The Science of Success Podcast

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Self Doubt & Feeling Like You Don’t Belong with Gabriella van Rij

Lace Gilger
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In this episode we share how to deal with self doubt and what to do if you don’t feel like you belong. We explore the power of kindness and how to build your kindness muscle and much more with our guest Gabriella van Rij. 

Gabriella van Rij is the founder of the #DaretobeKind movement, a kindness expert and a keynote speaker for leaders. Gabriella helps organizations tap into the power of kindness. She is the author of four books With All My Might, I Can Find My Might, Watch Your Delivery, and the soon to be released Kindness is a Choice. Gabriella has been seen by millions on Dr. Phil, ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX.

  • From being dropped off at an orphanage at 8 days old.. adopted twice.. and finally 

  • The importance of belonging

  • We cannot see ourselves.. and we all experience self doubt 

  • Self doubt is a universal human experience

  • Ask anyone: Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong?

  • We’ve all felt like we didn’t belong at some point in our lives. 

  • Self doubt is like a disease, it sets in and eats away at you. 

  • How do we deal with feelings of self doubt, inadequacy, and exclusion?

  • You cannot be kind to anyone if you aren’t in a positive place yourself

  • Muscle of kindness is built when people are mean to you, not when they’re nice to you 

  • Be kind to all the rude people! 

  • We come from a place of defensiveness. 

  • You have to put on your own kindness oxygen mask first.

  • “When you are kind to someone, you grow an inch"

  • How can you pivot from a place of kindness to a place of anger and fear?

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:12] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode, we share how to deal with self-doubt and what to do if you feel like you don't belong. We explore the power of kindness and how to build your kindness muscle, as well as much more with our guest, Gabriella van Rij. 

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to succespodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

What can videogames teach us about real life? In our previous episode, we explored the science behind the concept that we may be living in a simulation, looked at the hard problem of consciousness, explored the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness and much more with our previous guest, Rizwan Virk. Now, for our interview with Gabriella.

[00:01:38] MB: Gabriella Van Rij is the founder of the Dare To Be Kind Movement, a kindness expert, and a keynote speaker for leaders. Gabriella helps organizations tap into the power of kindness. She's the author of four books, With All My Might, I Can Find My Might, Watch Your Delivery, and the soon to be released Kindness Is a Choice. Gabriella has been seen by millions on Dr. Phil, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and much more. 

Gabriella, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[00:02:05] GVR: Thank you, Matt, for having me. 

[00:02:07] MB: We’re so glad to have you on the show, and I'd love to start out the interview today with your story because your back story is so fascinating and in many ways really informs what you write about and speak about and teach today. I’d love to start with your story and your journey. 

[00:02:22] GVR: Okay. Well, my story, even though I don’t think it’s that interesting, to tell you the truth, because I guess I lived it, right? But it is interesting to most people because it's so different. I was born close to the Himalaya Mountains in Pakistan, which was back then probably India. I got born just after the split between India and Pakistan. Basically, my biological mother, that's what they think, she dropped me off at a Catholic orphanage at eight-days-old. I kind of empathize Catholic because that's where I got the name Gabriella, because a lot of people don't know where I got that name from, of course. 

I lived there for three years. I also got adopted there one time as a baby, and I really, really don't remember, by an American couple. I got – It didn't work out apparently, and I was given back. Then at the age of three, I was very lucky that other couple arose from Europe, from the Netherlands, and they adopted me at three years old. We won't go into all of that but what maybe is, for me, the most important part is this is where the story joins a universal emotion which is belonging. 

See, when I moved from the east to the west, I just learned all of a sudden that there was something wrong with me, right? I mean, I'm one of many in an orphanage and nobody told me that I was weird or that I look strange or that my skin color was different. I didn't really know, because nobody said anything. The moment I set foot in the west, I realized that there was something wrong with me. Not only my adopted parents reacted a little bit strange, the school. Everyone did, and I learned the Dutch language under a month, so that's really, really fast. Basically, kids picked on me, so I didn't really understand that belonging obviously as a toddler that that is universal emotion. 

What do you think about that? That belonging is universal when it touches all of us. 

[00:04:34] MB: Yeah. That’s so interesting, and I can see how that experience shaped all the things you you’ve written and taught about. Let’s dig into belonging because I think it’s such an important topic. In your mind, why do most people feel like they don't belong or why do so many people feel like they don’t belong?

