The Power of Kindness

Miswanting

With the days getting shorter and colder in the Waterloo Region, it can be hard to do things that make us happy. That is why I chose our team activity to be about gratitude for our last staff meeting. Details about the gratitute activity can be found below. 

A lot of what I know about gratitude comes from a course I took online called “The Science of Wellbeing”. It talks about how the things we think make us happy, like the job, the paycheque, the car, or the house that we want don’t actually make us as happy as we think. This is because of a theory called hedonic adaptation. It means that while yes, a new car can make us happy in the moment, but overtime this happiness wanes. We get used to that new car and overtime it stops feeling new. We stop getting pleasure out of it and then we end up waiting for the next thing or “good stuff” that we think is going to make us happy. 

It becomes a bit of a cycle - this miswanting can leave us constantly seeking out the “good stuff" and we don’t even realize that this stuff is not going to make us as happy as we think. So this begs the question, what makes you happy? Well, it's a simple answer. Kindness. 

Consistently, happier people are coming up with ways to do kind things and are motivated to do them. We should be looking for opportunities to do acts of kindness and to remember the acts of kindness that others have done to us. After all, just like the character Klaus says in the film “Klaus” (2019), “a true selfless act always sparks another.”

Gratitude Group Activity 

For those interested in the gratitude activity, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen for each person involved in the activity. Everyone starts by writing their name on the piece of paper and then passes it to another person. Once each person has a piece of paper with a name that is not their own, start by writing something you appreciate about that person. It can be a quality you admire about them or a short story about something kind they did for you. It can be as short or as long as you’d like. Keep passing the papers around until you have filled everyone’s sheet, except for your own. You’ll end up with a sheet of kind words just about you to enjoy and look at later if you ever need a reminder of how awesome you are!

Alternate Gratitude Activity 

Try doing this activity on your own! We can be our worst critic sometimes and it’s important to practice self-love.