10 Reasons why you should improve your kindness

There are many reasons why you should consider improving your kindness. It’s one of the most valuable and powerful traits a person can possess and show towards others and oneself. 

But before going any further, let’s first answer this question:

What is kindness?

With this definition in mind, kindness is the act of showing someone else a certain kind of behaviour that is helpful for the other person in a way that is taken as caring. In other words: because you show some act of kindness towards another person, this person can feel valued, unique and worthy.

Now that we know what kindness and showing compassion towards others are, let’s clarify the following:

Why should you consider improving your kind behaviour by offering it to others?

When discussing kind behaviour, it´s not entirely about showing kindness to others, even if they immediately benefit from a kind demeanour. Still, there are also selfish reasons why you should focus on improving your kindness skills.

Kindness can profoundly impact both (you) the giver and the receiving person. This means you can also benefit from acting kind; therefore, kind behaviour can create a happy and fulfilling life. 

Treating oneself and others with kindness has many benefits in all different fields of life.

It feels good, but you can also benefit mentally and physically when acting kinder. Also, kindness is vital for any healthy relationship, whether romantic, platonic or even professional. 

When focusing on kind behaviour towards others, you automatically also focus on showing others respect, which fosters trust in the treated person.

If you struggle to see the benefits of treating yourself and others with all kindness you are willing to spread, don´t worry, friend! 

In today’s blog post, we’ll discuss 10 reasons why you should consider improving your kindness.

1. Kindness improves relationships with others.

The unique and miraculous thing about kindness and showing it towards people you love and admire is that the moment you give some compassion from within yourself, the relationship with that other person, the receiving part, will be improved. 

It has to be like this because, hands down, everybody wants to be treated with kindness and be the receiving part of the love of others. And it does not matter how small the gesture is. It can change our mood and how we perceive any situation.

Build a connection filled with love.

With any kind act towards the people with whom you share a relationship, whether platonic, romantic, or professional, you build a connection with them—a positive one filled with love. 

And don’t get me wrong when I write about “love” and professional relationship in one sentence because the term love does not always have to be considered romantic. We can show love in a variety of different shades. And only one of them is meant romantically. 

Also, a professional relationship can be filled with love as we maintain it with our boss or coworkers. But now we tend to call it differently. The word love is way too intimate to use in a professional term. Now we call it respect, empathy, cooperation, and teamwork. 

These are all terms whereby we must provide love and compassion through acting with kindness to improve our relationship with others around us.

2. Build a sense of community and connectedness.

When you start showing kindness, for example, in the act of volunteering, it can help build a feeling of belonging. Because your focus shifts from yourself and your issues towards other people and how you can be the reason, they have a much more peaceful and loving experience in that particular situation in which you are involved. 

You strengthen your connection with your surroundings whenever you decide to be kind.

This can help you feel more connected with others and start building a community with these people. 

Since you focus not on yourself and how you can be the absolute winner out of any situation and how you can benefit first things first but on others and how you can be helpful here, you shift from an overall isolated perspective to a whole teamwork perspective.

With this new teamwork perspective, you can feel more connected since other people have your back, and you have theirs, which creates a sense of community. 

3. Kindness reduces stress and increases happiness.

Before discussing how kindness can reduce stress and increase happiness, we must first clarify what habits can create tension and decrease the feeling of joy.

What habits, routines, and actions create stress?

The topic of stress is HUGE. Therefore, we could talk for hours about what creates tension, what pressure does to our bodies, how to reduce stress, and more. 

But even if we are not pros when it comes to the topic of stress, I’m pretty sure we can all agree that even without knowing the correct terms of stress and all the issues belonging to the case of stress, we all know what stress is about the moment we feel it within our bodies, right?

We all know how exhausting it is to feel stressed out. How tiring it is to be in a stressful situation. And even if we do not quite understand how we created stressful situations, we know clearly how stress feels when we are in that stressful situation. And that we all want to avoid it as much as possible because it simply feels horrible. Period.

When it comes to kindness and how it can create a stress-free environment for us, how can the absence of empathy be so powerful that it can increase stress and even decrease happiness?

Think about it for a moment. 

Could it be that when our focus, without kindness for souls other than us, can quickly shift from calm, happy and compassionate to anxious because without compassion in our hearts, doesn’t the whole world become our enemy? Aren’t we then, out of a sudden, completely isolated from everyone around us? 

Because with kind behaviour, we actively connect with other people, and without kindness, we cut these connections. And without connections, just focused on us, we are all alone, especially in our minds. 

