00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 154, "Rethinking Kindness." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Well, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. If you're a return listener, thank you so much. And returners, can I ask you a favor if you have not yet left me a review? Will you go on to whatever app is available to you and leave me a review? That would be a really great way for me to expand my reach to be able to help more people find content .They can hopefully bless their lives and help them move into a better healthier space with better relationships with themselves, with God, and with other people in their lives that they care about. If you're brand new to the podcast today, hope you enjoy it. Welcome and glad to have you here. 

01:00 

Alright. We today are going to be talking about rethinking kindness. So this started last Sunday when I was able to give a talk in Relief Society. If you are not a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Relief Society is the women's organization, and I get to be a teacher in that. Every so many weeks I get to teach a lesson and we taught it on a talk that one of our Church leaders, Elder Gary Stevenson, gave just a couple of months ago called "Hearts Knit Together" and I wanted to start off with a study that he talked about. And I'm actually just going to read his words because I like how he explained it. And I think it covers all the points that need to be covered. So he says "in the 1970s researchers set up an experiment to examine the effects of diet on heart health over several months. They fed a control group of rabbits a high-fat diet and monitored their blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. As expected, many of the rabbits showed a buildup of fatty deposits on the inside of their arteries. Yet this was not all. Researchers had discovered something that made little sense. Although all of the rabbits had a buildup, one group surprisingly had as much as 60% less than the others. It appeared as though they were looking at two different groups of rabbits. To scientists, results like this can cause loss to sleep. How could this be? The rabbits were all the same breed from New Zealand, from a virtually identical gene pool. They each received equal amounts of the same food. What could this mean? Did the results invalidate the study? Were there flaws in the experiment design? The scientists struggled to understand this unexpected outcome. Eventually they turned their attention to the research staff. Was it possible that researchers had done something to influence the results? As they pursued this, they discovered that every rabbit with fewer fatty deposits had been under the care of one researcher. She fed the rabbits the same food as everyone else. But, as one scientist reported, she was an unusually kind and caring individual. When she fed the rabbits, she talked to them, cuddled them, and petted them. She couldn't help it, it's just how she was. She did more than simply give the rabbits food. She gave them love. At first glance, it seemed unlikely that this could be the reason for the dramatic difference, but the research team could see no other possibility. 

03:22 

"So they repeated the experiment, this time tightly controlling for every other variable. When they analyzed the results, the same thing happened. The rabbits under the care of the loving researcher had significantly higher health outcomes. The scientists published the results of this study in the prestigious journal Science. Years later, the findings of this experiment still seem influential in the medical community. In recent years, Dr. Kelly Harding published a book titled, 'The Rabbit Effect,' that takes its name from the experiment. Her conclusion? Take a rabbit with an unhealthy lifestyle, talk to it, hold it, give it affection. The relationship made a difference. 'Ultimately,' she concludes, 'What affects our health in the most meaningful ways has much to do with how we treat one another, how we live, and how we think about what it means to be human.'" 

04:14 

I remember sitting on my sofa watching and listening to this talk, and I immediately sent a text to a friend and I was like, "what was that? Like, how is this even possible?" It was amazing to me, the effect of kindness, real kindness, that it could have on the physical health of these rabbits. And I thought, that's an amazing thing. And so in the month since conference, I've been thinking about this a lot and having gotten to give a lesson on this last week, I spent even more time thinking about it. And I love the concept that if we become more kind, in my mind is also more Christlike, that it literally affects the world in a positive way and affects individual lives in a meaningful way. And so I started to think, you know, well, really what  is kindness and why do I want to be kind? Do I want to be kind just for others' emotional and physical health? And I started thinking that, yeah, that's a great reason to be kind. That's a great byproduct. 

05:27 

However, the more I thought about why I want to be kind, the more I realized that I want to be kind for me, because that's the kind of person that I want to be. And it's not like when I do kindness, it's not like I'm putting check marks next to my name and every time I do that, God's saying, "oh, kind." And then at the end of my life, he's going to tally up all my kind acts. It's not like I'm earning anything. I'm not like garnering points. I love that Brad Wilcox says that "we are not earning heaven, but we are learning heaven. To become more like Christ is not something that we earn, it's something that we learn." And I think that kindness is a huge part of this learning heaven, learning how to be Christlike, learning how to behave in ways that align my spirit with God and with Christ. And I think that that's really a beautiful concept to think, that if I'm learning to be kind, I'm also learning to be Christlike. 

