Kindness as an Engine for Personal Growth, or Practicing What I Preach
Among my many activities here in Austin is serving as one of the leaders for a coaching group. We meet monthly, working to build our coaching skillsets, finding and conversing with other people that also want to become better coaches, and hopefully learning something new. On a Monday, pre-Covid 19 night, we colored outside the lines. We ventured outside the realm of professional coaching to how to use our coaching skills to have those difficult conversations in our personal lives. You know the ones I mean: political differences, inflammatory posts on social media, personal stances on volatile issues like healthcare or religion or personal choice, diatribes, rants, the general awfulness. In other words, we wanted to use coaching where it matters most.
We were all a bit curious about where the topic might lead us, but we waded in. After all, there are few among us who don’t want to have forbidden topics be more accessible. We want better conversations, better connections, more community with people. And the reception to the topic was phenomenal. People were open-minded, curious, and willing. Everyone left feeling like we do have the skills to have these conversations, and now we have the bravery to do so.
It wasn’t until I got home that I remembered a question I’d posed to an audience last year while speaking at a conference: What if kindness was an engine for personal growth? Essentially, isn’t that what we were talking about? Weren’t we demonstrating kindness for the other person by caring so much that we would be willing to have the hard conversation, and wasn’t that demonstrated kindness fueling our own growth in return? I cannot help but think yes, to both halves of the equation.
Hard conversations require good questions. A friend once told me that when in difficult conversations, particularly with someone where he does not have common ground, he asks questions until he can begin to see himself in the other person. This struck me as beautiful, compassionate, and so very hard to do in the moment. When someone espoused a viewpoint to which I have a visceral reaction, how could I check my response leaning in to understand, not necessarily to be understood. Could it be done? Could questions be used to gain insight, to unravel the knots we’ve tied to keep our positions secure?
The short answer is yes. When questions are asked from a place of curiosity, of kindness, of love, I believe that they are engines for personal growth. Those situations demand the most of us and the person in that conversation with us. Those are generally the hardest to have, but generally those are the most needed conversations, and they result in stronger connections.
You know the people that are lovely and pleasant and all good things? I am not that. I am anything but that. I have a mouth that needs to be checked and rechecked and often just zipped altogether. To help with this, I’ve made kindness a daily practice, and while it does not come easily for me, I’m getting better. When I said that kindness is an engine for personal growth, it’s most often my growth that we’re talking about. My purpose here is to become the best human that I can possibly be, and this path, of giving first without thought of anything in return, is where I need to take that first step. But I believe in kindness, especially radical kindness. I believe that good can outweigh the bad. I believe that it is far, far better to lift someone up instead of kicking them down. And more than anything, I believe that if we practice kindness, practice what we espouse, then we are contributing to our own growth. So thank you, Carol Dweck, for helping us to lean into a growth mindset, and to the Agile Austin community as a whole, and for everyone willing to ask that first, curious, kind question.
Photo credit for this blogpost is Linda Nickell. Find her on Instagram as @coznlinda.