Kindness as a Key to Success

The other day, I invited a guest speaker into my classroom. I wanted to teach my students about meditation and mindfulness. Now, I have practiced meditation, mindfulness meditation, off and on for nearly twenty years. I have read books, listened to countless talks, and even attended a couple of short, half-day meditation retreats on the topic, yet I wanted someone else to teach my students. So in came our guest, who was great, and she talked about how she came to her practice, and types of practicing, and she led a short meditation. I really enjoyed listening to her, and I really admired how she owned it. That’s why I wanted someone else to teach my students. It’s the owning it thing. I don’t. At least not easily. It's not easy to write about it here, as a matter of fact.

When I took an online survey that ranked my top twenty character traits that reflect my values, spirituality was number twenty, bottom of the list. I was not surprised, and yet I was. I know the quiz ranked the qualities we most value as well as those we most often lead with and use to interpret the world. I lead with humor, honesty, love of learning, judgment, and kindness, not with spirituality. And yet, I have two decades of practice at something many people connect to spirituality.

Maybe I am a really bad meditator. Or maybe I am just a closet spiritualist.

Spiritualist is the wrong word. I am definitely not a spiritualist.

But I was a little disappointed to find spirituality down at the bottom of that list. Almost as disappointed to find that there as I was surprised to find kindness in the top five. Judgment, sure. I reckon I’m pretty dang judgmental. Humor? Absolutely. As Jane Austen said in P & P, "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?" Honesty. Check. Love of learning--may I present this blog, a record of my foray into positive psychology and lord knows what else? Kind, though? Hmmm.

And yet. And yet. Perhaps there is a connection to the meditation practice and kindness. They say meditating helps you, but often you don’t know that it’s helping you. You just notice life is a little easier to handle. They also say that if you meditate, you develop compassion, aka kindness. Why is that so? Because once you take time to be mindful of what is going on inside you in the present moment, you realize that others are going through the same set of vicissitudes, also known as emotions, that you are. They’re not going through them at the same time you are, but they are going through the same ones. Thus, as you learn to be a little patient with yourself, you also learn a little patience with others, and a little compassion for everyone’s struggles, including your own. So maybe, just maybe, my stealth spirituality is reflected in my top five after all, via kindness.

And, if I am going to be kind to others, perhaps I can be kind to myself by reminding myself that judgment is not necessarily a pejorative characteristic. It’s an ability to see sides and facets and form an opinion based on discernment, rather than on pure reactivity.

I had my students take a quiz called the VIA Character Inventory. You can take it, too, for free.*  Quite a few of them had kindness in their top five. I found this surprising. Sure, they’re a nice bunch. Most of them are too quiet. Rendered speechless by the request to offer an opinion to the group, as a matter of fact and of deep annoyance to me. I feel quite judgmental about that reticence, and not in a kind way, if I’m honest, which according to the VIA character survey I usually am.

The relative preponderance of kindness in my classroom made me think that these kids might be reflecting a need they feel in our culture. Our popular culture, our news, our political leaders of late seem so far from kind that maybe our students, our kids, are presenting a collective need for it. I know that I have developed a real thirst for books about etiquette, and television shows that feature people behaving kindly and politely. The seventeen year old and I have been re-watching “Call the Midwife,” and one thing that show portrays is people in the poorest of circumstances behaving with politeness and dignity, even in the most undignified situations. I may start wearing a girdle soon I am so taken with the whole dignity of self-restraint thing. Give me a young, single gal dressed in a skirt, cardigan, and sensible shoes collapsing at a bus stop from an attempt at self-aborting a fetus over road rage and blatant insults on the nightly news any day.

Okay, not really. I don’t at all want to turn back the clock to illegal abortion and lack of contraception. I don’t want to turn back the clock at all. I want to move forward and beyond our current situation. But I recognize, and apparently so do many of my students, the need for kindness as we try to get there. I feel kind of hopeful about things, if kindness is a deep value for many of us. Kindness is not the sole property of the religious and spiritual. It’s available to all of us.

My students, or at least the two or three who do volunteer to speak, brought up the idea that kindness and politeness were two different things. That politeness is fake, or it can be. But I think they are related. Politeness might be fake—it certainly is fake, sometimes—but the adherence to it, particularly when you might not feel it, is truly kind. And when someone truly doesn’t deserve kindness, and no names will be named here, it’s a kindness to yourself to maintain dignity. Politeness, etiquette, allows that.

