This is the post I knew I had to do all week but I have been struggling to figure out how to attack it.  Let’s start here:

Just because you’re kind doesn’t mean that you’ll be rewarded in turn.

There, I’ve said it.  Launched the obvious grenade into the middle of the table.  Well, you might ask, why in the world do we want to be kind if it doesn’t make people around us be appreciative or be kind in return?  Great question, and most of you that read this blog already know the answers to that query.  So, for the next several paragraphs, I’ll literally be preaching to the choir.

First, this is not a black and white position I’m taking.  Not everyone will be kind in return–true.  Not everyone will pay your kindness forward to someone else.  But, some will and you will find your kindness appreciated and returned by many.  I think of a simple example of holding the first door for someone in a double foyer who, in turn, holds the second one open for you.  Or the older person whose groceries you carry to her car to be rewarded by her appreciative smile and “thank you.”  So, while there’s not an inevitable guarantee that your kindness will be received with gratitude and repayment, in many cases you will receive some acknowledgement for your efforts.

But, is this really why I’m proposing a life of kindness, generosity, mercy and helpfulness?  So, you can get repaid by kindness or so you can hope the benefactors of your kindness will “pay it forward” in return?  No.  This is where it gets trickier to explain and we must go deeper to understand.

The kindness I discuss above really has its root in common courtesy and manners–the stuff many of our parents teach us as we’re growing up.  Samples of this courtesy kindness include saying, “thank you,” opening doors for people, letting someone go before us in line, holding chairs out for our dates, and in the old days bowing and curtsying when we would meet new people.  We do have to admit that in this day and age those things are NOT a guarantee anymore the way they might have been years ago.  So when they do happen, it does legitimately feel like someone has extended us a kindness. And, I do think this common courtesy is an important part of civilized society and it DOES make a difference in someone’s day.  So, please…by all means, “rock on” with these forms of kindness.

The kindness that’s harder to draw on in our day-to-day lives is the kindness born out of love.  Yep, that’s what I said.  You read it correctly–LOVE.  This is not the ordinary day-to-day love we watch in movies or read in romance novels.  I’m talking about deep love for ourselves and others regardless of what they do for us or to us.   This is not conditional love based on whether someone “loves” us back.  Picture here: that colleague at work you just can’t stand to be around; that homeless person you run into on the way to work; that family member who always finds fault with the way you do things; that counterperson in the bakery who’s not very nice to you; that nurse in your doctor’s office who seems impatient with your questions; that neighbor who just won’t cooperate by following deed restrictions; that driver who cuts you off in traffic; that friend who seems to try your patience by talking your ear off about her woes.  I’m talking about the people in our lives who we find hard to “love,” or to show kindness.

I’m not sure we can find that type of love easily. You may have been blessed to grow up in a family or in a church that taught you this type of love. Others of us have only begun to glimpse it as a result of experiencing loss and the transformation which can be br0ught about by the loss.  It is from a deep sense of vulnerability that you can transform the way you regard yourself and others.  You realize when people are unkind to you that it is more about them and less about you.  It frees you to treat them differently than if you take what they say or do personally.  Your behavior is not dictated by whether they show you kindness.  It is dictated by a deeper sense of humanity; a deeper sense of love and compassion.

Those of you who know me know I’m not a “religious” person.  I have a deep and abiding faith and exercise it through various spiritual practices, but not through weekly visits to church.  If I find a minister who teaches like Richard Rohr, then I’ll reconsider that practice, but in the meantime, my mind has been opened to interesting possibilities by studying his books and his daily blogs.  For those of you who want to learn more about the “love” I’m talking about, I’ll provide you links below to two of Rohr’s blog posts this week.  These are posts on love and Paul’s famous chapter in 1Corinthians which we’ve all sat and listened to at weddings over the years (“love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things”).  Hopefully, it will further your understanding of the journey to a kindness that’s built on the foundation of love.  I am grateful for the food for thought his posts bring to me.

Love Never Fails

Vulnerability–Even in God!

In the meantime, it’s been seven days of kindness.  Remember it takes 21 days to develop a habit.  Keep on keeping on.

Funny thing happened to me on the way to completing my Richard Rohr blog post reading this morning.  I accidently hit something on my iPad as I was reading it and ended up on his Facebook page.  (Funny how those “accidents” happen).  From there, I noticed this other organization called “gratefulness.org.”  Well, of course I just had to visit that.  (All this while I’m supposed to be working on a speech–can you say “procrastination extraordinaire?”).

Then the most amazing thing happened.  I stumbled on this blog post that I couldn’t resist reading–if you read it, you’ll understand why.

Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

Per a friend’s suggestion–and you know who you are–I went out and purchased the little book by Marie Kondo called, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  Picture shown below.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

As I look around my home this morning, I have the inspiration to get started RIGHT NOW.  The place looks horrible.  I still have Christmas trees up (not to worry–they’re artificial; I’m not creating fire hazards here).  I have books and papers all over the place from some recent consulting work I’m doing and from two “The Great Courses” I’m taking simultaneously (of course).  Then there is the kitchen with the dishes that need to be washed and stored and recipes and mail strewn all over the place.  I don’t even want to mention the clothes jungle that exists upstairs (oh, but did I just say that in my out-loud voice?!).  The movie Twister showed devastation milder than this place right now.

But, naturally, having “the attention span of a grasshopper,” I want to begin RIGHT NOW and of course, I haven’t read the book.  Ah, but that’s where the wonderful world of Mr. Google and the Internet come in.  Can you type, “Book summary for ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up?'”  And what to my wonderous eyes should appear but a blog with the summary tips for changing my life by tidying up–conveniently included below in case you have the same inclination as I do on this Sunday morning.

