What Kindness means to me is to provide heartfelt experiences within your business and in your community at large.
Originally written on Saturday Feb 26, 2005
Have you ever experienced simple kindness from a stranger, from someone at work and been touched in some way that you say to your self, WOW! That was really nice.
A kind act towards someone else without an expectation of return. To live consciously, by playing your part wherever you go or are.
Does kindness have a place in business?
Yes, absolutely!
I was at a networking session the other day, (2005) and we are chatting and after I heard what a gentleman did, he asked me what I did, and I said, “I am in the Kindness business.” He said, “That’s a great business to be in.” I almost felt like feeling his forehead and asking him if he was feeling okay. In my travels of promoting kindness in business hasn’t been easy, have been called many things and comments like “that was not one of them.”
As this guy said, “Businesses are made up of people and without people we don’t have a business.” great comment.
Using Kindness as a strategy in planning or to improve your relationships with family, customers, friends raises the bar in how we treat people. How we treat people shows how successful we are in our lives. By the way, this includes how we treat ourselves.
How about customer service? If we treated everyone poorly, do you think we would have any customers or employees left? Do you have this problem now? Perhaps your service to these people is not working for them. Are you paying attention? WAKE-UP!
The idea of a Kindness Program is to have three components:
1. Kindness to oneself
2. Kindness to our co-workers
3. Kindness to our community
Kindness for oneself would be taking time for ourselves, to re-juvenate our mind and body. Some ideas would be to meditate, exercise, have fun, socialize, a bubble bath with candles, massages, pampering, time away from people. If you don’t take care of yourself who is?
Kindness to our co-workers perhaps is to cheer someone one, give encouragement, a kind word, a smile, even just a hello! If you are not having fun and you would like to create more of a cooperative team, it may be time to set up a structure of benefits, a wellness program, a reward program, i am sure if you asked you would get lots of ideas from your co-workers, bosses and any one else who works with you.
Kindness in our community would be finding a cause that you believe in or see a need to change something and go do it. It only takes one person to start, soon other people will join you. Create a social committee if you don’t already have one, find a way to give back to the community that you live and work in.
I figured in a 24 hour period we could take 9 hours to sleep, or take time for ourselves. 8 hours with family, friends and reach out to other people. 8 hours to work. Now I know, some of you will say that you got to work more, or don’t have the time to do any of this, have you ever noticed that when you work less you actually accomplish more? Try it and see!
I have heard all the excuses and reasons why you can’t start, from package it up and make it expensive to it’s just too simple to do. It’s really like the latest commercial “I decided to do something different, to lose wieght.” This isn’t any different. When we all decide to be more conscious being kind we can have all have healthier and happier lives. Which then leads to more successful relationships (as it really just is the simple little things that we do for each other) that make the difference.
I leave this post to say, I Challenge you to “Be the Difference Today.”
