How To Be Kind

thirteenth Nov 2010 | Comments Off on How to be Kind How to be Kind I’ve written earlier than about kindness, but today the wonderful Psychologies magaine is tweeting about World Kindness Day and also have a take a look at about kindness which you'll take here. This obtained me pondering, most people need to be kinder but many people really feel we fail. So what does the psychology literature say about being kind? I thought I’d begin by trying on the reverse of kindness â€" for example prejudice and discrimination. How can we be much less prejudicial in direction of others? Interestingly, Dan Wegner’s research reveals that trying to eliminate prejudicial thoughts and exchange them with kind ones is likely to improve the frequency, power and length of such thoughts. The alternative method is something which I write about frequently on this weblog: psychological flexibility. That is, as an alternative of attempting to change, get rid of or avoid prejudicial ideas, we should always accept them and defuse from them as literal reality. Instead of ma king an attempt to change our thoughts, we should change our relationship to them. A study by Lillis and Hayes (2007) showed that serving to individuals to simply accept and defuse from their prejudicial thoughts was more useful than attempting to discourage individuals from having such ideas in the first place. In this examine, the group which realized the way to accept their thoughts but not fuse with them have been far more likely to interact in behaviour which was kinder, more culturally various and fewer prejudicial than the group which obtained normal multicultural training. This has profound implications because a lot of our previous efforts to confront and problem prejudicial pondering instantly may very well have been counterproductive (Dixon, Dymond, Rehfeldt, Roche, & Zlomke, 2003; Mattaini, 1999). Of course, all of us need to be kinder. The reminder about World Kindness Day is necessary. But what's new is the analysis on psychological flexibility which shows us the psych ological processes that lead folks to be kind. Not for the first time, they aren't what we may have expected. / Career Change « From Career Change To Career T... What is Psychological Flexibil... »