The Warm Glow of Success and Empathy
By W. Owen Thornton
Human kindness needs to be practiced regularly and top-most in our daily actions. Here are two things to remember when promoting kindness in the world around you.
#1. Continually practice acts of kindness. In 1972, Isen and Leven studied the effects of what would happen to someone if they randomly did or didn't find a dime in a phone booth. Really, just finding a dime in phone booth makes people kinder? (well it's 50 cents today, I guess.) In the study people did or didn't find a dime in the coin return slot. When they turned around a co-conspirator of the test dropped papers in front of them. Of the 14 who found the dime, 12 stopped to help. Of the 25 who did not find a dime, only 1 stopped to help. Acts of kindness, like opening doors and helping others who are short change at parking meters need to be regular occurances of you hope to make the world a kinder place around you.
#2. Take a deep breath upon your initial reaction and then lead with empathy. In a workplace an employee with a bad back was standing at her desk. She could work this way in comfort, but NOT while sitting down. I get the boss's response to this "standing at the desk" act. They responded negatively because the boss had a vision of what was right ... and what was right is that people sit when they work. And so, the thoughtful, back-hurting employee was chastised for standing. The response produced an unfortunate moment in the workplace. The employee thought they were being clever and dedicated to their employer and was instead made to feel bad for being productive. Later when the employee had a chance to explain, the boss apologized. The better response? Ask why the employee is standing. It could have been that the chair was uncomfortable. Or, better yet, because the boss takes time to get to know their employees just a little, (through little human kindness moments once a week) s/he already knew that the employee suffers from a bad back from time-to-time and could have asked, "Back acting up again? Is there anything I can do to help? Are you all right to work like that?"
Human kindness takes such little effort and yeilds such large rewards. It's often not the salary we pay people that keeps them happy ... if we're within range employers are usually seen as reasonable ... it's being treated as a human being (again within reason) that goes a long way in making a happy, dedicated employee.
Dream Paths
Human Kindness: Dream-Paths
By W. Owen Thornton
I’d like to write about human kindness and dream-paths. To practice human kindness upon yourself when you have a dream means you need to do that which you can to fulfill your dream, naturally. Dreams come with plans … stages that you can manage meaningfully. If your dream looks like an elephant, you don’t try to eat it all at once. It’s too big and you’ll risk frustrating yourself and then giving up on your dream. Better to break a dream down into bits and pieces. The old adage is that the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time … where each bite represents a planned stage with a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, reality-based and timed (SMART). So writing a 20-page chapter in a week by spending the first hour of your day writing each and every day is good, while: thinking you can write a full 300-page novel in a month isn’t … unless you’re Stephen King that is (most people don’t write nearly that fast and many prize-winning novels take authors upwards of a decade (so don’t give up your day job, eh?)). But even then, it’s hard to know how to plan SMART stages for your dream.
For example, when you enter a dream area, you’re not educated or skilled in attaining it. You could talk to people who’ve achieved your dream for themselves and you can learn how they made it. You can take non-credit courses from experts at community colleges or through library programs. Learn what it’s like to “BE” someone who is attaining that kind of dream. Discover what skills or qualities others suggest you require in order to reach your dream. If you want stability and a family in your life, then the solitary life of a roving, starving actor may simply be outside of your character. The Brad Pitts and the Angelina Jolie’s of this world are exceedingly rare. Find a way to be realistic with your dreams. Maybe you can get a job during the day that you can tolerate and that can put food on the table while you work with a volunteer theatre company in your area. No company like that around where you are? Maybe you should start one! But if you learn that you may not like the sacrifices required of you in order to make it, your dream is nothing more than a passing fancy. Sacrifices for dreams should be the kind of thing you don’t even notice. So you take ten years before you write your best seller and an interviewer asks you if you disliked the years you spent alone in your writer’s garret and you look at them and say, “Huh! I never even noticed. I’m kind of a loner anyways. There’s nothing I love more than writing down the things about the world that I observe but feel powerless to change. But in my writing, my characters can do anything.”
Dreams come at the expense of about 10,000 hours of time before you become an expert in … anything. Before the Beatles came to North America to take the world by storm, they had gigs in German bars where they played music, performing before a crowd, eight hours a day … in many cases seven days a week. Eight times seven days equals 56 hours/week. Therefore in order to gain the 10,000 hours of expertise that most people agree is required of someone before they’ll become an expert at any task, would take 179 weeks or 3.5 years of work doing at a 56 hour/week pace. If you love what you’re doing, you can sock away the hours much faster than that. It is thought that Bill Gates and a few other fellows in his computer classes would go to school all day and work all night at programming things. Stories abound of Gates working 100 hours/week or more while at university. There he honed his craft rather quickly. But I’m sure that work came at the sacrifice of sleep, friendship (other than the ones he was working with), parties and many other deprivations. I can only suspect that while pursuing a dream at that rate, one would run smack-dab into a bout of awareness that would make them say, “Why in the world am I working this hard at this? I could have gone to that party last night!” And then, he would probably get swept away by the excitement of the next computer problem and the awareness that he was going to miss the next party as well would be gone in the joy he found in the work.
But you can do everything right and still not make it. Being an Angelina or a Stephen King can take luck, being in the right place at the right time and sometimes, life doesn’t offer you those breaks. So dreams come with bumps in the road. It’s difficult to know if those bumps are signs that the dream is off-base or whether it’s all a part of the process to attaining the dream. Norman Vincent Peale was fond of saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” In other words you have to be flexible, creative and inventive when you’re in a dream path. And … you need people to help support you. When Norman’s best seller, The Power of Positive Thinking was rejected for the 100th time, it was his wife, Ruth, who pulled it out of the garbage, dusted it off and took it to the 101st publisher who printed it and helped Norman to sell millions of copies of his book.
