If you’d like to listen to today’s heart-centered practice, please click here: BE NICE PRACTICE.
When I was younger, if you had told me that one of the highest compliments I would receive is being called nice, I would have been horrified.
Nice? I thought. Meh! More than meh, actually. Nice was vanilla. More than vanilla, actually. Nice was scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I wanted to be interesting, intelligent, creative, talented. Nice? Nice is what you are, I thought then, if you’re not interesting, intelligent, creative or talented. Nice was almost an insult.
The older I get, however, the more I’ve come to realize just how underrated nice is. . .and just how necessary.
That’s why today’s heart-centered practice is BE: Nice.
What is Nice?
Nice, the dictionary tells us, means pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory.
Those are milquetoast words, I used to think. The world seems to think so too. Can you imagine a commercial on TV trying to sell us something by touting its niceness.
Drive this satisfactory car? You will feel agreeable.
No way! Nice doesn’t sell.
Or does it?
A few weeks ago, my best friend and I decided to co-create an Instagram feed. She’s always messaging me her favorite cute Instagram pictures. We’re always talking about words and ideas. When we’re together we walk and talk for hours every single day. We were missing each other and so we decided to share our connection — and some sweetness — with others.
Almost all of the photos she chooses are like today’s puppy photo. Sweet and cute and nice. Mine are definitely more arty and photograph-y. . .and guess who gets the most likes? Her.
And the photo that has gone “viral” on our new little feed? The cutest one of all. (I’ll post part of our feed below and let you guess. (By the way, I’m the column on the left and she’s the one on the right. . .)
If you want to follow us or see which photo went “viral”, click here: INSTA/DUO.LOG
These days, as we’re all perfectly aware, stress is skyrocketing. But even before this global crisis, stress was ratcheting up at epidemic levels. And not just among adults. More and more little kids are being treated for stress-related disorders.
From the time they can see, children are bombarded with all the amazing, cool, incredible, hot, powerful, fabulous things, people, ideas, places they need to do, be, see, own, become, emulate.
The pressure to be amazing, cool, incredible, hot, powerful, fabulous, successful, wealthy, talented, famous is ridiculously stressful. By the time we get to adulthood, we’re already exhausted by all this pressure to “be” and “do” — when in fact just being as joyful and loving we were as kids would be the best we can be or do!
I’m convinced that’s why we all love the cute Instagram and Facebook posts. Ellen started a feed called Paws Up last month. It’s cute pictures of animals to raise the awareness of rescue animals. She started it before this global crisis and in a month Paws Up has over a million followers.
Why? Because a nice funny thoughtful person is posting pictures of cuteness! And we’re eating that up!
You see, I believe that, in all this trying to be amazing, cool, incredible, hot, powerful, fabulous, successful, wealthy, talented, famous , something fundamental has gotten lost: Basic Human Kindness. AKA being nice.
Being Nice
From time to time on social media I see people’s responses to having met me at some public event. Over the years, I began to notice that there was one word people used over and over to describe me. That word isn’t any of the words I hoped they would use when I was younger. No, the word people usually use to describe me is nice.
How do I feel about that now? Great, actually. More than great, actually. I feel grateful.
When I was younger and trying so hard to be thought smart, fabulous, innovative, successful, gifted — I put so much energy into those outside things that I lost something fundamental inside my own heart. I lost my ability to care about the well being of other people.
By focusing so much on being “the best I could be”, I forgot that the best I can be is nice, kind, caring, and compassionate to everyone I meet — two-legged, four-legged, winged, or finned. Nothing else matters.
So when people say I am nice, what they mean is that this person they didn’t know took time to talk with them, to listen to them, to hear them, to be present, to share a little of herself in honesty.
What more could I ever want to do than to show up to others in basic human kindness?
That’s what being nice means: That we show up to every interaction or conversation we have thinking a little less about ourselves and a little more about other people. It means we care about more about what other people are going through instead of our own little movie in our minds. It means that we move through the world in compassion and kindness for others instead of making ourselves the star of every encounter.
I learned how to be nice from my parents. In very different ways, both my mother and my father were very very nice people. They were also talented, attractive, funny, successful, wealthy, creative, admired, and famous. But at their core, what they really were was nice. Ultimately, they cared deeply about the well being of other people, animals, places, cultures, and organizations. They gave more than they took. They brought me up to do the same.
But I, born into a generation even more obsessed with power, prestige, and personality than their generation, didn’t give much thought to niceness. I figured nice is what you are at your core, so why not focus more on what you want to be. What I didn’t see was that without their niceness, none of my parents’ other amazing qualities would have mattered.
It took me decades of feeling miserable in my own skin to realize that a lifetime of trying to “be” something had hidden away the one thing I already was: Nice.
The Superpower of Nice
Now let’s be real. Nice is never a word that you see in the lists of qualities that create a successful life. Grit. Determination. Talent. Drive. Patience. Perseverance. Integrity. But nice, never?
I spent years cultivating all those success-oriented qualities, but it wasn’t until I began reaching out to my father’s fans in order to preserve his legacy that I actually recalled nice.
Nice came up, tapped my on the shoulder, and took me by surprise.
When I started meeting horror fans, instead of focusing on myself, I was thinking about how to share my dad with the people who love him. To do that, I had to put aside my own agenda and connect with theirs.
Most of them love scary movies. I hate being scared by movies or books. So what we had in common was loving my dad. I had to find a way to listen to why they loved horror with an open heart and an open mind. When I did, what I discovered was what kind and loving people these horror fans were. . .appearances aside!
When I did, I discovered what a kind and loving person I was, too.
I remembered nice, and brought it back into my own life. Soon I realized that the more I showed up in basic human kindness to every endeavor or encounter, not only the happier I was, but the better it all went.
Nice, it has taken me a lifetime to remember, is not just NOT a four-letter word. Nice is a superpower.
There are many words for nice — among them kindness, attentiveness, empathy, connection, compassion. Whatever the word, what it means just showing up to one another with our wholly open hearts. No matter what.
When we do that, the world responds in kind.
After a lifetime of trying to figure out how to be the best person I could be, I remembered how to be the best person I always was. Nice.
Being nice has become one of my easiest heart-centered practices. Because it’s frankly just so much easier to be nice than anything else.
To thank people. To be thoughtful. To listen when they speak. To smile at a stranger. To open the door fro someone. To respond in kindness.
I’ve found: Nice shifts everything.
Nice begets nice.
Nice brings results no amount of result-seeking can bring.
That’s why nice, I am convinced, can help heal our world — because being nice such a simple thing. Yet it’s It a quiet stealthy incredibly effective way to take #LoveViral.
Try it.
Trust me. You’ll love it.
BE: Nice! And then keep being nice. Until nice is the habit and everything else feels wrong.
That’s how Love heals and we help take #LoveViral.