Donna Cameron on Kindness

or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wealth. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Donna Cameron, who has spent her career working with nonprofit organizations and causes as an executive, a consultant, a trainer, and a volunteer. She's the recipient of multiple writing awards. Donna has published numerous articles and in two thousand and eleven, co authored with Kristen Leather's One Hill, Many Voices, Stories of hope and healing. In this interview, Donna and Eric discuss her book, A Year of Living Kindly Choices that will change your life

in the world around you. Hi, Donna, Welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thanks for inviting me. I'm delighted to be with you. Yeah. Your book is called A Year of Living Kindly Choices that will change your life and the world around you, And we will get into that in just a moment. But we're going to start the way that we always do, and that's with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. He says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And she says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I've always loved that parable, Eric, and I

love that you asked this question. Two answers come to mind for me. One it's sort of a macro level, and one at a more micro level. The first one is that there's been considerable research in recent years showing that unkindness and incivility are contagious, literally contagious. They pass from one person to the next, just like a cold or the flu. If we experience unkindness, even if we only witness it and aren't directly involved, it causes us

to behave more rudely in our next encounter. And I think that really explains a lot of what we're seeing in society these days. Incivility has become epidemic because we're feeding it. But at the same time, there's also been a lot of research showing that kindness is equally contagious, So just like a virus, it infects people who come into contact with it, and the same as as incivility, whether we extend the kindness, we receive it, or even just witness it, it's a catalyst for us to behave

more kindly. So I think we have a choice in which wolf we feed. And this arena, it's a choice in which epidemic we want to spread. And then on on a more micro level, let me share this example from my career. I worked in the nonprofit world for for more than thirty years, charitable and philanthropic nonprofits and

also nonprofit trade and professional organizations. And with the latter we sometimes worked with associations whose members jobs we're all about looking for mistakes, looking for errors, looking for abnormalities, jobs like building inspectors or radiologists or forensic accountants. So they spend their days looking for something to be wrong. And because they're good at their jobs, we're safer, we're

in better condition. Um buildings meet construction codes, tumors are caught earlier, financial or regularities are identified, so they do really important work. But the problem comes if some of these people can't turn off that fault finding skill outside their job. They become people, and we all know them, the people who you go to dinner with them and they point out the typo and the menu, or they

criticize the way their kid mowed the lawn. Rather than appreciating the fact that their kids bowed the lawn, they point out every flaw they see no matter how unimportant, because they just can't stop looking for errors. So they become people who are really good at seeing what's wrong, but they miss out on what's right. I call it playing gotcha with life, or or listening for the miss note rather than the music. I don't know if you know people like this, but they're exhausting to be around.

And so with regard to them, I would say that in their jobs, they're feeding the good wolf, but when they can't turn off that critical sensor, they start feeding the bad wolf, right, And I would say that people in those careers maybe more so that way, but a

lot of us have an inclination towards that. I mean, there's a lot of writing about, you know, the negativity, the negativity bias being a hardwired sort of thing, and it's just something I think that I certainly have to watch for in my life to make sure I'm looking for what is right versus what is wrong. And it's just a it's a matter of choosing what you choose to look for exactly, and it takes practice too, indeed, it does. So a year of living, Kindly talk to

me about your year of living. Kindly tell me sort of what your idea was maybe talk a little bit about some of the things that you did during that year. Well, for years, actually decades, I've been really aware of the power of kindness. And I've been awed by people who are just genuinely kind ing we're around them, they just feels so wonderful. And I I'm a nice person, and I was certainly raised to be nice, that was my mother's mantra, but I was never told to be kind.