I’ve never been one who can read signs well. I think I’m rather like Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty. In that movie Jim is praying to God for a sign. A sign truck, literally pulls in front of Jim, and drives slowly. Out the back of the truck you read, “wrong way”, “stop”, and “yield” but Jim’s character misses them all and continues on driving until he has a minor traffic accident. I simultaneously had two dreams: one to run a freelance writing business that would earn decent enough money to support my fiction writing habit (until my wildly-selling novels give me a career all its own). Neither dream ever got off the ground over nearly 20 years. I just didn’t know if I was doing something wrong, or if I was doing something write and just had to wait a little longer for the success I desired. I knew I had problems. I knew I couldn’t sell myself well enough, and I know that the writing market is an exceedingly tough game (the average freelancers in Canada earns about $11,000 – but that’s for full-time work and it leaves no time for the fiction) but I think there were many other factors that led to both of these dreams finally failing. I languished for 10 years in a life position that led me into a depressing rut. There is one thing that I know about dreams now that I didn’t know then.
When I found taking philosophy courses, I fell in love with something all over again. I’d long had my love of my work and my fiction-writing dream beaten out of me. I felt trapped and foolish for being intelligent and not knowing how to get out. And then God put all sorts of signs in front of me. It began with writing for this web-blog and hoping that I could write something for it that was both intelligent and insightful. I went to the mature student advisor at the University of Western Ontario seeking classes that could allow me to write better for thehumankindnessproject and it was she who directed me to my first philosophy class. What an interesting thing. I’ve since attended two other universities in philosophy and to my knowledge, neither school has such a position: so had I lived near those other schools there may have been no one to call, no one to direct me into philosophy … so I was in the right place at the right time with the right person.
So here’s what I know about dreams-paths. You’ll do anything you can to make them work because you love it so much, you don’t even notice you’re sacrificing other things people think are important to them. You will run out of energy long before it is over and you will need people and the reading of signs to give you the perspective you require in order to continue or … to give up. My dream-path is in its fifth year and I’m tired and for the first time, I don’t want to go back to school and face all that work … but it’s only 13 weeks until the hardest part is over and I get to write about something I’m incredibly passionate about: thirteen weeks of learning and feeling frustrated and of maybe not necessarily taking courses in subjects that I love, but in subjects that complete my degree requirements. So I have one last stage to overcome before the dream morphs more directly into the kind of thing I want to do: write and teach philosophy.
In the process of getting here, some interesting things happened. I fully intended on doing some writing/newsletter business while going to school. Within the first year, all my clients were gone through no fault of my own: my newsletter clients were either exhausted of doing newsletters or were moving to an electronic format or both scenarios played out simultaneously. It seemed I was destined to go back to school full time. I did so. By my master’s year, year five, I was being paid to be a TA and income started coming back into the family coffers. And this year I received a provincial scholarship to enhance what my school was going to give me and so the positive signs keep coming (including getting into Laurier for my Masters and into McMaster for my Ph.D. program). People want me in their programs … see me as the kind of person who will represent them well in the present and the future and people have also written letters of reference about my character that have helped me get into these new schools.
When I wanted to quit school, I found “adamant” support. When I told a friend and explained my challenges, she listened and said, “I think you’re where you need to be.” Strange that she would sense that and I would not … but sometimes you are not the one to see the signs pointing you to your dream-path. And I know that were I to quit now, I would regret it. It’s just that this last bite is a bit harder to chew … and … I’m not getting any younger in regards to the kind of energy I can bring to the table (as opposed to when I was 20). But I still bring an excitement and a joy to the process of writing a good paper and I’ll hold on to that. Even in the midst of my struggles, I’ve found cool things from the subject matter … lessons and ideas that I never would have received otherwise.
Now when I quit my business I did not regret it, so that’s a sign of successfully ending an ineffective dream-path. I did miss working with my clients, sure, but I didn’t miss the terrible feeling of continual failure of never getting that full-time salary to match the full-time work. I felt that way for nearly ten years. So when I finally let go of that old dream, I was so glad to do so. And when I find the time between courses and essays, I still dabble in fiction. But I think that goal has morphed too. I’ll write just for me from now on … leaving behind the bedazzled hope for fiction-stardom. And maybe, in letting go of that dream … well, who knows … maybe a different mental approach will mean making headway in that dream-path as well.
But who knows. We pick our dreams and we strive forwards and sometimes they work and sometimes they fail. We do receive lemons in this life. What’s important about that fact is not that we receive them, but it how we react to those lemons. We can let them destroy us, or we can be innovative and find a way to utilize them. And maybe that’s the life lesson any dream-path means to teach us.
God Bless and have a great 2012.
Owen
What is Our Duty to Human Kindness
By W. Owen Thornton
Lately, a great deal of information has been hitting my human kindness radar in regards to our individual duty to practice human kindness towards ourselves and others. I think we're often kindest to our "selves" but some of us don't even see our own inner worth and we stick our head in the sand, forget about ourselves and blunder on through life without concern for our own wellbeing. It's more than I can tackle here, though this idea of depriving ourselves of kindness is a plight upon many people suffering from abuse (existing abuse our historical abuse), those suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder etc. So that's an idea for another article at another time. I'm most concerned here with the question do we even have a duty to practice acts of human kindness towards others?
The quick answer, if we want a better world (which is what this web blog is all about) is, naturally, yes. We live in community and life is better when we have others on our side working on our behalf, even if it's holding open a door when someone else's arms are full of groceries. I think even the notion of demonstrating common courtesy towards others is one that indicates there is an expectation that we will practice acts of human kindness towards others. The problem we have with practicing human kindness towards others is "how far do we go?"
In the movie Pay it Forward, a movie all about practicing extraordinary acts of human kindness towards loved ones and complete strangers, the lead character, a little boy, paid for his acts of kindness with his life. In his attempt to save a weaker boy from being picked on by bullies, the title characer was stabbed to death. Now I'm not advocating that kind of heroics here. Let me call the extent to which we lay a part of ourselves on the line, the depth of your act of kindness. Doing nothing when there's the opportunity to be kind, doesn't even hit the depth chart. Opening the door for others is a mere blip and sacrificing your life is "off the chart".