[00:04:50] GVR: Well, I think, first of all, there's something really curious about all of us. Men and women, we cannot see ourselves. So when any of us wake up in the morning and we go brush our teeth and unfortunately there are mirrors everywhere in the bathroom, right? You can’t avoid them. So we pick at ourselves. We go, “Ugh, I got a zit here,” or, “I got this,” or, “I suddenly have a gray hair sprouting up,” or whatever it is. Men do this just as much as women. This is not just a woman thing, because people think but it’s not true. If we are not capable in seeing in the beauty of who we are and I mean beauty with everything, the in and the out, then it becomes very difficult to belong. Because the moment I meet someone and that person says to me, “Oh, you look a little bit strange, Gabriella,” or, “I hadn’t expected you to look like that or to sound like that,” that's when we start doubting ourselves. There is that little tiny seed that just was injected into you that says, “Maybe I'm not good enough.” It might not be bullying but it might just be enough to give you that self-doubt. 

I can tell you for one thing, once that self-doubt sets in and that’s at any age, Matt, that – I mean, you can be three. You can be two. Self-doubt is something that is the most horrible emotion I think that we can have, much more horrible than being sad or angry because self-doubt plays a little trick on us. If that self-doubt sets in, then belonging becomes a problem. I think for your viewers out there, anyone that is hearing this right now can honestly – I know if I could see you. You’ll honestly say, “Yeah, met too,” because there is one moment in your life anywhere that if you didn't feel that you belong to the group, whether that's at school, whether that's in a sports setting, whether that is within your work. 

I'm just going to take the example at the coffee machine, right? At work. Everyone stops at the coffee machine. They congregate, you say hi, you say what you did, and you feel that each time you arrived at the coffee machine that every single person stops talking. It’s silent and people always say, “Yeah, but I didn’t say anything.” But silence is complicity. Silence gives us that incredible doubt of, “Did I do something wrong? Is something wrong with my clothes? Oh, my gosh! They hate my hairstyle or there’s something off.” That’s what really, really happens. 

[00:07:46] MB: Yeah. That’s such a great point, this idea that really we think that it's our own unique experience but the self-doubt is really a universal human experience. 

[00:07:55] GVR: Yup. It’s so human, and we all have it. I mean, anyone. If you go out this afternoon and you ask anyone, “Have you ever not felt you belonged?” There’s people with incredibly happy stories, incredibly happy families that will say yes to you, because there is a moment that someone – I know this is not an English word but I’m going to use it anyway. Disincluded you. With other words, they for some reason didn't want to include you into the group and they excluded you. That was the word I was looking, not disinclude. They excluded you from the group. That's what happens when you speak too many languages. 

[00:08:35] MB: I’m jealous. 

[00:08:38] GVR: That is a big one. You know what I want to say to your reader, your listener right now? Think of when you say, “Oh, my people. When they did this, this, and this, it made me feel so awesome.” Think when you say that. If you can, please, please try to eradicate that from your vocabulary, the word my people, because it’s always at the exclusion of someone. The reason I’m going to say this to you is I’m going to make you laugh right now. I’m brown-skinned obviously because I was born in Asia. So if you think of it, I adopted obviously – My adoption country is Holland, so I’ve adopted the Dutch, who you all know are very tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, many of them. If I’m with them and they say my people, and let’s say that a few Americans and a few Germans and a few French are sitting there, they will go, “Yeah, but you’re not Dutch.” Do you see the danger of saying my people?

I always come from this aspect of always saying I have no country, no culture, and no mother tongue, and it gives me that incredible unique perspective to actually like everyone. When I meet you, I really meet you with an open visor, with an open mind that goes, “Hah, who are you?” Then it’s up to you who you want to be at that moment. If you want to be fun and engaging and if you are those things, then usually I like you in 50 seconds. Do you see what I mean? But if you start with my people, then we are at odds already because you're going to disinclude me. You’re going to exclude me from something. 

[00:10:31] MB: Yeah. It’s such an interesting point and it ties back into the whole idea of there are so many different ways, so many different categories, so many things that can cause us to experience self-doubt. We often think that it's something to do with us or it’s unique to our experience, but really it’s every single person at some time or another, regardless of your back story and regardless of your happiness, all of this stuff. You’ve had self-doubt, you felt excluded, and you felt left out at some point. 

