Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (34 page)

Stand up for yourself and what you believe in.

As I mentioned in the “Communicating” chapter, I’m often afraid to go talk to people, but that doesn’t seem a good enough reason to avoid doing it. The same goes for standing up for yourself, your beliefs, or others you see getting stomped on, but the reality is, not everyone belongs on or is well-suited for the front lines of activism. If you can’t be out front, maybe you can bring up the rear, supporting the front-liners with an e-mail thanking them or with a donation, by publicizing what they’re doing, or just by bringing them a plate of cookies.

Engage in “kindsourcing.”

“Crowdsourcing” involves reaching out to a large group of people, usually online, to get ideas or help. “Kindsourcing” is my term for a somewhat more indirect way to inspire a bunch of people to take action. It involves reaching out to others, online and off, with stories of impressively kind and generous altruistic acts that many will be inspired to pass on.

Research by social psychologists Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt finds that observing or even just hearing about others’ kind deeds motivates people to want to follow suit. It seems that powerful positive feelings rise up in us upon witnessing moral beauty: feelings of warmth, awe, and “elevation”—a term Thomas Jefferson came up with for what he described as a swelling of the chest and a longing to emulate compassionate acts we’ve observed.

In the words of one of Algoe and Haidt’s research participants:

Watching my grandmother aid this helpless, suffering woman near the days of her death caused me to feel a sense of responsibility to those around me. I began to feel more appreciative for my well-being and the fact that I was healthy. I felt the desire to be like my grandma and have the same goodwill and huge heart. I wanted to help!

Give yourself regular performance reviews.

I don’t have perfect manners. What I do have is a habit of looking at my behavioral failures, assessing how I screwed up, promising myself I’ll do better, and doing my best to follow through.

Express appreciation.

We feel a deep need to matter.

Because our lives have meaning through the positive effect we have on others, it means a lot to us to hear that we’ve made a difference. There also seem to be substantial benefits for the person doing the appreciating and radiating benefits for society. Gratitude researcher Robert Emmons observed in a 2003 paper that getting people to focus on the benefits they’ve gotten from others leads them to feel “loved and cared for” and makes them more likely to help others. Positive psychologist Lyubomirsky notes in
The Myths of Happiness
that numerous studies from her lab and her colleagues’ labs show that “people who regularly practice appreciation or gratitude … become reliably happier and healthier, and remain happier for as long as six months after the experiment is over.”

Getting in the habit of expressing gratitude takes regularly considering what you have to be grateful for—both big and little acts people do for you and the qualities you admire about them. In relationships, for example, we too often only express appreciation for the obvious—the stuff that comes in a little velvet box or has four tires and a big bow on top. You can also tell your partner how much you respect him for the way he handled some tough situation or how sweet and loving you think it was that he took a long detour on his way home to pick up your favorite dessert.

It really doesn’t take much to let somebody know they matter:

• Spread good gossip. Sometimes a person who appreciates another person will tell everyone but them. When someone says something nice about somebody and you know they wouldn’t mind your passing it on, do that.

• Express appreciation for people whose good qualities tend to go unremarked, like the lady who manages the coffeehouse and makes everyone who comes in feel welcomed.

• When you’re dealing with a company, especially if you’re a complainer when things are bad, be a complimenter when they’re good. Obviously, you can send an appreciative letter or e-mail when an employee goes above and beyond for you. But maybe lesser good works are worthy of mention, too, like when the lady in the call center isn’t some checked-out drone reading off a sheet but is friendly, is patient, knows her stuff, and does her best to be helpful. Maybe show her a little love by saying how much you appreciate that at the end of the call.

• Write a letter thanking a person who’s made a difference in your life. It doesn’t have to be a person you know. In 2009, it came out in the press that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who had pancreatic cancer, wasn’t doing too well. I mailed him a letter
⁵⁹
telling him that “there’s nothing in my life that’s changed and improved it as much as Apple computers” and that, in 2003, I’d even gotten my boyfriend at the Apple computer store.
⁶⁰

Make people laugh.

I joked in a column that if laughter were really the best medicine, hospitals would forgo the morphine drip and hang a chimp in overalls from that pole by a patient’s bed. The truth is, research finds that laughter is pretty great medicine, both physically and psychologically, which means you can heal the world a little by going around in a Halloween costume on May 21. (I keep meaning to have little cat ears made, the same color as my hair, and then wear them out and about.)

You can also put out humor in unexpected places. I love Smart cars. “Love” them as in once, while on a walk with my boyfriend, I ran over and hugged one. My 2004 Honda Insight, at 1,900 pounds, is only barely a car and only a little bigger than a Smart Fortwo. One Sunday afternoon, I noticed a white Smart car parked directly across the street from my car. I typed up a note, printed it on hot-pink typing paper in big letters, and stuck it under the Smart’s windshield wiper. I wish I’d saved a copy of it or could remember more than the first line: “My Honda Insight wants to date your Smart car…”

I thought I’d give the car’s owner and a few dog walkers a laugh and that would be that. To my delight, the owner played along. I found this note on my windshield:

I left my response on my car:

Teach your kids empathy and social skills.

