Commitment 1: Kindness and Caring

By now we’ve talked about Everyday Leadership. That definition of leadership that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with hierarchy or power or authority, but is the kind of leadership that we all have the ability to, and quite honestly the obligation to be, every single day. An Everyday Leader is a person that thinks more about the needs of others and themselves, speaks with integrity, acts with purpose, consistently, positively impacting the lives of others every single day. That’s easy to say, but more difficult to put into action. Everyday Leaders make eight commitments to themselves, eight commitments strive to demonstrate every single day. Of these commitments, today we’re going to focus on commitment number one: Everyday I will demonstrate kindness and caring for all that I interact with. Kindness and caring are a couple of words that get lumped together, sometimes with other terms that we use that describe in our minds the same type of things: kindness and caring and empathy and sympathy and compassion.  As we think about putting these feelings into action I want to separate some of these words a bit. Empathy is a way that many of us feel when we see someone in need. When we see someone that is hurting in some way, and we understand how they feel. And we have a feeling of wanting to try to help them. We’ve all  been in that position, of those intentions to be able to make their lives a little bit better. But the most interesting thing, and the most important thing, is what happens next after we have that feeling. Because it’s one of two directions in which we go. We either have the feeling and take no action, which is just complacency. Or we do something to demonstrate that feeling of empathy, that understanding of hurting toward the other person in order to make them feel little bit better. When we take action on our empathy we demonstrate compassion. Empathy without action is just wasted compassion. 

When I think about true compassion, the empathetic feeling of need for others and taking action on it, I think about a neighbor that I had when I was a young boy growing up. Her name was Mrs. Mayo and she lived across the road from me. I got to know her because I mowed her yard, but I also got to know her because for 39 years Mrs. Mayo was a cafeteria lunch lady. She served food in an elementary school little town in Boonville, Missouri in grades kindergarten through second, for 39 years. Many, many years ago Mrs. Mayo retired from that 39-year job. I was speaking with my mom as I called home one week to find out all the happenings in Boonville, Missouri and she had mentioned that they had the opportunity to go to Mrs. Mayo’s retirement party. A retirement party for the cafeteria lunch lady. I thought that was interesting and one of the things that my mom told me was that they told a lot of stories about Mrs. Mayo, some, that she didn’t know even after living decades across the street from her. And one of the stories was that Mrs. Mayo for those 39 years that she was a lunch lady, knew every name of every child that went through those lines, and strived to call them by name every single day. I thought that was amazing, but  I didn’t know why. I have to tell you that there’s another reason that Mrs. Mayo is so near and dear in my memories is that every Christmas Eve, Mrs. Mayo would bake our family a large tray full of cinnamon rolls. And as long as I can remember, every Christmas morning, we had Mrs. Mayo’s cinnamon rolls. As a kid it was a tough decision when you wake up Christmas morning to know whether to run to the Christmas tree and all those presents, or the smells wonderful cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven. Well I remember after college being home for Christmas, actually it was the year that she retired in May, and Mrs. Mayo called. And she said I have your cinnamon rolls ready but I’m just not feeling very well, can somebody come over and pick them up. So I went across the street, the place that I’ve been many times knocked on the door and Mrs. Mayo came to the door. And I have just enough manners to know that I can’t grab the cinnamon rolls and run, that I wanted to go in and talk for a while. We went in and sat around the table and we chatted. And I asked her, I said, I heard a story about you. I heard that all of those years that you served food to kids that you called them by name every one of them every day and then she kind of paused and looked at me and she said yes I did understand that not every kid that came through the lunch and had a loving mother and a father that they were raised with like you were across the road that some of these kids raised by aunts or uncles or their grandparents not all of them had a mother and a father some of them were raised by single parents some of them didn’t have all of the things that you were given in life she said so I thought there’s not much I can do about that but if I could learn their names and I could call them by name when they came through the breakfast line in the morning maybe I’ll start the day right and maybe if I continue to do that I said hi to them and ask them how their day was going called him by name at lunch maybe i can keep the day going and then she said something to me that I will never forget she said I never saw my job as serving food I saw my job as serving kids what a blessing a woman like Mrs. Mayo is to every one of these lives that she touched she was empathetic that she understood that not all of these kids came from a solid family background we’re probably struggling with things that she couldn’t comprehend but she didn’t stop with just empathy she did something about it intentionally for 39 years of her life she demonstrated compassion every day by caring about those kids calling them by name and trying to better every dang it she said very interesting we think about the jobs that we do we can think about them from a couple perspectives we can think jobs means to paycheck and occupation or we can think about them in the way to Golden male thought about them calling purpose of all cash my challenge to is to be an everyday leader strive every single day to demonstrate commitment number one show kindness and care action moving towards the cash every single person we have no idea what’s going on in people’s lives and you can be there in that moment to be able to make a great positive impact in someone else’s life be an everyday leader.