Archive for June, 2010

Day #6 – Kindness, Present and Past

Friday, June 11th, 2010

Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns.
~ Author Unknown

I stopped at a gas station yesterday to get a fountain Pepsi (I’m a fountain Pepsi addict and making no attempt at recovery) on my way to chorus rehearsal. The lady filling her drink in front of me dropped the lid she was trying to put onto her cup and before I could even think about it, I bent over and picked it up for her. She thanked me as I tossed it into the trash. Just a small act that hopefully helped another thirsty person.

Since today’s kind act was nothing exceptionally monumental, I wanted to tell you about a kind act I don’t even really remember doing that made a difference to someone else over 20 years ago.

A few months ago, my mom called to tell me she ran into the dad of one of my high school friends at her local grocery store and about the conversation she had with him. She thought she recognized the man and said that he gave her a look of recognition as well, so she decided to speak to him.

“Aren’t you Mr. M?” she asked him.
“Yes I am,” he replied.
“I thought so. Our kids were in choir together. I’m Angie’s mom.”
“I know,” he said. “I remember Angie quite well. In fact, I will never forget what she did for my son, B.”

He went on to explain,

“Angie encouraged B to try out for show choir as a sophomore after being in the accompaniment band his freshman year. His next 3 years in show choir did so much to boost his confidence and bring him out of his shell, and it was because of the encouragement your daughter gave him as an upperclassman to audition in the first place. I have often thought over the years that B would not have become the confident, outgoing and successful man he is today had it not been for Angie’s friendship and encouragement to go after what he wanted. I really am so grateful for that.”

My mom said she was a little stunned, but she thanked him whole-heartedly for telling her that story and went on about her shopping.

Me and B doing the show choir "thang". Don't laugh - this was COOL in 1987!

I remember B very well. He was a freshman when I was a junior and he played trumpet in the band that backed up my high school show choir. At first glance, he was sort of nerdy looking – a red-haired, freckle-faced, short, skinny kid with braces. Now any one of these traits at age 14 can be a social obstacle, but when you combine all of this with the fact that he was a “band geek”, he didn’t stand a social chance. He was in the marching band and had auditioned for the show choir band as well. I don’t honestly remember how we got to know each other, but with roughly 20 hours a week of rehearsals outside of school hours, I’m sure we had plenty of opportunity to chat and goof around. B was a smart guy with a great sense of humor – I remember him being quite the smart-eleck, which made me like him even more. He lived very close to me and I often drove him to and from practice because he couldn’t drive yet. I don’t particularly remember encouraging him to audition for show choir, but if he expressed even the slightest bit of interest in it, I’m sure I did since we were always trying to get more guys to be in the group. And I would have never let my friend just ‘settle’ for the backup band if he really wanted to be in the spotlight.

I haven’t talked to B for over 20 years. I have no idea where he lives, what he does, who he married, or anything about his life beyond high school. Our lives went in separate directions, like so often happens with friends you make in high school, college, and various jobs when the experience you have in common comes to an end. There is no way I could have known what an impact show choir would have on B’s life and I’m sure that “changing his life” was never my intention. But you never know when a seemingly small extension of friendship, kindness, generosity, understanding, sympathy or gratitude will do just that – change a life. Mr. M thinks I changed B’s life and, by telling the story, he changed mine in return. I will forever be grateful to Mr. M for returning the favor.

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Posted in Encouragement |

Day #5 – Taking the “I” out of “Weak Link”

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

I am a member of a team, and I rely on the team, I defer to it and sacrifice for it, because the team, not the individual, is the ultimate champion.
~Mia Hamm, US Women’s Soccer Collegiate, National and World Cup Champion, Olympic Gold & Silver Medalist

There were a lot of things I didn’t put in the About Me section of this blog because this project really isn’t “About Me” – it’s “About Kindness”. Who I am and where I’m from are irrelevant factors in my effort to increase kindness awareness. And I knew that along the way, I would probably be telling you little bits about myself to explain some of my actions. So as this project progresses, I will be giving you pieces of my personal background as they relate to my current evolution.

I sing with a women’s barbershop chorus, Capital City Chorus, and have off and on for the better part of 18 years. Capital City Chorus is a part of Sweet Adelines International – the parent organization of womens’ barbershop. I grew up in barbershop – my dad started singing barbershop in high school and I was raised on it. So that makes me a second-generation barbershopper, otherwise known as a “Barbershop Brat.” OK, enough background for now – I’m sure I will be telling you more about my wonderful hobby in future posts. Here’s the point for today.