I'd like to think that writing a blog about human kindness and attempting to practice it a little bit each day is a "steady-as-she-goes" sort of depth in regards to human kindness. It is far from heroic, but it is more than scratching the surface too. But I don't see my acts as heroic or off the chart either. I'm not sure why I've never done the kind of act of kindness that I write about. Maybe my humbility prevents me from seeing what I do as being as meaningful to others as my acts really are. That could be true. But one thing about acts of human kindness ... unless you deliberately look for opportunities to do nice things for others, both stumbliming upon them and having then having the time and ability to respond in the moment is a very difficult thing to practice. I've shared with you all the reports about how we can walk past opportunities to help others simply because we didn't find a dime in a phone booth. So it would appear our tendency to practice human kindness in others cannot be left up to chance, but requires regular focus.
What I have continually asked of myself and of you, here at www.thehumankindnessproject.com is to practice acts where there is some self-sacrifice to help someone else other than yourself. On the depth chart this means something more than a scratch and something that, say, is a bit risky. Making a pitch to your boss for someone to come work at your company is something like what I'm talking about. You know your friend, but if he/she doesn't fit and needs to be fired later ... well there's some risk that your reputation will be on the line because you made the direct referral. So that's the kind of act I'm thinking of here.
But the second question beyond the depth of our human kindness actions is ... if we believe that we do have a duty to practice human kindness towards others at all ... is how often do we need to tip the balance between living our own lives and performing acts of human kindness for others? Certainly we cannot all be "Mother Theresa." Were we all doing acts like she performed, there would be no one to mine the oil, to create the fuel, to fly the plane to places in the world where people like Mother Theresa need to be in order to be able to help those in need. And we have a duty to our friends and families and children and ... most of all to our selves. We cannot overlook the "self" in this equation. At times, we need to place ourselves number one. We have to take time to nurture our bodies and souls so that we have the time, desire and energy to be kind to others in the right measure.
There are so many causes out there. And we are members of proto-groups that should take responsibility for doing the right thing. Men should discourage their friends from objectifying women. Running shoe buyers should discourage others from buying shoes from companies who underpay foreign labour in sweat shops. People on earth should care about the diminishing habitat of the African elephant. Coral reefs are under threat. Rain forests are being chopped down. Kids are sniffing glue in Canada's North. Girls are second-rate citizens in dozens of countries. Thousands of children starve to death every day when there's enough food in the world to feed everyone ... if lack of concern, an inability to know how to help and corrupt officials would allow us to feed everyone. Sometimes the burdens of all that clutter of our world makes us just want to stick our collective human kindness heads in the ground and focus on the only thing we CAN control ... our own lives. But even "controlling" your life is a myth, isn't it. People get fired, plants close, cancer strikes and suddenly even our own lives are out of control.
But wait ... we're a long ways away from human kindness, now, aren't we? Sort of. But sort of not. There are so many places where we could practice human kindness that we feel overwhelmed and we give up hope that our efforts will even matter. We lose hope in what little things we might do that we talk ourselves out of doing anything at all. We have to pick a cause to care about ... make a stand that we can make ... and hope that a drive to knit slippers and sell them at a garage sale in order to raise money for a well in Africa is enough. So here are two tips about why and how you should be kind to others.
Why you should be kind to others is that it makes you a better person. You become more aware of the world around you and when you don't think of YOU ALL of the time, anxiety levels decrease. Christians will tell you that when you pray, you should pray for others before you pray for your "self" and this seems like a good way to begin thinking outside of our own lives ... because it's easy to think about our own lives ALL of the time.
I'm going to take a "how" you should be kind to others from a chapter from my church's Kids-To-Kid's mission projects. The leaders of our youth lead three kinds of projects each year: one that helps people in London, one that helps people in Canada and one that helps people somewhere else in the world. Now this mission project helps perfect strangers in most cases, but you don't have to make it like that for yourself. You might help a friend get a job (local) write a letter to your MP about your concern about the problems with remote northern communities (national) and send money to a food grain project to some place like Haiti (international). And voila ... you've practiced human kindness in a way many people do not in this day and age.
Ed Begley Junior is a leading environmentalist who walks the walk and talks the talk, but who understands what it means for everyone else to be an environmentalist. Ed knows that not everyone can go to the extreme measures that he has in order to help the environment. He knows it's not practical to think that everyone will do what he has done. But you could compost today if you've never composted. Or maybe hold a recycling fair on your street so that fewer used goods end up in the city dump. If everyone did just a little bit more than they do now, the environment would be much improved.
Hope. Hope for the environment, or kids in Canada's North, or the homeless in our cities begins with something small and then it grows into something big. I believe we all have that capacity within us ... if we but believed in ourselves and in our own natural, and divine gifts.
Owen
Predator or Shepherd
Predator or Shepherd?
In the world of human kindness,
where are your managerial skills?
By W. Owen Thornton
An email joke crossed my desktop here at the human kindness project the other day and the manager in the joke was portrayed as a lion. A number of mental leaps (sorry) came to my mind and it made me think that many managers in this world are like lions: they have a predator mentality. Think about what predators do to live. They hunt prey. Predators look for the sick or the young or the unaware to make a mistake and when the predator feels he/she can sneak up closely enough to kill their prey … they pounce.
Managers act like predators when all they do is look for someone to make a mistake so that they can pounce on that mistake. One understands this sentiment on one level because a manager doesn’t want a mistake to become part of the method of operation. But when people only wait for others to make mistakes in this manner predators make employees scared rabbits who continually look over their shoulder for fear of being caught doing something wrong. This strategy sends the wrong message to employees. Predator managers might think having employees afraid of the “pouncing manager” keeps employees on their toes, but what this management strategy does is slow down productivity because employees are not free to try new ways of doing things that may periodically fail or that may periodically succeed in making the company more successful.