My children's elementary school principal taught us all this little self-reflection about kindness. I think it originated in the teachings of Buddha, but I am not sure. It's not a verse, it's more of a rubric for self-reflection, self-restraint, judgment in a positive sense, and kindness:

Before you speak, ask yourself, Is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it helpful? 

I know that when I do this, I have to stifle some of my natural urges, which would answer those questions thus: Is it kind? Absolutely not, but it's clever. Is it necessary? Again, it is the opposite of necessary, it is superfluous, but possibly funny, at least to me. Is it helpful? Only if you want to add to the inanity around us all. Sometimes, Readers, that is what I want to do. Sometimes that is actually kind, helpful, and necessary. Sometimes we just need to take off the mental girdle. Sometimes a bit of unnecessary folderol is actually necessary. That's what keeps me going. That and, apparently, kindness.

Peace.

*Here’s the link to the quiz. It takes about 15 minutes. You have to give an email address and after you take the quiz, scroll to the bottom of your screen and you’ll see the list of characteristics. https://www.viacharacter.org/

Annals of Successful Parenting & Life

"It turned out that this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And he said - gently - that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at one, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born - and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible."  - Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott

I’m reading Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. It’s part of my required reading for my book - reading other memoirs, or memoir-type books that might be kind of like mine. Of course we are all unique and different and individuals and all that jazz, but still, we are links in a chain. Maybe it’s odd to be a secular, mostly atheist Jew with Buddhist tendencies who relates to Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott is a born-again Christian with neurotic tendencies and a sense of humor. Well, then I’m odd. So there you go. She’s funny and honest and upfront about her shortcomings and in that way I think the Venn Diagram of our writing overlaps.

If that is not being too bold.

Which it is not, I hasten to add.

Although I don’t exactly believe my own words.

And so it goes. Welcome to the mind of moi, Hope Perlman.

So what I wanted to say was, Hello, Readers, I am just coming off the two week visit of our French “exchange” student. The visit involved so much more field tripping and spending time around other humans than I usually want that upon delivering her to the grotty and miserable bus station in Albany at 4 a.m. Tuesday morning - yes, the 4 a.m. that is before the crack of dawn; the four a.m. that is the time of infinite night terrors; the 4 a.m. of insomnia — and then finding that the bus had been overbooked, and then standing around with fifteen or was it twenty or was it two hundred other bleary and annoyed parents delivering other visiting French students, and also with our own children, who promptly passed the ensuing hour sitting on the filthy floor of the station and playing hand games with their friends and crying and hugging until the new bus arrived at 5:15 am - I promptly came down with a fever, aches, weird stomach pains and postnasal drip. I had so very much else to do that day of the 4 a.m. delivery that I didn’t really admit to illness until it was all done and night had come. One of the first things, by the way, that I did, was to instruct the 9th grader to deposit the clothes she had been wearing when sitting upon the station floor into the laundry. Then I was on to other fry.

But yesterday there was no denying the illness, and so I spent a day doing what my body needed. It was a wonderful relief, Readers. I recommend it.

One of the benefits of having our “exchange” student (please see previous post to understand why I use quotation marks) was that I finally had that coffee with a mom friend that we’d been planning for a long time. I hadn’t seen her since before the election, and in fact, I was kind of afraid to. Not because we are on different political sides, but because I was afraid the thin gauze of optimism I have managed to enshroud myself with would disintegrate with a good old political discussion. But we had more immediate things to discuss, like how in hell to entertain French teenagers in Albany for two weeks. So we met and brainstormed, and my mom friend, who is more pessimistic than I am, even though my thin gauze of optimism is so very thin and gauzy, and I came up with some good activities.

I felt a little like country mouse and city mouse with my mom friend, by the way, since she’s a leggy ectomorph who dresses entirely in fleece and hiking gear and, well, I am not. But anyway, that was fun. But one of the ways our conversation got a little sharp and threatening to my gauzy wrap was our discussion of incivility and how rampant it is and how awful the things we hear on the news are that people say about one another and the partisan divide and the gap between the blah and the blah. And so on. And it was distressing to go over it all. And it is distressing.