And I started to really notice that there's a difference between kind and nice, and um, I would set an intention to be kinder, and it would fall by the wayside when my business got really busy or stressful, or just life got in the way. So in two thousand and fifteen, I decided to blog about kindness, and I called the blog a Year of Living Kindly, thinking I would just blog for a year about my own efforts

to really live a kind life. Also, because I'm kind of nerdy, I wanted to do a lot of research into into kindness. I was seeing that there's a lot of studies now quantifying the benefits of kindness, and I wanted to explore and share those and just share what I was learning and observing about kindness, and for me, having a blog really was the solution. It held my

feet to the fire. I had invited a few friends to follow the blog, so I know people were watching, and if I just let it fall by the wayside, that would be sort of a noticeable failure. So I blogged weekly about about kindness and I just learned so

much and it was always on my radar. So it was an amazing year for me in terms of experiencing kindness, getting better myself at extending kindness, and seeing how much kindness there really is around us that we sometimes either take for granted or more likely we're oblivious to it. And then at the end of the year, the people who followed my blog encouraged me to continue writing it

and to turn it into a book. And I had seen really early on that committing to and this wasn't something I was going to do for a year and then move on to learning salsa dancing or cooking Caribbean food or something. It really was something I wanted to commit to for as long as I'm on the planet. Can we dance and be kind? That's what I need to certainly do that. Yes, although I think a lot of people would say that my dancing is an unkindness

for those around me. It's it's entirely possible that that case could be made. So you said, being nice isn't the same as being kind, and this is uh, for some reason, my mom's catchphrase the last few years, So tell me what the difference is, since we haven't had her on to tell us. Okay, I think nice doesn't ask a lot of us. We can tolerate someone and still be nice to them. We can be fairly indifferent and still be nice. We can be nice and not

really make a connection with someone. But I don't think we can be kind and do any of those things. Kind really asks us to connect with the person we're dealing with. It asks us to really be vulnerable, because we're taking a risk. If we extend a kindness, it might be rejected. We might do it clumsily, we might call unwanted attention to ourselves. It takes courage to be kind. I don't think it takes courage to be nice. I

think that's very much true. And when when I read that in the book, I I certainly felt a recognition there. And I won't go on record with how kind or not kind, I think I am, but nice is a big one. And and one of the things you said that I thought, really sum this up well, you said, extend yourself captures the essence of kindness. It also highlights the difference between niceness and kindness, that idea of extending ourselves beyond maybe what is comfortable exactly. Yes, there was

a theologians uh here in Seattle. Uh He was a columnist for the Seattle Times, a motivational speaker, just a wonderful, incredibly kind man. And he used to hand out little cards with the words extend yourself on them. And I've carried one of his cards in my wallet for probably thirty years now. And Dale Turner is gone now. He

was just a marvelous man. But I've I've tried to keep that, uh, that tradition alive, and I now have little cards that say extend yourself that I I give out whenever I have a chance to talk about kindness.

But I think it really it does summarize in two short words, what kind of all about you say, Being kind means caring, It means making an effort, It means thinking about the impact I'm having in an interaction with someone and endeavoring to make it rich and meaningful, giving them what they need at the exact moment, without worrying about whether I get anything in return. And that's a

beautiful sentence, and it's also a high bar. So talk to me about you in your year of living kindly and times that you come up short, and how you work with that, because it's seems inevitable to me that in anything we endeavor, any sort of extending ourselves, inevitably we come up short some of the time. Oh absolutely, unless someone is Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama. We're never going to become perfect at kindness. It's really a path,

not a destination. And I think for me personally, and it's going to be different for everyone, but for me, some of the barriers to kindness that I really needed to overcome and sometimes didn't were obliviousness, just not noticing that there's an opportunity in front of me to be kind, or even not noticing that someone is extending me a kindness and I may not see it, you know, something as simple as holding a door for someone. And then I think, also because I was raised by a mother

who said never call attention to yourself. Sometimes doing something kind where I know I'm going to call attention to myself, whether that's stepping in if someone's being buoyed or um, you know, going and helping someone who needs help immediately. There's still sometimes a hesitation there because I know I'm calling attention to myself. But again, it's one of those things that gets easier with practice. If I were an inherently kind person, I wouldn't be doing this because kindness

would just be such second nature to me. And I do know people like that, uh, and I want to be one of them. You say that there's a chasm between kindness and unkindness. Talk to me about what that is. Well, I think it's indifference. Really, it doesn't mean we're unkind, but that doesn't necessarily not being unkind doesn't mean we're kind. So someone who says, well, I didn't do anything bad, so that must make me a kind person, No, it doesn't.

