitting with: a question asked without follow-through is worse than not asking at all. Because now you’ve signaled you care — and then shown them you don’t. That’s exactly where trust breaks.
Why it belongs in senior living
Senior living may be the single setting where routine most easily overshadows the person. Schedules, med passes, care plans, regulatory rhythms — all necessary, and all capable of quietly crowding out the individual at the center of it.
That’s exactly why this question matters here more than almost anywhere. For residents and families, what matters usually shows up as identity, independence, safety, dignity, family dynamics, and the fear
of loss. Surface those early, and you build trust. Miss them, and they don’t disappear — they resurface later as frustration, complaints, and conflict.
Which leads to the part of this we care about most.
What matters is also a risk strategy
Across decades of working with senior living communities on their hardest days — after an incident, after a complaint, after something went sideways and a family felt unheard — one pattern shows up again and again: the cases that turn into claims almost never start with a clinical failure. They start with a relationship that drifted — an expectation no one named, a conversation that didn’t happen.
That’s why we frame this not as a feel-good idea, but as one of the strongest preventive tools a community has. The strategy is straightforward:
Surface what families are actually expecting — early, while you still can.
Align while there’s still room, setting honest, realistic understandings of what care will and won’t look like.
Document the conversation, so the alignment is shared, not just remembered.
Say it as a principle: expectation management is risk management. The conversation you have at admission is the claim you may never have to defend. Kindness and risk mitigation turn out to be the same practice.
Asking well is a skill — not a script
Here’s the honest part. Staff often find this question “too big,” even risky. They worry it will raise expectations they can’t meet. The research backs this up: when teams use WMTY in real life, they feel genuine tension between task-focused goals and meaning-focused goals, especially under time pressure during transitions.
But that fear isn’t a reason to skip the question. It’s exactly why framing and training matter — and it’s where Guide Path earns its place. We don’t treat the hardest parts of this work — the communication, the relationships, the conversations under pressure — as things you either have a knack for, or you don’t. We treat them as skills. Teachable, repeatable, trainable skills. We give teams the framing, the language, and the confidence to ask the question well, so it strengthens the relationship instead of straining it.
And don’t forget to turn the question inward. Ask your teams: “What gets in the way of your best work?” and “What would change your day?” — then do something with the answer. Empathic leadership isn’t a soft perk; it’s an operational strategy. Respected staff stay, care steadies, and risk drops.
How to begin in your community
You don’t need to invent this. You need a simple, repeatable rhythm and a few moments to anchor it. Start with the five moments where alignment is most fragile:
Admission and move-in — “What matters most to you and your family in this transition?”
A change in condition — “What matters most right now as we plan next steps together?”
After a fall or incident — “What matters most as we stabilize and move forward?”
A hospital return — “What matters most to you as you settle back in?”
Goals of care and end-of-life — “What matters most in this next season of care?”
Notice the question barely changes. What changes is that you return to it, on purpose, exactly when emotion is highest and misunderstanding is most likely. It’s a practice you come back to — not a one-time intake form.
Join us all month: Voices of What Matters + the WMTY Challenge
The webinar was the kickoff, not the finish line. All June, our Voices of What Matters series is sharing the real moments — from residents, families, and care teams — where four words shifted a relationship, a care plan, or a whole culture.
And we’re inviting you to take part. Through the What Matters to You? Challenge, collect responses to the question from your team, your residents, and their families — videos, posters, cards, get creative — and send them in by June 24th. We’ll celebrate the teams doing the work, and five communities will win a pizza party.
Guide Path offers training that treats WMTY as a skill across resident, family, and workforce communication — including the full history primer, a guide to the moments that matter most, and practical implementation tools your teams can put to work right away.
“What matters to you?” is four words. Asked well — with genuine intent, real listening, and honest follow-through — it builds trust, steadies care, and prevents the misalignment that becomes conflict down the road. It’s the most human thing we do, and one of the smartest.
Want to bring it to your community?
Visit GuidePathLLC.com or message us — we’d love to hear what your community comes up with.