And so I was distressed when I left our coffee. But then later I thought about this incivility, and I thought about where I see it. On Facebook, on Twitter, on snippets of the news that I watch on Facebook and Twitter. Of course on comments in the failing New York Times, but everyone knows better than to read those. And then I thought about my regular life, and I thought about incivility there, and you know what? I didn’t find a lot. I found mostly people being nice. Even the ones that might have voted for You Know Who. Like the retired guy down the street who mows his not very big lawn on a riding mower in a sleeveless undershirt. Always been downright civil to me, obviously a liberal feminist with a fancy dog. He’s the guy who once suggested that I “get a couple a frozen meatballs, put ‘em in a dog bag, throw ‘em in the freezer. When you go for your walk, take the bag out of the freezer, and there you go. Cop sees you. You got a bag. Smells a lot better.” See what I mean? Civil. And probably votes for You Know Who.

And then there’s me. I mentioned this before, but it remains true. I still feel this gentle little careful spot inside me that I am tending. It’s me being nice to people I encounter. Nicer, I should say. And it’s a result of the hammering my guts took by the election. It’s an awareness there are a lot of angry, miserable people out there, and I might as well try to not increase their reasons for their anger and misery. I’m thinking if I feel that way, a lot of other people feel that way, too, because I’m not so special or different. I’m not particularly mean or kind. And so that makes a lot of us trying to be nicer to everyone, and therefore increasing civility.

Today I came across this little nugget in Anne Lamott’s book. According to a guy she met who worked for the Dalai Lama, the Buddhists - or maybe the Dalai Lama and his workers - believe that when lots of things are going wrong all around us, it’s to make room for something beautiful to be born.

Do Good and Succeed

“The organizational psychologist Adam Grant argues that the key

You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

to his own success – and yours too – is tirelessly helping others.”  - Susan Dominus, “The Saintly Way to Succeed.” New York Times Magazine, Sunday, March 31, 2013.

Well, I have to write about this one, don’t I? I’ve known my share of saints, or pseudo-saints. People who engage in activity, sometimes frenetic, that I’m tempted to label pathological. Let’s be honest: I do label it pathological. In fact, if I were to have titled this article, I would have called it, “The potentially pathological origin of success.”

When I was in my 20s, I used to hang around with a guy who became capital-S successful. This guy claimed to feel only two emotions: happy; and uncomfortable. We can argue about whether “uncomfortable” is an emotion; but I did that and got nowhere, so let’s not bother. What I am getting at, Readers, is that I had an annoying tendency to pick at people’s motives for how they lived. My modus operandi was pinpointing the thing they didn’t want to think about or feel and proving that that motivated them to work too hard or shut down emotion or whatever thing I considered a fault. A pathology.

My idea, I guess, was that once we all faced the things we were avoiding, we would all – do what? Sit around together, I guess, being real. And unemployed. But it would be an authentic real unemployment. Not some pathetic attempt to cover up our inadequacies with public recognition or a paycheck to spend on clothes, movies, and other entertainment to mask our inner selves. Or with actual accomplishments. Heavens.

So. While I set about to prove that this guy needed to EXAMINE his feelings and UNDERSTAND his motivations, and generally face his demons, he set about – well, I can’t tell you exactly because that would be too revealing. Let’s just say that he set about implementing a vision he had for improving the world through access to knowledge, a vision that involved changing technology for us - with the intention of improving the world.  Meanwhile, I EXAMINED my feelings and UNDERSTOOD my motivations, and did – well, nothing extraordinary. Years later, he’s still working on his vision, much of it in place, trying, as he told me not so long ago, to make things a little better for people.

I’ve found that the really successful people I’ve met all have this kind of annoying claim that success really stems from helping improve the world in whatever way you can.

Adam Grant, the focus of this piece, lives by a philosophy of helping others whenever and however he can, and he usually can. He’s a professor of organizational psychology at Wharton who studies happiness and success at work, among other things. Many other things. So many other things. This guy, in fact, is so busy with helpful acts that most people would collapse under the weight of them all. Aside from being the youngest tenured prof at Wharton, he’s Google’s go-to guy, just for starters, and he helps everyone and anyone else who asks.

