Speaker 2 (00:00.46)
Hello everyone and welcome to the My Local Marketer podcast. I'm Maria and today I'm speaking with Sarah Browning, who is a kindness cheerleader and communication consultant. Sarah, hello, how are you been? It's in the last, what, three hours since I last saw you at the Ethical Reading event.

Well, I'm well, thank you. Yeah, it's great to be here. And yes, it's certainly a warm afternoon, but any afternoon suits me for a conversation about kindness.

Yes, it's rather warm today. I've actually changed into something smarter than sitting here in my t-shirt as I was earlier.

you

professional front on. for our audience who don't know you, could you please introduce yourself and obviously what you do.

Speaker 1 (00:43.606)
Yeah, so yes, I'm Sarah and I am a Kindness Cheerleader and Communications Consultant. And what that means is that I am a, people often say to me, Kindness Cheerleader, that's brilliant. I think, well, you know, if you can't give yourself a brilliant job title when you work for yourself, when can you? So I like the job title, but also in all seriousness, for me, it perfectly encapsulates what I do.

So I am a communication professional by training. So I work with different organizations to help them communicate effectively with their audiences. And that's about making sure they get the right messages to the right audiences in order to achieve their desired outcomes and very much going back to a strategic approach to that.

And then the kindness side of it, founded about four years ago now, I founded the Time for Kindness Wellbeing Programme. And that is all about inspiring and teaching people to notice kindness in the world around them, because there is a lot of kindness around us. We just don't talk about it enough yet. But when we do talk about it, when we do notice it, when we see kindness, we feel better. And of course, when we feel better, then we perform better. So actually, that is better for...

us as individuals and collectively as groups, communities, businesses and so on. that's the work I'm doing there.

If people know there's kindness there, they are more productive. think going back to the meeting we were having earlier on, people are more productive, they're happier and that's good for businesses, isn't it? So could you go into a little bit of detail as to why kindness is important for businesses and can you get an ROI on kindness?

Speaker 1 (02:24.696)
Sure, absolutely. Like I said, I came into it originally at an individual level. So I have worked a lot in the past with not-for-profit organizations of various different types and also perhaps led businesses and so on. And I'd always described my clients as having a vision of a better world. And then I got to thinking one day, kind of what does that mean, Sarah? What would you mean by that? And that's the point when I thought kindness is what's important to me. And I think there's a lot of it.

I was having that thought process, I think it was kind of late 2020, early 21. I think we were all going, what on just happened there? So, you I was kind of assessing what do I believe in? And so that was really important. And then went to accept that it is better for individuals, because what I noticed in myself was that I was feeling upbeat, I guess, you when I saw examples of kindness, and it just gave me that little boost.

And then I found that other people were saying the same things to me as well. They were saying, I've seen what you're doing and I really like it. And you'll appreciate this as a marketer because I started off saying, thank you very much, thank you very much. And then I started saying, why, what is it that you really like about it? And the words that kept coming up were hope and positivity. And people would say it makes people hopeful, it makes people feel positive.

So, you from that personal wellbeing point of view, that's kind of where it came from. But as you said, in terms of then why does that matter for businesses? So as I've developed, I now run workshops and I give talks to teach people the habits to notice kindness. I'm one of the parts of those talks and workshops, you know, we talk about what is kindness, but we also talk about why does it matter? And what I like is that there is an increasing body of academic research around kindness. Why does it matter?

different as it may. For example, there was a study by the Harvard Business Review, which showed that leaders who express kindness in their interactions with their teams, kind of on a regular ongoing basis, they found difficult conversations and providing uncomfortable feedback much easier. And that was due to the kind of relationships that they had built up over time.

Speaker 1 (04:37.556)
So as a leader, you you are going to have to have difficult conversations. You're going to have to give people feedback. And if you have that relationship, that trust in place that's been built up over time, it makes those conversations much, much easier. So I think that's one aspect. Another one I like is that there was a study at the University of Warwick that found that kindness in general, but in businesses, increased happiness. And then they kind of went on.

To demonstrate that happier people ended up 12 % more productive than less happy people. I just said one more as well, because I've done another little one on my own sheet. So there was another hub business review. They did a study, the Price of Incivility Study, and they looked at unkind behaviour in businesses. So kind of verbal abuse, bullying, people not feeling safe, that kind of thing. And they found that in those workplaces, 48 % of people intentionally decreased their work effort.

because of the culture they were surrounded by and 78 % said that their commitment to the organization declined. know, that unkindness has a massive impact in a negative way on your business too.

