Houston Kraft | Making Kindness a Habit From the Author of Deep Kindness

Written By Kristel Bauer

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Join us as Houston Kraft shares how to cultivate empathy in young children and two ways to overcome the mental health challenges related to social media.

Key Takeaways From This Episode

  • The first step to raising kind and empathetic children

  • One way to help your kids see kindness as an achievement

  • The three biggest barriers to cultivating empathy

  • The key for practicing real kindness

  • A constructive way to respond to differing opinions

Disclaimer: All of the information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and they are not medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

About Houston Kraft

Houston is the co-founder of CharacterStrong - an organization that provides curricula and training to help teach leadership, character, and social-emotional skills in over 5,000 schools globally. In 2019, his face was featured on Lays BBQ chip bags as someone who helps "spread smiles.” In 2020, his first book, Deep Kindness was published by Simon & Schuster.

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Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people awaken to their ultimate potential.  She is a wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, Physician Assistant, & Reiki Master with the goal of empowering others to live their best lives!

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Episode Transcript

Houston Kraft (Teaser)

If we're looking to address the challenge inherent to social media. We have to get better at teaching young people and all of ourselves to be well to regulate and an anxiety filled world. And number two, I think we have to teach and talk about the meaning of happiness. 

Kristel (Guest Intro)

If you are looking to add more kindness in your life, or if you're looking to teach your kids to be kind, this episode is going to bring you a ton of value.

I had a really incredible conversation this week with Houston Kraft. He's the co-founder of character strong and organization providing curriculum and training to help teach leadership character and social, emotional skills and over 5,000 schools globally. He also wrote the book deep kindness. We are going to be talking about how to teach your kids to be kind, how to navigate social media usage, how to be kind to yourself.

And how to add more kindness to your life, which is so incredibly important, especially given the current climate of the world. 

So I'm super pumped about this episode. It's such an incredibly important topic. Let's jump right into it and welcome Houston Kraft to the show.

Hosuton:

Yeah, my Joy. It’s good to see you.

Kristel:

You too, to start, I would love for you just to share a little bit about yourself and what you're currently up to.

Houston:

The who am I question?

I don't know, figuring it out every day. I mean, Houston, I currently help run an organization called Character Strong, which is my life's work. I've been speaking and working in schools for a decade. I spent a lot of my time wandering around doing assemble. If you remember those, I spoke at about 600 high schools and middle schools and realized that the message needed to be scaled beyond myself on a lot of airplanes.

And So I came together with a hero of mine to create Character Strong and we serve schools through curriculum and professional development. So pre-K through 12th grade, we help schools teach the skills and competencies, empathy, emotional regulation. Kindness and all the things that we believe that help increase the likelihood that students feel like they belong, help increase mental health and wellbeing, uh, and young people and in adults and help people feel engaged that they are capable of making an impact in their school and their communities in the world.

Kristel:

This is, yeah, it's amazing. And it's so needed. I mean, kindness in this world is so incredibly important. And I know I have, I have two kids and one of them just started middle school. And so, you hear stories and like, you know, just mean words and kids that aren't thinking before they speak and the words that words can hurt and they can last a lot longer than I think kids realize. So what tips do you have for the parents listening on how they can raise empathetic, kind, loving children who hopefully are supportive and kind to their classmates and peers and friends. 

Houston:

It's a great question. It's unfortunately a complicated one. I wish I had all the easy answers.

I think step one in my brain is acknowledged the gap. And one of the most frustrating pieces of research I know came out of Harvard's graduate school for education, and they asked families to rank in order what they wanted the most for their kids, for them to be high performing. Happy or kind. And the interesting data was that 80 something percent of families said that they would rather their kids be happier, kind over high performing.

And then they asked the kids of those same parents. Hey, what do you think your families want you to be? High-performing, happier or  kind. And the data was the exact opposite. In the study,  they called it the rhetoric reality gap. The gap between what we say is important and what we actually make important.

