I’m sure most of you have heard of the saying “Treat others as you want to be treated.” There was a time when children were taught this, and it continued to be reinforced in their early years as an attempt to fill the world with compassionate adults. With this coming of age lesson, you learned to respect your elders and take care/protect young children from the negative aspects of the world to make them greater beings. These early teachings are what influenced this week’s family value of…
KINDNESS
There are so many people who go through their day to day “alone” without close relationships; this can be because they didn’t get empathy and kindness from others or they didn’t give kindness to others. Almost all siblings have fights and almost all children are annoyed by their parent’s rules at some point, but in the end, families should stick together. If one’s family can learn the secrets to kindness, this leads to happier people navigating the world. There are many families who have troubling relationships and it’s not because they don’t love each other; but they fail to understand each other’s feelings. For example, in the 90’s movie “Soul Food” you had a family where the matriarch did her best to teach her adult children and grandchildren family values; their were some disruptions of greater levels than others but in the end we saw a family who learned to understand each other after these events and made the decision to choose love/kindness.
So how can we adjust our thinking and behaviors to include more kindness…
- Learn to say thank you even if it’s just for someone passing a bottle of water out of the refrigerator.
- Practice active listening when someone talks to you about how they feel; listen first and think before you speak to make sure you consider the other person’s feelings in terms of how they will receive what’s expressed.
- Engage in an act of kindness for someone (i.e., go to the grocery store for your pregnant sister, buy a coworker some coffee) to put that energy out into the universe.
- Treat yourself with respect because the negative thoughts you may have can unknowingly affect what your project to others.
So, being that Thanksgiving Day is soon to come here in the U.S., the full history behind it may not be the greatest story to reflect on kindness but we can change this continued pattern and serve others in a way that brings a great energy into the lives of all. In the words of the great poet Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”