06:38 

So then I started putting this in the things that I talk about. How does this fit in with the thought model? Where does kindness go? Well, kindness is an action. So kindness would go in the A line. Okay, but kindness could also go in the F line. It could also be a feeling of kindness, or kindness could be an action. And so really, I think that if we have kind feelings, then that produces kind actions and we could be more specific about what those are. So we put kindness in the F line, in the feeling line. Then we want to ask the question, "what thoughts create true kindness?" And I started thinking about a lot of different thoughts that could do that. And I started to hone in on the idea that sometimes I do kind things, not because I'm thinking kind thoughts, but because I'm afraid of what might happen if I don't do kind things. I'm afraid of the judgments of other people or something like that. And I thought, going back to the idea that we've talked about so much on this podcast, I have kindness that's going to come from one of two thoughts, fear-based thoughts or love-based thoughts. 

07:53 

So fear-based thoughts are going to be...these are going to create the feeling of kindness, but it's going to be rooted in the idea that if I don't do kindness, then this is the kind of person I'll be: people will judge me. I'll judge myself. God will be unhappy with me. In which case, when that moves down into our action line, we find that we are being kind with a sort of white knuckling. We're doing it, but it's not creating energy. It's actually depleting our energy. It's zapping us of energy because it's not coming from that good place. Fear-based anything always takes away, depletes our energy. And so it gave me a chance to really look at a lot of the kindness that I have engaged in in the past and that I continue to engage in sometimes and look at it from that angle and go, oh, there are times that I have a lot of fear-based kindness. 

09:00 

But let's look at the other end of that. The other side of that is love-based kindness. And this as well starts in my thoughts. "I love people, I love God, I want to be like God. I want the joy that comes from being kind." Again, that starts in my thoughts. And this becomes an energy-producing kind of kindness. It comes from the heart. It's an intrinsic kindness rather than an extrinsic kindness. So let me give you a quick example. The first one that came to my mind was when I was a young mom and was putting kids to bed. There were times I put my kids to bed with a lot of love-based kindness. And I will tell you, there were a lot of times I put my kids to bed with a fear-based kindness or angry or frustration feeling behind it. And my kids could always feel the difference. People can feel the difference when we are not coming from a place of love, when our thoughts are not aligned with where we want them to be. Because how we treat other people, there's an underlying feeling with that. And that's why so many women will say, "I just want my husband to want to do the dishes." Well, he may be in there up to his elbows getting the dishes done. And the wife is still in the other room going, "oh, he's just..." you know, and she's angry that he doesn't want to do the dishes. And she can tell, he's doing the action, he's doing the kind action, but she can feel the feeling behind it. 

10:46 

So for myself, I can feel a difference when I'm coming from a place of love or a place of fear. And my self-respect responds to that accordingly. If I'm doing it just from fear, it is not making a positive impact on my self-respect, but when I am doing it from a clean love place, from a place of real Christlike love, then my self-respect goes up and I am proud of myself and I feel good about myself. When I do the right thing for the right reason, I find that I am in alignment. I'm in alignment with God and with Christ. I'm in alignment with myself and with my values. So how do I get my thoughts to come from a place of love to be aligned with myself and with where I want to be? How do I become aware when they're not coming from a place of love? For me, this is one of my biggest indicators, is recognizing when I get judge-y of other people. When I start shooting  other people, "they should be doing this, they should be doing that." When I start having these expectations of how other people should behave, or even how I should behave. When I have that manual, remember we talked about that last week? When I move into this place, I know that I'm getting judge-y and I am not coming from a place of love. 