[00:10:58] GVR: Yup, absolutely. That’s why it’s universal. Self-doubt is a little bit like a disease. It sets in and it eats away at you. It’s often not – I always say to people, it’s not what happened to me. It's not not knowing your biological parents that – Yes, it gets me sadness from time to time but it's not that in the end that gives you sadness. What gives you the sadness in the end is when you see people that have family treat them so badly. Then you kind of go, “Oh, my gosh! I wish I had one.” You kind of ache for that bond and that belonging and looking like someone saying, “Oh, my god! We have the same nose or the same type of timbre in our voice.” When you see that in the Western world, I'm always a little bit taken back because I go, “Wow! I just wish I had a sliver of what you have.” 

That brings me to why I do what I do, because I said to myself this belonging, this self-doubt that we go through is universal. It surpasses our gender. It surpasses our faith. It surpasses everything. It even surpasses fear if you think of it. It really, really connects us at a primal level. If that connects, how do we get rid of it? I'm one of those people that is passionate and I said, “Okay, if I want to help the world, what am I going to do?” The first thing I kind of went like most people is let’s go after hunger. Let’s help people to be successful. What can we do? Then I said to myself, “No, all of these things are categories. If I change a category, I will have some success but I will at a certain point just coast, right? I won't have any growth anymore, because people will not really change their minds internally.”

So what is it that I can bring to the world and to people everywhere that I meet to say, “How do I teach you something that should be inside of us, inside of all of us?” Then I went, “I’ve got it.” Kindness is innate. We just throw it on the wayside not because we want to. I think we do it by accident. I think that – Or interaction together makes us doubt the other person and the intentions of the other person. So if I'm hurt and, for example, if we’re hurt in a relationship, like in a love relationship or in a business relationship, we take that. I’m going to call it garbage for a second because I like calling it that. We take all those invisible constraints and this enormous garbage bag that nobody can see that's on our backs and we take it to the next relationship and we take it to the next job. So we keep saying, “I can be successful because it's always their fault, right?” Look, look. I’m at this new job or I have this new girlfriend or this new boyfriend, and they’re the problem because it's happening all over again. 

For me, the kind of secret sauce to life is saying, “Hey! Stop it for a second. Take that step back and really look. What did you do?” Because we cannot be kind, and this is biggest thing I can teach any of your listeners right now is the biggest thing I can teach you is that you cannot be kind to anyone if you yourself are not in a positive place. It's just impossible. My quote is nobody strikes another human being coming from a positive place. I’ll explain real quick again. If we have almost 7 billion people on this planet, that means 6.8 people, a billion people are in an unhappy place. They’re not positive. That’s why we keep going in a perpetual cycle because we keep meeting these type of people. It is maybe, just maybe, it's up to us to learn how to treat them and if we know how to treat them. 

I have honestly grown so much that I really rarely get upset anymore when someone shouts at me. I take it with huge doses of humor. I take a step back and I say, “Who beat you today? What happened? Tell me.” Because the moment you do and the moment you give them their name, so I’m going to use your name, Matt, the moment you say, “Hey, Matt. What happened? I know you’re not yourself, buddy. Tell me.” That moment, I defuse everything. I make it a success right there, because instead of striking you back, I open the possibility to a dialogue that might be very vulnerable. 

[00:16:13] MB: Yeah. That’s such a great point and one of my favorite. I don’t if it’s a quote or just an idea but this idea that the muscle of kindness is built not by being kind to people who are nice to you but it's built by being kind to people when they're mean to you. 

[00:16:29] GVR: Absolutely. I always say let's be kind to all the rude people out there. I’m telling you, the moment you learn this, you learn the behavior, see the moment they act to you. What is the problem with our human nature is that we are going to react and we are going to say, “Who the heck does he think he is,” or, “Who the hell does she think she is?” That’s our problem. That’s our problem. We come from that thing of defense. Let's defend ourselves, right? I take my own example. When I was in my 20s and someone said, “No, you’re not Dutch. I'm telling you, Gabbie, you're not Dutch,” what do you think I said back? I had a big chip on my shoulder, so I said, “I am Dutch.” Whereas now I say, “What do you think I am,” because the truth is I really don't care. I just answered to what a person asked me. If they don't believe I’m Dutch, I really don't care about it because it's not a point of contention. I understood that it's not important that I'm right. It's actually much more important that I have relationships. 

[00:17:44] MB: Yeah. That comes back to something you said a minute ago, which is this idea of you can't be kind to anybody unless you're in a positive place first. It’s essentially the same idea of you have to put on your own kindness oxygen mask before anybody else. 