Predator managers who are great at looking for failures spend most of their time doing just that, which means that when something good does happen, it gets overlooked: so the employees are duly punished when making mistakes and they are not rewarded for doing things right. When you think about it, using my analogy, it makes sense: when a lion needs to spend all her time seeking prey, there’s both very little time to do anything else and the skill-set required to notice good effort is void. In addition some managers still mistakenly believe that when employees do something right, the reward is the paycheck. So, good things are rewarded automatically and dispassionately via the paycheck. There’s never an immediate pat on the back or any spoken praise (and meaningful praise should be specific and immediate). Why anyone still believes that the paycheck is enough to motivate employees alone is nearly impossible to fathom. Surveys indicate that a pay raise only motivates people for about one to two pay cycles and after that, they’re just doing that which they “get paid for!” Gallup surveys repeatedly demonstrate that engaged employees are happier and more productive … and “engagement” does NOT mean treating people like scared rabbits.
Be a Shepherd
Instead of being a predator, managers should be shepherds. They should lead the staff to good grazing land, show them the territory, let them explore new avenues for revenue and production upgrades, and give them some open terrain with which to be creative. A shepherd has a crook with them at all times, and can hopefully pull back a lost employee before he/she gets too close to doing something harmful to themselves or the company. In other words some risks should be allowed, but others are not. An independent budget to try new things should only be as large as the manager is comfortable losing should the employee make a mistake. And should something bad lurk in the rocks or the darkness, the good manager is also there with their shepherd’s crook to whack the incoming danger away from their employees. When a mistake is made – even via the best intentions – a good manager roles up their sleeves first and digs in, in order to help so that the problem dissolves and something can be learned by the employee. In this way, employees feel protected by their manager … they know they can take some risks to better the company and they also know that their boss won’t let them stray too far afield which means they cannot make a catastrophic or “fireable” mistake.
In general I sympathize with predator manager syndrome. To some extent, it isn’t a horrific way to manage. The problem with it is when it becomes the only way to manage people. If we could turn the predator managing style into one the aspect that protects people who are “engaged” in their positions this strategy could be incorporated into the shepherding managing method. People need to feel appreciated and as I’ve stated here, the paycheck is not the only motivator. It is not even the number one motivator. Interim words of praise or notes in their employee files are winning strategies to allow good employees become even better ones. The shepherd managing approach will build and keep good people and in a time of an employee shortage, the advantages to this strategy and the benefits it provides should be clear.
Remember: when there is a predator in the long grass, everyone suffers.
Cheers and … be kind to one another out there, eh!
Owen
Did you know?
By W. Owen Thornton BA
Human kindness must be about individual happiness. And there are a great many things out there that negatively impact our happiness.
Executive Salaries Harm Happiness and Human Kindness:
The first tidbit I have to share is a surprising one. Did you know that a recent study has discovered that the wider the discrepancy between executive salaries and the minimum wage, the greater the unhappiness of the populace? Independent surveys confirm this fact to be true. The wider the range of salaries between the highest and lowest paid people in a culture, the greater the unhappiness. This study was done over dozens of countries and the evidence seems clear.
Yes sir, those ludicrous salaries that we see executives receiving actually diminish the happiness of the entire populace. I don't know the reasons why, but I can speculate. I'm supposing that the more people feel they are falling behind those "reported" executive salaries the more stress and anxiety they feel. Perhaps, though this idea may be subtle, the rest of us feel just a little less today than we did yesterday ... like we don't measure up. Now, when we feel badly about ourselves, it would seem logical to me that we would be less likely to be reaching out towards others in acts of human kindness.
Human kindness must be about being true to ourselves. But can normal, natural processes which look protective of our "selves" actually prevent us from feeling our own emotions from our own experiences?
Mirror Neurons: Does becoming an Adult Deaden Us ... to a Degree?
I think human kindness means retaining some of our naivete ... some of our child-like wonder of the world. But is that filtered out of us?
I've reported here before that we all have mirror neurons which, when we see something happen to others, or we see them doing something, a part of our minds echoes that thing that is happening to others, or we feel the same things as the other person is doing. So, witness someone being fired and being escorted off the premises of your workplace and you feel the same emotions, to a lesser extent, as the person the action is really happening to. Now a child feels it 100 per cent and may well react with the same frightened and tearful response. But as we mature, we place filters in our mental system that limits our reaction. This means that while the same parts of our brain are kicking out slightly less of the same chemicals and hormones as those in the brain of the person actually being escorted off the corporate premises, that we "realize" we are NOT the ones ACTUALLY being fired.
So the question I want to ask is this: as we experience more and more events in life and we realize that they are not happening to us ... do we train our minds to not be impacted by these vicarious experiences? And does it follow that if we train our minds to not experience that which someone else is feeling, do we then train our "selves" to not experience things as deeply when they actually happen to us?
Is this why it takes more and more to surprise and shock us as we get older?
Here's what I mean and I hope the danger of what might be happening to us is clear. Say I see someone be fired. My brain kicks out the same adrenaline and other chemicals and hormones into my system but to a lesser extent. But my "knowledge" allows me to realize that "I" am NOT being fired. Do I train the receptors, the parts of me that uptake the chemicals and hormones that make me "feel" like the other person to cease taking those chemicals up inside of me? That seems unlikely. The physicality of something designed to do whatever it is designed to do, wouldn't seem to me to change. I still "feel" the same way through those receptors, but through experience, I learn to shut down my reaction to those feelings. This would seem to be a good thing because that experience really isn't happening to me!
So, each time I shut down my reaction to those feelings ... those protective mental filters I have put in place prevent me from reacting foolishly when something is happening to someone else. But wouldn't those protective mental filters still be there when that sort of situation actually does happen to me?
To be clear. I watch someone be fired. Mirror neurons compel me to experience the same thing to a lesser extent. Chemicals and hormones are released in my brain. Other parts of my brain pick up those chemicals and hormones and I feel sad, frustrated, frightened, worried, hurt ... Now, adult maturity kicks in and because I have more experience and knowledge, I realize that the experience isn't really happening to me. I place some kind of mental filter between myself and those feelings. This would seem to be a good and protective system. After all, it wouldn't do us any good to react to something happening to someone else as though it were happening to me right now too, or otherwise we'd be emotional wrecks.