And I think that's an important gap, an important gap to acknowledge if we're going to help raise empathetic, kind young people is that, uh, we can't just say things are valuable. We have to make them valuable. And the way we make things valuable is what we give our time to. It's what we measure. It's what we teach.

It's what we celebrate. And So, for each of those categories, right? There's a lot of action items, a lot of steps that we would need to take in order to, I believe, begin to close that gap. I think it, it means allocating more meaningful time towards things that we take for granted as obvious, right? Like we all want to be kind, but if we don't make time for the practice of it, then we're going to continue to experience just as a value and not a behavior.

We can say that kindness is important, but the primary thing we measure in schools, it looks a lot different. The things that we celebrate, I'll never forget being at a high school in Texas, who they're like big back to school event, I was doing professional development and they were like celebrating, their one of the top 50 high achieving schools in the country.

People are cheering and all excited. And at the end of the day, I'm walking next to a counselor and she says, you know, there's been a lot of time to celebrating this big win in our school. And we send a kid to the hospital every week for mental health supports. 

Kristel:

Wow. Wow.

Houston:

And I'm like maybe our definition of like top 50 high school.

It needs to change. What does achievement look like if it's at the expense of our collective well-being? 

Kristel:

What you're saying though, about sacrificing wellbeing at the expense, or basically sacrificing wellbeing for achievement is something that I also saw in practice because I was working in integrative psychiatry for quite a while before I started my business.

And that was something that actually got me inspired to start my company to be like, we need to do something here because this does start at the school level. And then it progresses into the workplace. And people think like when I check off this box of achievement, at some point, I'm going to be happy.

I'm going to have that sense of fulfillment, but that only lasts for like a short bit. And then. People are left, feeling a little empty, cause they're not taking care of themselves or they're not spending time on those really meaningful, important things like kindness, connection and deeper meaning in life.

So this definitely resonates with me. 

Houston:

Yeah. But a lot of it starts with the questions we ask each other. And as families, if you're looking for a way to change how we measure achievement, it's not always about like, what grades did you get on the test? What'd you learn today? You can ask questions. Like who did you help today?

What have you done for others today? You know, what was an act of service? What moved you today? What inspired you today? Right? We can escape the, how was your day or the transactional? How the Tesco and orient are even some simple daily measurements that happen in the way we ask. 

Kristel:

Yeah, that's great. I even just something as simple as like around the dinner table, like what you just said, like having that be a really key part about, you know, what did you do that was kind today? 

And that's something that we like to do as a family, is just really try and focus on filling buckets. And there's this bucket book that I loved when my kids were little and it just talked about like trying to fill other people's buckets. So we'll always be like, oh, you know, we hope your buckets filled and we hope you feel everybody else's buckets.

It's like those simple phrases and little things I think can help kids see that as an achievement that they're making their parents proud and they're doing things to make other people feel good and themselves feel good too.

Houston:

Absolutely. It's a language. There's a whole vocabulary to it. That our culture doesn't effectively promote because it orients our culture, orients, everything towards productivity and kindness isn't always productive in the moment.

It's productive in a different sense, but not in the sense that our world typically measures. And so one of the best gifts we can give young people is the vocabulary. The questions that guide a different way of thinking.

Kristel:

And branching off this subject a little bit. I would love to get your thoughts on social media, because that's something new that I didn't have when I was growing up.

It's like a new, I don't know, challenge. I see it as a challenge for kids to navigate and especially with bullying and the feeling of you're not enough or jealousy and comparison and self-doubt and all of that. I think that in certain ways that can be amplified by social media. So what are your thoughts on how to approach social media from a place of kindness to yourself and to others?

And this goes for adults too, because it's not just kids, you know, adults have struggles with social media too. 

Houston:

Yes. For me. Yeah. I'm framing it a few different ways to me. One of the biggest challenges of social media is just over consumption that leads to anxiety. So young people today consume more information than has ever been true in our history.

