Take the Kindness Challenge!

“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses." - Confucius

Kind acts can transform your body, mind, spirit and your experience of life! Science proves it (read The Science of Kindness). But don’t take our word for it. Conduct your own experiment and try it for yourself for a day or two or even a week. Make performing kind acts a focus in your life during your experiment.

Challenge yourself to discover how many ways and places you can be kind. Think of all the people you interact with over the course of a day. What would it be like to sprinkle kindness energy around yourself that drops on all of these people: drivers on the streets and highways, the checkout people in the stores where you shop, the UPS person delivering a package, the people in line with you at the post office, the Customer Service person on the other end of the telephone.

You may find it most difficult to be kind to those closest to you, as these are often the ones with whom we feel the most free to be open, honest and direct in releasing the feelings related to stress and frustration. Here you get an opportunity to be the most accountable for your internal world and to take charge of your frustration in ways that do not hurt other people. Big challenge.

Also notice what happens when you give without expecting anything back. In fact, the less visible these acts are to others, the more likely you will learn about the impact of kindness on YOU. Performing acts of kindness that involve an external reward can contaminate your experiment, as it can shift your attention to getting the reward rather than noticing how being kind personally affects you. And notice your resistance to being kind. Become a stalker of your thoughts and behaviors to help you pay more attention to opportunities for being kind and to help you recognize either a missed opportunity or when you blew it and went into unkindness.

We want to caution you about one thing: that being kind does not mean being dishonest or failing to tell the truth at a critical time. We believe that you can say almost anything in a kind way. In fact, speaking kindly is likely to help other people really hear your truth. Notice when it is the most difficult for you to be kind, and question yourself about why this is. You will see that focusing on being kind can penetrate not only the corners of your life, but also the corners of your mind in ways that really accelerate your consciousness.

We are interested in knowing how taking the Kindness Challenge impacted your body/mind/spirit and invite you to share your experience with others. You can do this by personally witnessing your Challenge in your relationships, workplace, church, and neighborhood and by emailing a story about it here.