Kindness is not weakness
It always warms my heart when I observe a player from one team extend a hand to help a player from the opposite team get back on their feet. Don’t get me wrong. It also makes me happy when that same player aggressively blocks the opposite team’s player. But the simple act of kindness, extending a hand to help someone get up, displays a sometimes rarely existent human trait that we all sorely need.
As a former CEO, it always upset me when my acts of kindness were interpreted as weakness.
OK, I’ll admit it, sometimes my nurturing genes outweigh my homo sapiens attack, lie, cheat, anything-to-win genes. You know, those competitive genes that we developed to preserve human life and take out the poor Neanderthals who were just trying to herd their wild animals and stay alive in their villages.
It’s true. The reason the Homo sapiens defeated the Neanderthals is that they perfected lying, tricking, and eventually either killing or cross breeding with them. The Neanderthals weren’t as bad as they have been made out to be. OK, the guys did have some hair on their backs, and sometimes their foreheads were kinda big. And occasionally their knuckles did drag on the ground a little.
But it was the Homo sapiens who wiped them out. They lied to them, pretended to be friends, and then drove their herds into cul-de-sacs and slaughtered them so the Neanderthals would starve.
Let’s face it, we sapiens were tricksters, and if you watch 10 minutes of any political broadcast, or just listen to some very persuasive commercials promoting things that are not good for your health, you’ll see that we still are. How else could we be in such a ridiculous ongoing mess in this country?
Anyway, back to the topic of kindness. I’ve been often accused of being too kind, and I’ll wear that badge on my lapel with pride. With Quaker ancestors who helped with the Underground Railroad, opposed wars, and were generally pacifists, there had to have been some genetic influence on me. Oh, and when I met my Italian relatives from the little village just south of Rome, I understood even more about kindness vs. weakness. I couldn’t buy or do anything for them the entire visit.
It always fascinated me when people tried to take advantage of my kindness. In fact, occasionally, to prove my commitment to the specific goals and passions that I embraced to grow our organization, I was sometimes forced to do something that could only be interpreted as aggressive to prove I wasn’t weak, but that never came easily to me.
I’m pretty convinced that much of life comes down to the takers and the givers. You can spot them quickly. There are those who care about others and those who simply look for ways to take advantage of them. That’s probably why my phone rings four times a day to sell me warranty insurance for my car or to tell me I’m eligible for Medicare Plus.
The takers are sitting in their multimillion-dollar houses in Florida or are employed by the Iranian or Russian governments and are laughing their backsides off when someone falls for their scams.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been taken, plenty of times, and sadly by people in power that I had trusted. But I’m older and wiser now, and I kind of smell them coming. My advice is to be nice and when you realize you’re in the room with a taker, simply hold onto your wallet or purse, and acknowledge their inability to be kind because it truly is their weakness, their malady, their cross to bear.
I’m not a big hell guy, but they may end up living or already are living their own versions of hell and sometimes kindness helps them see the light. Or not.
Nick Jacobs of Windber is a senior partner with Senior Management Resources and author of the blog healinghospitals.com.