It’s a tough time for libraries, and people in customer service. And while we don’t want to veer into any toxic positivity, it is good to spend a little time focused on building your happiness level. We are not going to solve people’s serious mental issues here. But bringing some happiness skills to your week can be helpful to everyone!
Mondays can be a little hard, even when things are going fine. Use this small injection of a happiness skill to your week. We are here to support you, and to help you to be a little happier in the library.
One of the best ways to build your happiness levels is to spread some kindness around your library. Being kind to others, when you don’t expect anything in return, boosts your own happiness levels Give it a try!
You can read more about it in the article Kindness Can Have Unexpectedly Positive Consequences; we share an excerpt here:
“Across multiple experiments involving approximately 1,000 participants, people performed a random act of kindness—that is, an action done with the primary intention of making someone else (who isn’t expecting the gesture) feel good. Those who perform such actions expect nothing in return.
Across our investigations, several robust patterns emerged. For one, both performers and recipients of the acts of kindness were in more positive moods than normal after these exchanges. For another, it was clear that performers undervalued their impact: recipients felt significantly better than the kind actors expected. The recipients also reliably rated these acts as “bigger” than the people performing them did.
Our work suggests that simply being part of a positive, prosocial interaction is meaningful beyond whatever it is a person receives. People understand that cupcakes can make folks feel good, to be sure, but it turns out that cupcakes given in kindness can make them feel surprisingly good. When someone is thinking primarily about the tasty treat they are giving away, they may not realize that the warmth of that gesture is an extra ingredient that can make the cupcake even sweeter.
Missing the importance of warmth may stand in the way of being kinder in daily life. People generally want to perform kind actions—in fact, many of our participants noted that they’d like to do so more often. But our data suggest that underestimating the impact of one’s actions may reduce the likelihood of kindness. If people undervalue this impact, they might not bother to carry out these warm, prosocial behaviors.
Furthermore, the consequences of these acts may go beyond a single recipient: kindness can be contagious. In another experiment, we had people play an economic game that allowed us to examine what are sometimes called “pay it forward” effects. In this game, participants allocated money between themselves and a person whom they would never meet. People who had just been on the receiving end of a kind act gave substantially more to an anonymous person than those who had not. Meanwhile the person who performed the initial act did not recognize that their generosity would spill over in these downstream interactions.
These findings suggest that what might seem small when we are deciding whether or not to do something nice for someone else could matter a great deal to the person we do it for. Given that these warm gestures can enhance our own mood and brighten the day of another person, why not choose kindness when we can?”
You can read the whole article here.
CMLE can be part of your support network; we are here for you, and support you in your library work. Take a nice deep breath in, and whoosh it out; it’s going to be okay today.