Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Houston Craft. Houston is a popular speaker who's worked in more than 600 schools around the country, and he's the co-founder of Character Strong, which provides curriculum and training for safer and kinder schools. And he's the author of Deep Kindness, a revolutionary guide for the way we think, talk, and act in kindness, which we're here to talk about today.

[00:38] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[00:41] SPEAKER_00:

Houston, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thanks, Justin. So kindness is one of those things that we learn about from a very early age, and it's easy for us to kind of stop thinking about it as big people. And this is not a children's book. It's not a picture book. It's not for preschoolers.

[00:58]

Why is it such an urgent priority that we, as bigger people, think about kindness?

[01:03] SPEAKER_01:

It's a great frame, Justin, just that premise that... It is something that I think once we think we've figured it out, we stop doing deeper, meaningful reflection around it. And I think there's a really interesting gap in our culture between the way that we think about skills and the way we think about values, right? I would never fix the chain on my bike and call myself an engineer, but sometimes because we were kind...

[01:29]

you know, growing up because we believed in kindness as a household or because I do a community service event once or twice a year, I give myself permission to call myself kind. And we think about it as a passive thing as opposed to a proactive pursuit. And I think that's the gap. And I think that gap illuminates itself. And to answer the second part of that question, why is it an urgent priority? Well, look around.

[01:52]

I've never asked anyone, do you believe in kindness? No one's ever said no or like, yeah, you know, it's okay. It's something I think we understand as a fundamental human need, and then we sort of look around and realize we're not very good at it. So that's why I think it's an urgent priority is because it's, to me, a really meaningful gap in our life, perhaps one of the most profound ones where it's something we collectively agree is good, and yet we're collectively not very good at. Here's, to me, one of the most specific or sort of analytical cases and points is this really fascinating study out of Harvard's Making Caring Common Project, where Dr. Richard Weisbord asked families to rank what they wanted most for their kids.

[02:34]

Number one, high-performing. Number two, to be happy. Number three, to be kind. Put those in order, priority, what you want for the young people you're raising in this world. And 80-something percent of them put happiness and kindness over high-performing. which seems like it is resonant or parallel to what we would say we believe in.

[02:55]

And then they asked the kids of those same parents, hey, what do you think your parents want you to be? High-performing, happy, or kind? And the data was the exact opposite. In fact, in sort of the summary of the research, they said that kids across the board said that they thought adults in their life would rather they get good grades than be good people. And Harvard really beautifully calls it the rhetoric reality gap. which I think is the perfect label for why this is an urgent priority, because there's a huge gap between what we say is important and what we make important with our actions, with what we measure as success.

[03:28]

And that has a tremendous ripple effect into just about every interaction we have in the world. And so I think we need to reframe how we think about it and talk about it.

[03:36] SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. So it strikes me, Houston, that the gap that we're seeing in the message that we want our children and our students to pick up from us, that that gap is not just a result of miscommunication, but of really mixed messages between what we say we want and perhaps what we model, what we show that we want by our own actions. exhibit a lack of kindness? I mean, I don't want to dwell too much on the counter example, but I think we've got to acknowledge what's the alternative to kindness that we seem to actually value more than the kindness that we claim to value?

[04:14] SPEAKER_01:

It's a great question. I think contrast helps us understand some of those things better. And I would say the two things we probably exhibit most frequently, one on the generous side, I would say we demonstrate niceness a whole lot more than kindness. And niceness, as I talked is the reactive version. I'll be good to you if it's convenient to me, if I have the time, if I get some sort of benefit out of it, if it's comfortable. And I think a lot of us, in terms of our generosity, it's an action of convenience.

[04:41]

And my speaking and storytelling mentor, a guy named Tyler Derman, he says, a commitment to growth is a commitment to pain, which means anytime we want to grow in anything, it's typically an action that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. So I would say the antithesis in many ways, maybe not the antithesis, but the thing I think we think of as kindness in our culture is usually just niceness. The farther away from that to me is busyness, is exhaustion, right? Is the thing that we role model, I think pretty relentlessly to young people, the younger generation would be that the true measure of success is just how much you get done. And there's a lot of frustrating research in the compassion field around how the biggest barriers to things like kindness oftentimes have to do with how much time we feel like we have. So how much of a rush we are in, how busy we are is one of the biggest barriers to us actually giving.