We are exposed to thousands, thousands, and thousands of words of we're exposed to like gigabytes of data and information and imagery. And we spend a lot of our waking hours consuming things at a rate that is unpresented. Our brains aren't yet caught up to that. And as a result, we get this just like delusion of data at the expense in many ways of our mental health and one of my favorite authors and a friend, her name's Dr. Michelle Borba. 

She wrote a book called Unselfie and she's been researching empathy for 30 years. And I love her approach. It's not just, how do we develop empathy. She asked the question of what gets in the way of empathy. And she says in the research, the three biggest barriers to cultivating connection or empathy is a narcissism, fear and anxiety, all three of which sort of categorically and statistically have increased in the past few decades. 

And for lots of reasons, I would assign social media to one of those things. Social media can increase fear. It can increase narcissism, it can increase anxiety. And when those things go up and empathy goes down, it makes sense. Anxiety is a self consuming emotion. The more worried I am about what's going on in my world, the harder time I have extending myself into yours.

So one of the challenges is increased anxiety is going to make empathy harder. So as a around about attack, I would say that one way that we can address social media is to get better at teaching the skills of reducing anxiety. So if we can't effectively remove social media altogether, which I don't think we're going to be able to do anytime soon.

Can we teach skills that help balance it out. Can we teach emotion regulation? Can we teach deep breathing? Can we teach more deeply about wellbeing and what it means to be well in our world? Which leads me to the second point, which is about the idea of happiness. I think social media is most dangerous because it plays on our human desire to be happy.

And I'm a word person. I love different types of words to describe things that I think sometimes the English language does clumsily. And many years ago, I heard about different levels of happiness. And how in Latin there's different words used to describe different kinds of happy. So the first word is latest.

Latest is the happiness of a thing. I see the pizza, I eat the pizza. I am happy. The problem of course, is that it's transactional. It doesn't take me long until I need another pizza to be happy again. And our world promotes this kind of happiness. Pretty incessantly. It is the gathering of things. It is the gathering of money of consumption.

And I think when you think about it for the lens of social media, it's the gathering of things like likes. And when you draw that comparison, you realize that gathering likes or comments or followers on a thing is the equivalent of making people things that reduces our capacity for empathy. And it makes all of our happiness transactional, and momentary.

It's a temporary thing, and we will always need more likes and more things to be happy. The second level of happiness is feeling. Feeling is the happiness of comparative advantage, meaning of more than you is so unhappy. Social media plays on this, of course, because we're looking at everyone else's highlight reels while we're suffering in our own real, expansive, more complex life.

And so we're constantly playing that comparison game as you scroll. Oh, I wish I was like this person. I wish I had their hair. I wish I had their job. I wish they had their girlfriend. I wish I had their money. I wish I had their life. And we're constantly playing that comparison game in a way that it is devastating to our sense of happiness, because we're never going to win. 

We're never going to win that game as we scroll. We're just going to constantly exhaust ourselves with comparison, which leads me to the big one that I love the word, because the word is  Beattitude. And I always remember like beautiful with an attitude and B attitude to is seeing good and doing good for others.

So it is first in awareness to find good in the world. To seek it out. And then it is the action is action of generosity or kindness or compassion to try to do good for others in the world. And the result of that is a different kind of happiness. It's a humbling that makes me feel more connected to people around me.

It yields gratitude in relationships that are strengthened. It yields joy even in times where like the practice of doing good, as hard as or sacrificial or painful, like the far side of that many of us know is really beautiful. And I say all that to say this, that if we're looking to address the challenges inherent to social media, I think number one, we have to get better at teaching young people and all of ourselves to be well, to regulate in an anxiety filled world.

And number two, I think we have to teach and talk about the meaning of happiness and our world is going to tell us relentlessly that we're supposed to be happy all the time. And I don't think that's actually the truth. I don't think that's actually what we need as people. I think we actually more deeply crave purpose, connection, meaning community, which when we do those things well, there are going to be plenty of chapters where we're not going to be happy or it's going to be really hard or uncomfortable or sacrificial.

