3 Steps to Seeing How Mean You Really Are

STEP TWO: For a few days, commit to saying nothing negative to or about anyone in your life. Nothing. You can’t get exasperated that your son didn’t take out the trash, you can’t suspiciously ask your colleague whether Bob and Nate had that big meeting without you, you can’t post that sarcastic retort on Facebook. You can’t even say to yourself “Why bother even trying this? So-and-so isn’t going to change!” Nothing negative.

If Step One is a good wakeup call, Step Two is more like a head-butt! Once you have to cut out all negativity, you quickly find just how often you do it. Here’s a tip: Do you know what your specific negativity pattern is? There are seven completely different patterns, and we all have at least one that tends to show up in multiple ways in our life. Look at the list in Chapter 6 of The Kindness Challenge to diagnose yours.

Now, as an aside, as Step Two you could go straight to doing the 30-Day Kindness Challenge instead. It is much narrower, but very productive, because it is specifically for one person you want a better relationship with.