12:21 

But this is the thing, sometimes we can feel so justified in our judging of other people, and in our manual and our expectations of how they should behave. Another way that I can start telling when I'm not coming from a place of love is that I start to have opinions of people. What they should be doing, how they should be doing it. It could be as simple as, "I don't like their hair, I don't like how they dress," to judging how they're parenting and having opinions about their parenting or opinions of how they're living the gospel. This having opinions, none of my business. And this puts me in a place of being judge-y and it keeps me from being kind. Kindness is creating a space for other people to be them, to be human, and I just get to love them. I just get to stand back and share love and kindness. I love that Marvin J. Ashton many years ago in one of his talks said, "Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don't judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet." Having opinions about other people and how they are choosing to live is judging and categorizing them. And guess what? That is none of my business. None of my business, how anybody else chooses to act unless it's directly infringing in my life. None of my business how anybody else chooses and kindness is more than the action. I can keep my mouth shut if I have an opinion about how somebody's dressed, but it's going to show up and they're going to feel it because kindness starts in my thoughts. And even if I'm thinking it, I'm going to be a little bit judge-y and then even just the look in my eyes and the way that I look them up and down is going to show that I am being judge-y. 

14:28 

So if I really want to be kind to other people, it has to start in my thoughts, not with my actions. I have to learn how to be accepting and loving and to extend grace to create space for other people to be human. I have to learn to be forgiving. We can just feel so justified sometimes in our judging of other people and in our manual and our expectations of how they should behave. I love that several years ago, Dieter F. Uchtdorf said in a talk that he gave, "when it comes to hating, gossiping, ignoring, ridiculing, holding grudges, or just wanting to cause harm, please apply the following: stop it." That the other side of this is, when it comes to accepting, loving, extending grace, creating space for being human and forgiving: start it. Our natural human tendency is to gossip, ignore, ridicule, hold grudges, hate other people, want to cause harm. It's our primitive brain's way of protecting us and keeping us in the tribe. Back in caveman days, if we were kicked out of the tribe, we would die. And so our brain has this natural tendency to want to keep us in the tribe. And so doing things like gossiping and ignoring and ridiculing and holding grudges, that pits us against other people and in a way that our brain thinks that it's keeping us in the tribe. 

16:01 

So what is the best way to combat these natural tendencies in ourselves, these natural tendencies to lash out at other people to be unkind? First, we have to decide to be compassionate for our own humanness. I think one of the worst things that we can do is to beat ourselves up when we notice our flaws, when we notice our sins, when we notice our shortcomings. One of the worst things we can do is beat ourselves up. One of the best things we can do is not get judge-y, not be angry, but become compassionate to ourselves, compassionate for our humanness. Our primitive brain wants to be judge-y with us. But if we can decide to be compassionate, that is the first step of what we need to do to move forward. 

16:56 

Second, we need to choose to start becoming more aware. We need to ask God for help to see. We need to seek and start looking at our behaviors. I would even suggest get some coaching, because you can find ways to look for the thoughts, to find the thoughts that are keeping you from showing up with loving kindness. We need to start choosing to become aware. We have to look and ask and seek. 

17:29 

Third, we can then identify thoughts that create the feelings of love and acceptance and grace and creating space and forgiving. And we choose to start thinking them. When we catch ourselves being judge-y or gossiping or all that other stuff, we just need to take that opportunity to go, "whoa, not where I want to go. I want to be loving. I want to be accepting. I want to extend grace. I want to be kind and forgiving." And guess what? This can be a process and that's okay. It's okay if it takes time. We're not meant to change all of our behavior in the blink of an eye. If we were, we would all be perfect a lot quicker than we're getting there. It takes a long time to start changing thought processes that have been going on inside of our head  for decades. And this is why we need to start with compassion. I do not imagine that God is up in heaven watching us and rolling His eyes and sighing in exasperation. Like, tsking His tongue, and shaking His head and going, "oh, that Tanya, she's such a wreck." I don't imagine God doing that at all. 

18:52 

Remember when you had little kids, if you did, and when they would make mistakes or they're starting to learn to walk, we didn't roll our eyes and tsk and get frustrated when the sweet little child fell over trying to walk. We were just like, "yes, you did it. You got three steps!" And we'd stand them back up. I imagine that that's how God is with us. He knows that these are new things that we're learning. He knows that we're not good at it. He knows that we have a long way to go before we're going to figure this out. He's not exasperated with our behaviors. He loves us desperately and He's encouraging. He wants us to stand back up. He wants us to see it. He wants us to learn from it. He created this safe space for us here on earth to learn all the things, to lay out all of our stuff and take a good look at it without judgment, without unkindness. And this space is then covered with the umbrella of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. The Atonement allows for all of the mistakes, for all of the shortcomings, for all of the weaknesses and failures. It lets us know that it's okay if we exhibit human tendencies, because guess what? We were created to be human. We are imperfect people, placed in an imperfect world with other imperfect people. That sounds like a recipe for imperfection. Right? I don't think there's anything in there that God says, "yeah, I expect this to be perfect. I expect this to be done just right." I don't think so. 

