Tag Archives: Grace

Oh, The Stories We Tell!

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“The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We have only to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.” (Marilyn Ferguson) 

Attribution: Donna CameronWe learned in drivers’ training that everyone has a blind spot, or scotoma. Because of the way the eye is constructed, every human being has one. It is a location with no photoreceptor cells, where the retinal ganglion cell axons that compose the optic nerve exit the retina (the biology lesson ends here, I promise).

We may never be aware of our blind spots, though, because we’re really good at compensating—our brains are able to fill in the gap so the surrounding picture appears absolutely complete.

Beyond the physical level, we have blind spots on a psychological level, too, and our brains also attempt to explain the unknown data—with mixed results. We’ve all been there: when we lack information our brains make up stories to fill in the gaps—often the stories are both erroneous and damaging.

Perhaps two co-workers whom you often lunch with head out at noon without asking if you’d like to join them. Bewildered, you make up a story: You offended Carrie when you said you didn’t have time to check the figures on the budget she was working on, or you ticked Erika off by not stopping to chat when you came in this morning. They probably think you’re mad at them, and now they’re mad at you. They’re at lunch talking about you and saying nasty things about you.

By the time they return from lunch 30 minutes later, you’ve woven such a tale of perfidy that you’ve convinced yourself they no longer want to be your friend and nobody else in the office wants to be either. Why should they, after all, you’re a terrible, horrible, very bad person…?

When Carrie and Erika walk in, carrying fast-food take-out bags, you learn that Erika dropped her car off for servicing and Carrie followed to pick her up and drive her back to the office. As they’d feared, it took so long that they only had time to stop for some mediocre take-out, which they’ll now have to eat at their desks.

The story you constructed was entirely false—nobody was mad, nobody was offended, nobody was saying terrible things about you behind your back, and you are not a terrible, worthless person.

Sound ridiculous? Maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration, but we do it all the time. We don’t know the reason someone acted the way they did and we make up a motive that has no basis in reality. It might suit our mood, or our current level of insecurity, or maybe our flair for the dramatic.

How many times has your spouse or significant other seemed a bit distant and you’ve attributed it to anger, lack of interest, or smoldering resentment because you failed to wash your lunch dishes? When the truth is that he is just trying to remember the name of his 8th grade math teacher—and it’s driving him crazy that he can’t.

Many, many years ago, I learned that the board of directors of an organization I served as executive director for held a board meeting without telling me. I stewed for 24 hours. Why would they meet without me? Did I do something terrible they needed to talk about without me present? Are they going to fire me? Finally, I picked up the phone and called the board president. I explained that association boards should never meet without the knowledge and presence of their executive director. It was my job to make sure they never violated any antitrust regulations or nonprofit laws. What, I asked, could possibly have motivated them to hold a meeting without me? There was a long pause at the other end of the line. A very long pause. Finally Doug said, “We do know that, Donna, and ordinarily we’d never meet without telling you, but our conference is coming up and we wanted to honor you for great job you are doing for us. We were talking about the best time to have a special ceremony and what we could buy you for a thank-you gift.”

I felt like bug spit.

Ever since that embarrassing moment, I’ve tried to imagine positive reasons for inexplicable actions rather than—or at least in addition to—negative ones. My positive stories are generally just as erroneous as my negative ones, but while I’m in that suspended limbo of not-knowing, why not enjoy my imaginings rather than agonize and fret over them?

Kindness Lessons

There are some great kindness lessons for us if we take time to think about how we feel and what we do when we have gaps in our knowledge:

Lesson #1: It’s not always about us … in fact, it’s usually not about us. Just because we’re the center of our own universe, it’s very unlikely we hold that exalted position in many other minds. I find this reminder immensely freeing: “Forget what everyone else thinks of you; chances are, they aren’t thinking about you at all.”

Lesson #2: Yield to the curiosity triggered by not-knowing. As we talked about in an earlier post, “Kindness and curiosity leave no room for anger and resentment.” Employ curiosity to seek kind and compassionate answers to gaps in our knowledge.

Lesson #3: We can assume one another’s good intent. Instead of attributing a silence or an ill-chosen word to malice or resentment, we can just as easily say to ourselves, “That didn’t come out the way she meant it to … I know her intention was positive.” Why wouldn’t we want to believe the best rather than the worst?