But the by-product of that is much deeper joy. And so I don't think we are going to erase social media, but can we leverage it in a way that helps us better understand and lead to like a deeper sense of happiness? Can we teach what happiness looks like and that we're not going to find it in likes or in comparison, but in something much more challenging, but more meaning.

Kristel:

Yeah, that was beautiful. I think that fostering of connection and a deeper meaning is so incredibly important and that connection to like your personal mission. In this life now, which surpasses the likes and the scrolling and all of that. And I think if people take time to really reflect on that and to explore and to figure out what lights them up, what drives them that can help guide them to that greater sense of happiness.

Know, and on that note, I would love to hear some suggestions that you have for people to develop more kindness towards themselves, more self-compassion more self-love. And, and to be able to tap into that, like inner peace and deeper meaning for themselves and for their lives. 

Houston:

Yeah. I think the word practice is a good one for me, so much about kindness can be in our life is a, is a ritual. It's a routine. It's something that we, in order to make it real, it needs to be an active, consistent pursuit. 

My favorite simple example is my mom who kindergarten through 12th grade, wrote me a note in my lunch box every day, my entire school career. And I think back, I have a lot of these notes.

I look at them. They're not long, they're not complicated. Sometimes it was a word of the day that you wrote down and defined. Sometimes it was a quote you found sometimes it was just a note that was affirming or loving. So I'd argue it would, it probably took her two to five minutes every day to write these things.

But when I look back on it in accumulation, I realized that it is collectively probably like the single biggest act of love in my life. Let's just the sheer consistency of it. And I think that's the challenge many of us face with kindness is that we, our practice of it is typically when it's convenient and the argument to make in my book, which is called deep kindness, is that when we aren't practicing kindness consistently.

We're actually just practicing niceness or practicing something that's convenient to us, which, uh, number one and perhaps most importantly, it doesn't actually help us grow. My speaking mentor and a friend of mine. His name is Tyler. Tyler's one of my favorite nuggets of wisdom from him is a commitment to growth is a commitment to pain.

Which means anytime we want to get better at anything, it requires us to do things that are challenging, uncomfortable and sometimes painful. And not that my mom writing every day was painful, but it certainly required the intention and sacrifice of daily time. And I think we get overwhelmed sometimes with abstract values, like kindness or gratitude or presence, whatever the thing is that we want to be.

And I love the premise, my friend, Dexter Davis says we're not human beings. We're human becomings.  Will Duran says we are what we repeatedly do excellence then is not an act, but a habit like scratch out excellence. And I'm like, let's fill that in with whatever we want to be kind. For example, kindness is not an act, it's something we do repeatedly habitually until it starts to become a part of who we are. Not just something we believe in, but it becomes part of who we are because we behave in it consistently enough. So in terms of like a practice in terms of a tip. There's lots of ways to actualize that in your life.

Maybe it's a part of a morning routine for me. I need to put stuff on my calendar and I'm like, I'll block out time on my calendar visually to add that to my practice, organizationally at Character Strong, our team, everyone has an accountability partner each quarter and we set character bulls. So the beginning of a quarter, we'll say, this is what my, I want to be more kind of hsealthy balanced present. And then each week we established what that looks like for the week. 

And then every single day in the organization, we have our, like our work goals where we share what we're going to get done that day. And we balance that. We say, here's what we have to do. And right above it, we say, here's who we want to be.

So the top of our goals each day, we write out a to be list. I want to be kind today. It's going to look like this. And then I have a partner this quarter, her name's Ashley, Ashley, and I get to check in and every week as we're measuring our metrics and the organization of making progress as a business sense every week, we also check in is your character goal on track or off track?

Are you aligning your behaviors to the abstract things that you say you want to be about? So a few different ways that like, we try to mobilize that because at the, ultimately we have to create systems to hold ourselves accountable. Otherwise we're just going to stay busy and overwhelmed with stressed. 

Kristel:

Some great advice there.