[00:17:58] GVR: Yup. You always need to understand something. If you're going through something, the other person is too. I always say jokingly, come on. When anyone got up this morning out of bed, did you wake up and say, “I am going to pester my colleague. I'm going to be really unkind to X, Y, or Z.” You didn’t. We don’t set out in our daily lives to be mean or upsetting to someone. None of us really have that, because it's not innately in us. We’re actually good folks. The reason I know we’re good folks is we just have to learn to look at the children under five. Look how kind they are to us. Look how inclusive they are or how incredibly in restaurants, when you sit next to a child, before you know it, that child makes eye contact with you. It wants to give you their toy. It wants to share a sticky, ucky bottle with you, which you don't want to have at all but it does that automatically. We are kind when we see that coming from little children or small animals. But when it comes from an adult, we have a suspicion and we go, “What do they want?” It’s so funny. 

I’m just saying, well, if you truly want to be a successful person and – I am going to ask Matt something. What you do then see as success? I’m going to ask Matt because it is your show. Success, what is that to you, Matt?

[00:19:37] MB: Yeah. I mean, that's something we talk about a lot on the show and trying to figure out. 

[00:19:40] GVR: I know. 

[00:19:41] MB: I mean, I think everyone has a different definition of success. To me, success is really – I think gets a bad rep in many ways, because people think, “Oh. It’s money, power, fame,” whatever the kind of trio of things that you think about traditionally. But to me, being successful is really about living life on your own terms and achieving what it ever it is that you want to achieve and being good at whatever it is that you want to excel at. There are so many commonalities and common lessons that you can put together from all kinds of disciplines and all kinds of walks of life that, to me, that’s what really the science of success is about is trying to figure out all those shared lessons and bringing them together in a way that it doesn't matter what you want to do. You can try to apply it to making yourself happier, healthier, etc. 

[00:20:23] GVR: I love what you said because it encompasses everything, right? My definition of success is the intangibles. Think of all the intangibles that you have in your life, that dumb little phone call you made. But if you made it and you made that phone call to your mom or your dad or an uncle or an aunt and they just light up because you didn't forget about the and those intangibles. To me, that’s success. People think, “Yeah, but how do I do that?” Well, you can start every day. Just think of your coffee latte. If you don’t drink that, then your chai latte or your pumpkin latte. I don't know what it is that you drink in the morning. But think of that when you go to work and you pick it up on the corner of whichever coffee shop you’re at. Think of making the invisible people in your two-mile radius visible. 

What I mean by that. The barista in the coffee shop, he or she is 90% of the time invisible. But when he or she disappears and quits their job, then you are the first in the line to go, “Hey! Where was that person? They were about yea high and they had a big smile, and I love the way he made my coffee, right?” Then you miss them, so that’s kind of what I mean with the invisible people. All the people that indirectly that you meet every single day, the person in the parking lot that takes you a little ticket or whatever it is, that person. When you stop and you don't drive off and you actually say, “Hi, can I put you a newspaper tomorrow? Because I always see you sit here. Would you like to read something,” they light up. I mean, they absolutely light up. 

I lend one of the guys in the parking a book and I must say that within three weeks, he said, “Hey, lady with the book! I’ve read it. I loved it.” These are just fun things, because we think we have nothing in common with them but we do and we only know that if we open that door. 

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[00:24:27] MB: That reminds me of something that you’ve described the difference between kindness and civility, and I want to explore that. But actually, even before we do that, let's take one step back and say what in your mind and we’ve danced around this. I don’t know if we’ve directly looked at it but what is kindness? Then maybe after that, how is that different from civility?

[00:24:49] GVR: To me, first of all, kindness is innate. It’s something that is actually truly not learned. We can copy it because we see something that someone else does. Of course, the more kindness we see around us, the more it becomes prevalent for us to repeat it because we do have a little bit that monkey behavior, right? What we see around us we do propagate. That’s one. But civility, what I call nice, right? Nice versus kind. Well, nice is something your parents teach you. They teach you values and standards, right? Standard is your government, your society that says, “Okay, we are not going to drive through a green light,” for example. That's a rule and regulation that your government sets. That’s a standard. Then your parents teach you to hold open the door for an elderly. Your parents teach you to not eat with a mouthful, to not smack your lips when you’re eating or to go, “Yum, that was delicious,” or to do it a little more polite. That’s the civility.

Now, what’s very, very funny, Matt, is I meet people that say, “Hey! I stood up for an elderly in the busy Metro in New York City,” and I go, “Wonderful.” Then they go, “Yeah. But, hey! You were the kindness expert. You’re supposed to tell me that I was awesome.” I said, “Sorry, no. You should do this every day.” “Yes,” the person says, “But I don't understand. This is kind, right?” “No,” I said, “Kind is going the step above civility.” First of all, you have to do one thing. Get your nose out of your device because to be kind, you have to see the need. Our slogan is one moment, one person, one kindness. 