When thoughts kick into our minds that prove that we are isolated because we feel isolated, this is when isolation creates stress; it can be exceptionally stressful without a network of other people we can trust and have faith in. 

Also, when feeling isolated, our inner walls to protect us from our “enemies” get thicker and thicker. Anxiety can take over the lead and lead to a downward spiral of unpleasant feelings like stress and a lack of happiness. 

Let the world become more colourful again.

But the moment you let your heart be filled with kindness for others and show it to others, the world can become more colourful again. You do not have to feel isolated. The moment you start looking for these unique connections is when your heart can be filled with happiness again. 

Feeling happy does not relate to others but to how you treat yourself and how you let yourself treat others. It’s all about shifting your perspective. And as soon as you manage to rise, it’ll make sense.

Because with kindness in your heart, you will realise that the souls in your outer world deserve to be treated with compassion, just like you. You will see that you are the one who “has to” treat them with kindness since you have no choice other than being kind. 

And this is how your kind behaviour can reduce stress and improve happiness.

4. Kindness is contagious.

There is this very famous quote Mahatma Gandhi is credited for: 

And this quote comes to play when talking about kindness. Because kind behaviour is contagious, when you show others generous behaviour and compassion, the feeling you convert with your actions can inspire the receiving parts of your kindness to do the same. Do the same with themselves, you, and everyone around them.

Because when we feel good, we mostly want others to feel the same. But one needs to start. One needs to be the beginning of this domino effect to become this massive, unstoppable wave of kindness eventually.

Kindness is enormously powerful, and if everyone in this world can contribute even the tiniest kind act, like a smile for a person you don’t know yet, our world can become more loving, calm and peaceful. 

5. Kindness can make a positive impact on the world.

Kindness can make the world a better place. But every single one of us must participate in this massive project. Because if every one of us does something kind to one another every day, the world has no choice but to become a better place for all of us. 

But it’s essential that you do not wait until others start being kind to you in the first place. It can be tempting to wait until you are treated with kindness before you “can” start being kind in return. 

It does not work like this!

Hear me loud and clear: you cannot wait until something happens to you first for you to do something in return and expect something miraculous. No. You need to be active before anyone else. You need to be the one who starts and takes the first step. 

And this advice does not only belong to kindness and acting accordingly. It goes with any of your goals and desires. It’s ridiculous to wait and expect what you want to magically appear and knock on your door without you undergoing the necessary changes within yourself.

Let me ask you to challenge yourself to change the person you identify as today to experience another reality tomorrow. That’s how it works. 

Do the work today, and change will come. And eventually, your whole reality will shift in your favour.

6. Foster empathy and understanding.

Until this point, we already know that kindness is exceptionally marvellous. 

But how can kindness help foster empathy and understanding?

When embracing kindness and spreading it with the world, your focus must shift from an isolated, self-focused perspective to a more comprehensive one. 

You then need to realise that it’s not all about you and your concerns. It’s more about all of us and how you receive all of it. It’s about you seeing the world as it should be and not how you sense it to be.

With the realisation that there is more than you and with this shift of focus, you can be part of something tremendous and start training your empathy muscle. 

What does empathy mean?

By this definition, empathy contains the perception of “understanding.” Understanding does come from feeling compassion for someone else. And here comes again kindness to play. 

The more you want to listen and understand what you cannot hear with your ears, the more you are empathetic to the other, and the more you can finally step into your kind and compassionate era. Also, if you act with kindness, you will eventually start feeling more empathetic for the other person and begin to understand. 

It’s like a hoop, a self-contained circle. And this is how kindness can foster empathy and understanding.

7. Improve workplace morale and productivity.

Of course, if kindness can improve the above topics, kind behaviour can also improve workplace morale and productivity. What works in your private life may also work in your work life, and kindness always helps, no matter the place or circumstances!

By showing kind behaviour to your coworkers, colleagues, managers, clients etc., you create a positive and supportive environment where everyone feels valued and appreciated. And when people feel seen and respected, they feel more likely to be motivated and engaged in their work. This can then lead to increased levels of productivity. 

And a productive workplace, where respect and empathy are actively maintained, and such behaviour is valued and appreciated by one another, is where people love coming together and working as a team.

Eventually, here is where real business can happen!

Also, an extra benefit of acting kind to others is that this can build trust since people around you feel respected, and respect creates trust. This leads to much stronger relationships with your coworkers, which can lead to a more intense sense of teamwork, ultimately leading to increased overall performance.

Acts of kindness can push so much in the right direction. And the best part is that it takes little to make an impression.