So my question is: with these filters in place, protecting us from experiencing the feelings vicariously through others, how would our minds know to lower the filters when, say, a couple of years later, I am actually fired? Now we "should" be feeling sad, frustrated, frightened, worried, and hurt ... but I have this filter in place that downgrades this experience. In fact, I've watched lots of people in my company be fired. So when it finally happens to me ... am I a calm, rational, automaton?
So when a friend reacts negatively and strongly to our being fired ... a friend not so tainted by similar experiences ... do we hear ourselves trying to calm down our friend by saying, "It's not the end of the world! I'm going to be okay, you know. It doesn't really bother me that much."
Has our filtration system used to prevent us from reacting negatively every time we see an incident happen to someone else ... well has that filtration system, that mental capacity somehow detached us from our "selves" ... our own feelings? And if we're downplaying our own feelings, wouldn't this lead to a partial or complete denial to the emotional experiences we are really having? And so ... suddenly when we have every right to feel bad, we're denying our emotional experience ... downgrading it ... we're separating our "selves" from our "self". This seems strange to me, but leads me to wonder if this separation from our own life isn't something that leads us to denying what is happening to us ... denying what I am feeling ... And when we deny our own experiences and emotions, we are hiding from our "selves" and our own lives. We are not feeling ... not living as richly and as deeply as we might live.
In part, this makes sense. It feels as though we should want to hide from this sort of deep emotional pool. Conversely, we can wallow too deeply in pools of emotion and this wouldn't be helpful either. It's almost as though we need to intelligently know when to allow ourselves to experience emotions and to what degree. And THAT sounds like crazy talk to me: intelligently allowing ourselves to experience our emotions to the right degree. Aristotle would have something to say about virtue ethics here: doing the right thing, to the right degree, to or with the right person, at the right time and in the right way ... this is what makes us virtuous.
So a natural filtration system establishes a barrier to our emotions for perfectly logical reasons -- we don't want to be seen reacting the same when we see someone else hurt -- but this barrier could well deaden us to our own experiences if we let it.
How does all this cycle back to human kindness? If we're denying ourselves our own emotional experiences ... down-playing our own lives as it were ... we're not living our lives to the fullest extent. And when we're not living our lives to our fullest extent, including the times when we're happy and delighted, we're less likely to reach out and be kind to others.
How do we overcome this natural phenomena? I don't know. Humanity is ... hard. We are strange animals.
Signs
Human Kindness Can Be About Signs
By W. Owen Thornton
Today’s topic on Human Kindness explores practicing human kindness towards your “self” … and then to others. I have been having many conversations lately about signs … the kind that may be directing you towards having a better life for your “self”. I’ll begin by defining them, and citing some examples. Then I’ll write about “seeing/hearing” them, doing something about them, and last I’ll focus on how we can be positive “human kindness signs” for others.
In the movie Bruce Almighty, staring Jim Carey, there’s a scene where Bruce is praying to God asking for a sign. “What should I do, God?” A city work truck cuts him off and on the back of it are a bunch of exposed signs saying things like “wrong way”, “stop”, “do no enter” etc. But all Bruce sees is the annoying truck that’s just pulled in front of him. In addition to pulling in front of him, it is also impeding his progress to going … really … nowhere. At this time in the movie Bruce has no destination. I’m thinking here of the Beatles Song, “He’s a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.”
Signs can be that direct. Ironically enough, even when we’re asking to see them, we can still miss them. Signs can be flashes in your head, pictures of dreams that you don’t know how to fulfill. I’ll call these signs internal ones because they come from within. There are also external signs. They can be comments someone says like, “Why do you stick with that job?” or “I have a friend who may be able to help you out.” Or “You’ve changed lately. Is anything going on that you want to talk about?” I have a fortune cookie taped to my computer monitor that I received before going back to school that reads, “Excellent chance for future success” and now I’m nearly finished my Masters in Philosophy and I’ll be going off to McMaster for Ph.D. work in the fall. Signs often hit us at moments when we cannot see the forest for the trees. It can be like this: You know your refrigerator is dying though it still works, but it’s a hassle to go out looking and you really don’t want to spend the money. So you pretend to ignore the situation. You don’t see the advertisements for refrigerator sales (signs) until the day it breaks … and then you’re desperate to get a new fridge.
For me, in going back to school in philosophy I kept having these wistful visions of how much I enjoyed the university classroom. I loved the lectures, the setting … the entire experience. But I couldn’t act on those images. I told myself that they were wistful fantasies of a time long gone. It was a ‘reasonable’ explanation for a person whose career was faltering and had been for some time. I think those images, those fond remembrances, had many things going for them so that I couldn’t act upon my own internal signs. I thought I was looking back at university with rose-coloured glasses … that it wasn’t as much fun as I remembered. I thought it was foolish and selfish to think about going back to school when I was “supposed” to be of working age. Going back to school felt like it was out of the synch with a cultural pattern. You go to school when you’re young. You work when you’re older. So the sign “feels” wrong, even when there is no stigma about going to school at any age.
Many people I know are at a stage in their lives when they are changing careers, or changing work locations or they are stepping up into supervisory roles. Many say they are doing so after having failed to read the signs for so long. Some have stopped climbing the work ladder and are stepping back from the corporate model of success. The sign? High blood pressure, excessive stress … panic attacks … all of which were signs that finally cut through the clatter of their own self-talk and allowed them to examine their situation so that they could make the change.