Those research studies are really fascinating and I will put links to them on the landing page for anyone who's interested in checking them out. What challenges have you faced in your mission to get businesses to focus on kindness?

think there's a couple of things. So think one of the things is the confusion of kind and nice. And I think kindness has particularly in business circles, but probably more widely as well, been viewed as weak, maybe a bit fluffy. I think it has a bit of a reputation problem because it is kind of seen that way. But to me, kindness, it shows up in so many different ways. And like I said, in a business you will often have to have

Speaker 1 (06:31.842)
those difficult conversations. But kindness is about having those conversations, but doing it in a kind way. Whereas often if you're trying to be nice, you avoid having that conversation. As an example, I say, you know, if you've got somebody in your team who is not performing, if you don't address that performance, then actually you're not being very kind to them because you are kind of setting them up to fail essentially and they don't know what the issue is.

you're also not being very kind to the people around them because what often happens in those circumstances, if you have someone not performing, their colleagues end up picking up the slack. So actually there's a kindness in addressing and holding people accountable. Another challenge is to make the time to be kind or to show kindness. But again, I think that's just an excuse really. It doesn't have to be time consuming.

In the workshops that I run, one of the things we do is we talk about what is kindness, what counts as kindness. And people sometimes think it has to be big, grand gestures, but it also shows up in the really tiny things. You know, if you are in a shared office space, make a colleague a cup of tea. So let's start doing that. Let's start changing the story and rebalancing.

It's not about toxic positivity. I'm not saying that we say, you know, that bad stuff's not happening. We're just going to focus on the good. Clearly, there are challenging things as well. But we do, you know, that's not the only story. And we do need to rebalance that and get used to talking about these things that we perhaps traditionally haven't talked about, particularly in a business setting where there's this kind of perception sometimes that it's the, you know, the nasty tough.

horrible people who shout and thump the desks, because that's what Alan Sugar does. So that must be successful business. No, actually. And the research shows, yes, there are some people that succeed in that way, but there aren't very many of them. And in fact, there's more research that shows that actually that isn't successful ultimately, apart from in those very few cases.

Speaker 2 (08:47.34)
I think you mentioned two very good points there. So the difference between nice and kind, I totally agree. think people think it's fluffy, but it's not. It's just, you're nicer so what it's like with collaborating. If you're nice to people, you probably find more clients and get collaboration, which will lead to more work. It's just that simple for me. So that's a nice one. But also the other point you mentioned about how people are busy and then your manners go out the window too. Obviously we're all going to have bad days, but you're absolutely right. think it's just.

practice and if you're the sort of person who is nice, people will forget those slights. If you've had a bad day or you say something in anger, you're probably doing an office at some point. yeah, really good points. Do you have an example of how a business has used kindness to have a positive impact?

So some examples, one story that I really like, somebody who got in touch with this, she was involved in a team's meeting. And for some reason, her young son was off school that day and she was feeling a bit awkward about having him around whilst trying to do the meeting. But her colleagues were really welcoming to her son and they had a little chat with him at the start of the meeting. And then they said to him, would you like to draw a picture while mummy's doing her meeting?

drawing a picture. And he did. And so then, you know, he sat quietly and drew his picture and she was able to do her meeting and it was great. And then at the end of the meeting, you know, they all were suitably kind of cooing over the drawing of the dinosaur that he'd done and so on. I really like that example for a couple of reasons. Obviously, it was kindness to the mum that she was then able to do what she needed to do and to take part because, you know, life happens, doesn't it? So it was kindness to her. But also,

It was a kindness to that little boy because he's an employee of the future. And so it showed him that work does not have to be a negative place where people are unkind, that it can be a positive thing. So I like the kind of the dual aspects of that. Something else which comes up quite often when I'm talking to teams about how they're going to ensure that they kind of...

Speaker 1 (10:52.206)
keep this positive feeling around kindness in their day-to-day interactions. I've had quite a few who have said, you know what, we're going to start our team meetings by sharing a story of kindness. And because that we know that talking about kindness gives us all that boost, makes us all feel more energetic, more positive. They still have to talk about the operational difficulties. They still have to talk about the budget challenges, all of that stuff. It doesn't make any of it go away.

But what it does do is it starts you off in a more positive frame of mind to have those conversations. So again, that's a really quick, simple way just to introduce a little bit more of this positivity into that, those kind of interactions.

Oh, I think there are a lovely couple of examples. Now, as well as the kindness, as we said at the start, you are a communications consultant and you're a writer as well. So when you've been working with businesses, what challenges of communication have they faced, either internally or externally?

So yeah, it's the tricky one, communication, in the sense that actually we're all communicators. Even if you're just talking to the cat when you get up in the morning, make up a tea, we do all communicate in some way. But somehow, we go into, particularly into workplaces and businesses, it becomes more of a thing and it becomes a bit more of a challenge. But the biggest problem I see, I work with,

organizations to be really effective about their communication. And what that involves is going right back to kind of the basics of what are you trying to achieve here? You know, I can, I can quite often I get clients who'll come to me and say, Oh, we, you know, we need to be on TikTok or whatever the latest new flashy shiny thing is. Why? What's the, what's the purpose for communication here? What would you want to see happen as an outcome? You know, it's not just, you could spend a lot of time.