Kindness is more than not being unkind, and I think there's a lot of us who spend more of our time in that sort of indifferent stage. I don't know if you're old enough to remember back in the sixties when Kitty j. Genevise was murdered in New York and all of these people listen to her screams, but nobody did anything about it. And that's an extreme example. But you know, they weren't evil people, but they just didn't want to get involved, and kind of desks us to

get involved. That the chasm is jumping in being willing to get involved, even if it's a bit of an inconvenience, or even if it's a bit of a risk. And that is certainly one of the things that can get in the way of being kind it being inconvenient. You list a bunch of other things that get in the way of our kindness. I'll just read the list and then I'll let you pick one or two that you would like to talk about. So fear, laziness, impatience, indifference, inertia, obliviousness, shyness,

and habit. So those are some of the things that you list that get in the way of kindness. Maybe you could just pick one or two of those and and talk a little bit more about them. Well, I think fear is probably the biggest one because it comes in a lot of different flavors. It's the fear of being rejected the fear of doing it wrong, the fear of unwanted attention. That's a hard one for us. Fear often paralyzes us. And I'm just trying to take my fear along with me and stick it in my pocket.

Acknowledge it, but move ahead anyway. Another one, and I'm not sure if you mentioned it is keeping score. And this one for me was a big ah. I started noticing how many times in our lives we keep score. So it could be something as simple as um, you know, with your spouse or your partners saying I emptied the dishwasher last time, it's your turn to do that, or we had them over for dinner last it's their turn to have us. I won't call her until she calls me.

All these, all these silly things I I even encountered a woman who created this elaborate spreadsheet to track her Christmas cards. And uh she tracked the people she sent cards to and their names and addresses, but whether she received a card from them, and whether they signed it

or included a personal note. And then at the end of the season she would go through and delete anyone who didn't send her a card so that they wouldn't get one from her the next year, And I just thought that was such a strange thing to do to our friends, to keep score that way. We never know maybe somebody's having a year where they can't afford to buy Christmas cards, or they're dealing with illness and they

just can't do it. But to scratch a friend off off the list because they didn't send a card, that for me was just a real eye opener of Um, what do we get from keeping score? I think we just get grudges and resentments, And if we can stop doing that, it frees up our mind to to appreciate our friends and and appreciate our lives more. If Christmas cards were a criteria for friendship, I would have exactly zero friends. I'm I'm afraid I'm in the same camp.

It's been a long time since I sent a card, and fortunately I still have some friends who still send them to me. Exactly. But the point is a really is a really important point, which is that to the extent that we are doing that, keeping score, not only does it limit our ability to be kindness, it does limit our ability and all out of cases to have good relationships. Because that's not the way things really work.

You know, maybe ideally over a long period of time, there's some degree of mutuality in a in a relationship, I think for to have close relationships with people, there is some of that, but boy, it can be kind of out of whack at different times, or you know, one person is more there for the other than another time, and vice versa. And and uh and I agree. I agree keeping scores a surefire way to be unhappy totally. Yes,

I guess obliviousness is another big one. Uh And I don't want to be one of those people who who adds to the conversation about always spend too much time on our devices and we're our heads are always in our screens, But really, what are we missing by choosing to be so connected? I see parents down at the park near our home. Instead of enjoying their kids playing in the park, they're on their phones. I think we need to always remember that when we say yes to something,

it often means we're say, say, notice something else. So I just encourage people to find a balance with their technology so that it doesn't keep them from noticing other other things, noticing that opportunity to be kind, or someone trying to extend a kindness to them. Yeah. I love that line that when we say yes to one thing, we're often saying no to another. That's a really useful

sentence to keep in mind, because it's totally true. And I have noticed often that I will do, not necessarily unkindness, but when I'm in the middle of doing something and somebody asked me something or does something, I often just sort of give a very you know, brusque. Is that the right way for that? Um, it's one of those