And therein lies something important … something completely intangible … finding ourselves in a position to allow ourselves to finally see/hear or read the signs. I cannot say how it comes about where people can finally allow themselves to read the signs whereby they find the power to actually do something about it. Letting signs crack through our own egotistical barriers of our own ability to “know-how” may be the trickiest part of signs. It may be something that I cannot explain. Certainly for anyone who had an annual check-up and who received high blood pressure pronouncements were able to read that sign. But for others, sometimes the situation never gets bad enough. What I can tell you is how I finally recognized my internal signs as something important. Now I recognize them in hindsight … but maybe signs have the power to change us in mysterious ways that allow us to finally come into alignment with the direction the signs are telling us to go.
As I said, two things were happening to me at once. I was having these internal images of how much I loved going to the University of Western Ontario. In the midst of my freelance writing business tanking I would fondly look back at those days as the best of my “doing” life. I say “doing” life because I include doing school work and doing “work” work in the same category here. I loved doing the work of studying and learning and reading and writing. (Though I admit I hate writing exams!) I always felt that university was a dynamic, “alive” place that I had loved being a part of. But there was no way to get back there … or so I thought. And my freelance career was going south for two reasons. First, the local newspaper and magazine market had coalesced into one huge conglomerate that didn’t take as much freelance writing and my business writing was suffering because businesses felt they didn’t need print newsletters when they could do something on their own by creating an interactive web page.
It’s fascinating how an act of kindness to the world, helped me along the way. What I’m about to reveal is one way that we might be able to come to hear or see or read those signs: do that which comes naturally to you and you and your signs may just find they unite. I have long felt that the world has become too harsh, that it has forgotten the days of the barn-raising: where the entire community came together to build someone a barn … because … everyone knew that one day they might need everyone else to help them do that which they couldn’t achieve on their own, like take in the fall harvest because they had fallen ill or some such thing. And so I wanted to write about human kindness. I did so both selflessly and selfishly because I knew if I did anything to make the world more kind: the world might become kinder towards me.
So I began doing that which I had always done: I wrote. But this time I wrote about something I was passionate about: human kindness. Writing about something I am passionate about was one thing I hadn’t done much of in my entire non-fiction writing career. Assignments for magazines were often redirected away from what you wanted to write and some business work was just that: business work, but there wasn’t an opportunity to put your heart and soul into it. So I took a risk and purchased a web blog and dug in. I quickly found myself dancing around philosophical matters … which I didn’t even know were philosophical matters at the time … of metaphysics, epistemology and especially applied ethics. Suddenly that which I had wanted to do was becoming problematic: I was dishing out wisdom that I didn’t think I was educated enough to dish.
Next thing I found myself doing was calling the Mature Student Advisor at UWO to talk about taking some psychology and some sociology courses so I could write better articles for the www.humankindnessproject.com . I wasn’t certain I was going to go back to school but I at least wanted to explore my options. I had found a way to mesh my fantasy of being in a university classroom with the reality of writing what I wanted to write about. Somehow, my internal signs had guided and directed me to do that which I had wanted to do for years. Where I hadn’t been able to give myself permission to return to school for years, now, suddenly I found it.
That mature student advisor was the perfect person for me to have met. We connected on a multitude of levels including the fact that she was of the same faith in the same denomination … and that’s something that it would have come up in conversation and because Presbyterians are approximately one percent of the national population. She guided me not to psychology and sociology, but to philosophy. My first professor was brilliant and made the subject come alive. When my first essay was due, I found the only person on campus who could help me write better essays and I received the best grades I had ever received during my entire academic career. Somewhere in there I received that fortune cookie I told you about earlier, “Excellent chance for future success.” The signs were everywhere and I missed most of them on the first pass … but that didn’t stop them from guiding me beyond my own “self” non-awareness.
So, in the end, when it comes to signs, I think there are only two things we can attempt to do. One, we need to pay attention. When you find yourself thinking, “That’s the third time someone has told me, ‘You’ve changed lately and not for the better. Is anything going on that you want to talk about’?” it’s finally time to pay attention to the messages the universe is sending you. And secondly we can allow ourselves to do that which is integral to us, that which we care about most. I love writing and I love doing something to help make the world a kinder place and those two things led me back to school where I and my “signs” finally meshed.
But reading signs can be difficult. I have written over a dozen novels and none of them were ever published. I still want to write novels. I don’t know if they are merely practice for my non-fiction writing, or if I’m meant to do them but I haven’t found the right genre, or the right agent or the right publisher, or if novel-writing is meant to be an escapist hobby. Sometimes I have stopped writing for long periods because I … just … don’t … know … what I’m supposed to do with all that.
I read Jim Butcher novels and at the end of them he writes a little about how he became a novelist. His story helps me a little. He fell in love with sword and sorcery (as did I) but he didn’t publish in that genre. Instead he writes about a wizard in contemporary Chicago who solves unique crimes that often include things from the world of “never-never”. Today, he finally has a “sword and horses” novel or two to his credit. Maybe I’m supposed to write my masters and doctoral thesis and then write some fiction that matters to me … and to an agent and a publisher and a few dozen dedicated readers. One thing I can tell you is … I’m taking that Jim Butcher add-on at the back of his books for what it is. It’s a sign, I tell you. I don’t know exactly what it is telling me, but I refuse to ignore it.
Cheers, everyone. Read your signs. You will know a sign when it speaks to your heart, where you and no one else will be hurt … but it may mean doing a hell of a lot of work in the process … like writing a masters and doctoral thesis.
Be kind to one another out there eh?
Oh yeah. And we are one another’s signmasters, aren’t we. When we say things like, “You’ve changed lately. Is anything going on that you want to talk about?” we’re seeing things in others the things they haven’t paid attention to … yet. We are one another’s signs too, eh!
Owen
Strange Animals
We Are Strange Animals
By W. Owen Thornton
When it comes to encouraging human kindness it turns out that the way to a person's kindness MAY be through their stomach ... er nose? Which is a fancy way of saying if you want someone to be kind: give them a warm cookie. Now listen. We have to have pure motives when it comes to kindness. Manipulating people in a bad way so that you "get them to do something you want them to do that they may not otherwise do" isn't what I'm talking about! But ... nudging them to be kind for their own sake and for the betterment of the world overall? Well ...
