Kindness-Generosity
Self-Sufficiency Is Over-Rated
My colleague Michael Kerman of Leading Edge Seminars sent me this article Self-Sufficiency Is Over-Rated, published in the New York Times opinion section on Thanksgiving Day. I think it strikes an intelligent balance between the integrity of individual responsibility and utter necessity of compassion in a caring community. And so I pass it on to […]
Helping Kids Embrace Their “Otherness”
Maybe because I woke up one morning last week to an air quality rating of 249, officially “very unhealthy” and couldn’t see to the end of my block because of the smoke from the still-raging wildfires here in northern California, I went looking for encouraging news about resilience and people helping other people be resilient. […]
Tiny Glimmers of Joy and Love Build Resilience, Too
Just when I was feeling a little bit more than weary, my friend Lee sent me the link to Tiny Piglet’s Whole World Changes When She Meets This Baby Cow. Was she kidding? Lee has sent me links to mindfulness teachers in Mexico and an interview with Jon Macaskill, Navy Seal director of Veteran’s PATH. […]
100 year old man raises $40 million for health care – and other good news
You may have already heard this bit of good news – it went viral quickly. (More good news from many parts of the world below.) As retired British army officer Capt. Tom Moore approached his 100th birthday (still mowing his own lawn and driving his own car) he pledged to walk an 82-foot path next […]
Showing Up for the People Who Are Showing Up – Pizza Delivered to Grateful ICU Health Care Workers in Brooklyn
When the generosity and kindness of the human spirit shows up to support fellow human beings on the front lines of our current coronavirus crisis, when real people shine through all the faceless statistics, it’s inspiring and motivating. My friend Kathryn’s cousin Gerard is the physician in charge of the surgical critical care unit at […]
Saving Lives – Big and Small
The Heroes and Zeroes post of October 21, 2019 drew as many positive responses as any post I’ve ever posted. Readers resonating with the realization that the smallest actions on behalf of common humanity and “looking for the helpers” can be as significant to cultivate resilience as the truly heroic efforts on a larger scale. […]
Heroes and Zeroes
The Pacific Sun, a local newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area, ran a weekly Heroes and Zeroes column for years, highlighting the selfless/helpful/nurturing behaviors of some local citizens and the selfish/hurtful/damaging behaviors of others. Actions like (hero) a video produced by a local police department to alert citizens how to deal with school bullying, […]
Retrospective Kindness – Good Medicine for the Brain and for the Self
Most of us want to be kind, to ourselves and others, most of the time. Most of us try to be kind, much of the time. And then there are the many, many times when we “wake up” hours or days or years later. “I could’ve…!” “I should’ve…!” But the person we now want to […]
“Giving” Leads to Resilience More Than “Taking”
It might seem counter-intuitive, in our modern business-driven society, that people who are “givers” are more likely to succeed, certainly to experience more well-being, than “takers.” But that’s precisely the point organizational psychologist Adam Grant makes again and again in Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success. Based on decades of collaborative research […]
‘Tis the Season of Cultivating Kindness and Goodwill
When the local drugstore called to say I had dropped my wallet in the parking lot and would I like to come pick it up, I was 1) shocked that I had even come home from the drugstore not knowing my wallet was missing; 2) profoundly relieved that my wallet had been found/turned in and […]