This Saturday I will be giving a presentation at the University of British Columbia’s Student Leadership Conference (it’s the biggest and most awesome student-run conference in North America). Drawing on this year’s theme – “Be Infinite” – my talk is entitled “Achieving Infinite Kindness”. I’ll be focussing on straightforward tips on how to spread kindness in your community at school, at work and at home.

How to Spread Kindness

Drawing on quantum mechanics, active listening, genetics, well-being, cultural anthropology, professional sports, existentialism, pop culture, and my own stories, here are three tips for spreading kindness in your community.

Refer to no one as “Them”

I recently saw Anthropologist and Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis speak to a whole bunch of changemakers in Vancouver and he spent a good chunk of his time thanking geneticists for proving that the idea of race is absolutely a social, not biological, construct: “we’re all cut from the same genetic cloth. Race is an utter fiction.” Going even deeper, researchers exploring quantum mechanics explain that the building blocks responsible for everything about us are the same. People are are made up of the same stuff as each other and the communities in which we live, so it makes good sense to love ourselves and our shared connections.

Existentialists see things similarly. I’ll let Dustin Hoffman’s character from I Heart Huckabees explain:

My point is this: spreading kindness begins with acknowledging the fact that there is no “them and us”, there is only “us”. Everyone deserves kindness, especially if we are expecting kindness from others and, most importantly, if we are in the business of being kind to ourselves.

Because, as the evidence shows, we’re all connected and we’re all each other.

Listen. Like, Really Listen.

There is a lot of noise in the world, which makes it difficult for people to be heard. Because we’re competing for airtime – and because many of us have moderate and/or sizable egos – people engaging in conversations are often not actually listening, we’re just waiting for our turn to talk. So, my advice for being an ambassador of kindness is this: seek to understand someone before being understood by them.

This starts with awesome active listening skills, such as eye contact with (and squaring your body to) your audience, synthesizing what s/he is saying and repeating it back to her/him, and by asking clarifying questions that deepen your understanding of what they are saying. Understanding how someone is feeling and what s/he is thinking also requires exceptional empathy, which will require you to be authentic if you try some one, two or all of these examples of things you could say:

• “Tell me more…”
• “That must make you feel very frustrated/hurt/amazing. What happened next?”
• “I’m sorry to hear that. What you’re describing sounds incredibly difficult.”

Combining empathy with active listening will allow you to acknowledge where your audience (friend, colleague, staff-you-manage, community-member) is coming from and how your kindness can help them get where they want to be.

Be Generous and Be About Building

In my experience, kindness is often seen as being synonymous with weakness; especially when people talk about the world of work and/or dating. The cliché is that nice folks don’t get ahead. Think about this weird myth for a minute. When in your life do you enjoy – or strive to – collaborate with a jerk? My theory is that such behaviour is very, very rare because nobody wants to work with an asshole. So, that’s the first part: people want to work with people they like.

The second thing to remember is that relationships drive the world of work. How kind you are to the people in your community will impact how you are talked about, how you are connected to others and how many favours come your way.

In his article about the value of generosity, Sean Blanda features Penn professor Adam Grant’s research into three types of people: givers, matchers and takers. People who give generously, according to Grant, are more successful in life – the caveat here is that these folks need to balance such giving with strong organizational skills so as to not burn themselves out by spreading their kindness too thin.

Inc’s Jeff Haden finds that kindness and likeability are strongly correlated. Likeable people tend to give away their power – exercising “social jiu jistsu” to ensure that their audience, not themselves, are the subject of the conversation.

Finally, my most fun recommendation for spreading kindness isn’t my idea at all: it belongs to Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres, and the super-fun pioneering concept about spreading kind vibes is called a “Nice Off”. You can learn more about being nice in this fun activity to be shared amongst friends:

I love this sort of kindness because – by leveraging the co-opetition – Jimmy and Ellen compete with each other in a way that makes everybody feel great and also models being nice to others in their communities.

And you should strive to win with kindness, too.

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Here is a wonderful quote from 99u’s book Maximize Your Potential, edited by Jocelyn K. Glei, that highlights the importance of kindness when it comes to fostering relationships:

To achieve all that we’re capable of, we must enlist a group of allies to accompany us on our journey. Empower our coworkers and clients to give us honest feedback, build collaborative teams with an eye toward fresh perspectives, and tend to our network of acquaintances with generosity and authenticity.