A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Jono Fisher from the Wake Up Project. If you’re not familiar with this, the Wake Up Project is a wonderful initiative that celebrates kindness and wisdom. You can listen to my entire interview below, but before you do I thought I’d explain a little bit more about this great project.
The Wake Up Project is an experiment in kindness, where everyday people are encouraged to demonstrate a random act of kindness with either someone they know or even a complete stranger. So how does it work? Here’s the four step process:
1. You start by requesting free kindness cards through the Wake Up Project website.
2. Once your kindness cards arrive, you think of a kind act that you could do with someone you don’t know (for example you could fill up someone’s parking meter, leave a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers on a neighbour’s doorstop)
3. Once you’ve decided on what you’re going to do, you simply go ahead and do it, but you leave an anonymous ‘kindness card’ so that the recipient knows that they have just received a random act of kindness
4. Whoever received your kind act simply shares the love by passing on their own act of kindness
What an amazing idea! I would highly recommend taking part in this, because it’s such a great process. For me, I thought long and hard about what act of kindness I would do. I thought about leaving some chocolates – but then decided that wasn’t a very healthy act of kindness! I though about leaving a $10 note on the window screen of a random car…but I didn’t want it to be about money. So I asked myself this question:
“What’s the one thing that people really need?”
And do you know what came up?
Positivity & hope
It’s true. In my experience, people are so focused on their problems and what’s not working and what they haven’t got and what’s missing that they forget to think about everything they do have. Where’s the positivity? Where’s the appreciation for life?
And so, I decided to try and give people a sprinkle of positivity in the hope that this raindrop of hope might trickle through into the rest of their day or even their week. So, I took a piece of paper and this is what I wrote:
“Dear fellow human being. Today is going to be an Amazing day! With love”
And I pinned a kindness card to my note and left it on the windscreen of my neighbour’s car.
I have to say, as I walked away from the car I felt AMAZING. Just the thought that a complete stranger would find this note and would maybe, just maybe go away and have a good day was really a great feeling.
Plus, research has shown that acts of kindness and compassion physically slow down your heart rate and affect your health positively. So, whether you’re spiritual, religious, atheist, agnostic – it doesn’t matter, kindness is something that we can all aim for. As the Dalai Lama is fond of saying:
“Kindness is my religion”
I hope you enjoy listening to my interview with Jono where you’ll hear all about how the Wake Up Project began, some tips for starting your own passionate project or business, plus some great advice for starting to integrate kindness into your life.
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