[05:37]

And so I think that's the sort of opposite that we role model is we say kindness is important, but we never have time for it.

[05:43] SPEAKER_00:

And you said niceness is kind of the reactive substitute for kindness, which is more proactive. Is that right?

[05:50] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. I think that I heard it from a student. I spoke at a high school in Texas. And this kid came down after the assembly and was like, I realized after listening to you today that I'm a really nice person. And I'm like, good. Yeah, that's kind of the point.

[06:04]

And he goes, no, you don't understand. I realized the way you talked about kindness today. He goes, I realize I'm nice, but I'm not kind. And he goes, I think my whole school sort of dismissed you when you started talking because they already think of themselves as kindness. They're as kind people, but they're like, he's like, really? We're just a nice school.

[06:20]

Everyone is nice to the people that are like them or talk like them or think like them or agree with them already. And he's like, but kindness is different. The way you talked about today, he sort of resolved at this point at the end, because I realized that kindness requires work And I think I have a lot of work to do. I was like, well put my friend, me too.

[06:36] SPEAKER_00:

That brings me back to this idea that like we think of kindness as something for kindergartners, for first graders, for, you know, for the little people in our lives to learn, but that we're too busy for, you know, that we don't have to worry about kindness because our lives are full of activity. and of responsibility and we'll be nice when we're put in a position where we have a choice of being nice or mean. But kindness, like it seems like it requires a different level of almost planning as adults. How do we make sure that we're in a position where we actually can be kind and not just nice?

[07:09] SPEAKER_01:

It's a great reframe. And I think it's sort of the crux of early on in the book, I talk about the difference between confetti kindness and deep kindness. I think confetti kindness is the kindness that you allude to, which is this thing we've been pitched since a very young age. Having worked in a lot of schools, I would say just about every school I've been in has a motto or one of the principles or their core tenets are related to kindness. And so I get to see a lot of posters advertising kindness as a good thing. And I think probably one of the most common ones I've seen across 600 schools is throw kindness around like confetti.

[07:43]

And I think about that poster all the time because it is an exemplar of something that is well-intentioned but damaging. It's just saying we should give kindness more frequently. What it is also doing is saying that kindness is as easy or as simple or as freely spread as throwing confetti in the air. And so from a young age, we're convinced that kindness is this simple thing. And I think one of the most damaging narratives in our culture, not only that we tell young people, but for all of us, is that kindness is free. It's not.

[08:09]

Anyone who is actually showing up with this sort of plan or this deep kindness, as you're alluding to, recognizes it as, is it costing at the very least time? Right. Time is something that is precious to all of us. It's our most finite resource. But to take it a step further, it could also cost energy and effort of which in the current reality of the world, we're all exhausted pretty regularly. And then you go a little bit deeper and you realize that the kindness that can be really transformative, shifting a relationship, shifting oftentimes costs us pride, costs us ego, costs us comfort, costs us listening.

[08:43]

You know, it costs us all these things that when we equate it to something like confetti, Growing up, if that's the narrative, if we think of something as it's truly that simple or easy or free, I think particularly the American culture has this narrative of like, if it's free, it doesn't have value. And I have a lot of other things to get to today that our culture does value. So it becomes secondary. And yet when you ask people about it, they'll say that it's important, right? All of us want kindness in our life to be recognized, to be validated, to be seen, to be heard. And you look into the current realities of our culture right now and you realize that so much of the damage, so much of the undoing, so much of the pain that is so evident, I think, in our country, in our world right now is the result of people not being seen or heard or acknowledged or validated.

[09:29]

You bring it back to the education system, right? Kids who don't feel seen or a sense of belonging in school, we know aren't going to have that sort of engagement that is going to be a huge indicator of success in our life. So how do we then, the how is important here, yeah? How then do we build it into our practices or our life? I think we start with the why, because the why is going to inform the how. Do I have a deep sense of why this matters, why this is important?

[09:56]

Do I have a deep sense of the kind of kindness I want to offer to people in my life? Let's take it a step further. One of the more powerful, when we're thinking about behavior change in our life, one of the more powerful pieces of research that we talk about and think about at Character Strong is this concept called implementation intentions, which is to say, I create micro habits in my life When I say things like, I'm the kind of person who blanks. I'm the kind of person who, when I see someone who's suffering, I'm the kind of person who will check in with them. I'm the kind of person who, when I see a piece of trash on the ground that isn't mine, I pick it up. I'm the kind of person who, when I see someone who's experiencing homelessness, at least looks them in the eye and acknowledges them.