20:43 

The God that I know and the God that I love is kind and compassionate and forgiving and loving and encouraging. He wants us to move into a better space. He's trying to help us get there without taking away our agency because He knows how valuable that is. So learning to be kind, learning heaven, is going to be starting in our thoughts rather than our actions. And this is a huge powerful shift of how to rethink kindness. I think so many of us have lived kindness just in our actions for a lot of years. We just think, "oh, this is a kind thing to do." And we've always just done kind things, but I would love for us to rethink it, to step back and to look at how kindness, how we can think about kindness, and change everything that goes into our kindness, so that our kindness itself changes from actions to an internal Christlike desire and behavior. This kind of kindness embraces the change that the Atonement of Christ is meant to bring into our lives. I don't think we're meant to just be kind on the outside. We really want to be kind on the inside. We don't just want to have kind platitudes. We don't want to just say kind things. We want to internally ooze kindness. 

22:29 

We want it to come out without thinking about it much like this researcher. It just was so natural for her to give kindness to be kind. And we have that same ability to create that in ourselves and not just do kind things. The internal kindness, this genuine kindness, can be felt by us and by those that we interact with and it creates self-respect for us and it creates a different experience for the people around us. And this is the thing...I don't think it's just a matter of not being unkind. I would imagine that all the other researchers in that study that they were not unkind to the rabbits. I don't imagine them going up and shaking the rabbits and yelling at the rabbits and getting frustrated with the rabbits. I'm sure that they went up and they were like, "hey little rabbit," and they gave it its food and they weighed it and they did all the stuff that they were doing. I'm sure that they weren't unkind. 

23:38 

But there's a difference between not being unkind and being kind, and thinking thoughts that internally can be felt by those people around us. We can make the intentional choice to be kind starting with our thoughts and to create the kind of kindness that Christ exhibited. If anybody was judged and had reason to be judge-y about other people, Christ did and yet he still chose to always exhibit this kind of kindness that comes from thoughts that are aligned with God. And this creates a true change of heart, a place where we literally take upon us the countenance of Christ. 

24:37 

So this week my friend, I would like you to start rethinking your kindness. Start looking at the kind things that you do, because I know that you do them. You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to be kind and be a better, more engaged person. I know that you're already kind, but let's take a look at our kindness. Let's see. Let's start exploring. Let's start seeking to be aware of where our kindness is coming from. I'm sure that none of us are going to be black and white either. I don't think any of us will be 100% loving kindness and 0% judge-y or 0% just action. We're all going to be a mix of that because we're humans, right? I don't think anybody's going to be 0% loving kindness and 100% fearful kindness. We're all a mix. But I would love for each of us to take a step back this week and start looking at the times we are kind and saying, "where does  that come from? What feeling created that feeling or what thought created that feeling of kindness where I then wanted to act on that kindness?" and really start seeking to become more aware. And when we find those areas that we can make some adjustments, let's figure out how to do it. 

25:55 

And if you need some help with that, contact me for a free consult. This is what I do. I help you see your thoughts. I help you understand how you can step into the next best version of yourself. I can promise you that very few of you have lives that are on the edge of collapse. You have some tough times. A lot of people have been in this. But even if you're in a great place, coaching is an amazing opportunity to see things that you haven't been able to see before, to up level your life, to become more of what you really desire and what you really want. So you can go to my website, tanyahale.com. You can book a free 30 minute coaching session, or a consult, to get you started. And I can help you start learning to see yourself more clearly, to start identifying your thoughts, and help start you on a path of further growth and development than you've already been on. Okay my friends, that is gonna do it for me this week. I wish you all the best this week. Have an awesome day and a terrific week and I will see you next time. Bye. 

27:15 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.