Lesson #4: We always have a choice about the stories we make up. Even if we are drama queens and kings, we can make up stories based on positive assumptions. All it takes is some awareness on our part.

Lesson #5: We can always choose peace. We have control over both our perceptions and our reactions. We can choose the path that leads us to peace. It takes practice, but it’s within our capabilities.

The stories we tell ourselves have power—power to change the world. When was the last time you made up a story to fill a gap in your knowledge? Was it a positive story or a negative one? What are you going to do next time?

“We do not actually know other people; we only know our judgments.” (Bryant McGill)

Strategies for Bringing Kindness into Your Life

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“If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.” (Lucy Larcom)

IonaNorthShore-RocksAs I was thinking about what to write this week, I stumbled upon an article that resonated deeply with me. Juliana Breines, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow at Brandeis University, wrote an article entitled “Three Strategies for Bringing More Kindness into Your Life” for U.C. Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center.

She describes 10 core kindness practices, under three broad categories, that research shows will enhance kindness and generosity, leading to increased overall satisfaction with life. What’s not to like here?

Cultivating Feelings of Kindness

The first category of kindness practices deals with cultivating feelings of kindness. For each of the painless strategies enumerated, there are research studies showing their effectiveness in enhancing our desires to be kind and compassionate.

Feeling Connected Practice – This practice asks us to think about a time when we felt strongly connected to another person—perhaps by a shared experience or a profound conversation. Research has shown that this simple exercise increases concern for others and spurs intentions to perform generous acts. The explanation for this outcome, according to Breines, is, “feeling connected to others satisfies a fundamental psychological need to belong; when this need is unmet, people are more likely to focus on their own needs rather than caring for others.”

Feeling Supported Practice – Another simple practice, this one involves thinking about a time you were comforted or supported by others and the qualities and actions of those people who supported you. Research has shown that this practice increases our compassion and willingness to assist a person in need or in distress. In addition to instilling a feeling of “attachment security,” this practice reminds us of the qualities we want to exhibit in ourselves.

Take an Awe Walk – I love this one. An awe walk is a stroll to a place that makes us feel “connected to something greater than ourselves.” It might be the ocean, a forest, or whatever to us seems immense and “perspective-shifting.” For each of us, that awe walk may be a different destination—it might be a lengthy hike, or a few steps from our back door. What’s your awe walk?

Compassion Meditation Practice – This is often referred to as lovingkindness meditation. It’s a practice combining breathing with extending feelings of goodwill toward oneself, one’s loved ones, acquaintances and strangers, and even people we dislike. Breines cites research that just two weeks of compassion meditation result in more generous behaviors and even alteration in the part of our brains that govern compassion and emotional responses. You can find many guides to compassion meditation on-line, including the Greater Good in Action website.

Pause: Before we move to the next category of kindness practices, pause and think about doing some of the above. Schedule an awe walk or think about when you feel connected or supported. Look into the lovingkindness meditation practice.

Increasing the Happiness We Get from Kindness

This next set of strategies deals with ways to be more intentional about practicing kindness in our own lives—and turning kindness into a habit. If you want to increase the number of kind and generous acts you perform, try these proven practices:

Random Acts of Kindness – Such acts are usually simple, spontaneous actions, such as picking up the tab for a stranger’s coffee, putting money in the meter so someone doesn’t get a ticket, or donating blood. This practice suggests performing five random acts in a single day and then writing about the experience. If you’d like more ideas about random acts of kindness, Buzzfeed has a great list of 101 suggestions. Breines notes that performing random acts of kindness both lifts our spirits and increases our self-esteem.

Making Giving Feel Good – There’s a difference between giving because we feel pressured or obligated to do so and giving because we want to. The former may not feel good and may even lead to resentment. The latter does feel good and increases our personal satisfaction. To avoid the negative feelings, we need to make giving a choice—whether we are being asked to give or asking others to give—it must be okay to say no. An additional way to make giving feel good is to make a connection with the recipient of your kindness—don’t just hand a homeless person a couple of dollars and hurry on; take a moment to make eye-contact and exchange a few kind words—it’s easy and it will make you both feel good. Another is to learn about the impact of your generosity—if you give time or money to a cause, take time to learn about how people are positively impacted by your generosity.