[10:40]

And there's a lot of power in that because I've, first of all, I've decided why kindness matters to me. And then I've given some really practical examples of where that comes to life. And what that does is it creates these little micro habit routines in our brain. So if I declare that out loud or I write that down somewhere, the next time that circumstance happens to me, I'm much more likely to behave in the way that I've pre-declared myself to do. So that's one sort of like background example. Let's make it more active.

[11:06] SPEAKER_00:

So you said that's an implementation intention. And it sounds kind of like a mini plan that can be activated when you recognize, oh, this is the situation I said I was going to be in. And when I am in that situation, here's what I'm going to do to be kind. Like we're planning ahead, even though we don't know when we're going to be in that situation.

[11:23] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think one of the issues with kindness is that it's such a big, abstract, vague concept that we can allow ourselves to say, I'm a kind person without really knowing what that looks like in practical action on a day-to-day basis. So one of the things that like when you're setting goals, one of the things that goals most commonly fail to acknowledge in the setting is the practice of asking what's going to get in the way. This comes out of some great research from the character lab, which is Dr. Anzal Duckworth's organization. She has this thing called whoop goals, which are proven to be way more effective than the quote unquote smart goals. And the way they set themselves up is we've declared ahead of time that what's important to us, what we want the outcome to be.

[12:05]

And then you very clearly outline the obstacles. So when you think about kindness in your life, if you pre-declare some of the obstacles, the final part of this goal-setting process is an if-then statement. If I see blank, then I'll do this. If I experience this barrier, then I will do this to overcome it. And the value and the practice of that is that when we face those barriers that typically would prevent us from reaching that goal, we have something that we've pre-declared that helps us to motivate us through the action in the first place. And it comes down to building these habits in our life.

[12:38]

One of my favorite premises that challenges me is that 45% of my day is built on routine. It comes out of Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. And that stat Yeah, classic, right? That book terrifies me. Because if that is true, if 45% of my day is habit, it means that 45% of my week is, which means that half of my life is effectively on autopilot. And I remember when I read that statistic, the first question I asked myself was, what percent of my 45% is kind?

[13:08] SPEAKER_00:

Because it's that 45% that we don't think about. We're just acting on habit that we may or may not have developed on purpose, right?

[13:14] SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. Right. The follow-up question becomes, do I want any percent of my 45? Do I want any part of half of my autopilot life to have something related to kindness in it? And if so, then what does that look like? How do I actually put that into action?

[13:29]

My friend Dexter Davis has this really beautiful saying. He says, we're not human beings, we're human becomings. And I think about that a lot when people say, just be kind. What does it mean to just be kind? Does it mean simply to believe in it? Does it mean simply to value it?

[13:44]

Or what does it mean to become that thing over time? One of my favorite Will Durant quotes is, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. And because kindness has become an obsession in my life, I scratch out that word excellence and I put in kindness. Kindness is not an act, but a habit. So what does that look like then?

[14:02]

Am I 45%? What does it look like to begin to weave practices of whether that's kindness towards myself or kindness towards my family or kindness towards my friend? What does that actually look like? To take the goals conversation one step further, one of the famous sayings in businesses and organizations is systems over goals. How do we create systems that support goals as opposed to just constantly being chasing after these one-off things? So I'll give you an example of organizationally the kind of system that we use at Character Strong to try to promote the becoming of kindness, at least with our team.

[14:38]

Every single day in a group channel, we write out our work goals. What would you traditionally call like a to-do list. Okay, here's my to-do list for the day. And everyone does that in the organization so everyone can see what everyone's working on at any given day. And then at the top of that to-do list, everyone in the organization writes out a one item to be list. So I want to be kind today as an example.

[15:00]

But that could change, right? It might be like today I want to be committed. I want to be grateful. I want to be humble. I want to be present. I want to be celebratory, which I would suggest are all words that most of us at some point in our life say we want to be about or live into.

