The Be the Sun, Not the Salt team is a big fan of the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. After all, we believe there is really no better thing to aspire to than being kind, moment-to-moment, every day.
If you haven’t found it coming natural to you to make space for kindness in your schedule, there’s an annual event that may help: It’s World Kindness Day and it falls on November 13, each year. We encourage you to start today, pick even the smallest act of kindness, and intentionally make Kindness the Norm! Take this annual date and purposefully perform an act of kindness on this day—and then to continue from there. It’s the doing that makes the difference. This difference is visible for you and all those around you. As Brooke Jones, Vice President of the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, says, “Look for ways to make kindness the norm in your daily life. World Kindness Day is a great day to begin building a new routine.”
“What if we stopped thinking about them as random acts of kindness and started thinking about them as intentional acts of kindness?”
What might that routine include? The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation has a handful of suggestions for ways to start making kindness the norm in your daily life:
• Send an uplifting text to a family member or friend.
• Let that guy merge into traffic with a wave and a smile.
• Include intentional moments of kindness, laughter, and delight in your daily routine.
• Go slightly outside your comfort zone at least once a day to make someone smile.
• Share a compliment with a co-worker or friend.
• Reach out to a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while.
• Treat someone to a cup of coffee (a friend, a stranger, or even yourself).
It’s enough to do any of these small random acts, of course—or anything else that occurs to you. On those days that Being the Sun is a bridge too far, just holding the Salt can be good enough. Bite your tongue, you don’t need to say everything you think. Being kind is as easy as;
• Smiling
• Keeping your Word
• Being Dependable and Honest
• Doing the Hard Work
• Listening Well
• Speaking Thoughtfully
• Being Compassionate
• Being Forgiving
• Wanting the Best for Others!
It turns out kindness doesn’t take much effort. It does take intentional effort in every moment though to choose to do the next right thing. What if kindness were a habit as ingrained as brushing one’s teeth or grabbing a coffee on the way to work? What if we judged everything we did against one simple test: Am I being kind? Start small. Join Be the Sun, Not the Salt on World Kindness Day, and intentionally practice doing something kind…and then keep doing more of that please. Tell us about your experience in working towards Being the Sun and you just may see it on our website.