Inspiring Kindness in Others

The next set of practices are ways to help others see the value of kindness and engage in kind actions.

Reminders of Connectedness – This is simply examining our surroundings and looking for ways to create reminders of the importance of kindness and connectedness. It might be pictures of people working together placed on the walls of a classroom, a letter of thanks from someone who was helped by our work on the bulletin board at our office, or an inspiring quotation at the top of a board meeting agenda. Look around your place of work for places to convey your team’s connectedness or your shared mission.

Putting a Face on Human Suffering – Sometime kindness requires a kick in the pants—to help us overcome that powerful inertia that keeps us from acting. Sharing pictures or stories of people in need often lights a fire of action and involvement—motivating people to help. Remember the pictures last month of the Syrian child who had drowned in his family’s harrowing sea journey to freedom? That photo motivated more people to action than all the faceless reports of data related to the humanitarian crisis. Similarly, we’ve seen many times that a photo of an abandoned dog or cat in a cage at the humane society spurs the adoption of stray animals far better than reports citing the statistics of homeless animals.

Shared Identity – This practice asks us to explore ways of forging a sense of our common humanity across group boundaries. Whether it is our common love for our children or mutual passion for a sport, we can overcome fear and mistrust by developing a sense of shared affinity. When we take time to think about it, we have so many more similarities than differences with the people who may seem alien to us.

Encouraging Kindness in Kids – If we can instill kindness at an early age, we can change the world. Strategies for nurturing children’s natural propensity toward kindness and generosity include avoiding external rewards for kind behavior so kids see that kindness is its own reward; praising kids’ character so they come to see themselves as kind; when criticism is called for, criticizing the child’s behavior, not their character; and modeling kindness ourselves.

As I review this list of strategies and behaviors that promote kindness, I’m struck by the fact that none of them are difficult, they simply require practice. Like anything we want to do well—from public speaking, to ping-pong, to piano playing—we get good at it by practicing. I can’t think of anything more worthwhile to practice than kindness. Can you?

“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” (Jim Rohn)

Kindness Requires Presence

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“Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.” (Jose Ortega y Gasset)

Attribution: Donna Cameron

Blue Moon at Storm Lake, July 2015

Remember how annoying it was as a child or adolescent to hear teachers repeatedly admonish their students to “Pay attention”? Sometimes it was code for “this will be on the test.” Other times, it was said over and over because the teacher had lost the students’ interest and instructing them to “pay attention” was probably easier than exploring new ways of making geometry or 18th century European history exciting. The best teachers rarely said “pay attention”—they didn’t need to.

All these years later, I keep a little slip of paper bearing the words “Pay Attention” taped next to my desk. I think it’s one of the secrets of a good life.

I’ve also come to see that it’s one of the requirements of a consistently kind life. If we are unaware of what’s going on around us, it’s so easy to miss opportunities to be kind. It might be something simple like holding a door for a stranger, making eye-contact and smiling, or offering to help someone who is struggling with heavy packages. Or it may not be so simple—it might be recognizing despair on a friend’s face and taking time to listen to their story, or thinking about just the right words to say to help a child deal with disappointment or rejection. If we’re oblivious, we miss all these opportunities to make a difference.

Opportunities to extend kindness are all around us, but they’re also easy to miss if we aren’t paying attention. And these days we’re all so distracted by technology that we lose awareness of what is going on around us.

Choosing Presence

people textingMeetings are a major component of my profession: educational seminars, conferences, board meetings, committee meetings, breakfast/lunch/dinner meetings. It’s how we learn, how we network, how we get the business of our non-profit organizations done.

It used to be that during breaks at meetings and conferences, people would help themselves to a cup of coffee and chat with others attending the meeting. Now, people still grab the coffee, but then they stand in solitude at a distance of about four feet from one another and they stare intently into their devices. They check email, they text, they surf the net. What they do very little of is connect with other people in the room. I’ve had people admit to me that sometimes they pretend to check emails because it’s what everyone else is doing and they feel self-conscious just standing there with no one to talk to. If I’m going to be completely honest, I’ll admit that I’ve done it myself.

