The Science of Happiness – Week 2 – Be Kind

I’m doing an online “Happiness” course together with a group of colleagues at work, and I’ve decided to skip the academic theorising behind it all and focus on the little tips and techniques that can make us happier.  This week there were two main things to try – one was to stop criticising yourself and instead focus on your strengths.  The second was to turn outward and try and do something supportive for others / your community as an indirect way to feel happier in yourself.

1. “Know your Character strengths” was a good idea in theory – its all to easy to let the critical inner voice give ourselves a hard time yet fail to celebrate and acknowledge to ourselves when we have done well and are feeling good.  The exercise was suggested by a member of my discussion group and is available here.  It’s a series of statements that you grade depending on how true they are for you.  The top 5 character strengths for me were Creativity, Bravery, Love of Learning, Fair Judgement and Humour, and from this foundation I am meant to build a strengths-based life.  However for me the whole premise was a bit flawed by the fact that it was little ole me, assessing me and therefore, for me, it lacked credibility.  It was how I saw myself based on how I was feeling at that moment and as I always tend to be a bit hard on myself it made me not really trust or put any great stock in the results.  The voices of the Nuns who taught at my catholic secondary school were just ringing in my ears – “self praise is no praise”.    That’s my failing – not the exercise’s.   Maybe it would have been more effective if I got two friends to complete the questions about me.  However, as I’m here to only use what works for me and discard the rest – NEXT!
2. “Be kind to Others” is pretty self explanatory. People tend to think of epic and movie-worthy random acts of kindness to strangers but I decided to start small and just be a more pleasant person to deal with at work and rather than nag my son so much to get dressed for school in the morning I’d try to make it more fun.  At first, I admit I eye-rolled a bit when I read this one.  I tend to feel I’ve just got my nose to the grindstone in my own little world, juggling work, exercise, motherhood, home life and dating and I hardly need to deplete my resources further by trying to save the world now do I?!  But you know what, this is the bit where I guess I have to admit the aforementioned nuns were right!   They and all others who devote their lives to a cause or a charity or caring for their community might actually be on to a good thing.  I honestly have to admit that I felt better by the end of the week’s trial from putting this tip into practice.

   At work, I deal with members of the public all lost and clueless and needing information and I try not to let my irritation show at having to repeat the same flippin’ thing 100 times a day, (you can tell I’m a natural at this customer service stuff can’t you!).  This past week I really made a conscious effort to smile and be patient and fair and tell myself – how can I expect them to know something when they just got here. I went out of my way to be more helpful, and explain things better and ask if they needed anything further and I felt nicer and more positive in myself as a result.  I can actually say it raised my self-esteem.   I took what my ego can sometimes say is a lowly aspect of my job and made it the most worthy focus of my time and I genuinely helped people.

   This exercise totally feeds into the notion about “being your best self” rather than resentfully just showing up in body but not spirit, for the least enjoyable aspects of your life.  This was a win for me so I’ll be making a better effort to do this in future, especially on those days when I’m feeling low or stressed myself.  Focussing on helping others really re-programmes a bad day into a good one.