Capital City Chorus, Calgary, 2007

I have taken a few breaks from the chorus in the past 18 years when the rest of my life demanded my attention.  I have not been actively singing with Capital City since January 2008 and recently decided (after some encouragement from my closest Sweet Adeline friends) to rejoin the chorus and prepare for International Competition in Seattle,WA in October. These women have been preparing for this competition for over a year – learning music, learning choreography, perfecting music, perfecting choreography, paying coaches to come in and tell them how to perfect their music and choreography, etc. They practice each Thursday evening for 3 hours and occasionally have extra practices on Saturdays to accommodate a coaches’ schedule. I am jumping in toward the end of their journey, so I have a lot of catching up to do to get up to the level they have worked so hard to achieve.

So yesterday, I spent some time working on my music and new choreography in preparation for this week’s rehearsal. I studied my sheet music and made some markings that help me make better sense of the notes and their progression (I sing baritone and it sometimes doesn’t make melodic sense when I’m trying to learn it.). I combined the sheet music with the learning tracks so that I could listen to how my part goes, which helps me learn it faster. And then I spent some time trying to recall and review the choreography I learned last week so it would be fresh in my mind and easier to reproduce at rehearsal.

I owe it to these women to be prepared to do my best each week. It may not be a “sport” (however, there are times that many Sweet Adelines would dispute this claim), but it’s still a team effort and a team is only as good as its weakest member. Coming in this late in the game, the weakest member could very easily be me. Some people will read this and think “As a chorus member, it is YOUR responsibility to make sure you get your ‘game’ up to the level of the rest of the team as quickly as possible. ‘I’m new’ is no excuse.” I wholeheartedly agree with this AND add that it is also a matter of having enough respect for my fellow chorus members to make sure I am not ‘the weakest link.’ The chorus management team is very good about giving members as many tools as possible to aid the learning process, but nobody can learn the music or the moves for me – I have to do it for myself. And I don’t want to hold back the forward momentum of refining and perfecting our repertoire because I didn’t take the time outside of rehearsal to practice and get myself up to speed. I shouldn’t expect anyone to have to wait on me to catch up. I respect my chorus sisters too much to slack off and just ease my way back into the material. Yes, I did benefit from this preparation – and so did my CCC sisters (I hope).

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Posted in Teamwork |

Day #4 – Familiarity not required

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady.
~ Thomas H. Huxley, English Biologist, 1825 – 1895

I work from home 3 or 4 days a week and only go into the office the other 1 or 2 days each week. I am very fortunate to have this work arrangement. But this means that some days, I work at home all day and am not actually out in the world interacting with people. This can make it difficult to find ways to be kind to others when I don’t encounter anyone outside of my family all day – challenging, but not impossible.

Today, I decided to take advantage of the suggestions from Facebook and send birthday greetings to two of my friends on Facebook. I will admit, this is not an extraordinary act of kindness. In fact, I do this often. But I don’t do it every day for every one of my friends who is having a birthday that day. There have been times when I’ve seen the birthday list for the day and thought “I don’t really know that person well enough to wish them a Happy Birthday?” Today it occurred to me – Just how well do you have to know someone to wish them a Happy Birthday? As a server, I wished perfect strangers a Happy Birthday everyday in hopes of increasing my tips. But there doesn’t have to be anything in it for me to pass on a simple birthday greeting.  And I didn’t do it thinking that MY specific birthday greeting would have an impact on the person or their day – I just wanted to add to the collective group of wishes that they hopefully received from many people in many ways that day. It was about increasing their total number of birthday wishes received by one. It took very little time or effort and cost me nothing – when I thought about it, I was a little embarrassed that I had actually passed up these opportunities before because I thought I “didn’t really know the person well enough.” All you have to know is that it’s their birthday – and I didn’t even have to keep track of that myself because Facebook reminded me. It’s a kindness that has been staring me in the face for years and it’s one I won’t pass up again.

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Posted in Thoughtfullness |

Day #3 – Today I was “Somebody Else”

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

…And no, I’m not talking about an out-of-body experience.

We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.
~ Ronald Reagan, 40th President of The United States, 1911 – 2004

On day 3 of The Kind Year, I found myself in a very nice public restroom. Not your average, run-of-the-mill, “should be afraid to go in it” public restroom, but one where they take pride in the cleanliness and upkeep in their restroom. In fact, there was a lady wiping down the sinks when I went in.

