Kindness is our anchor for resilience. Kindness towards ourselves, our family, friends, and strangers. What can you do today, to raise your resilience, to be kind to another?

Acts of Kindness for Yourself:

  • Buy yourself some flowers
  • 10 minutes of stretching in the morning
  • Start the day with a positive intention or choose a word that helps you for the day. Today I choose the word “play.”
  • Make yourself nourishing meals
  • Make yourself a pleasurable real food treat like muffins, truffles or simply enjoy some quality dark chocolate with a spoon of nut butter.
  • Turn the music loud and dance like no one is watching.
  • Buy more plants or succulents for your home or desk.
  • Make reading some of a book daily a non-negoitable.

Acts of Kindness for Family/Friends:

  • Pick up the phone and call a friend for a quality check-up, or record a short video and send it to a friend, letting them know you are thinking of them and what you treasure about them.
  • Create a holiday to celebrate someone you care about. “Declan appreciation day,” for my son, for his positive outlook each morning and desire to create memories.
  • Find opportunities to give a compliment. After a backyard burger night with my friend Annie, she made it a point to let me know how beautiful I looked. I feel funny even writing this, but it’s not often we are getting compliments, esp from others when socially distanced. You have the power to make someone’s day, taking the time to compliment them.
  • Send a card to a family member or friend, letting them know why and how much you appreciate them. I will even have the kids color pictures for our elderly neighbor who doesn’t have her weekly events to attend to anymore w/ friends. This small gesture brightens her day.
  • “Want me to grab you anything while I head to X?” This is a common phrase exchanged between my 2 cousins that live close to me. Why not help each other out, and reduce the number of times we need to go to the grocery, by combining efforts.
  • Cook an extra portion at dinner and take it to a neighbor. My neighbor down the road and I do this when we make something special that is gluten-free.
  • Print favorite photos of friends or family and send it to them to frame. I just swapped all of our pictures for newer ones and it feels so cozy.
  • Focus on being a good listener without feeling the need to provide a solution.
  • Speak as though you are always being recorded. If there is something you have an urge to say that can fall into gossip or negativity, perhaps it is not worth our energy.
  • Ask a neighbor if you can help them with their yard work, kids, errands. I have been doing this more and trust it’s good karma.
  • Call your parents. Call your grandparents. Call your siblings.
  • Leave painted rocks with positive words on them on a neighbors front step.

Acts of Kindness for the Public:

  • Take a nursing station, fire station, police force flowers.
  • Many of us are resorting to Amazon for shopping, and you can support a small business (shoutout to Kelly Schmidt Wellness) or a favorite non-profit, like JDRF, and use their business link or Amazon Smile to support them. This comes at no cost to you.
  • Say “thank you” to someone who is making a difference. I recall when our pandemic heightened early this. year and our close friends reside in Australia, and the husband is the CEO of a famous race track there and he was the very first person to shut crowds down and got a lot of backlashes. However, looking back, he did the right thing and perhaps saved lives doing so.
  • Donate blood or bone marrow.
  • Become an organ donor. I am an organ donor and I have also registered to donate my body to science for type 1 diabetes.
  • Leverage what you are good at, perhaps as a free service to the public. Starting in Septemeber, I am donating 1 week of wellness resources, coaching, and tactics for Beating the Burnout.
  • Volunteer
  • Donate your things
  • Pay for someone’s coffee.
  • Leave a big tip, even if it’s for takeout.
  • Instead of social media scrolling, search the web to see how you can pay to plant a tree.