Kindness is a practice

Kindness is often considered a personality trait or an emotion. While some tend to be naturally inclined to kindness, you have to work on it every day. It is difficult to be kind unless you think of it as a practice, as something you try to do every moment, be it with yourself or with others.

What is kindness??Essentially, it is the recognition of how none of us knows everything that can be known. It comes from allowing space for the unknowns and supporting ourselves and others as we learn more about the unknowns.?Kindness can only be practiced with empathy, compassion, patience, creativity, and an open mind - That's how we can discover the unknowns without loss of perspective.

In teams, it is tough to build a culture that tolerates failure without the kindness needed to acknowledge failure - I cannot expect the other person to understand my failure if I am unwilling to let them fail.?Conversely, you cannot ask someone else to be kind to you but we live in times where the expectation of kindness can be turned into a weapon. We get angry when we do not receive kindness from someone. And in that process, we stop practicing kindness towards the other person.

Being kind with intent is hard work - it teaches you to feel emotion without judgment but at the same time teaches you to judge without sentiments. It makes you more aware; you cannot be kind without awareness Kindness to yourself makes you feel more comfortable in your strengths and helps you develop humility about your weaknesses.?

Being kind is a complex skill that combines intellect, emotional and social acuity as well as a deep but flexible sense of self-awareness. It is something we are almost intuitively able to assess - We are born with the ability to intuitively understand kindness. We do not need an extremely complex analysis to tell if someone is kind to us. However, as adults, we lose our innate sense of kindness. And so, we need to think of it as a practice, just like meditation and any other professional skill we want to become better at.??