[15:16]

These are the kind of people or friends or bosses or coworkers we want to be. But my argument to go back to the skills versus values conversation is that something like kindness requires just as much dedicated, consistent, disciplined practice as any of the other things on my to-do list. And if I don't intentionally create systems that actively force me to value that thing, meaning I'm putting time or attention to that thing, then those abstract ideas are always going to fall to the bottom of the to-do list. Because I got a thousand things to do. My to-do list is never done. So unless I put it to the top and I value it with just as much accountability and intention as anything else on my to-do list, then I'm never going to get it done.

[15:55]

So to give just one more sort of practical idea of what that looks like to begin to make it a part of your 45%, that's how we do it organizationally is everyone in the organization every day puts out their one item to be list. And then we have accountability partners within the organization that checks in on each other. so that we can mobilize these things and put practice to these abstract ideas.

[16:18] SPEAKER_00:

It occurs to me, Houston, that we've been teaching reading in schools for centuries, and we've been teaching physical education for decades, or maybe close to a century. But really, we only got serious about teaching kindness in schools this millennium. So the idea that know that this is something that we should actually teach that we should actually build in goals that we should actually put organizational habits in place to achieve those goals like these are all pretty new ideas to us in k-12 education how can this show up at the school level because uh you know often we've taken a fairly reactive approach to problems like bullying we have a reporting system and we have consequences and we have you know different things we can do reactively to deal with bullying. And in schools, we think of bullying as the archetypal opposite of kindness, right? What can that habit building look like on the proactive side in schools?

[17:13]

Because we don't want our kids to be kind by accident, just as we don't want them to learn to read by accident. We want to be intentional about this. What can that look like? And how do you work with schools in that area?

[17:24] SPEAKER_01:

Such a great question, Justin. And I think my gut reaction is You don't teach kindness. And I think that's the mistake that a lot of schools make is that you hope to teach directly to this behavior. But much like any other behaviors that you might intervene with, there's a lot of things that live beneath the external demonstrated behavior. So I say that kindness is a character trait. It's a behavioral action that's informed by a whole lot of social emotional competencies that live beneath it.

[17:53]

So when we ask someone to just be kind, or when we're trying to teach people about kindness by putting on a random act of kindness week or something, I think we fail to acknowledge all the skill sets required to actually deliver on that behavior. For example, I think kindness is made possible by the social emotional skill of empathy, of perspective taking. If I don't understand what you need, if I'm unable to reach into your story or imagine myself into your circumstance, then sometimes my kindness is ill-informed. I might be just giving you something that you don't actually want or need in that moment. So are we effectively teaching empathy, for example? Are we effectively teaching emotion, understanding, and regulation?

[18:36]

Are we thinking about how our emotions are connected to our behaviors, how our thoughts are related to our feelings? How quickly we make those snap judgments in our life and how in understanding how quickly we make a lot of those judgments, we begin to have empathy for how other people are experiencing situations different than us. I think about emotional regulation when it comes to kindness, when someone's cruel to me in response, but I'm offering something generous and someone's cruel to me in return. It requires a lot of emotional regulation to still return to that person with kindness. Right. To still show up in that experience or even later on to come back to them with kindness.

[19:12]

I have to regulate a lot of feelings in order to show up in generosity in that moment. So I think one of the mistakes schools make is they're like, well, if we just talk about kindness a lot and we give kids a lot of opportunities to practice kindness, well, then they're going to be more kind. But if we ask them to behave in a way that we haven't taught the skills that live beneath it first, it's like asking someone to do an Ironman if you haven't taught someone how to swim yet. And I think that that distinction is really important when thinking about what's happening in education, the larger narrative around social emotional learning. I think that social emotional learning is not the end result. Social emotional learning are the skills that can lead to somewhere.

[19:53]

which is where that character development side comes in. I think that character is the action-oriented piece that we are hoping for, right? On the far side of social emotional learning, we're hoping people put those things into action in the world, right? Behaviorally, we're hoping people show up with more compassion in school, that people stand up for people who are suffering from bullying or marginalization. But that is only possible when we bring those things alongside each other. The example I'd offer is just sort of in the ethos of, again, how we measure the nonverbal ways that we communicate what's valuable.

