107-2008-05-16

Everyday Kindness Fills Any Room
By W. Owen Thornton

Daily we underestimate and take for granted the power of human kindness.  Everything we do in our career, we do for others.  When our reason for doing something becomes about the product or service we provide, we’ve lost our way.  We build things for or provide services to people.

Today, in my gym in the heart of the University of Western Ontario, I realized something vitally important.  I love working out, but it is so much more inviting when the trainer on duty is kind and polite and giving.  In a location where more people ‘should’ be than really are, it makes sense that you would hire people who make the gym an easy place to go to.  Friendly staff willing to answer questions or to spot you for fear you might hurt yourself when lifting heavier weights, make the gym a much more inviting environment to work out than if there was a drill sergeant calling you a maggot for only doing 27, instead of 30 push-ups.

In my gym all these folk sit quietly by, only waiting for someone to ask a question.  If they aren’t answering questions, they are really like an emergency response person should something go wrong.  But about how people lift weights or do exercises, they never judge.  They are not hired to critique anyone, even if they are lifting weights in a way that could hurt them.  I have thought it odd that they don’t offer to help these folk, but now I’m beginning to see why.  A: people in gyms are notorious for ‘knowing’ what they are doing is okay.  Therefore any criticism would only insult the person, and fall on a deaf ear anyway.  There are too many communication filters in the way to allow the corrective message to be heard.  But B: and this is even more important I think, in a place where people volunteer to go, it would be wrong to see the trainer in charge always correcting everyone.  It would feel as though everything you do is wrong … that you are being judged … and in that environment, no one would feel comfortable and suddenly, you wouldn’t have a very vital gym business.

What struck me today is that virtually all of the trainers at my gym are kind, gracious, helpful people.  They are easy to talk to.  They make coming to the gym easier, more delightful.  And because you know that kind person is sitting by the entrance, you feel better about yourself and where you are.  For me, anywhere in the room, and it is a large gymnasium, you feel looked after, cared about.  This positive feeling I’m experiencing is a very subtle thing.  I have been going there for 18 months or so, and I have always known I liked going there not only for the ability to work out but because there are kind helpful people working there.  Until today, I hadn’t put my finger on that last part!

Here’s a weird thing to speculate.  Do you believe that a place can have an aura?  What I mean is that some part of the people who frequent a place make the place friendlier?  I have heard, somewhat vicariously that people are different from one region to another, in part because of some inborn communication the people have with the land that surrounds them.  People in Europe are different from North Americans, in part, simply because there is something about the place where they have grown up.  I don’t mean the social norms and conventions.  I mean take the same person and raise them in a bubble of isolation in Europe and in North America and the difference in the geographic location may somehow impart a unique imprint into that person.  They would not be the same because they grew up in a different geographical locale.

If you can allow that, then can a people who populate a place imbue a geographic place with their goodness and their innate human kindness?  I wonder.  Do we leave some little part of ourselves behind, wherever we go?  In the two school terms that I have attended Western and gone to the gym, the trainers, who are all students, have already changed significantly.  It is not in getting to know the people who work at the gym that has created this overall sense of kindness I feel in this place.  Yet my feelings of comfort and kindness towards the different staff and towards the place are still the same.  Sure the person hiring the staff has something to say about it.  Obviously they are doing a good job at getting the right people there.  But do they, in part, hire the right people because the right people were there before?  Is there an aura about the place that invokes the person hiring staff to hire the next best kind of staff?

Certainly we can see great work cultures where people love to go to work.  I’ve heard good things about Costco and how people there are treated.  Certainly I like to go there because the staff always seems happy and friendly.  That’s at least one indicator that the management treats the staff well!  And we see places like London’s City Hall where the absenteeism has skyrocketed, suggesting there is a culture there that people like to be away from!  But if you pulled all the people out of a place, say, and changed the business and then hired a new crew for a new business … would the culture slide towards the one that had been there previously?  That’s an interesting thing to think about.  (Maybe it’s not the place.  Maybe it is the nature of the work being done and how people react to the staff that creates the environment.  That would be an interesting thing to consider too!) 

All I know, and this sounds a little weird even to me, is that the gym where I work out seems imbued with human kindness from the people who work there.  Those delightful young trainers make the gym a great, fun place to go.  It is a friendly atmosphere that makes it easy to don the workout gear.  In the days and weeks to come, think about the places where you frequent and ask yourself why you go there more than any other place.  I’m betting you’ll find that despite the fact that there are different qualities of fruits and vegetables from one grocery store to another, that you attend a store in part because of the staff.  If the staff is good, then the veggies and fruit will BE fresher because the staff cares enough to make sure the dubious stuff is pulled off the shelves.  At my A&P grocery store, we have a cracker check-out lady.  Every time we check out with crackers and we’re in her line, she asks us about them: she loves crackers and is always on the quest for great varieties.  We recently held a party for friends and we asked the cracker lady for a great cracker for our party.  She recommended a brand we didn’t know and I asked her why she liked them.  “Because they taste great and they don’t break up into dust when you bite into them.”

It might be odd to think of a cracker lady in a grocery store, but she is just one of the ‘people’ reasons why we go there.  People and their attitudes do make a difference.  People fill a room with human kindness.  We go where we like to go and where we feel comfortable.  I’m betting that in the places where we’ve stopped going, we’ll find that we didn’t like the feel of the place for some inexplicable reason.  That just might be another way of saying the staff wasn’t very friendly.  Sure.  There are other reasons to go to a place, quality, price, lay-out, ease of finding things … But I’m betting the people quotient of why we frequent businesses is much higher on the scale than any of us want to admit.  I’m betting that the quality, price, and lay-out have to do with the quality of the people working there.  They buy the best because they want the best.  They price kindly, because they like kind prices.  They lay out a store because that’s the way they’d like a store to be laid out!

In the end, I’m wondering if we go to places at all.  Maybe we just “go to people.”

Take, care.  And be kind to one another out there, eh!

Oh, and don’t forget.  Create some kind places for people to go to, too!

You can print off a copy of this article here.
June 2008 Article 2