You know the old adage that the way to a person's heart is through their stomach. Well this is apparently true ... with a minor adaptation. Much of what makes food enjoyable is related to the rich smells that accompany food. So it appears to be true that rich food smells, according to a research experiment done by Isen and Levin in 1972, make people kinder ... at least for a short while. People who received a warm cookie did seem to be kinder to others than those who did not receive a warm cookie and who were being tested to perform the same act of kindness. Isen and Levin called the phenomenon, appropriately, "the warm glow of success."
Now I don't know about you, but in my neck of the woods "malls" have popcorn stores that just ooze of the wonderful smell of popcorn ... when they are actively making more product that is. So here's the test. It would be interesting to note the following. If there was a conspirator of a test who dropped some papers nearby one of these popcorn stores while the popcorn smell was in the air, would we find that more people helped the paper-dropper with the smell in the air than say, further down the mall where there was no chance of that smell? The answer would suggest that more people WOULD be kind to the paper-dropper with the sensational smell of popcorn in the air.
Now you could try muffin shops, or even burger joints when the grill is kicking out the nice smell. It seems that we would still be kinder than if there were no rich smells in the air. Now, I wonder if you operate a store that sells fresh-cooked product in any way ... if you encourage people to buy more often or more at a time, simply because of the smell that is in the air?
In Other Strange Kindness News
The "warm glow of success" impacting human kindness aside, there is another factor we have to watch out for: this is the kind of effect that will prevent us from practicing human kindness. When we're in crowds, we're bad actors.
Many experiments demonstrate that we'll act better alone than in a crowd. In a room where smoke starts to filter in, individuals seek help far more quickly than those sitting in a room where a conspirator doesn't seem to notice the smoke at all. Now isn't that nutty! Apparently we'd rather burn to death in a fire than look to be a nervous Nelly and shout fire ... especially when the other person in the room isn't reacting to it. Now I realize this isn't a kindness example, but it could well be. If we're in a room with others and someone starts to have a seizure and the confederates of the experiment don’t move to help then it is less likely we'll move in to help.
It turns out we’re far too easy to manipulate. By the way … would you like a warm cookie?
Three Acts of Human Kindness
By W. Owen Thornton
Here are three acts of human kindness that you can perform that will make yourself or others more kind. The first act is something that you can do for your self and the other two are things that you can do to make other's kinder. The key behind these last two acts of human kindness is motive. If you perform these acts in hopes that they will simply make people more kind, then that's great! If you perform them to manipulate ... well, if there is a power of positive energy in the universe, you will not be rewarded should you attempt to manipulate. All three acts have science behind them.
To make yourself feel better, tell someone your daily story. In fact, this idea works well in pairs. Find someone who will take time to listen so that you feel "heard" and share your stories with one another. Sharing your daily story will make you more kind. Why? because when we tell our daily stories, we release positve hormones and chemicals inside our bodies. These hormones and chemicals are then taken back up into parts of the brain and we receive a positive high from this action.
To make someone else better touch someone in a loving or caring manner. Now this one is a bit more "loaded" than the first idea. Some people have a wide personal space, so touch CAN be tricky. However scientists can now detect the following. When you are ill and someone you care about visits and touches you meaningfully, again, your body emits positive hormones and chemicals that give you a positive high. My question is why wait until someone is unwell to touch them. The power of a positive touch is healing power and can change someone's attitudes and behaviour.
Last bake some cookies or or a pie or make some popcorn. In fact, you don't really have to eat any of these things to have a human kindness reaction. Isen and Levin, in 1972 determined that people will be kinder for upwards of 20 minutes simply by smelling things like food. Again, hormones and chemicals are released inside of our bodies that enable you to feel a positive high and this can make other people kinder towards themselves and others.
Now in all of these cases the effects do not last long. Isen and Levin thought that the warm glow of success would last upwards of 20 mintues. But wow, in the meantime, you or the people you care about the most will have better thoughts than they were having moments before.
And your Bonus Human Kindness Tip?
Place Teddy Bears around the house (or the office if you dare!). There is something real and true about a teddy bear that prevents you from getting angry and that may well prevent others from getting angry at you. It seems, seeing as teddy bears are about love, that people cannot get angry in front of a teddy bear because ... well ... simply ... how could someone with a teddy bear around all the time ever get angry. And, if you're the kind of person who had teddy bears around ... others will feel hesitant in getting angry in front of them. Oddly enough, the presence of a teddy bear is not a short-term effect. Having them around will make your world a kinder place.
We are strange animals eh?
Dreams Do Come True
When is it Time To Celebrate ...
And What You Need For the Journey
By W. Owen Thornton BA
Human kindness does take time, persistence, hope and love to achieve. But all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. First, let me celebrate with you. I have received news that I have a conditional offer to go to McMaster University in Hamilton to study philosophy at the Ph.D. level. I'm jumping for joy and I wanted you all to know. So naturally, the time to celebrate is upon completion of an important goal. (Yay!)
But let me tell you there were some doubts along the way. I was fairly certain I wasn't going to get in this year. Time. Sometimes when we need to change in order to be kind, we need to give ourselves time to make that change. Change in human beings, can be slow as we work through our old modes of being, set them aside and pick up the new modes of being that we desire for ourselves. In this instance, had I not received a positive response to get in to university for Ph.D. work this year, I would have needed to allow myself time ... time to reapply.
And in waiting that year ... had I needed it ... I would have needed to allow myself the time to wait ... to wait to apply again ... to wait to apply so that I could be kind enough to myself in order to give myself another chance at my dream. I was mentally prepared for that. You need to be mentally braced for the time you will have to wait to fulfill your dreams.