[20:27]

I was working at doing professional development at a school in Texas, and it's a massive school that touted to me very excitedly that they're one of the top 50 high-performing schools in the country. And I remember walking through this massive school, it was beautiful, 4,000 students, and a counselor pulled me aside, and I'll never forget, she said, Just so you understand, we talk about being one of the top 50 schools in the country a lot, but we send a kid at our school to the hospital every week with some sort of suicidal ideation or attempt. And I remember being struck by this idea of what we call high-performing matters, right? What we decide as achievement, what we decide as success as a school matters a lot. And we can say, be kind, and we can make it a part of our mission, and we can try to teach it all we want. But if at the end of the day, the way we measure success as a school Is it the expense of young people's well-being and safety?

[21:20]

I think we're missing a key ingredient in the puzzle. If we're teaching to a thing, but we're not actually showing that we value that thing with allocating the right time or energy or recognition around it, I think that's the other gap in the education system in terms of just measuring. So those would be my two initial thoughts right away is that we have to teach the social-emotional learning that lives beneath the action of kindness. And we have to begin holding success both as an academic pursuit as well as a well-being. Are students feeling a sense of belonging, a sense of safety? Do they come out on the far side of school understanding their own well-being and how to maintain mental health in the world?

[22:03]

And have they learned to think beyond themselves? Have they developed a critical consciousness of what it looks like to show up in the world and give to it compassionately and serve students? in some way, or as Robert Greenleaf says, the true test of a leader is did you leave people better than you found them, especially those with the least amount of power? Do they walk into the world with that disposition? Because otherwise, we're saying we're winning, while students are literally, in some cases, dying.

[22:28] SPEAKER_00:

And to me, that's a misconception. So the book is Deep Kindness, a revolutionary guide for the way we think, talk, and act in kindness. And I have to admit, Houston, I've been on your website while we've been talking, and I actually found your scope and sequence for advisory. And it occurred to me that I don't know if I've ever seen something like this, where we actually have, you know, kind of a syllabus for, say, homeroom. or advisory period where we actually talk about things like, you know, why using people's names correctly is important or personal branding. Talk to us just briefly, if you could, about the kind of scope and sequence idea there and some of what's available to schools that are interested in training or curriculum for students.

[23:14] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I mean, that's the primary thrust of our work at Character Strong is figuring out how to effectively teach towards these things that we know are important, but ultimately the research is scarce on. And we've developed scope and sequences that relate to all the best research that we know out there, as well as trying to think about this through the lens of equity, which sort of the social emotional learning category has long failed in. What do we actually want on the far side of an advisory program? Is it simply to teach SEL skills just to check it off for the sake of themselves, or are we aiming towards something? And so our scope and sequence was built through the lens of three outcomes, which is belonging, well-being, and engagement.

[23:56]

What can we do that is non-traditionally curricular? What can we do that is non-traditionally academic to help young people first and foremost feel a sense of belonging and safety in schools? which we know are going to lead to a lot of other academic outcomes. What can we do to teach them a sense of well-being? Because we know that anxiety, the average student today has as much anxiety as the average psychiatric patient from the 1950s. We know that young people, you know, suicide has recently overtaken homicide as a number two killer of teenagers.

[24:22]

So we need to teach some of those stress and coping and resilience skills that they need to not only thrive, but in some situations literally survive. And then what are we doing to teach engagement, right? Not only from an academic sense, which we know is sort of the hallmark of education. We want that academic engagement, but also like, what does it mean to be engaged in the world, in your community, in your school, in creating a better community around you? And so that scope and sequence is reverse engineered from those three outcomes. And we put a lot of things into that stew.

[24:53]

We know that emotional regulation is key to that. We know that teaching effective empathy is key to that. We know that teaching about thoughtful goals and really at the far side of that habits systems in young people's lives to help support the dreams that they have. And we know at the end result of all this, ultimately, we want to teach them to be to work collaboratively towards a better world. You know, that's, I think one of the functions of education. if we're doing it right, is not only smart people, but generous people as well.

[25:24] SPEAKER_00:

So again, the book is Deep Kindness. And where can people go to find out more about the book? And then if you could give the Character Strong website again, that'd be great.

[25:33] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, deepkindness.com has all sorts of resources. And then characterstrong.com, if you want to learn more about the work that we do in schools, support social emotional learning, character development, as well as a ton of work to support educators who we know are in one of the most unique times of our world. And the more tools and hope and strategies we can provide them, that's our work right now as well.

[25:55] SPEAKER_00:

Houston Kraft, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure. Let's do it again sometime, Justin. Thank you.

[26:00] Announcer:

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