Cultivating Joy and Kindness: Your 5 Steps to Success

Can a simple smile make your day better, and possibly someone else's too? This intriguing question is what we're addressing in our kick-off episode, where we explore 5 practical steps to live a life of joy and kindness. Let's navigate through the power of gestures, like a smile, that can reduce stress, increase your heart rate, and light up someone's day. We're also sharing insights on the art of truly listening, understanding the essence of patience, and the undeniable power of respect.

As we delve deeper, we aim to create an inclusive environment, fostering open-mindedness and respect for diverse perspectives. On the journey of this podcast, we're not just sharing stories and experiences, but learning and growing together. Whether you're navigating life or wrestling with business challenges, this episode is bound to inspire and remind you of the importance of kindness, for others and yourself.

So Amiga, grab your favorite beverage, and let's embark on this enlightening journey of kindness.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Amiga's let's Talk the show where we discuss life and business and everything in between. I am your host, demaris Ramirez, and every week we will bring you stories and insights, hopefully to inspire you to think differently. My goal is that every woman lives her best life. So, amiga, grab a cup of coffee or tea and let's talk In the Amiga episode one. I know we were supposed to release in July, but life happens and unfortunately we got a little backed up with our schedule. But that's okay. All we can do is do our best and just get right back on track. So I thought we would start out with this journey of the podcast discussing, for our life and business, some ground rules. I wanted to discuss what my hope is and how I hope that we treat each other on this podcast. So this is going to be today all about the five steps to living a life of kindness, and this is because I want this to be a place of culture, a community based on kindness, where we're not here to judge. Instead, we're going to understand and learn from each other. It's important to me because we live a life in a world with stress and fatigue and burnout and the dreaded fear of missing out. Sometimes we have anxiety and life takes over, and I don't want us to forget that we should be kind to others and, most important, to ourselves. So I thought it would be appropriate for us to kind of go over some five steps of living a life of kindness. So here they are. They're the ones that I'm going to be following, so hopefully you can follow along, and so the first step would be to smile. So wake up in the morning and smile. A simple smile is going to brighten up your day. It's going to brighten up somebody else's day. It's really the easiest way to show kindness and warmth towards each other. I read once that researchers at the University of Kansas had found that smiling helps reduce the body response to stress and can lower your heart rate in 10 situations. So I've been using the technique for a while and it works. You have to try it for yourself, but every time you're feeling a little stressed, smile. Doesn't matter what other people think. We spend too much time on our cell phones and sometimes we're too busy and we don't have time to pause or we don't have time to have the human interaction. So today I would say smile anytime Somebody gives you a service. Smile when you go pick up your coffee or tea. Smile when the guy at the gas station asks you for the bank card. Smile when you drop off your kid to your teacher. It's a good start to their day. I will tell you that you're going to start to notice that you feel better, happier, when you start your day this way, and people want to communicate more with you. So the other thing is that when you smile, you're sending a message to the brain that things are good. So that's how I like to start my day, and when the brain gets that message, it releases endorphins that are naturally feeling good, chemicals that will make us happy. So smile today.

Speaker 1: 3:24

The second step is to listen. Listening is a powerful act of kindness, so we can show kindness by attentively listening to others without judgment. So when we do that, let's talk about what that means. If someone's talking, can you truly repeat what they just said, what someone just told you? If you cannot, then you're not truly really listening. Right, we find ourselves sometimes saying are you listening? Because you might be telling a story that's important to you, but the other person is too busy scrolling through their phone. I can tell you, sometimes that happens to me Might be telling my husband about my day and all of a sudden he gets a text or an email notification from his job and the phone is nearby, distracts them. He picks it up. He doesn't really mean to be rude, but when I say, are you listening or did you hear what I just said, he'll just say, oh yeah, sure, but in reality, if I asked him what I just said, he probably can't even remember. So we try to have a rule. Our rule is let's place the phone face down. We do have them on silent when we're home so that we could truly listen to each other. You know, and I do the same with friends and family, because you know, it's important that you give someone your full attention.

Speaker 1: 4:47

So today, when a good exercise that you can do is when someone's talking to you, it's to wait until the person stops talking. Give it a minute, absorb what you just heard so that you can really contribute to the conversation. Don't forget to give them the eye contact, especially when they're trying to tell you something important. It means a lot to the person that's trying to share their feelings with you. Listen to the words you're hearing and the message that they're trying to give you. You know you want to try to understand. You know, are they sad today? Are they happy today? Do they need to hear that they're doing a great job? So you want to listen when people tell you they love you. You want to listen and people tell you they don't. You know, realize that all conversations are not going to be positive, and that's okay, because both in life and in business we're going to have ups and downs, and so, you know, the important thing is that we do hear what we need to hear, right, and then we do pay attention to things that others feel are important for us to hear. So listening is a valuable skill that really, when it's done well, it's going to help you to get to the next level. So let's get at it today. Practice doing attentive listening.