I've read a thousand times. I don't know if I've heard it said, but I give that sort of reaction, and then often I stop and I pull myself kind of out of the immersion I'm in, and I go, oh, hang on a second, that's not how I wanted to answer that, or that's not the response I wanted to give,

And that is a degree of oblieve bousness. I don't know's it's it's just being involved in something else, but I do recognize that mechanism that when my attention is really focused in one place, if there are people around me, they often then don't get the attention. Yeah, And it's a choice we make, and we can't always be paying attention to everything around us. That just isn't isn't realistic. But we also don't need to always be connected to our internet feeds or or whatever it is that's on

our screen. Let that be a lesson to those of you. Don't interrupt me. Let's talk about some of the science about the health benefits of kindness. Um, David Hamilton's has done, you say to done considerable researching reports. There are five beneficial side effects of kindness. Let's have a couple of them. Well, there are quite a few, yes, And Hamilton's is he's a Scottish researcher and he's done quite a bit of this, and there's also been a lot of other research by

by other universities. But when we experience kindness, our body produces the hormone oxytocin, which has been shown to lower blood pressure and reduce inflammation. It fights heart disease and slows aging. UH. Kindness has also been shown to reduce chronic pain and reduce depression. Another fascinating study that I found was that kindness alleviate social anxiety. So people who are painfully or even debilitatingly shy if they focus on

kindness instead of their discomfort. It helps them to endure and even enjoy social situations. Uh. There's also evidence that kind people sleep better and that they live longer, so that's a lot of good health benefits. I think there are a lot of people who probably hear the word kindness and think, oh, well, that's sweet, it's fluffy, it sounds nice. You know, who's gonna who's going to argue

with kindness? But then they may not really realize that there's a lot of evidence to show that choosing kindness changes our lives in so many ways, and I think if enough of us do it, it's going to change the world. Definitely has lots of lots of benefits that I've experienced in my own life, and I think that

that social anxiety is really I've experienced that myself. By you know, I used to have to go to these networking events for work, and and I did never I never liked them, not liking them as a mild way

of putting it in a lot of causes. And what I found, though, is if I went there and I looked for somebody else who looked every bit as out of place and lonesome and morose as I did, and I just went to that person and would just kind of talk to them and find out what they were about, and just kind of ask them questions and maybe try and include them if I knew another person. I found that as soon as I started doing that, the whole situation changed for me in a way that made it

a lot easier for me to be there. Yes, and and you also made it a lot easier for them. That's a great kind You say that when I am unkind, it is probably more in thought than indeed, I exercise unkind thoughts more often than unkind actions. That's me talking about me. Yes, you know, I'm outwardly. Um, I do unkind things I don't think, but I still occasionally make judgments. I will say I'm a whole lot better than than I was because I'm more aware and I don't want

to make judgments. But if I see someone in the grocery store who's totally oblivious and blocking the aisles or doing something, I might make a judgment. I try not to do that now, and I and I have skills and strategies for for avoiding that. But we often say, oh, I'm I'm a kind person because I don't ever do anything unkind. But if you're thinking unkind thoughts, you still

have ways to go. Yeah, you say that. For me, unkind thoughts seem to creep in when I am in the most ordinary of circumstances, surrounded by others who, like me, are just trying to get in, get out, and get onto the next thing. And boy, that is where mine comes from to mostly, whether that be like you said, somebody blocking me in a grocery aisle, or somebody who just seems kind of oblivious that there's anybody else around them, um,

at the checkoutline, driving the car. All those are places for me that the judgments rush in very quickly, and I really have to sort of work to slow myself down a little bit and and kind of try and dislodge this idea in my mind that the entire world should move at my pace or my schedule, or is there the entire world is basically there just to get

out of my way. But that's as I've been talking about kindness in recent months, I just can't count how many people have come up to me and said, I think I'm a fairly kind person, except when I'm behind the wheel of my car. And then all kindness flies out the window. And then others have said where the place that really gets to them is airports are travel, So I think you just congectu sent and crowds. It's sort of a natural way for us to pull our

show up and and just want to resist. And sometimes thinking in advance about how you want to behave in those situations is all it takes to to help us get past that initial response of making a judgment or ignoring people. If we think in advance, while I'm going into a situation where they're often irritants, how can I how can I avoid acting them? And one of the great ones is to employ curiosity. Two. Instead of judging people, think about I wonder what's happening in that person's life.