When we're in the waiting place (Suess: Oh the Places You'll Go!) that's when we also have to have persistence. Persistence is a strange gift to human kind. Sometimes, when we want to do something ... when we want to achieve something we need to keep hammering away at it. Sometimes, we need to pick up our ball and go home: the universe is telling you to try something else ... to do things a different way. And sometimes when life is like that, we're like Bruce in Bruce Almighty: We're asking for a sign and a truck load full of signs pulls in front of us (quite literally) and these signs say: stop; wrong way; do not enter. It seems to me that this is a very difficult place. Do you keep pressing forwards, do you try another way, or do you stop and recalibrate and try for another goal? I can only say this. Be more willing to be flexible. Be willing ... and this is rather mystical ... to see the signs. Sometimes they ARE there. Sometimes we just don't want to see them. When we're in the waiting place, perhaps while we're trying ... again ... maybe that's when we should pick up another ball and throw it ... see what it's like ... try it on for size. If it bounces back ... maybe we're meant to go in that new direction.
Hope is a daring thing. Hope for change ... hope for success. Hope is a great gift for human kindness. There are two little boys in the movie Angels in the Outfield. They are wards of the state about to either be adopted or farmed out into the foster program. They have a rather bare existence ... though their caregiver is wonderful ... even if she is poor. We need to be like the one who keeps saying, "It could happen!" If you're looking for a goal, you need to believe that, "It could happen." Though goals do need to be SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timed. For example if you want to be a published author, you'd better be able to write well enough to give yourself a chance. In regards to dreams and goals, however, I recommend prayer or in some other words, asking the universe to provide. I don't know about the latter, but I have heard that studies show that those who pray do attain more of what they want in life than those who do not pray. Putting that energy out there into the universe ... darn it if doesn't seem to work!
In regards to love ... well ... you have to love yourself enough in order to place yourself in line with the universe such that you give yourself a chance at your dreams. You have to do some of the right things. But in my case, when it looked like I wasn't going to get into school, you need love from others who are willing to give it. I found care, love and support from all sorts of corners. I think you find this kind of response, in part because those who give it to you, know that you are the kind of person who would give it back to them should they need the same kind of tender loving care. I had all sorts of encouragment that I should reapply in the following year ... that lots of people get in on their second try. I even found two people who had had that happen to them and they shared those stories with me. Astounding.
Look. I know this human kindness stuff is airy ... fluffy ... especially when you're in the waiting place ... waiting for your life to get a reboot. I know saying be persistent, have hope and share love doesn't seem like much. But we do not live in a linear world. You can do all the right things and fail (even though everyone would tell you you should have succeeded) and sometimes you can do all the wrong things and succeed in spite of yourself (even when everyone would tell you you are so lucky because you didn't do the right things to enable success). Life, like some other gooey substance we all know well and fall in at times ... well life and that gooey substance ... it happens ... you know! Do the right things, trust and hope that the universe will bring you what's right for you (even if you don't know it's right for you in the moment) and love yourself and others in the process.
You will get there. As Norman Vincent Peale said in his Book The Power of Positive Thinking (and I paraphrase here) you make lemonaid from lemons and know that the longer the reward is withheld from you, the greater it will be when it arrives. I must say that feels true to me right now.
Cheers. And be kind to one another (and yourself) out there, eh?
Owen
In the meantime: Go Marauders!
Change Comes Slow: even when practicing Human Kindness
By W. Owen Thornton
Wanting to become more kind or wanting to practice human kindness more often, in the right way to the right degree (Aristotle) comes slowly. In this instance, I finally got something right: I practiced hospitality.
When we want to change our behaviour it is very difficult to make the connection between wanting to do X and actually doing X. When we are so conditioned, so automatically working in one mode, it is difficult to jump out of that old mode and engage in the new one we desire to have for ourselves. I call knowing you want to change and not quite being able to change, as having shadow knowledge. The knowledge of the desire to change is like a shadow that you haven't taken up into yourself. Opportunities come and go and and you miss the chance to do the right thing. Moments later, you bang your hand on your forehead and you say to yourself, "That was it! That was the chance to do the right thing ... and I didn't ... again."
A trick here is that you shouldn't beat yourself up for this. The entire "thing" that happens when you bang your head and chastise yourself for not acting in the desired manner is part of the process of changing ... part of the process of moving into a new self. Know that the shadow will be taken up into your self one day. It just happened to me.
A needy fellow just came to the door. He told me a horrific story of poverty, illness and despair. He'd do anything, including cleaning my windows for money. It turned out well for him. I happened to have $8 worth of coins in my pocket and I gave those to him. I had an excellent model for this kind of behaviour this year. Bob, one of the professors I assisted in his tutorials for a first-year philosophy class said this to me when I made a request for him on behalf of a troubled student: "I'd rather they take advantage of me and give them some assistance than have it rest badly upon me if I didn't do the right thing when it was needed".
Now, giving the man at my door money, wasn't the shadow knowledge I've wanted to take up into myself. I've done that before. But this time something more happened in my brain ... the shadow was taken up inside of me. First I walked back inside my compfy home and then then Christian sense of hospitality hit me and I walked back to the door and called the man's name out as he was walking away. "Dave (changed to protect his real name) would you like a cup of coffee?" He declined my offer. But I had done it. I had finally done it. When I saw someone struggling and needing money, I had finally offered them some of my time and some sustenance. I had done more than what was asked of me. Now, next time I see the homeless fellow at the grocery store, maybe I can go inside and buy him some food instead of just giving him a toony. That'll be the next challenge.
But at this moment, I feel good. I feel like I did the right thing. Maybe it wasn't enough. Maybe I was taken advantage of. I don't care. Read Bob's quote above, if you didn't let those words enter your spirit when you read them the first time. For me, this was a personal breakthrough for human kindness. I am pleased to have practiced human kindness on a new level.
You'll get it right too. Bang that hand on your forehead when you miss an opportunity for positive change in regards to human kindness. Refuse to let yourself get down about it. Realize that "head-banging" is part of your change. Realize that you're human. Practice human kindness upon yourself too. Know that the shadow that follows you will be taken up inside of you ... and on that day ... you and the world will both be better!
Cheers
Owen