Between the time I entered the restroom and the time I went to the sink to wash my hands, I could tell that she had started at one end of the counter of 5 or 6 sinks and had worked her way down to the other end. The sink I used was one she had already wiped. When I reached for the paper towel, I dripped water from my freshly-washed hands onto the counter top. So when I was done drying my hands, I used the paper towel to wipe up the drips I had just left before I threw it away. The lady watched me (because she was already anticipating the need to go re-wipe my sink) and looked a little surprised by my actions. I just smiled at her, tossed my towel in the trash and left.

I have never seen this nametag. Have you?

I know it’s her job to keep the restroom clean and nice, but that doesn’t mean I can’t clean up after myself just because I don’t get paid to do it. Her nametag didn’t say “Somebody Else” (in fact, it said “Janet”), so I didn’t think it should be left for “Somebody Else” to do just because I knew “Somebody Else” would. I made the mess.  It wasn’t difficult or time consuming to clean up, it didn’t require any special tools or skills, and there was no reason for me to feel I should be compensated for it, so I cleaned it up.  It was just one less time she had to wipe down that sink on that day.

Too often, we leave things for “Somebody Else” to do because we are too tired, or too busy, or too disinterested, or too whatever to do it ourselves. “Somebody Else” always seems to have a lot to do:

“Somebody Else” will volunteer to help with the activity.
“Somebody Else” will make a donation.
“Somebody Else” will recycle.
“Somebody Else” will clean it up.
“Somebody Else” will fix it.
“Somebody Else” will finish it.
It’s “Somebody Else’s” job to do it.

But why leave it for “Somebody Else?” And what happens when “Nobody Else” does it?

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Posted in Giving of oneself |

Day #2 – The small sacrifice that may have made a difference

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. 
~Leo Buscaglia, Author & Speaker, 1924 – 1988

Sometimes extending kindness to others requires virtually no personal sacrifice, while other times it requires a sizeable amount of personal sacrifice. In the grand scheme of things, this one seemed small.

"T" in her tap outfit.

Sunday was my niece’s annual dance recital. This is the event for which they rehearse and practice all year long. And every student from the dance studio participates in at least one dance number – sometimes several. For the past three years, I have been unable to go to the dance recital because I worked a job with a Sunday shift that started right in the middle of the dance recital time. One year before I started that job, I didn’t go thanks to a really nasty migraine. I think, in her 6 or 7 years of dance lessons, I have only been to the dance recital once. And while I really enjoyed getting to see T’s dance numbers, the rest of the 2 & ½ hours of the event are not all that interesting. The teeny tiny girls are cute all dressed up, but half of them barely even move once they get on stage – the last time I went, one little girl who was probably 3 actually laid down on the stage during her number. Ideally, I would love to go and see T’s routines and be in and out of there in 20 minutes. But it doesn’t work that way. And this particular Sunday, it would have been really easy to find “other things to do” rather than go sit in a dark auditorium in the middle of the afternoon, watching 70+ girls I don’t know.

But none of the things I could have been doing on a beautiful, sunny day could have been more important than making sure my only niece knew how much we love her and how proud we are of her. I can’t really show her that I support and appreciate her and all of her hard work this year any other way than to come and applaud her at her dance recital. I didn’t really care about all of the rest of it – it turned out to be more entertaining and not nearly as tedious as I had remembered from the previous recital. I cared about T and her effort and I wanted her to know that there were some extra people in the audience just for her that day. As a performer, I know what it does to your confidence and morale to know that there are not just a few but several people in the audience who came to see you. And I wanted T to have that feeling – to make her experience just that much more special. I don’t expect that my specific attendance was a factor, but the role I played in increasing her audience count was.

As it turns out, I got another chance to do a nice thing while I was there. While reading through the program that listed each dancer’s name in each routine, I noticed the name of another girl whose family we know. So I made sure to pay close attention to her routines also. It just so happens that after the recital, I passed her family in the lobby. I waved to them and said “Tell M we saw her and she did a great job!” So while we weren’t there to see M, I was able to let her family know that I did recognize her effort and give them a little extra unexpected praise for her performance. A little unsolicited praise can go a long way – especially when it comes from an unexpected source.

So my small sacrifice of a sunny Sunday afternoon hopefully made a difference in the day of two lovely and talented young ladies who danced their hearts out for us that afternoon. And my laundry and tall grass were still there when we got home, awaiting their turns to capture my attention. They weren’t nearly as captivating!

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Posted in Giving of oneself |

I choose courtesy

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
~ John Wooden, All-Time Winningest College Basketball Coach, 1910 – 2010

The first day of The Kind Year was not exactly the day of inspiration I had hoped it would be, but I did manage a kind act.

