What's The Big Idea: Houston Kraft - How To Practice Deep Kindness
“There's a collective cry out for kindness right now. ”
Today’s guest: Houston Kraft
His big idea: We highly value kindness as a society, but we don’t understand what kindness means, or how to practice it.
Houston Kraft is a professional speaker, leadership consultant, and kindness advocate who speaks at schools, conferences, and events internationally. He has spoken to nearly a half a million people at 500 engagements and counting. He is the co-founder of CharacterStrong - trainings and curriculums that create more compassionate cultures in schools and communities. He has been featured on the Huffington Post and highlighted by the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation. His messages about character, leadership, compassion, and kindness resonate with audiences age 5-95.
Listen to What’s The Big Idea on your preferred platform below:
Key insights Shared:
Leadership is love: More than communicating effectively or representing a group, leadership is about compassion and can easily be evaluated by considering if you left the team you lead better off than when you found them.
Life is the size of our awareness: Create a little circle around you of all the things you know and understand, that's the world that you inhabit. There is so much world beyond that and it’s key to push that circle to be larger.
The difference between nice and kind: Nice is a reaction, it's how you respond to people and events and it is often not premeditated. Kindness often requires premeditation, you have to plan and actively demonstrate an act of kindness. It’s not necessarily convenient or comfortable and you can be kind to people you disagree with.
The key is to focus on deep kindness, rather than confetti kindness.
Empathy is key: In order to practice deep kindness, we need to pay attention, listen and exercise our empathy. Practice the platinum rule, treat people the way they want to be treated, not the way you think they want to be treated.
Deep kindness: The practice of connecting with ourselves and others in a way that’s informed by skills underneath the act itself.
Empathy: An umbrella term, our capacity to feel with people.
What are the applications of deep kindness: Practicing forgiveness for the people who hurt us the most. This allows both us and the person we’re forgiving the chance to heal.
Why don’t we forgive people:
We’re afraid of making it “ok” the way someone behaved and in essence condoning their behavior.
We become strongly attached to certain narratives (this person hurt me) and we have a strong aversion against letting go of those narratives.
If we are told a lie for long enough we start to believe it’s true.
As a people pleaser it can be hard to have important, bounty conversations because you fear that people will like you less. Ironically, these conversations will result in people respecting you more.
The difference between hard and brutal: Drawing boundaries is hard, living with resentment and judgement is brutal.
One of the best ways to practice self development is relationship wellness
Understanding Love Languages, (Gifting, physical touch, words of affirmation, quality time, words of afirmation) recognizing what languages your partner communicates with and how to meet them on their level.
Average drop out rate the first year in college in the US is 50%
We spend so much time preparing students to get to college that we have forgotten how to prepare them when they’re at college.
Exxon Oil Rig: Working on an oil rig has one of the highest injury and fatality rates. Exon hired a leadership expert who provided empathy and vulnerability training to the crew of the oil rig for months. They found that productivity was doubled and safety increased by 80% - simply teaching the workers how to ask for help and how to think about their fellow coworkers made the oil rig dramatically safer and more efficient.
To learn more about Houston and his work:
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