That person-to-person networking of days gone by was often as valuable as the formal education of the meetings. It’s where practical, informal learning took place, not to mention cultivating business connections and making friends. Have we all really become so important and indispensable that we can’t disconnect for two or three hours? And if it’s true that we are expected to be constantly connected, is that a good thing? I don’t consider myself a Luddite—though some may call me one after reading this—but I do think we’ve become too connected to our electronic devices—to the detriment of connection with our fellow humans.

I think we’ve lost sight of our own capacity to set boundaries. We’ve let the devices rule us, when it should be the other way around.

At the park near our house I see parents absorbed in their smartphones, oblivious to their children’s exuberant cartwheels or triumphant heights on the swings. I wonder whose loss is greater here….

I see couples in restaurants, apparently on a date, but both of them repeatedly checking their phones and responding to texts or emails. I see people walking along busy streets and sidewalks, oblivious to everything but the phone in their hands. At the symphony, I saw the glow of many hand-held devices—their operators oblivious to the magnificence of a Sibelius concerto. What are we missing when we choose not to be fully present to our lives?

When I lead groups in strategic planning I remind them that everything they say “yes” to means there is something else they must say “no” to—so they need to think hard about what is most important to them. It’s the same for us as individuals: what are we saying “no” to as we say “yes” to perpetual connectivity?

Mindfulness Fosters Compassion

There is research from Jon Kabat-Zinn and others that mindfulness cultivates compassion and altruism. Experiments have shown that mindfulness training makes people more likely to recognize and help others—even strangers—in need. It doesn’t seem like rocket science: if we’re present for our lives—paying attention—we’re going to recognize when our gifts are needed: a smile, a word of kindness, a proffered hand.

I suspect it works for self-kindness, too. If we are aware and awake to our lives, we are more likely to recognize that we are tired and we need to rest, or we are stressed and need to pause. As we cultivate awareness of our own lives, we will be better able to recognize and respond to the needs of others. We can’t live a life of kindness toward others if we are not kind to ourselves.

And it all begins with the simple act of choosing to be present, and choosing again and again what we will pay attention to.

“Every day, we are given countless opportunities to offer our gifts to those at work, in our families, our relationships…. If you give less than what you are, you dishonor the gift of your own precious life.” (Wayne Muller)

Thinking About Our Legacy

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“It is not the nature of the task, but its consecration, that is the vital thing.” (Martin Buber)

• PEARLS BEFORE SWINE © 2015 Stephan Pastis. Reprinted by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK for UFS. All rights reserved.

• PEARLS BEFORE SWINE © 2015 Stephan Pastis. Reprinted by permission of UNIVERSAL UCLICK for UFS. All rights reserved.

In the preface to his recently published book, The Road to Character, David Brooks talks about the difference between “resume virtues” and “eulogy virtues.” Brooks describes the former as the skills and proficiencies you list on your resume—those abilities that help you land a job and be successful in your profession. He describes eulogy virtues as the qualities that are likely to be mentioned at your funeral, “the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest, or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.” Brooks admits that for much of his life he gave priority to resume qualities rather than eulogy ones.

I don’t suppose many of us want to think about our funerals, or what people are going to be saying about us as they stand somberly at the podium or nosh on Swedish meatballs and potato salad later. But it’s probably a safe bet that they’re not going to be talking about the wealth or possessions we accumulated. And they’re not going to be lauding our knack with PowerPoint or Excel, or our ability to sell cars, write code, or design heating systems. And if perchance they do, it won’t be about the skill itself, but about the heart and soul that we brought to that ability.

Maybe they’ll talk about the passion we brought to our job, the humor, the patience, the integrity, the kindness. And separate from our jobs, they’ll talk about the qualities that stood out to them. For each of us, those will be different and they may include courage, loyalty, reliability, devotion, compassion, commitment. Each friend and colleague will likely see us differently: to one we were a mentor, to another a buddy, and yet to another we were a sociable neighbor or a wise-cracking cubicle-mate. Each will recall different special qualities depending on the relationship and their own needs and interactions. Yet each of us probably has a few overarching qualities that others recognize as our legacy.

Even for those whose jobs contributed significantly to the community’s, or perhaps the world’s, wellbeing—doctor, statesman, author, scientist—it’s not necessarily the skill or the accomplishment that will be cited, but the dedication and intentionality that accompanied that accomplishment. Equally important as the surgeon’s skill with the scalpel is the compassion she brings to her patients and their families, and to her colleagues in the operating theater. And if the author who pens the greatest literary work of the 21st century is seen off the page as one of the biggest jerks of the century, too, he has earned—at best—hollow tributes.

