Houston Kraft may just be the up-and-coming “king of Kindness,” as he daily prioritizes and spreads this important value in everything he does throughout his life and work! A speaker and kindness advocate for years, Kraft has now added published author to his list of accomplishments with his debut book Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness.
Read on to see what Houston means when he talks about “Deep Kindness,” learn a few tips you can implement to increase kindness in your life today, and much more!
Hi Houston! Thanks for answering a few questions for The Nerd Daily! To start, tell our readers a little bit about yourself and how you got into the work you do.
Happily! I went to a leadership camp the summer before my senior year in high school that changed the way I thought about my role in the world. Did you know that nearly every definition of leadership uses or describes the word “Influence?” The paradigm shift for me: leadership isn’t about a position or a title, but about your ability (and willingness) to build influence with others. How do you do that? Through consistent generosity, empathy, and kindness. So, to give myself accountability to practice these things, I started a club in high school that was focused on practicing compassion. I started a similar organization in college.
Both of these groups had a profound impact on my sense of purpose and community, so I decided coming out of college that I wanted to share what I’d learned as a young person with other young people. I spent 7 years speaking full time in high schools and middle schools to over 600 campuses around the country. In 2016, I co-founded CharacterStrong with my long time educational hero John Norlin. Our goal is to transform education to better teach the skills that research tells us are key ingredients to a fulfilled, successful life — things like emotional regulation and empathy. We currently support 2,500 schools around the world to bring these messages to life.
After thinking and talking and teaching about kindness for over a decade, I figured it was time to write a book on what I’d learned on the subject.
Your new book Deep Kindness: A Revolutionary Guide for the Way We Think, Talk, and Act in Kindness is out now! What made you want to write this book and what can readers expect from it?
I was sitting outside one day feeling deflated about the state of the world. I’m not sure if you’ve ever looked around and felt frustrated with the divisiveness or cruelty of our current culture, but I’m confident I’m not alone in my occasional despondence.
In all my speaking events, I’ve never met anyone who claimed they didn’t believe in kindness. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about that gap — the gap between what we say we care about and what we actually do for each other. How is that we could so collectively believe in compassion and be so collectively ineffective at it?
That’s why I wrote the book. I want to offer a new way of thinking about kindness that explores that gap and challenges how we act with it in our daily lives.
You differentiate between just plain kindness and what you call “Deep Kindness” in the book. What is the difference and why is this distinction important to you?
Distinctions are important to me. I find that understanding what something isn’t is usually my favorite pathway to more deeply understand what something is. In the book, I talk about “plain kindness” as Confetti Kindness in honor of the poster/quote I see often in schools which implores folks to “Throw Kindness Around Like Confetti.” I try to contrast this traditional notion of kindness with the practice of Deep Kindness.
Here’s how I describe the difference in the book:
Confetti Kindness: The mass-marketed, feel-good Kindness that I associate with bright colors, poppy news stories, and warm fuzzies like Pay-It-Forward coffee lines or other random acts.
Deep Kindness: The kind of Kindness that overcomes selfishness and fear. The sort of generosity that expects nothing in return. The unconditional care that is given despite a person’s shortcomings or ugliness. The commitment to consistent, thoughtful action that proves, over time, that your giving is not dependent on circumstance or convenience. Deep Kindness requires something more than politeness or even an honest desire to help—it requires careful self-reflection, profound courage, a willingness to be humbled, and hard-earned social and emotional skills. Deep Kindness is the by-product of a whole lot of emotional intelligences coming together in concert to perform an action that may look externally simple but is quite internally complicated. It’s the kind that overcomes generational hate and champions justice. It’s the type of Kindness we must teach (and explore for ourselves) if we are ever going to live in a world that is less divisive and more compassionate.
In Deep Kindness you talk about how people tend to agree that being kind is an important thing, yet they struggle to actually DO it. This really stood out to me and you go into great detail in the book about why this is and how people can work to change this. Can you share two quick, easy ideas with our readers about what they can do today to put kindness into action?
Yes! There is even a Greek word for it: akrasia. It translates roughly to our “weakness of will.” It alludes to our repetitive failure to take action on things we know are Right with a capital “R.” Akrasia causes us to simultaneously understand what we should do and rather frustratingly choose not to do. We’ve all been in a moment where we could identify a need and decided not to meet it.
