Kindness Is A Choice

By Gabriella van Rij

The definitive guide from the Kindness Expert that answers questions such as...

What happens in society when Kindness is at a deficit? Can Kindness be taught? Why should we care about developing Kindness when others are rude or mean? Do some have a greater capacity to be Kind than others?

The founder of the #DareToBeKind Movement draws from a tapestry of life experience that includes being an orphan in Pakistan, facing racism in Europe with her adoptive family, and surviving hate after 9/11 due to her ethnicity. This down-to-earth guide shows us why Kindness is underutilized today, how the lack of it affects every sphere of our lives, and what we stand to gain by choosing Kindness at every opportunity.
After reading this book, you’ll know...

•3 devastating effects of a lack of Kindness
•8 excuses you tell yourself to avoid being Kind
•9 pathways to Kindness to overcome your excuses
•5 levels of personal growth and how to develop them
•6 easy-to-start activities that anyone, anywhere, can do

Discover how to refresh your life, your family, your work, those around you, and solve workplace conflicts, relationship friction, and societal issues with one startling conviction: Kindness is a choice!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gabriella van Rij
• Release date: Jan 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734352696

Gabriella van Rij

GABRIELLA VAN RIJ [pronounced "Ray"] is the Kindness Expert, a keynote speaker, and the founder of the #daretobekind Movement. With a brave and compassionate voice, she speaks at businesses, universities, corporate training events, school assemblies, community centers, places of worship, and on network shows, inspiring audiences and organizations to tap into the power of kindness--the most underutilized skill in today's world.In 2010, Gabriella wrote her first book With All My Might, her mesmerizing memoir of one of the first cross-cultural adoptions of the 1960s. In 2014, Gabriella published I Can Find My Might, part self-help and part practical resource for students, parents, and educators. Shortly after her second book was published, she directed and produced a documentary, Our Silence Is Complicity, released in the fall of 2014, to raise awareness on the devastating effects of bullying. Watch Your Delivery, Gabriella's third book, is based on one of her popular presentations of the same name, was published in 2016.Her latest book, Kindness Is A Choice, is a down-to-earth guide on why Kindness is underutilized today, how the lack of it affects every sphere of our lives, and what we stand to gain by choosing Kindness at every opportunity.She has been seen by millions on Dr. Phil, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX. She also writes for the NY Daily News.Visit her at: https://www.gabriella.global/

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KINDNESS IS A CHOICE

Published by Gabriella van Rij at Smashwords

Copyright © 2020 Gabriella van Rij

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-7343526-9-6

Editor:

Tomoko Matsuoka

Cover design and interior illustration:

Yoko Matsuoka

To schedule the author for speaking engagements or to bring her Kindness programs to your corporation, community, school, or university, please contact: 

[e-mail]

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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dedication

I want to simply thank you, Tomoko, by dedicating this book to you. Your acts of Kindness during the last few years have kept me on course, especially this year, as 2019 had some rough spots.

You are that individual I talk about in this book who believes and encourages another person to move forward. Thank you for believing in me and the message of Kindness.

—G.

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

1. What Is Kindness? 

The many faces of Kindness 

What are some positive effects of Kindness? 

2. What Happens When There Is a Lack of Kindness?

Unnoticed, unwanted, unloved…

Strike Syndrome

Longing for belonging 

Thoughts on a lack of...

3. The Different Distinctions We Make

Nice vs. Kind 

Random vs. Purposeful Acts of Kindness 

Kindness vs. Compassion

Tolerance vs. Acceptance 

Compassion vs. Empathy

4. The Most Underutilized Skill 

Hindrances to Kindness

Pathways to Kindness

5. How to Make Kindness a Choice

During holidays 

At work 

At home 

At school

To self

6. Become a Kindness Instigator 

What you can do in your two-mile radius 

7. The Start of a New Lifestyle 

Finding your Might 

Tackling fear

Shifting perceptions

Living with the natural flow 

Wanting the world to care 

Resonating reflections

Footnotes

Essential Quotes To Take With You

Image Contributions

Other Works by Gabriella van Rij

About the Author

Back Cover

Quote mark

Without knowing it, the other person pulled you into life, made you important, gave you significance, and granted you the right to be heard and seen.

Introduction

The annoyance of being Gabriella van Rij is that I’ve always been curious about how people use words. By the time I was four, I had been exposed to Urdu, English, French, and Dutch for reasons I will get into later. So the languages I speak are not my mother tongue, and honestly I speak all of them a bit funny and not necessarily correct…

But when you speak more than one language you are attuned to slight distinctions in not only the words you use, but also in language, behavior, culture, and so on. What does distinction mean? It is a contrast, a slight variation that is important enough to draw attention to.

For example, the distinction between Kindness¹ vs. niceness. Or the distinction between a random act of Kindness vs. a purposeful act of Kindness and a few others.

I feel distinctions are important because they help us look at people, circumstances, and even daily situations with fresh eyes.

In the following chapters, I hope to surprise you and hopefully evoke you to take your own habitual blinders off for the duration of the book to look at what others go through in a new way so you can see from different perspectives and observe the distinctions others make. Finally, I want to show you how Kindness is the most underutilized skill on this planet.

We live on a planet with close to eight billion people who all have different cultures, languages, and habits and somehow we need to try to get along with each other, right? And when we try to do this, what do we notice? That this is truly hard to do!