Another annoying point most capital-S successful people make is that by focusing on doing good work, pettier concerns (like success?) fade in importance. Ironically, as you let go of seeking success, it comes to you, apparently. Like a cat. Along with happiness. Also like a cat. Adam Grant is further proof. Like on steroids.

According to Adam Grant, helping others increases productivity and creativity, keys to organizational success. Sometimes more than traditional reward systems, doing good motivates even people in tedious jobs like telemarketing. He did a study of how to increase hand-washing in hospital personnel and found that if there was a sign over the sink saying “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases”, people washed their hands longer than if the sign simply read “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases.” So apparently we have this propensity for altruism built into us.

(Although maybe the outcome reflects our ability to use denial to our benefit. When only thinking of themselves catching diseases, people don’t wash their hands carefully because they assume they aren’t susceptible. It won’t happen to me.)

Research shows that people feel better about themselves and their lives when they give to others. Altruism makes the altruist feel good. This is the kind of truth that gets existentialist teens and early 20-somethings worked up about living virtuously: If even giving gives the giver something, then how can one ever live unselfishly?

Writing from the ripe old age of no longer 20-something, I ask, who the hell cares? Or, more insightfully – or at least less succinctly – why is it bad to feel good about something as Good as doing good? 

Readers, I now see the nobility in pursuing external work, even if it might be rooted in avoiding existential anxiety or fear or depression. At least it’s positive. At least it’s other-centered. At least it does some good for others, and some good for ourselves.

Yet, have I changed? After all, what I found most interesting about this article about Adam Grant was that Susan Dominus worried that motivation question, too. While he avoided getting into why he is the way he is by saying he’d simply inherited the “fix-it gene,” Dominus warmed the cockles of my heart by pressing on. She was into the potential pathology, too. So Grant has a book out, Give & Take or something, and he defines three kinds of people, because all experts have to make categories and lists: givers, matchers, and takers. The givers, the tireless givers like Grant, he says, are usually powered by dual motives – the desire to please, and its corollary, the fear of disappointing others.

I also learned this excellent term, “compensatory conviction,” which refers to the common situation where anxiety about one thing (the thing that evokes that “uncomfortable” emotion) motivates the pursuit of another. In Grant’s case, his pursuit is doing good.  Of his underlying anxiety Dominus writes, “Mortality, he said, was the one subject that gave him something like panic attacks.” It had been that way since he was a kid, and he had “lost days at a time to his anxiety.”

Panic? Anxiety? Fear of death? Read on, Macduff!

His solution was to notice that idleness allowed his anxiety to poke through, and to therefore eliminate idleness from his life. Doing good keeps him busy and makes him feel good the way altruism makes anyone feel good; but it also keeps him from feeling - uncomfortable. But at least he knows what his fear is, and even if, like my capital-S successful friend, he chooses not to navel-gaze, he is aware of his compensatory conviction. He just doesn’t have that need to confront it, that apparently I do. Susan Dominus does, too, so I am not alone. Maybe it’s a writer-thing.

So I say, hang onto your defense mechanisms, be powered by your existential fears, if they help you do your good in the world, Adam Grant, and everyone else.

Now, I’m thinking of sending him my book proposal and asking for some input. What do you think? He can’t say no.

In Honor of Kindness: Primum non Nocere

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Primum non Nocere – first, do no harm – is one of the fundamental precepts of Buddhism. (Ahimsa, FYI.) It’s also the underpinning of medical ethics, handed down from the Ancient Greeks (Hippocrates, anyone?) in slightly different words. Oh, and it's also basic to the Judeo-Christian religions, among others.

When I was a young mother, one of my uncles told me the most important thing to do as a parent was to be kind. I was (am) the sort of person who looks to others for advice. Growing up without a mother, I looked for mothers everywhere. Books have often been pretty good substitutes, and I can recommend a few essential ones on parenting. My uncle’s advice, however, has always stayed with me because it was surprising. Not that my uncle is unkind. Far from it. But something about kindness as a principle struck me as foreign. It was certainly different from much of the advice I’d read in my book-mothers. Not that they advocated unkindness - not at all - but their focus was on handling specific problems or certain phases of childhood, on theories of discipline, or on modes of communicating. “Be kind” was something else, an underlying principle, a rudder to steer by, if you will. A secret to parenting success.

