On What side of the balance are you?

Surely you have heard that old saying that goes: “Everyone who passes through here brings happiness with them, some when they arrive and others when they leave”.

Funny? Maybe. Although not so much if we ask ourselves: “and me? On what side am I? with those who arrive or those who leave?”

I’m pretty sure that in many cases the balance inclines more than we’d like to think so towards the “those who leave” group. So here’s the question we need to ask now: What do we plan to do about it?

The sad reality is that, in part because we are used to and in part because we are selfish, typically our attention is focused on how other makes us feel (comfortable, angry, happy, frustrated, etc.) And on very few occasions do we think about how we make others feel, thus coming up with ways to make them feel good is practically a non-existent thought in our minds.

And in reality leaving others feeling better than you found them, should not be that hard. In fact, we don’t need to do great feats every single day to do so, it’s actually the simpler things that can help us add value to other people’s days:

-          How about being the first to smile? Very few things are as contagious as sharing a smile.

-          Or how about calling people by their name and showing them that you care and respect them enough to know who they are?

-          Simply being nice to others? Taking a couple of minutes to say hi to someone and listening to how they are doing will not rob you of your time.

-          Celebrating people? Definitely! We should never miss the chance to tell someone close to us how we cherish them.

And the list could go on and on, but since we have to start somewhere, here is my suggestions for next week (and all the weeks that follows): How about paying close attention to adding value to the days of every person we interact with during the week and have a simple gesture that will leave them feeling better than when we found them?

We could even recur to the classic, somewhat used, but always useful practice of putting a marble in a jar for every person we help feel better so that at the end of the day, the week, the month, the year or even at the end of our life we can remember that we did do something good for someone else after all.