8. Reduce conflicts and promote peace.

When discussing work ethic and interacting with different kinds of people, there is often a conflict just around the corner. It’s a natural condition that whenever we interact with other people, and the more we do this, conflicts can arise.

Conflicts are not, in general, a bad thing. Far away from the truth. Conflicts are enormously vital to a healthy relationship, regardless of origin. Because different people think different thoughts and since diverse people value various aspects of life, conflicts are natural. 

Conflicts are natural.

The tricky part of conflicts is not that they may appear here and there but how people usually deal with them. In these situations, forcing ourselves to win a discussion at any cost is tempting since a conflict can be seen as a threat, which activates the fight or flight response. And here is where kindness plays a massive role in reducing conflicts and promoting peace. 

Because as we already discussed earlier, when you concentrate on kindness and compassion, you focus on what behaviour you can provide to serve the other person well.

Therefore, we are focused on finding solutions and compromises with what outcome everyone can be okay with. But when we focus on helping others instead of being a shark and prioritising winning no matter what, conflicts have a more challenging time escalating.

And this is how kind behaviour can reduce conflicts and promote peace.

9. Better health outcomes.

In addition to all the emotional and social benefits discussed above, kindness can positively impact our overall health and well-being. Kind acts make a difference in increasing feelings of calm and happiness. And aren’t these feelings precisely what we crave most?

Who does not want to foster happiness in their lives? Who does not love living a calm life, no matter how chaotic it may be outside our minds?

Furthermore, altruistic behaviours, such as kindness, can be accounted for positively affecting health and longevity as long as acts of kindness are done with feeling great in mind.

This means that as long as you focus on how you feel while you’re being kind to others and how it can benefit you, and as long as you are not considering it a burden to be helpful or altruistic, considerate behaviour dramatically impacts our health status and can even influence our longevity. 

Research has also found that kindness is linked to subjective happiness. Again, this means that kindness can make you happy. Because this is associated with more positive memories, happy people see life more positively than unhappy people.

What can you learn from this?

Happy people experience life in a highly positive and light way. Their experiences tend to be much more colourful than the life of less happy people. Since happiness is linked to kindness, acts of kindness can help you be more optimistic than ever. 

Also, being happy gives your life more quality, which is the one thing we all aim for, right? A life that is rich and qualitative on our conditions.

10. Being kind feels great.

Kindness and what it feels to be kind is linked to the feeling of love and other feelings the term love contains. When we express something related to kindness, these light and warm emotions are one of the things in life most people would make much effort to keep as long as humanly possible. And can’t we all agree that all related emotions to love are welcome in our lives?

Acts of kindness also lead to such light and warm feelings since it simply feels fantastic to help others. To see that others benefit from what you can provide to them. The knowledge that you are the source so that another being can feel better. 

It simply feels fantastic to help others.

And knowing that it does not take much from your side to let not only benefit the receiving part from your actions but also you as the actor is a beautiful condition. Knowing that you are in control over what feeling you can express with controlling your actions and improving kind behaviour. 

Kindness feels excellent, even if it’s a simple gesture like a smile or helping someone with some bits and bobs. 

If all it takes to feel this greatness of what kindness is, and if you know you are the creator of these feelings by acting kind to others, what stops you from always being kind?

Nothing can stop you from being kind!

We live in a world that often values competition and individualism over compassion and empathy. We live in a world that seems to not care about what belongs to other people than themselves. 

But mostly, it’s just where our focus goes. It’s mostly just an illusion, and as always, the more you endeavour to see the whole picture, the more you see that there is more to it than you initially thought.

You can only see the picture your focus illuminates for you and nothing else. Therefore, you can decide whether you want to be one of these highly successful people in these standard terms our society declares success – competition and individualism – or if you want to become one who sees a different picture. To be one whose focus goes in another direction so you can eventually see the power in being kind. 

The moment you start prioritising kindness in your life, you can grow.

And it’s not about significant changes and gestures. A kind act can be as simple as holding the door open for someone or offering a kind word or a smile to a stranger. It can also mean being more patient and understanding towards others, even when it may be difficult.

And life is about these difficult moments. About the moments that force you to grow. Because growth means change, and change is natural. And with kindness as your trigger for growth, you can merely come out as the winner.

Now is the time for you to take action!

I want you to try out being more kind. But start today! 

Start today shifting your focus towards where you can be kind to someone. Keep your eyes wide open to these magical opportunities where you can act kind and be a great help to someone else!

You can do it! I believe in you!

Until next time, 
Keep on evolving into your most glorious self!