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5 Intention-setting Ideas to Strengthen Your Kindness Muscles

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World Kindness Day was first introduced in 1998 and is observed each year on November 13th.  The World Kindness Movement (WKM) introduced World Kindness Day to promote awareness of global goodwill and offers an opportunity to highlight good deeds in the community.  People around the world are encouraged to perform acts of kindness every day throughout the month.  If you need some ideas to stir your motivation, The Mayo Clinic offers a Kickstart Kindness program that you can check out.

Kindness is not simply an action.  It is a quality of being that can be cultivated.  Demonstrating kindness can be simple and free and has been shown to be health-enhancing!

Below are some intention-setting ideas for why kindness matters and why you might want to catch the kindness wave this month:

  1. Connection.   Acts of kindness have been shown to create bonds between people that foster relationships.  They create a sense of community fulfilling a basic human need for a sense of belonging.  Consider volunteering some time this month in a community outreach effort such as at a local food pantry or an environmental conservation project, such as a beach cleanup.
  2. Well-being.  Being kind can boost your own mental health by decreasing stress and anxiety and increasing your mood.  It often leads to feelings of happiness and fulfillment and often starts with being kind to ourselves.  Perhaps this month you set an intention to write down the noise that your critical voice is often heard making and try rewriting it as if you were offering a dear friend or your child words of comfort to show themselves kindness.
  3. Ripple effect.  Demonstrating kindness can inspire others to be kind when they see and feel it in action!  Modeling behaviors impacts people, especially children, by teaching them social skills, to help others, and how to engage in other positive social interactions.  So know that when you model kindness it is creating a positive chain reaction that can spread throughout a community.  Consider where you might model kindness this month and then observe how your behaviors might become contagious!
  4. Resilience.  Kindness builds resilience in many ways, including helping you to focus on your strengths (instead of where you feel you are going wrong), activating your brain’s reward system reducing powerful emotions such as shame and self-loathing, and building social connections and a supportive network.  With these tools, kindness can provide support and comfort, helping you to better navigate challenging times.  Even witnessing acts of kindness increases the production of serotonin, a neurotransmitter that regulates mood.  So perhaps set an intention to increase the occurrence of expressing your appreciation to the people in your life that support you in some way every day, knowing it will build both yours and their resilience, a gift that will keep on giving for a life time!
  5. Empathy.  Developing empathy can support exercising our kindness muscles.  Empathy requires us to not only understand but share in another’s emotions as if you were walking in their shoes.  It encourages compassion, which goes beyond empathy by actively wanting to reduce the suffering of another by taking some action to help them.  Consider someone you know that might be suffering in some way right now and lean into what they might be feeling at this time.  Notice what emotions arise for you.  Notice if some action comes into mind that might provide this person some support.  That’s empathy and compassion at work, promoting a more caring and tolerant culture.