Speaker 1: 6:11

For me, one of the hardest ones of these steps to living a life of kindness is being patient. I think I'm better at it, but I would say in my early 20s or 30s boy, I lack patience. You know, patience is a virtual and we must show kindness by being patient to others and with ourselves. When I was younger, I was aware of it, and so I just started to work really hard to try to adapt to a life of patience. I think maybe teaching really helped me to change. Slowly, because I was forced with working with different kinds of people, different kinds of students with different types of learning abilities. I realized that if I wanted them to be successful, I needed to be patient. I needed to meet them where they were. So I started to practice being more patient with not just my students, with my family at work, with my friends and even with strangers.

Speaker 1: 7:18

I think the reality is that people are doing the best they can at any given time. Right, it doesn't mean that they're a bad person. So, for example, the people at the motor vehicles we all have been there, we all know the long lines. They're doing the best they can Remember. They're working with the systems that they've been given. You know it's not their fault that the computers are slow or staffing maybe is low, maybe they don't have enough staff, so maybe the line is longer. It's going to take you longer to get that renewed license. It's not their fault that they're still providing paper that we need to fill out. So that is confusing to some people, again making maybe the wait longer.

Speaker 1: 8:03

We have to be patient. Sometimes the person that we're losing the patience with. It's not their fault that they're in that situation, and so we have to do our part and try to be understanding and be kind, because there are plenty of things that will lead us to a inpatience in our daily life. You know, like waiting at the Starbucks, right, a slow driver, a business that's not growing fast enough. You know, and many of us are even inpatients with ourselves right, try to be calm. Right, you want to find your zen. If that means you have to breathe deeply and slowly when you're feeling that, you know you're getting anxious, you're being impatient. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it's difficult, I know, but showing patience can make a huge difference in our life and the life of others and, for sure, in our business.

Speaker 1: 9:04

The next step is being respectful, please. On this podcast, we need to be respectful towards each other in this community. Let's create a positive environment that promotes inclusivity. Let's be friends here, right? That's why I called it Amiga. Amiga means friends in Spanish. We wanna share our experiences, we wanna help each other. We want to promote different cultures, ages, beliefs. Let's be open-minded. You know we all don't share the same views. The views on this podcast are mine and you might have different opinions, and I respect that.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Finally, the last step to living a life of kindness is to practice self-kindness. I have to admit, in this category I'm a work in progress. I'm trying to improve every day so we can improve together. Let's give ourselves some grace. Let's practice self-care and self-love.

Speaker 1: 10:05

Really, I say this should be our number one if we were putting them in priority order to take care of our body, our mind and our soul. So we wanna. For example, we need to all get more sleep. We need to get adequate sleep. They say really that should be between seven and nine hours per night.

Speaker 1: 10:24

We need to exercise regularly, even if it means just going for a short walk around the block or the park, or if it, wherever you are, the weather is not good. Then you could always head out to the mall before it opens. Most of them do open the doors and I have done that and I find you know I'm walking with the seniors in the mall, but that's okay. Almost makes me feel guilty that they're probably doing that every day and I just kinda sneak it in whenever I remember or feel like I have the time. So that's a great opportunity. The other one is practice mindfulness, right you, if you can try to engage in meditation and yoga and Pilates. All of those have helped me to reduce stress and promote relaxation. I did, a couple of years ago, have the luxury of going to Bali to do yoga and meditation and I have to say you know they do it a lot in Bali and maybe that's why they're one of the most relaxed people that I have ever met.

Speaker 1: 11:31

So make time to do these things. Make time to connect with your friends and family, especially now that the pandemic is over. You know you could also practice gratitude. Keep a journal. You know you want to ultimately surround yourself with positive people that are gonna encourage and support you when you need them the most. So there you have them, my five tips to living a life with kindness. Let's challenge ourselves to be our best self. Let's start this journey with an open mind and a willingness to help each other. I am really excited that you're here and look forward to our weekly talks. Thank you for making Amiga's let's Talk part of your day. We hope you enjoyed listening to today's episode and be sure to hit the subscribe button to get notified when we release the next one and if you know someone who would enjoy the show, please share it with them. I would really appreciate it. Thanks for listening and remember to smile. Listen and be patient today. Until next time, bye.