I spent most of my day setting up this website and blog – which is not as easy as I had hoped. I wouldn’t say I’m a “technophobe” – I think I am fairly open to embracing technology. But website creation and hosting and domain names and blog templates and widgets (OH MY!) were all just a bit outside my current knowledge base. Thankfully, I had some help from my friend and co-worker, G.H., who gave me some extremely helpful tutoring and was able to adequately “dumb it down” for me to understand. Many thanks to G.H.! I was beginning to wonder if I would be able to interact with anyone to be able to do a kind act. And then my website hosting service dropped an opportunity in my lap.

Shortly after setting up my website, I got an email from my web host asking me to call them to verify my billing information. I guess they wanted to make sure I really did want to create a hosting account with them – hosting account fraud must be becoming an issue?!? So after doing an online chat with the hosting service to make sure this “Please call us” email was legit, I called the number. I spent several minutes on hold and finally my call was answered by Charles. I decided that when he told me his name, I should make a point to remember it so I could thank him by name later. Then, Charles had to transfer my call to Adam in “Account Verification”. So I thanked Charles for his assistance (by name) and continued on with Adam. He asked me just a few questions to confirm that my account information was correct, and that was all he needed. I made sure to also thank him by name as well.

It’s a matter of courtesy and respect to remember someone’s name if they give it to you. If they took the time to share that piece of personal information, I should have the courtesy to make a note of it so that I can call them by name later. It makes the “Thank You” much more personal. And I’m sure that these two guys get enough unhappy people on the phone that any amount of courtesy and respect they can get is worth it. It wasn’t a big thing and perhaps they didn’t even notice that I thanked them by name, but I know I did and I felt good about it. Some people say “I’m so bad with names” and expect that to exempt them from remembering names later. I think it’s just a choice – it’s what you choose to remember. Are they also bad with “their social security numbers” or “directions home” or “their birthdate” or “remembering how to tie their shoes?” No! It’s what you choose to remember. Charles and Adam will probably not remember me, but I chose to remember them.

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Happy New Year – sort of

Saturday, June 5th, 2010

I have started to notice lately how often people pass up opportunities to be kind to those around them. It’s not necessarily that I observe intentional “unkindess” – people aren’t trying to be rude or selfish or inconsiderate (at least I don’t think they are) – but they aren’t trying to be kind either.  People don’t often hold doors for complete strangers who are attempting to use the same door at the same time, cars don’t wait for pedestrians patiently, people litter freely (and walk past trash on the ground without even seeming to notice it), people rarely say “Thank You” or “Have a Nice Day” anymore, etc. And like anything else, now that I’ve noticed it, I notice it more every day.

So it got me thinking – what can I do to encourage social kindness? I’m not anybody important – outside of my own little world, anyway. I don’t have a “media voice” like Oprah, or Ellen, or Katie Couric, or Dr. Phil. When these people want to draw attention to an issue, they have a national media outlet at their disposal. But I’m not famous, so why would anyone listen to me? I considered the possibility of approaching the “offenders” and pointing out their missed opportunity. While it might be effective for some people, it would probably just get me beat down or killed in today’s world (yet another sad statement on society, but that’s another topic for another day).

After much consideration, I decided that the best way to try to make a difference was to live by example. I’ve decided that I’m going to spend one year looking for ways to be kind to others at least once every day. And then, I’m going to write about it – here. I want to explore ways to be kind to others now that I am looking for them, and how those acts of kindness make me feel and what I learn from them.

Notice that earlier I said “live by example” and not “lead by example” – this effort is not about broadcasting to the world “Look how wonderfully selfless and kind I am. Come follow in my footsteps and you, too, can be better than the rest of the rude, selfish masses.” This is simply about trying to put into words how being kind makes me feel as the instigator and how it impacts me and my life. MAYBE someone else will read this blog (other than my husband and my mother who are obligated by association). MAYBE someone else will learn from what I learn. MAYBE someone else will be inspired to find ways to be kind in their own life. MAYBE someone else will choose kindness just once. The worst that could happen is that I spend a year trying to be a kinder person, I keep an online documentation of my experiences, feelings and lessons, and the only person that benefits from it is me. That’s not so bad, really. The BEST thing that could happen is that some other people stumble upon this blog and realize that if I can do it, they can choose to be kind too.

So it starts today. I will be counting down the days and tallying up the kindness and I’ll see what happens over the course of the next year. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about what I did kind today – and I’ll tell you about the event I witnessed that sort of pushed me over the edge and set me on this course. Feel free to post your comments about what you read here – good or bad. I would just like to know if anyone else is benefiting from what I am learning – it’s all about sharing the knowledge.

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