Deep Kindness With Houston Kraft
Houston Kraft is a professional speaker, author, curriculum designer, and kindness advocate who speaks at schools, conferences, and events internationally. He has spoken to over a half a million people at 600 engagements and counting. He’s the Cofounder of CharacterStrong, which is training and curriculums that create more compassionate cultures in schools and communities. They work with 2,500 schools serving over a million students with their content. In 2019, he was featured by Lay’s on BBQ and Jalape?o chip bags for their spreading smiles campaign. His first book, Deep Kindness, is being published.
It’s quite a journey. What I love about your website is these pictures of you as a young boy. I’m imagining, there’s a story there of what got you into wanting to be involved with schools and students, as well as this a-ha moment of when you realize that kindness was going to help you through something.
My roommate, who’s a comedian and amazing storyteller says, “I was in middle school and I hugged someone and said, ‘I can monetize that.’” His joke for how I’ve ended up where I’m at. It’s not how it happened. My world has revolved around the practice of kindness for a long time. In my senior year of high school, I came together with a group of friends and we started a club at our school that was about weekly kindness practice. That was the premise. It’s protected time to put into action. What we believed was we knew we wanted our school to be a more compassionate place.
We wanted people to feel accepted, belonging and safe in our schools, organizations and for our world. We thought, “What is the most practical way to make sure that we did that on a weekly basis?” That was a turning point for me was the experience of running that club with friends and watching it grow, feeling the joy that I got from participating and practicing kindness. My world and life ever since have been like, “How do we do this for more people in more places?”
What did you decide you’re going to major when you were in school? Did you think you might be a teacher? How did you get to this level where you are now writing books and speaking about it?
Mostly on accident. My two big passions in high school were theater and student leadership. When I got to college, I’m at student leadership, I said, “What does that look like in the real world and politics. I’ll be a politician.” I took one political science class and I was like, “No, I’m not going to be politician.” Acting was my other passion. I went to Los Angeles, the summer after my freshman year. I worked on a movie with Lindsay Lohan. I was like, “I’m not going to be an actor either.” I realized that the fusion of the two was speaking in schools. I got to be a storyteller, performance aspect, but I also got to talk about how to lead in a way that had integrity, that was focused on service and compassion in the world. That’s what I started doing. As I was finishing college, I was beginning to speak on stages and here we are.
Do you find that people are asking for you more than they were even many years ago because of bullying issues, school shootings and things like that? If that’s on the opposite end of what you’re teaching and no matter where you stand on gun control, the whole point is how do we prevent people from feeling isolated and angry that they need to act out is most likely not a lot of kindness coming to them in their childhood.
My ultimate aim is to work myself out of job, and yet, I feel busier than ever, which is tough. It is the context of the world. We’ve always had challenges and access to information distribution that allows us to be more conscious or aware of some of the challenges that we already had. As we communicate information more quickly and widely, the way that we speak about things to me is what I’ve grown to be passionate about. In some ways, it’s why I wrote the book. The language we have around kindness doesn’t do kindness a service.
Tell me more about that.
With every word in our world, we have the dictionary definition, cultural definition and our own personal lived experience definition. The cultural definition of kindness for most people brings to life the things that the news talks about what kindness is, which is like the pay it forward coffee lines or the high five hallways or the Post-it note that were positive. In the book, I talk about that as confetti kindness, which is not inherently bad. We’re about to celebrate World Kindness Day and there are all kinds of organizations that promote random acts of kindness. I suppose my argument is that the kindness the world needs, in my opinion, presently is not random at all. It’s incredibly specific, intentional, thoughtful. It is the by-product of listening and empathy.
As we look into the reality of how most people interpret kindness, a lot of people think about that it’s free. My argument is that kindness is not free, but it requires time, energy and comfort from us in order to in many ways be humbled and do good for people who look different, act different, talk in front of us. In a time where we have divisiveness, kindness is going to require a tremendous amount of listening and perspective taking. That’s what I’m advocating for is a new way to speak about kindness so that we can navigate those issues that even you’re alluding to more honestly. How do we tackle things like gun control or the political divide or bullying? It starts with an honest assessment of what kindness looks like in my life and how to practice it in ways that move the needle, not just the surface level of goodness that the media pays attention to.
I know your opening chapter is titled Something Somewhat Provocative. I love that it grabs the attention with my storytelling and advertising background, which is the kindnesses. I thought, “I guess it isn’t.” What can a parent or teacher do to change that, so that it wouldn’t be normal for a child to do the kind thing first as opposed to it not being the norm?
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