Delay and a prayer
A lot of things were happening last week both at work and here in Hive world. And I was trying to find examples of the precise things I had as Kindness prompts. Overall this delayed the post. I am not too miffed at myself though, both because I am trying a lot to be less demanding of myself, and also because I did feel more kinder through the week. So @gregscloud's main aim to have people be kind with purpose and be kind to themselves were both met. Hat-tip to Greg for making this week happen and looking forward to what more we can do with the Kindness community.
Do join up with us and let us together try to create our own corner of a kinder world.
Day 4 - send a handwritten thank you note
This one stumped me up a bit. I do give thank you to people all the time, but almost entirely it is on apps (both in office and in personal lives), and in person. Never a hand written one, at least not since my childhood. I ended up working out a way which felt true to the spirit of the challenge. I wrote a note in a notebook, took a photo of it in my phone and then sent it to my friend who has been very helpful to me without even my asking. Just the fact that he is a swell person helping everyone has helped me immensely.
Positive reflection
It does take me a moment to write on paper. Sitting at the table with no electronics around and writing with pen on paper did feel like I was paying attention to what I write. Now I don't want to feel like I don't mean it when I write online, cause I know I feel every word I type. However there is something to be said for the tactile sense. It reminded my of thank you and sorry cards we used to make or buy when we were kids. It feels purposeful. I can see the value of that and will try and do it more often.
Negative reflection
This was something different from how I do things. The simplest might have been to write thank you notes to family. And I probably will do it in future. However at this moment I overthought it and felt that if I do it now during the challenge it will feel like I am doing it for hitting a day goal rather than from my heart. Yes, I do live a lot within my mind. Now instead of fighting with that mindset the way I normally would, I took @gregscloud's advice to be kind to myself and decided to write thank you to whoever I feel comfortable will not see it in that light. But the condition to myself is that I WILL write thank you notes to everyone I wanted to, even if it takes time.
Day 5 - Compliment someone to their boss
I did not get a lot of opportunity for it this week as I have been working from home with very less interaction. So I did compliment the delivery person in my feedback. But I don't consider this as the action done. I do compliment people at office to their bosses but will try and be more cognizant of doing that. I will have to leave this action unfinished for now. But having done it before this is one that I am sure I will do soon.
Day 5 alternate - be kind to family
So instead of doing that action I took up an alternate one. Typically when somethings upsets family members with each other, and I can see it is a simple misunderstanding I tend to get heated a why they cannot see this simple thing and instead are passive aggressive about it. Last weekend something came up and I surprised myself by not trying to solve the issue but rather just calming things down. I am happy I did not get riled up and make the situation worse, and also happy that the simple matter got resolved soon.
I attribute this change in my behavior to the idea of kindness being at top of my head thanks to this challenge
Day 6 - Spread kindness on Social Media
I had zero clue about this one till I sat down to write this post today. Interestingly, on reflection, I think my avatar on social media has been kind this month. I know it is easy to be kind here on Hive within your community and tribe. I am talking about being kind in the big bad world of Twitter :D
Well I exaggerate. The actual toxic crowd of Twitter I just block them immediately.
In this case there was a fun Classic Rock knockout polling happening there for about 152 songs and there was a lot of good natured ribbing each other over the voting. Some were a bit trollish, and normally would have triggered me. However this week I answered them with more kindness than snarkiness. I know, I know, a lot of you might think that I am getting emotional about nothing. And I would have actually not even thought of it. But this conscious thinking of kindness every single day seems to be paying off. Maybe, just maybe, Internet can be a sweet place :)
Done's Done
That was an interesting week for me. There was one more day - to buy coffee for a colleague. I did not have the opportunity this week but I will do it for sure sometime in the coming days. Overall it was a fun challenge to do, and it will be interesting to see how the community progresses. It would be great if a lot of us join in and take advantage of the data Greg has collected around Kindness and each become a beacon of kindness in their pocket of this universe.
Learnings.
- At times I thought I know how to do this as it has been part of my daily routine. I realized that I was polite, sure. But not consciously kind. That did make a difference, to oneself. As I did not get any of the benefits of being kind as I was not aware I was being kind. It was a just an automatic thing.
- At other times I felt I could not do it, and all the kindness talk I am doing is just for show. 101 imposter feeling, essentially. Managed to claw out of that by involved in multiple initiatives and letting people I was interacting with give me feedback rather than listen to my own critical self. Also kept repeating Greg's advic of "Be Kind to yourself"
- I joined in because I have believed in power of positivity even though I have been cynical too. I was listening to @taskmaster4450 in his podcast, and he highlighted that on the whole no negative person can every rise to the top of anything (I paraphrase him here) Positivity seems to be a common trait among achievers. The second reason for joining was Greg and his passion around the subject. So my entire takeaway was just going to be that being kind is possible and it is good . Just that, no big surprises. So imagine my surprise while thinking about the week, that it does seem to have made life just a bit more easy to live, by being kind. I don't remember changing my behavior to be kind or anything. But I guess just the thought, and the fact that most of us are generally polite, made some changes in my character happen.
Next
Will see how we can help make the Kindness community more active. Will also work on some kind of process or framework for myself with help from @gregscloud.
Feel free to join the Kindness community everyone.
Update: In the comments below @olujay left a very beautiful one which reminded me of the word I kept forgetting when writing this post. And the word was the key learning for me this week. The word being "intentionality This week was all about that intentionality and that made all the difference for me.
Sources:
- All images are generated by AI created by me using Open.Ai (Dall-E)