And I'm going to put a link to your book, Deep Kindness in episode details. So if you're listening and you really want to learn more, you can click there to, to get it. I want to do one more topic before we go to the last lightning round, because we're getting close to the end here. But the last thing I want to talk about is seeing that there's a lot of division right now in the world, you know, with vaccinations, with alot of other stuff too. 

There's a lot of people on what seem to be opposing sides and there's a lot of anger and resentment. And what insights or advice would you have for people who are potentially struggling with that? Or they have a lot of anger or resentment towards people who don't share their views on some of these really hard topics?

Houston:

Well, the first thing is not to dismiss anger as a bad thing. Anger is a motivating emotion. It's a clarifying emotion, often also a secondary emotion, right? We feel anger as a result of feeling fear or scarcity or sadness or resentment. Those things lead us to feeling anger. So I sometimes feel angry because I feel sad at our inability to listen to each other.

I feel angry because I don't feel heard in my own position sometimes. And as a result, I'll get angry and that anger we need to first learn how to like, channel that. Well, anger can be motivating if we assign it a destination. So for me, it's like, how do we get angry towards listening. How do they get angry towards healing?

How do we get angry towards action or learning? Right. If I get, what if instead of angry making me lash out, what does anger forces me to do more research, to listen to more podcasts, to intentionally seek another perspective. The biggest challenge we face is that we continue to promote the narrative that our politics, our identity, and, and the more that we continue to do that, the more we're going to continue to distance ourselves from each other and reduce our capacity to listen.

Because when we begin to identify with the thing, then anytime someone disagrees with that thing, it's not an assault on our beliefs. It's assault on who we fundamentally are. And when that happens, it's a whole lot harder to listen. So the practice is to continue to dissociate our opinions and beliefs from who we actually fundamentally are, and to do that same thing for the people around us.

I love the premise that forgiveness is separating the person from the behavior. People while are made up of many behaviors. People are not fundamentally their behaviors. And if we can separate who someone is from how they're behaving or what they believe, but we can show up and listen to a person while disagreeing with their beliefs.

Kristel:

I love that. Yeah. That's that's really, really well said. So anything else you would like to share before we go into the last, in the wellness lightening round?

Hosuton:

I think to go back to the premise of, of what sometimes this quote-unquote work can feel overwhelming. And I really believe that one of my, one of the most startling statistics I know is that 45% of our day is habit. It’s a routine.

And we crave routine our brains. It's an energy conservation technique. The more we can reduce the number of decisions we make each day of less exhausted we are sort of brain is looking constantly for habits. I think to myself at 45% of my day is habit. What percentage of that is designed to be kind?do you well, to be whole, to be healthy.

And I give myself permission sometimes to say, what if I just made 1% of my day kind. And I would argue that that 1% shift over time is going to have a much bigger impact than any like huge retreat or big action or like transformative experience. I just think about my mom write notes in my lunchbox. That 1% shift is going to be the thing that shifts us. 

Kristel:

I love that. And it makes it more doable too. If you like, have you say 1%, you know, that small thing it's like, that feels like it's achievable. I really, I love that. Well, this has been awesome. Okay. So are you ready to do a few really quick wellness, lightning round questions? 

Houston:

I think so. 

Kristel:

Okay. Let's do it.

So first question, just tell me, you know, first thing that comes to mind, what is a book you've recently read that you would recommend.

Houston:

Currently reading a book by the School Of Life, which is a sort of consortium of modern day philosophers and brilliant writers. The book is called an emotional education and it's.

Kristel:

Love it. Okay. So if you were on a deserted island and you could only bring three foods with you, what was your three food choices be?

Houston:

Pizza, peanut butter and honey mamas chocoloate.

Kristel:

Love it. Alright. Last question. Knowing what you know today, what advice would you give to yourself from 10 years ago?

Houston:

Loneliness is okay.

Kristel:

Thank you so much.

This has been such a wonderful conversation, and I really, really appreciate you sharing all of your insights with everyone today. 

Houston: 

My joy.

Kristel Bauer
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