Anyway, the point is that after all that theory, “be kind” struck home. It spoke to my role as the attitude shaper for my offspring, to my role as Person Responsible for How She Acts and reacts in any situation. This agglomeration of actions and reactions being, well, life.

“Be kind” also, now that I think about it more, gives a nod to the little tykes’ individuality, to their little autonomous selves, and gives me space to recognize that whatever it is they might be doing, they are doing it to create their own individual selves, and those selves must not be crushed. So, be kind. And recognize how hard that is. Developing the self, that is, and being kind. They are both hard.

Be kind functions as a mindfulness tool. If I can take a tiny step away from the emotion of the moment and see my child as a separate critter, then I have a chance of acting in her best interest, not just reacting.

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I was reminded of my uncle’s advice a few weeks ago, while reading the New York Times Magazine’s Dec. 30, 2012 issue, “The Lives They Lived.” Basically it’s a giant obituary section. Nothing wrong with obituaries. As my friend Reyna points out in her blog post, they can be instructive. In it was a tribute to David Rakoff, a writer and contributor to “This American Life” and a general wit. The tribute was this lovely letter to David Rakoff written by one of his friends, and my point, because I know I have one, Readers, my point is that this letter mentions that he once wrote an essay in which he said that “as fun and Margo Channing as it might seem to be drunk and witty and cutting, it’s probably better in the long run to be kind.”

To be kind. To forgo the thrill of the harsh joke and the ensuing laugh in favor of kindness. Well, Readers, this struck me, in light of my previous blog post about my friend Let’s Call Him Mark. Because I agree with Rakoff. And my uncle. And the Dalai Lama. Let’s not forget him. Overall, I do, although occasionally, what I hope a 19^th Century British novelist would have described as my “charming high-spiritedness,” overcomes my better judgment, and I give in to the urge to be, uh, mean. I’m in good company, after all. Doesn’t Emma Woodhouse do just that? And of course she is terribly wrong to make her joke at Miss Bates’ expense, as Knightly so rightly points out. (Internal rhyme unintentional, yet pleasing nonetheless.)

Readers, I have perseverated on this blog post for weeks. I have umpteen drafts of it. I can’t figure out why it’s been so hard to write. It’s really a simple post: I value kindness. Brené Brown talks about the importance of vulnerability. She talks about how we are afraid to be vulnerable, but that from vulnerability comes true experience. By allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, which she considers an act of bravery, we allow ourselves to fully be in the world with what matters most to us. From that place of essential meaning flow goals, acts, and endeavors that impact the world. Maybe stating something essential in which I believe relates to her message about the challenge of being vulnerable.

Or maybe it’s because any of you who follow my blog or know me in real life, know how far short of kindness I repeatedly fall. Kindness is subtle, so easily underrated. And I lack subtlety. After I read that appreciation of David Rakoff, I felt kind of intimidated, or inferior – unevolved – by comparison. I checked out three collections of essays by Rakoff from the library and began reading them, looking for the source of that quotation.

I could not find it. I did, however, come across an essay he wrote about Fashion Week in Paris. Apparently Karl Lagerfeld made a rather unkind comment to him about how on earth he’d find anything to say about fashion week that hadn’t already been said. Rakoff, despite his credo, responded in print describing Lagerfeld thus: “with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin overrisen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L?” 

Frankly, his outburst was a relief. And, while much lengthier and more literary than anything I may have said recently - or ever - was also much meaner. So there’s the aspiration and there’s the reality.  Be kind.

However, I still wanted to find the essay in which David Rakoff wrote that sentence about kindness, so I emailed Ariel Kaminer at The New York Times, who wrote the piece. She soon responded, sending me the link, which was very kind of her, along with the comment that she’d simply googled the sentence in question and found it easily - which, perhaps, was not.

But at least her tone was ambiguous. And she did send me the essay. Rakoff wrote it in 2010. His florid and biting description of Karl Lagerfeld was part of a collection of essays published in 2005. So, he mellowed over time. According to the Dalai Lama, that’s a gesture in the right direction. As he said the other day on Facebook, “If you can, help and serve others, but if you can’t at least don’t harm them; then in the end you will feel no regret.”