Blog post summary of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Sigh.  I know I’m cheating a bit…but as you read her blog to see what I mean…my clothing will breathe better as a result of it!  At least I hope so…as long as I don’t get distracted by that other little book sitting just over there…..

I know I’m being rather lazy these days and short cutting my own blog writing by supplementing with other blog posts, but I couldn’t help thinking this particular entry in the Harvard Business Review post would be of interest to my subscribers. I have recently had to make a few rather major decisions and I had a friend far wiser than me say:

Try not to think of choices as a right one and wrong one. Rather think in terms of a continuum of which choice you may regret doing or not doing more.

So, for example, when recently faced with an invitation by a dear friend of mine to travel 14 hours via air to Dubai or not to go, I asked myself which would I likely regret more–going or not going. Phrased another way, if I went to Dubai, would I wish I had stayed home? If I didn’t go to Dubai, would I wish that I had? The choice was an easy one–GO! And I had an absolutely marvelous time–thanks to my friend’s wonderful hospitality (a true SWOG!) Not once while I was there or after coming home did I feel any sense of remorse over the choice I made. On the contrary, I’m extremely happy that I went. Perhaps the rest of this post–the information from HBR will help explain why. I hope this helps you with any upcoming decisions you may need to make. Enjoy!

Stop Worrying About Making the Right Decision
by Ed Batista | 2:00 PM November 8, 2013
Comments (38)

Much of my work as a coach involves helping people wrestle with an important decision. Some of these decisions feel particularly big because they involve selecting one option to the exclusion of all others when the cost of being “wrong” can be substantial: If I’m at a crossroads in my career, which path should I follow? If I’m considering job offers, which one should I accept? If I’m being asked to relocate, should I move to a new city or stay put?

Difficult decisions like this remind me of a comment made by Scott McNealy — a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years — during a lecture I attended while I was in business school at Stanford: He was asked how he made decisions and responded by saying, in effect, It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about “making the right decision” and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.

I’m paraphrasing, but my memory of this comment is vivid, and his point was crystal clear. Before we make any decision — particularly one that will be difficult to undo — we’re understandably anxious and focused on identifying the “best” option because of the risk of being “wrong.” But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the moment of choice and lose sight of everything that follows. Merely selecting the “best” option doesn’t guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn’t doom us to failure or unhappiness. It’s what happens next (and in the days, months, and years that follow) that ultimately determines whether a given decision was “right.”

Another aspect of this dynamic is that our focus on making the “right” decision can easily lead to paralysis, because the options we’re choosing among are so difficult to rank in the first place. How can we definitively determine in advance what career path will be “best,” or what job offer we should accept, or whether we should move across the country or stay put? Obviously, we can’t. There are far too many variables. But the more we yearn for an objective algorithm to rank our options and make the decision for us, the more we distance ourselves from the subjective factors — our intuition, our emotions, our gut — that will ultimately pull us in one direction or another. And so we get stuck, waiting for a sign — something — to point the way.

I believe the path to getting unstuck when faced with a daunting, possibly paralyzing decision is embedded in McNealy’s comment, and it involves a fundamental re-orientation of our mindset: Focusing on the choice minimizes the effort that will inevitably be required to make any option succeed and diminishes our sense of agency and ownership. In contrast, focusing on the effort that will be required after our decision not only helps us see the means by which any choice might succeed, it also restores our sense of agency and reminds us that while randomness plays a role in every outcome, our locus of control resides in our day-to-day activities more than in our one-time decisions.

So while I support using available data to rank our options in some rough sense, ultimately we’re best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving foward by:

paying close attention to the feelings and emotions that accompany the decision we’re facing,
assessing how motivated we are to work toward the success of any given option, and
recognizing that no matter what option we choose, our efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to our choice.
This view is consistent with the work of Stanford professor Baba Shiv, an expert in the neuroscience of decision-making. Shiv notes that in the case of complex decisions, rational analysis will get us closer to a decision but won’t result in a definitive choice because our options involve trading one set of appealing outcomes for another, and the complexity of each scenario makes it impossible to determine in advance which outcome will be optimal.

Two key findings have emerged from Shiv’s research: First, successful decisions are those in which the decision-maker remains committed to their choice. And second, emotions play a critical role in determining a successful outcome to a trade-off decision. As Shiv told Stanford Business magazine, emotions are “mental shortcuts that help us resolve trade-off conflicts and…happily commit to a decision.” Going further, Shiv noted, “When you feel a trade-off conflict, it just behooves you to focus on your gut.”

This isn’t to say that we should simply allow our emotions to choose for us. We’ve all made “emotional” decisions that we later came to regret. But current neuroscience research makes clear that emotions are an important input into decision-making by ruling out the options most likely to lead to a negative outcome and focusing our attention on the options likely to lead to a positive outcome. More specifically, research by Florida State professor Roy Baumeister and others suggests that good decision-making is tied to our ability to anticipate future emotional states: “It is not what a person feels right now, but what he or she anticipates feeling as the result of a particular behavior that can be a powerful and effective guide to choosing well.”

So when we’re stuck or even paralyzed by a decision, we need more than rational analysis. We need to vividly envision ourselves in a future scenario, get in touch with the emotions this generates and assess how those feelings influence our level of commitment to that particular choice. We can’t always make the right decision, but we can make every decision right.