When you finish reading this book, I hope you shut it with a thump and feel renewed energy, knowing for a fact that you, too, can find your Might and be a Kind individual.

Along the way, I will try to answer some of the most recurring questions I get asked while on the road. Human beings are naturally curious. We want to know how others got to where they are, in the hope we may learn and create some of that magic that they seem to shine.

Let’s start off with two questions that I get all the time: Why do you do what you do? and What pushed and inspired you to become a Kindness Expert and to found the Dare to Be Kind Movement?

Essentially, here’s why Kindness matters so much to me:

Because of my own experiences with being bullied and my long search for belonging, I discovered dehumanization was the common denominator that joined all humans suffering from abuse and trauma.

Dehumanization is the thread that unites... 

the bullying victims who suffer in silence,

the homeless who have no place to go,

the elderly who are vulnerable to abuse, 

the immigrants who we fear, 

those with disabilities, who are boxed in by our labels,

the veterans who often feel discarded,

those on the poverty line we pretend not to know, 

and countless others. 

Feeling less-than-human is at the root of issues regarding suicide, race, mental health and well-being, lack of acceptance, ostracism, and more.

If dehumanization is the problem, what is the solution? One intentional act of Kindness gives humanity and dignity back to those who feel unwanted, unnoticed, and unloved. 

In short, Kindness humanizes. 

I truly cannot believe—even now as an adult…

That everything that hurt me as a child still exists and happens consistently to others.

That we live in a society where we seem to not have grown internally, where we seem to have learned nothing from history.

That we continue to think we are better than the next person, due to our ethnicity, status, money, or anything else (this list is very long).

That we ignore that suicide is an epidemic, where adults and children alike are harassed every day at work or at school, further amplified via the Internet.

That we can buy a gun and shoot another to resolve dissatisfaction and anger issues at work.

That a person can plow a car into a crowd for the sake of a belief.

Need I continue the list? All these social issues continue to plague our society. One day, I’d heard one horrifying story too many, and I said, No more, not on my watch.

I have, thank God, a booming voice that I use not only to give workshops and keynotes, but also for those who cannot speak, for those who feel so paralyzed with fear and who feel so small that they cannot make it in our society. They only have a few ways out, which I discuss in Chapter 2.

As I toured the country after my first book, speaking at school assemblies across the States, talking to students helped me explain values and standards in such a way that I came up with the idea of the ball of Human Kindness. So, Kindness with a capital K was born in the form of a real red, white, and blue basketball, as well as in the hearts of those students who got to meet the ball.

Gabriella van Rij, holding the Ball of Human Kindness

Holding the Ball of Human Kindness at Gower Middle School, Illinois

I do what I do in the hope that one person a day will feel less alone and a bit more human through the power of a simple interaction. And the simplicity and beauty of that connection between two people can make the other person cry or laugh and reconnect to their humanity right there on the spot. You might have no clue that this is happening…

But you know why I know this as a certainty? Because I experience it all the time. Whether you are grieving because you lost someone or you are on the point of committing suicide or any other harmful action, the moment someone looks you straight in the eye and shows you any form of human Kindness, you know it! You feel it instantly! And that is why I say it can make you burst into tears because you so needed that connection at that exact moment. I don’t feel weak admitting that I have been on the receiving end of Kindness and have encountered those moments in my own life. Even while writing this book, this has happened to me.

Without knowing it, the other person pulled you into life and made you important, gave you significance, and gave you the right to be heard and seen. What an incredible emotion!

It is a real strength when you give a single, purposeful moment of your time to another human being.

I always say that both the initiator and the recipient walk away an inch taller, their shoulders are straighter, their step is bouncier, and their energy soars.

I do what I do for the sole reason that I have lived what I teach and that I walk that talk to show each and every individual that I come in contact with that they are worthy no matter what came before… We all have traumas, but they do not need to define us.

Abandoned as an eight-day-old baby, I lived in a Catholic orphanage in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Then I got lucky and was adopted by an American couple living there at the time. I lived with them, I have been told, approximately six months until I was given back when the woman got pregnant. I was returned to the orphanage and lived there until the age of three, when I received a second chance with a Dutch family, becoming one of the first cross-cultural adoptions of the 1960s.Through all of this I learned that I am not my color, I am not the orphan, we are not our parents, and we are not the wars we have been through. We are who we show up as.

I have no country, no culture, no mother tongue, yet these circumstances have helped me to accept others more readily and be more compassionate and accepting of others due to what I went through in my first few years of life. It is only during the past fifteen years that I have been able to turn my pain into my greatest strength, which in turn makes me the cause’s best ally. And you can, too!

We all hide adversity. Every day we are taught to wear a mask from the moment we set foot in the institution called school. We become not good enough. We are taught to compete with each other and told to be better and faster than the child next to you. Speak more languages, have bigger and better material things to show our superiority from a very young age. Where you live, what you wear, and which gadgets are in your hand are what seem to count. Not your personality, not the innate Kindness you were born with. None of that seems to matter the moment you enter school.

Additionally, from the moment you are born, your parents fret whether they can get you on a good daycare list and then elementary school, middle school, and high school, and, at last, the most prestigious university. Poor parents. What a battle…

There is light at the end of the tunnel if we look at other cultures that live simply, that do not have such pressure put