Random Acts of Kindness Day

Posted 5 years ago

To show our support for Random Acts of Kindness Day today, 17th February 2021, we are encouraging staff and customers to get involved.

Showing even one small act of kindness can have a positive impact on someone. It could put a spring in their step or even turn their day round entirely! A random act of kindness can come in many forms; from a simple thank you to offering your time to help someone. Your act of kindness could be extended to a colleague, a friend, or a family member.

The concept comes from The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, who strive to inspire people to practice kindness and pass it on to others. With well over 1 million people following their Facebook page it is clear that people do care about kindness. However, it is easy to get swept away with the everyday stresses and strains of life and not actively practice kindness. This awareness day provides a great opportunity to remind everyone that kindness actually takes little effort but makes a significant impact for the better. Small things can make a big difference.

The following gestures are simple to do but are designed to make the recipient feel good and make their day that little bit better – try these today!

· Give someone a smile
· Thank someone who you appreciate
· Give an honest compliment
· Be a good listener for someone
· Make someone a cup of tea or coffee
· Offer your help to someone
· Pick up some litter
· Call a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while for a chat

The idea of kindness

There have been many positive news stories promoting the concept of kindness. Do something for nothing and pay it forward, are initiatives that were born to encourage small acts of kindness to others. Pay it forward refers to asking the recipient of an act of kindness to repay the kindness they received in some way to someone in their life, in order to keep it going. Do something for nothing was born when a UK hairdresser decided to offer the homeless free haircuts to encourage people to help others, utilising skills and resources they already have. Kindness.org, established in 2016, has a clear mission to educate and inspire people to choose kindness. The idea is that spreading kindness brings a kinder world which in turn makes for a better world. They conduct and fund research in kindness with the aim to discover its impact and design programs to increase the scale of kindness.

Being kind is good for your health

You don’t have to look far to find studies into the benefits of kindness. Evidence suggests that the act of being kind improves your mental health and wellbeing in many ways, for example reducing stress and increasing feel-good chemicals in your body. Equally, witnessing acts of kindness can emit those feel-good chemicals meaning spreading kindness can have positive effects on those that complete the act, the recipient of the act, and those that see it.

When we’re kind we inspire others to be kind and studies show that it actually creates a ripple effect that spreads outwards to our friends’ friends’ friends.

David R. Hamilton PhD

Kindness at iHasco

As an organisation that prides itself on adhering to a set of values and practices to ensure we have happy staff and happy customers, we truly believe we have an established culture of kindness. Colleagues praise each other for good work and we listen to one another and we help each other out every day.

We want to spread kindness to our customers, and our Customer Service Promise illustrates how we value treating our customers right. As online training providers to a variety of industries we see kindness everywhere – employers looking after their workforce, management supporting their teams, and individuals looking after their colleagues, customers and patients.

With that said, we understand that right now there are a lot of people struggling with anxieties, stress, and even depression as a result of the pandemic and national lockdown. So, we are encouraging you to share our free Mental Health & Wellbeing resources with someone you think would find them useful. On this page, you’ll find tips to reduce anxiety, stress-busting tools, and a breathing tool.

We hope that you choose to show some kindness today and we hope we’ve demonstrated how easy it is to fit a kind gesture or two into day-to-day life.

Here at iHasco, we choose kindness.