Think of it. You’re sitting in the Metro or you're in a restaurant. You’re anywhere where there are people. You need to see something happening, like someone that is sad, someone that is struggling to pay seven cents more at the cash register because that's what they're exactly missing to be able to pay whatever it is that they're trying to pay. If you see that, it’d be logical that I would say, “Hey! I have those seven cents for you,” to a total stranger, right? Or I could say, “No worries. Let me get you another cup of coffee,” if it fell on the floor. All those little things we can really help people in being kind. By doing that, you actually lift them up. 

In civility, you put a smile on their face by standing up. But in kindness, I think you lift them up. I jokingly say and I need it. I say jokingly that when you were kind to someone, you grow an inch. I mean that because inside of you something shifts for the person that gives the kindness. You’re kind of like that child that goes, “Hmm, I’m proud I did that.” You have that little, “Hmm.” Then when you look back, you turn your head. You see that the person that you gave the kindness to, their step is stronger. They bounce a little bit more. That makes you, in turn, also very happy. It’s a win-win. Both people gain an inch. Because I’m 4’11”, I need an inch. 

[00:28:25] MB: Yeah. That’s such a great point and this idea that really by being kind to people we experience more positive emotions. We put ourselves on an upward spiral. Simultaneously, you can create the same change in someone else, and so it's really a win-win for everybody. 

[00:28:41] GVR: Absolutely. Think of it. This is why kindness is so important. When that person comes home, you saw the coffee fall and you just went out of your way to get another coffee for them, to lift them up, to get them literally off the floor or get the mess squared away. Think of that moment. Think that person goes home and says to their partners, “Oh, my goodness. This is what happened today.” That’s how much you have affected that person. They will not talk about all of the negative things that happened to them that day. They will talk about that one thing that stood out. Do you agree?

[00:29:24] MB: Yeah, absolutely. It can – One kind act can often wash away a lot of negative experiences. 

[00:29:31] GVR: That’s how I believe that we change behavior. If we change behavior – See, for example, in a sports arena, right? Let's take the NBA. Let’s take Federer, fantastic tennis player. Any one of these athletes, I call them pure talent, right? I don't know how they do it. I don't know how many basketballs they get straight into the hoop. It's just amazing to me when I see them on the courts. All of us, there is not one single human being that doesn't agree with me that they show talent, and we seem to have a disregard for everyone that doesn’t have talent, which is commonality, 90% of all of us. We’re just the everyday person that is walking around. But if we could treat that person with that same respect, with that same civility that we would give to the talent person, wow, can you imagine? 

Think of the Olympics. When we are in the Olympics and you look at all the people that visit the Olympics, there are like throngs of people watching ice-skating, for example, the speed skating. This shows that I'm really Dutch because I’ve watched the speed skating and because the Dutch are always in there in the first three, right? They always win the medal. It doesn’t matter who wins. Who see that the person next to you stands there and he might be Russian and you don’t understand a word of what he said. But you see his face light up when one of their athletes do really well. It doesn’t matter that your team just lost. You start cheering for the next one, and that kind of behavior is exactly what I'm talking about, if we could still behavior into us instead of only. 

Every two years, during an Olympic event, whether it's the Summer Olympics or the Winter Olympics or whether it's a big NBA game. If we could instill that on a regular basis to all of us without anything natural bad happening to us, then we have a win-win situation. 

[00:31:56] MB: You've shared a couple examples already, but I'd love to hear some practical tips or strategies for if you’re either in a bad mood or you’re angry, frustrated, fearful. How can you pivot that into a place of kindness? 

[00:32:11] GVR: The first thing – We hate doing this by the way. What I’m going to say now to you and your listeners is totally not something we do. I do it all the time with the people that I work with. If you’re in a bad mood or you didn’t sleep enough or just basically stressed, it can happen to anyone, communicate. We continue action reaction if we don't communicate. So I come to work and I say, “Hey, guys! I’m having a really bad day today. Can someone have my back?” You should see what happens. It’s amazing. All your colleagues just jump, because they get it. They’re really surprised that you say it, and it doesn’t necessitate an explanation. It doesn’t need a defense. It doesn’t need anything. Nobody is going to ask you why. They understand that you need downtime and they got your back. Now, that's one way to avoid it. 