Here are my two tips:
Add Kindness to Your Daily To Do List: In fact, I call it a “To Be List” and I visualize prioritizing it over my daily to dos. At CharacterStrong, our team writes out our work goals each day so we have a good pulse on what everyone is working with in this remote world. At the top of the list, everyone writes a 1 item “To Be List” for the day and makes it just as concrete and actionable as everything else on the list. Here are some recent examples:
To Be // Thoughtful:My roommate lost his uncle to COVID yesterday, so want to make him dinner tonight and do the dishes.
To Be // Kind: Acknowledge 3 people today for their work and how it impacts the team in a positive way.
To Be // Generous: Give a 100% tip for my coffee this AM.
2) The Weekly Buildup: Time is, of course, our most precious resource. One of the fun thought experiments I do with myself is thinking about the intersection of Time & Impact. Time & Meaning. Time & Fulfillment. I will spend 2 hours today, for example, catching up on emails. I wonder if I can have a similar impact, sense of meaning, or feeling of fulfillment with 2 minutes of intentional Kindness?
So, here’s the strategy: challenge yourself to see how much impact you can have on Monday with 1 minutes of Kindness. On Tuesday, what’s the greatest encouragement you could give in 2 minutes? The most profound thing you could communicate in 3 minutes on Wednesday? By Sunday, the challenge is to devote 7 minutes to Deep Kindness. I wonder, at the end of the week as you look at the big picture of where you put your time, which minutes felt the most meaningful?
While we are on the topic of taking action, your book also includes many activities readers can use to practice kindness through both self-reflection and interaction with others. Why do you feel it is important to both reflect and take action with others in order to promote growth?
Because Kindness without self-reflection can, at its worst, be self-righteous or self-serving. A story from the book that emphasizes this well talks about the necessary foundation that Empathy provides Kindness:
“The Sandy Hook tragedy provides some great examples…of well-intentioned, but non-empathetic, Kindness. In the aftermath of the shooting, the school was sent tens of thousands of teddy bears. Just weeks after the event, the town had to rent a twenty-thousand- square-foot warehouse to hold them all. At the candlelit vigil, stuffed animals outnumbered attendees.
Matt Cole, one of the vigil organizers, provides a chastening perspective: ‘A teddy bear is wonderful, but a teddy bear can’t pay for counseling. A teddy bear can’t pay for a funeral.’”
If we don’t pause to reflect on our Kindness, we can easily give in a way that serves ourselves more than it does the people we may genuinely want to help.
You work to build a culture of kindness and character in many different ways, not just through your new book. Could you tell our readers a little bit about what CharacterStrong is and why you founded this program?
I fundamentally believe that Education is the best pathway to a better world. External behaviors are the byproduct of internal emotional intelligences and CharacterStrong believes in helping equip schools with the tools and training they need to cultivate the sort of social & emotional skills that can shape a more compassionate world.
We offer curriculum for grades Pre-K to 12th grade and professional development for educators because, well, if the adults don’t change then the students certainly won’t.
Let’s role model & teach our way into a more Kind world.
2020 has been a particularly hard year for so many people. How can what you teach others be adapted for these unique circumstances? What are some strategies you have been using yourself to help make it through this difficult time?
As my friend Dr. Michele Borba says after researching empathy for 30 years: “As anxiety goes up, empathy goes down.” Self-care is a necessary exercise to help us see beyond our stress and actually give to others. You know what else the research says? That when we are able to take care of ourselves well enough to reach out to others, giving support is actually better for your emotional and mental wellbeing than receiving support.
Long story short: protect time to take care of you. I recommend dancing each morning as close to nature as possible, but that’s just my technique.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: The Phantom Tollbooth
- 3 books you would take on a desert island: On Being Nice, The Name of the Wind, Daring Greatly
- Movie that you know by heart: The Princess Bride
- Song that makes you want to get up and dance: “Warriors” by Too Many Zooz
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: The Waitomo Glow worm Caves in New Zealand
- Introvert or extrovert: Ambivert
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Cappuccino
- First job: Doorman for a day in New Mexico. I really wanted the hats they were wearing.
- Person you admire most and why: My mom. She embodies generosity every day.