It bears thinking about now if we want to leave behind us a legacy of friendship, or courage, or faith … or kindness. I have always loved the short poem, Late Fragment, said to have been written by the great Raymond Carver just hours before his death.

It so beautifully describes a life that didn’t end in regret.  As we cultivate our skills in order to achieve professional or creative success, we need also to cultivate the qualities of personal success, those that go beyond our technical or career proficiencies. Think about what values or virtues you want to don each morning when you rise, wear throughout your day and tuck under your pillow when you sleep. Whether it’s faith, kindness, integrity, friendship, courage, or all of the above, choose to live your eulogy every day.

It’s either that, or learn to be a damn good parallel parker….

“Love doesn’t mean doing extraordinary or heroic things. It means knowing how to do ordinary things with tenderness.” (Jean Vanier)

Kindness – An Evolution or a Transformation?

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“Be kind to people and don’t judge, for you do not know what demons they carry and what battles they are fighting.” (Vashti Quiroz-Vega)

Little FriedaHave you ever been adopted by a stray cat? It prowls the porch for a few weeks; then you put out some water and maybe a smidge of tuna, and before you know it, you’re hand-feeding him Chicken Marengo from the dinner table and making him a bed on the best chair in the bedroom.

That’s how kindness sneaks up on you. You start small and pretty soon it’s an habitual practice and it’s made a home in your life.

I’m a big believer in incremental change. Maybe that’s because attempts to make lofty changes all at once have never worked for me. Whether it’s exercise, writing, or keeping my office clean, an attempt to go from zero to sixty in one big leap always resulted in failure.

After years of thwarted good intentions, I finally realized that if I start small—exercise for 15 minutes, write for one half-hour, clean one shelf of my bookcase—the resulting good feelings reinforce the action and I want to do more. And pretty soon a new habit is ingrained.

Kindness works the same way. One can’t go from being oblivious and self-absorbed to being Mother Teresa’s more compassionate sister by simply saying, “From now on, I’m going to be a kind person.” As author R.J. Palacio recently stated, “If kindness were easy, after all, everyone would do it.” We have years of inattention and self-centeredness to overcome, not to mention the attendant fears of having our kindness rejected or “doing it wrong.” But we can go out of our way to perform one small kindness each day, and perhaps after a couple of weeks, perform two, or engage in a large act of kindness. As we see how good it feels, we want to do more, and pretty soon we’re approaching every encounter with the hope that there will be an opportunity to extend ourselves.

I don’t really think there’s such a thing as a small kindness. A warm smile, a kind word, a door held or a package carried—they all influence the receiver to pass it on or “pay it forward.” We have no way of knowing how far one kind action can reverberate.

On the other side of the spectrum, we can stop the reverberation of unkindness by absorbing an insult without retaliating, or hearing harsh words and not hurling them back. These small—but difficult—acts will help to slow the epidemic of unkindness. That’s hard to do, especially when we are just itching to voice the clever retort that will put that person in his or her place. It helps to approach such encounters with the spirit of inquiry we talked about a few weeks ago, to ask what might be motivating this person to act as he does, and what burden he might be carrying that has shortened his temper and brought out the Darth Vader in him. We don’t even have to understand—it’s enough to recognize that there might be more going on than we can see, and to give the benefit of the doubt.

Kindness—like playing the piano or becoming proficient at golf—requires practice. One way to instill the practice that will lead to proficiency is to set an intention of being five percent kinder—to ourselves and to others. Just five percent—or maybe two percent, or ten. Not a lot, but just enough to notice the difference it makes. Let that small incremental change take root and flower. After a while, and with steady practice, kindness becomes both intentional and instinctive—and that’s when magic happens.

Think about it for a moment. What would you do differently if you were just five percent kinder? To yourself? To others? To the planet?

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wisely said, “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”

Like the stray cat who comes to stay, let kindness creep in. Feed it and make a bed for it. Before you know it, the light will flood your soul….

“When we do what we love, again and again, our life comes to hold the fragrance of that thing.” (Wayne Muller)