Now, I’m going to just give you an example in the boardroom. This happens a lot, when you throw your colleague under the bus. I’ll give you an example. A project needs to be finished, and you’re working with four or five people on it, and you got the boss and all of you guys as a team are in that boardroom. One of you didn't do it, and that means that whoever the project goes from. The graphic designer to maybe the web designer to someone else, and it just keeps going. You didn't get it on time, so your part of the project is not finished. You turn around really snippy and say, “[inaudible 00:33:47]. Mr. so-and-so didn't do it as always,” and you just threw him under the bus.

But what if you did it differently and what if you could say in the boardroom, “Hey! I didn't finish that on time. May I have it to you by 4:00 today? Promise.” The eyes of that person that knows he or she was at fault, that colleague, you have the best colleague in your entire future now, because he or she knows that you did not throw – I mean, he will high-five you. They are happy. They are amazed. They look at your behavior and go, “Wow, man! Thank you. Thank you because I just couldn’t have afforded another bad point here at work.” Then you might just ask him, “Hey! Why does this happen so often?” Now that he knows that you have his or her back, they will tell you the truth, and that truth is very vulnerable. It might be that his wife is sick or his mom is dying or something going on that you had no idea about. 

Before you know it, there's a real relationship because the truth is we work with people that we have no relationship with. We know nothing about them. We think we do but we don’t. 

[00:35:13] MB: Yeah. That’s such a great example and in many ways comes back to something you said earlier that I thought was really important, which is this idea of taking responsibility instead of blaming other people. Not only in the example of the work example that you just gave but even for your own well-being, for your own emotional state and not pinning it on other people who really are saying, “You know what? I’m going to take responsibility and I’m going to be kind today or I’m going to take my responsibility for making sure that I try to spread kindness and that I try to create positivity,” as opposed to just being, “Oh, something happened. I'm in a bad mood,” and being in a state of reactivity. 

[00:35:47] GVR: Absolutely. Reactivity is exhaustive. I know this as a fact because like I said I was very honest about it. I had a chip on my shoulder during my teenage years and let's say from 20 till just 28, 27 that I really – When I’m 24, 25, I started realizing that if I kept doing this, I was going to have the same results. By just being nice and ignoring this question that I'm not Dutch, it just kind of went away. You know what it [inaudible 00:36:22]? It just – People see your attitude back and kind of go, “Well, does it really matter,” and they go on, right? You open the gates for a real relationship and you defuse by your behavior. You defuse anything, and it’s really that simple. But what you have to do, and maybe this is the most important tip, you have to take that deep breath. It’s up to you what you do. I just take literally a gulp of breath and just hold it and just smile and just say this is not about me. 

My second tip is learn to listen. We don't listen. We listen by in our heads already having the answer and the rebuttal back as if we’re lawyers literally. If someone tells you – My dad recently passed away. So if I told someone, “Oh, the funeral really went very well,” before you know it, five other colleagues interrupt and all tell me about funeral stories. But what they did is they took it away from the person that really needed to tell you something. They needed to share some of their sadness, and this is why I think people get into such foul moods, because they’re holding all these pent up emotions inside of them that they can never get rid of. 

[00:37:54] MB: For listeners who want to take action to concretely implement some of the things we’ve talked about to bring more kindness in their lives, what would be one action step or piece of homework that you would give them to really start to live some of these things?

[00:38:08] GVR: Start by helping someone else. It's always easier helping someone else than helping yourself. By helping someone else, you’re going to start learning how to do that for yourself too, because kindness starts with you. So take that deep breath when someone is rude and think in your head immediately, “This person is struggling with something, and I’m going to make their day because it's that easy.” That's one. The second one is don't throw your colleagues under the bus. Take responsibility. The third one, do not be reactive. Anyone, anyone really is a kindness instigator. We are all instigators. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but most of the time we are kind. I really believe that if you make kindness a choice, together we can change humanity. 

[00:39:01] MB: Gabriella, where can listeners find more about you and your work online?

[00:39:06] GVR: Everywhere. Just do the #DareToBeKind. daretobekindmovement.global is our websites. Nobody can pronounce my last name except Matt, because he did a really good job. Do gabriella.global. Find our more. I mean, my phone is literally available. It's on the Internet everywhere. I will speak to you anywhere in the world if you have a problem or if you feel really that you’re stuck. I feel that if we pull together, we can make things happen. We can be so successful ourselves but as a group, as a community, and that will spill over to the rest of the world. 

[00:39:48] MB: Well, Gabriella, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing your story, and all of the wisdom that’s come out of it. 

[00:39:56] GVR: Thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate it.

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