Let’s become part of the acts
of kindness ripple effect,
Image Credit:Helen Green
13th
On
November we celebrated
World Kindness Day and while looking for some inspirational materials
for my students, I came across an unusual post by a lovely lady, called
Helen Green. Helen is a former English teacher from England, who suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome.
On her way to recovery, Helen realised that meditations and being mindful were really helpful. Trying to find
her own happiness, she also found
that doing something to cheer someone up was exciting.
That’s how Helen started her own
website
http://maketodayhappy.co.uk/ and set
up a Facebook page Spreading a
Little Kindness. For the last year
she has initiated dozens of random
acts of kindness, such as sending
cards with a nice message or buying
coffee for strangers. Her mission is to
become part of the acts of kindness
ripple effect. You can find out more
about it on her website.
One of her successful projects is a
KINDNESS ADVENT CALENDAR, which has already been downloaded over 40, 000 times. Well
done, Helen! Her Kindness Advent
Calendar works just like a normal
advent calendar but instead of the
usual chocolate treat, we are embracing the true spirit of Christmas by
doing 25 random acts of Christmas
kindness.
Helen was kind enough to
give me an interview for
“Inspirational English”.
Enjoy it.
How did you come up with the
idea of the Kindness Advent
Calendar?
I created my first Kindness Advent
Calendar last year. I’d been blogging about my random acts of
kindness for a few months and
wanted to do something special
for Christmas. I thought a Kindness Advent Calendar was the
perfect way to inspire myself and
hopefully others to spread a little
more festive cheer by doing one
small act of kindness each day. It
works like a normal advent calendar but instead of the usual chocolate countdown, we are
embracing the true spirit of Christmas by doing 25 random acts of
festive kindness.
And the bonus is that it also
boosts our own spirits at the same
time. Last year’s calendar was well
received by friends and family,
having just over 200 downloads. A
few friends recently asked me if I
was doing one for this year, and I
thought why not?
I wanted to make each act of
kindness easy, quick and cheap
(well, mostly free actually), to
show that kindness doesn’t have
to be big fancy gestures and anyone and everyone can take part.
We probably do a lot of these kind
acts without even realising. It's
really wonderful to see how these
small acts of kindness can some-
times have such a big powerful
impact.
What did you do for 13th November, World Kindness Day?
Due to the debilitating nature of
my health condition - I have CFS
which means that I only have a
limited amount of energy - I’d been
preparing my acts of kindness for
World Kindness Day a few weeks
beforehand, and staggered
them over the three days leading
to the 13th.
Starting on the Friday, I made up
a few Kindness Goody Bags, and
put them on windscreens of cars
parked at the local hospital. I
thought the recipients will have
been visiting a friend or loved one,
have had a hospital appointment or
even a hospital stay.
On the Saturday, I launched this
year’s Kindness Advent Calendar. I
wrote a blog about it and posted
on Facebook page and a few other
kindness Facebook pages. I’m astounded that at the time of writing,
it’s been downloaded over 34,000
times.
On World Kindness Day itself, I
bought a big bunch of bright colourful flowers and split them up
into single stems. I attached one of
my Kindness Cards to each flower,
and placed them on the windscreens of cars at the restaurant
where we had a family birthday
lunch.
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