Are are they going through some sort of a stress that's making them be oblivious to the people around them. And one of the things I've noticed is that it's just impossible to be unkind and cure areous at the same time. That's an interesting observation. I have found that with many other things and curiosity, that curiosity is a great way to stop judgment. And and you're saying that

judgment is a form of unkindness. It's interesting, there's a there's a chicken and egg here a little bit right, which is I certainly notice for me that when I am in a good mood or a better mood, or in a good space, like, it's so much easier for me just to be kind. It is just easier for me to let the people on the road do their thing. I'm kind of relaxed, and yet also kind of like you're saying, sometimes then the effort of stopping and really making the effort to be kind can sort of change

the mood also. So I think this goes both ways. I think you're right, and I think we attract what we look for. So, you know, going back to the wolf parable, if we're looking for kindness and expecting kindness, that's more likely what we're going to find. And if we're expecting a situation to have some sort of offense or or challenge to us, then that's what we'll pick

up on exactly. So in the book, you have lots of practices for living kindly, and I was wondering, as we come nearing our end of time, if you could share, you know, maybe maybe two three, four practices that you've found to be really helpful for you as ways to

be kind. I think that you know, I know for me that doing something kind is on my I have sort of a master list of like an all occurt list of things that I do that I know are good for me, and it's there's a lot of things on the list, and I obviously don't do all of them every day, but kindness is one of them. But often it's helpful to have some concrete practice, like, Okay, I want to do something kind. What are some practices that you use. Well, one of them is very simple,

and that's learning to pause. I think that's probably the most powerful kindness practice there is. We tend to sort of have knee jerk reactions to other people, and um, if someone says something to us that's offensive, we snap back in the same tone. And if we just learned to pause, it changes everything. Most of us have mothers who, at one time or another said, before you respond in anger, count to ten, and that was really good advice. So in that pause, we can think about who we want

to be. We can think about what else might be going on that that made that situation seem offensive. We can think about what we want to get out of this interaction and how we can manifest that. One of the things that I try to ask myself going into a situation, especially something that's new or I haven't experienced before, is what is the kind response here? And just having kindness in my radar helps me choose wisely. Another kindness practice that we most of us, really need to practice

is receiving graciously. Some of us are really really good givers, but we don't receive kindness real well, especially here. We're all raised to be independent and go by our own bootstraps and things like that, and so we don't ask for help when we need it, and we we often say no if someone offers us help and we really

could use it. So learning to receive graciously, whether it's at gift or a seat on the bus or a compliment, we need to sort of change our look on that and look at it as if we receive graciously, we're giving a gift to the giver, we're helping them feel good about having given something. Yeah, that's one of those things that my wise girlfriend reminds me of, or doesn't does it necessarily remind me of, but but talks about from time to time, how how important that is, and

your earlier idea about the pauses. It's back to that basic Victor Frankel idea of that. You know, there's a space between stimulus and response, and in that space is where all of our human powers of choice come. And the pause, the intentional pause, is just a way to create a little bit more space there exactly. I think that pause gives us the gift of grace. It's a

beautiful sentence. Well, you and I are going to continue this conversation in the post show conversation, and I'm going to ask you to tell me, uh Stephen Covey story that you tell in the book. That's one of my favorite stories of all time. Also, so you and I will do that in the post show conversation. Listeners, you can get access to that by becoming a supporter of the show at one you feed dot net slash support. But Donna, thank you so much for taking the time

to come on. Thanks for sharing your book and your kindness with the world. Thank you, Eric. It was my pleasure and I so appreciate your inviting me. Yes, my pleasure. Also, take care, bye bye bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you please consider making a donation to The One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.