The Power of Kindness

I am obviously late to the party on Ted Lasso, as I try not to start any series at all due to what my therapist calls “completion compunction” (and yes I binge watched the entire first season on two consecutive evenings not that long ago but have had the good sense of not starting season two). If you haven’t seen the show, the central character is an American football coach who winds up coaching a British soccer club and winning over (nearly) everyone with his kindness. The level of kindness on display and its results are obviously overdrawn, but provides a lovely counterweight to the cynicism and pettiness that pervades so much else (I don’t watch reality shows but catch glimpses of them at times and oh my).

I have been working hard for years now to be more kind and feel like I have made a lot of progress. Before explaining that, let me first talk about what I mean by kindness and why I believe it is powerful.  For a word that is so widely used it is surprisingly difficult to capture its meaning. The dictionary definition of kind is to be of a sympathetic, helpful, forbearing nature. The wonderfully named website “Kindness Is Everything” provides a more provocative statement: Kindness Is Love In Action. Of course “love” is an even more difficult word and so this may result in more questions than it answers. That’s why further down on the same page there is a more operational definition as “Kindness is the sincere and voluntary use of one’s time, talent, and resources to better the lives of others, one’s own life, and the world through genuine acts of love, compassion, generosity, and service.” For some counter-intuitive takes on kindness, check out these aphorisms from the School of Life (I don’t agree with all of them but they will make you think).

What then did I mean when I titled the post “The Power of Kindness” – what is the power of kindness? There are two parts. The first is that kindness can transform relationships. Ted Lasso abounds with fictional examples of this, but I have experienced it myself many times over. Kindness can take an adversarial relationship and turn it over time into a friendship. Of course that may also not happen because the other person may not reciprocate. But that brings me to the second part, which is in some ways even more important. It will change for sure how you feel about the relationship. The true power of kindness is that it lets you go from annoyed, irritated, even angry to accepting (or maybe even loving).

So how can one make progress on being kind? While kindness is fundamentally an attitude, it can also be practiced much like a skill. The best analogy I have been able to come up with is waking up from sleep. You could try to will yourself awake or you could simply start to get going with your day and let your mind catch up. Kindness works much the same way. Just start with some kind acts, even you don’t feel compelled by kindness towards them, and you may find – much like I did – that over time kindness grows inside of you.

Go give kindness a chance. I highly recommend it.