Raise a kinder, more generous next generation by modeling kindness and generosity for them, by asking them to imagine how others must feel, and by encouraging them to do kind acts to show them how great it feels to do something nice for somebody in need.

Ask your kids who the underdogs are—the kids other kids are mean to—and to think about how difficult it must be for them. If your kids have enough social capital that it won’t hurt them, suggest that they could help the underdog kids stop feeling so sad and alone if they reached out and included them, and then ask them ways they might do that.

When another kid is disruptive in class or is causing problems for yours, ask your child, “Why do you think they do that?” My neighbors’ daughter Lilly had a problem in first grade with a boy kicking her under the table. Her mother, after making sure she was okay and had told the teacher, explained that the boy might have a hard time controlling his impulses or sitting still. She asked whether that seemed like the case. Lilly told her that he would get up and jump on desks sometimes and that he got in trouble a lot for not sitting down when he was supposed to in class. “Do you think it’s hard to be that way?” her mother asked her, and they discussed how it must feel for him.

We tend to assume that kids will just pick up social skills as they go on in life, but Carlin Flora, my former editor at
Psychology Today
and the author of
Friendfluence
, suggests a more proactive approach: Bring up hypothetical scenarios to them like “What should you do if you want to join a game that kids are already playing at recess?” and play out the outcomes with questions like “What should you say to them, and what should you say if they say no?”

“Don’t judge their answers,” Flora adds. “Just listen and then perhaps share your own ideas and values.”

Treat everyone with dignity but “the little people” with more dignity.

We pretty much automatically treat people on the upper rungs of the socioeconomic ladder with respect, but I think it’s especially important to treat busboys, supermarket bag boys, lawn workers, and the homeless with as much—or
more
—respect than the “important” people. (Everybody sucks up to bigwigs; in fact, many could probably use a vacation from it.)

You respect the dignity of the often-disrespected by taking notice of them (instead of treating them like they’re invisible, as many do) and talking to them like they’re your equal, which they are, as a co-human. Respecting the dignity of homeless co-humans also means being mindful that the big boot of life has come down on them in harsh ways and doing things to ease their struggle. Even small gestures, like putting your recyclables out in a bag next to the trash bin so a person doesn’t have to root through your garbage, make a difference. No, it’s not the same as giving them “three hots and a cot,” but just because you aren’t prepared to save the world in big ways every day doesn’t mean you should give up on trying to relieve people’s suffering in the small, manageable ways you can.

Mentor people—officially or unofficially.

There are formal mentoring situations in workplaces, but you can also spend a few hours mentoring some recent grad you sit next to on a plane or, when you see something in some kid you meet, take them under your wing. Advertising copywriter Len Gelstein, now a photographer, did that for me when I first got to New York, becoming my friend and guide when I was in my early twenties and at my most lost. He was everything I think a mentor should be: the old hand showing the newbie how it’s done, passing along good values and habits, and encouraging embracing failure as an expected and essential part of the process of figuring out the right path. I talked to him recently and joked that I have a mind like a steel sieve but can still quote some of the things he told me, like “Worry that somebody’s going to steal your idea if you only have one idea.”

Most people think of mentoring as an activity limited to the professional sphere, but you can even mentor an eight-year-old. There’s a great little girl who lives behind me. Her mom’s attention has recently been commandeered by her intrepid toddler, a kid who pretty much spends his days looking for an electrical outlet to stick a fork into so he can see what happens. When her weary mom lamented to me that the little girl wasn’t getting as much attention from her, I started going over for a few minutes every day to take a look at her drawings or watch and comment on her progress on her cartwheels. I come up with things to ask, show, and tell her that could be helpful to her. Reflecting on this, I think the findings from research on generosity seem to be right on. As much as I’m intending to help
her,
when I’m going out my back door and she runs up and gives me a hug or when, while washing a mug, I look across at the crayoned “I love love you love” card on my kitchen windowsill, I can’t help but feel I’m getting the better end of the deal.

Ask yourself,
How can I be somebody’s good fairy or secret Santa today?

As my friend observed when her girlfriend brought a Diet Coke to the older lady on the bench in Boulder, small kindnesses that would be no big deal if you did them for someone you know can be earth-shifting when performed for someone you don’t.

To get yourself in the habit of reaching out to others, you might try a Generosity Week: commit to do at least one kind act a day for a different person every day for seven days straight. Don’t just repeat the same act of kindness; do whatever you think would best serve a particular person in a particular moment, like maybe bringing out a bottle of lemonade on a hot day to the guy your landlord hires to take care of the lawn or crossing the warehouse-store parking lot to help a woman with an almost-escaping shopping cart who has her hands full loading stuff into her car. Assuming you aren’t struggling financially, when you see a family at the diner getting out of a car that looks like it’s held together with chewing gum and hope, you could give the cashier money to pay for their lunch. So they don’t think you did it out of pity, tell them—or tell the cashier to tell them if you’re gone when their already-paid check comes—that you just thought they looked like a really nice family and that you wanted to do something nice for them.