Speaker 1 (12:49.646)
And this applies internally as well with internal communications as well. know, they can be like, right, well, we've got a newsletter or we've got a team's channels or whatever. But if you don't know what they're for and your audiences don't know what they're for, it just becomes noise and it just becomes extra work. And, know, you can have a beautifully, I worked, I mean, some years ago now, but I worked with a big organization who had a staff, I mean, this shows you how long ago it was, staff newspaper.

So it wasn't actually a printed paper. And it was beautiful. mean, the journalistic values in it and everything were amazing. But when I did an audit for them, was internal comms thing, people were saying to me, yes, it's beautiful. I don't have the time to read it. So it wasn't achieved. There was a lot of time and effort going into it and money, but it wasn't achieving anything because people didn't have the time and there wasn't content within it that they...

that made a difference to them. I think that's the other thing. If you're clear on what you're trying to achieve and who your audience is, who you're trying to connect with, then it makes it easier to work out, so what's the content that they really need? So if it's internal, what do they need to do their job? But also what is the sort of the kind of nice to know cultural side of things? And if you're communicating with your external stakeholders, your customers, again, know, what information do they need? How do they want to

feel in order to think I'm going to spend money with that business, what is the content that's going to kind of trigger that? But until you're clear on what you're actually trying to achieve, it's very difficult to make any of those decisions. So I think that fundamentally that's at the heart of a lot of the challenge I see.

think that's a really good example and that reminds me that obviously in business it's all about achieving the goals, it's making the business run, it's getting the profit and as you know a lot of businesses at the moment are going through change. So what advice do you give to communicating change in maybe difficult times in businesses at the moment?

Speaker 1 (14:56.398)
Yeah, it's really difficult times, isn't it? I've run some change comms workshops and one of the things we talk about is again, understanding the different kind of audiences and where they are in relation to that change. So particularly talking about internal change for a business, you know, and there are businesses that have to make some really difficult decisions in terms of kind of restructures, redundancies, that kind of thing. And what

often happens is that the kind of senior leaders that obviously they are the decision makers that is what has to happen. They will kind of go off into some meeting room or being a team show or whatever and there'll be all these conversations going on and they will, you they don't take these decisions lightly. They will look at these difficult times from every angle. They'll consider all sorts of different options, what have you.

but then they forget that they have had the time to kind of consider the change and maybe get a bit more used to it. And then the communication comes out as a sort of, this is where we are in a kind of complete kind of thing. And actually you haven't given people that time to kind of process what's going on. Clearly those things have to happen. So again, it's not about saying, if you're communicating effectively, you're not doing the tough stuff.

that's the reality of businesses, know, there are tough things to happen. But I guess this went back to kindness really, is around thinking about, well, how can we, how will this feel to people? And how can we make sure that we have considered, you know, the impact on people and how we might change our communication or sort of angle our communication to recognize that and to acknowledge that this is difficult. And yet still.

maintaining that clarity of what is happening and why as well. That's another thing which quite often people, for all sorts of reasons, often speed kind of gets missed in terms of the kind of why is this happening? Because again, you know, it's difficult to take, but actually if you have a bit of understanding of how you've ended up in this position and information has been...

Speaker 1 (17:13.208)
provided. I think the other thing, I just thought of another thing that happens sometimes is information kind of trickles through or you hear about it from somewhere else rather than from the person who really ought to have heard about it in the first place. And again, that comes from lack of planning and organisation and kind of comes kind of goes off in all directions. Whereas if you have a nice, you know, a plan that takes it through step by step, then that reduces the chances.

of that kind of leakage of information.

I love the loop back to kindness. And I think it shows that at the core of a business, if there's kindness, then it can help and trickle down throughout the whole structure. So yeah, very good example that you put there. Now, what thoughts would you like to leave our listeners with today?

wow, gosh. I guess for me, it's about the power of kindness, really. think kindness is powerful because it connects us as humans. And whether that's something we're trying to do collectively as a business or in our private lives and our family, friends, our community groups, connections are really important. That's what we have. That is our power in the world. So kindness is part of that.

Kindness is all around us as well. think that's the other thing. I'm really keen for people to realize that this isn't just a, yes, we can say, well, people could be kinder or the world could be kinder. Yes, it could, but there's lots already. So let's notice it, let's focus on it. Because actually where we focus is where we get more as well. So if we start to focus on that. So I think that's.

Speaker 1 (18:58.19)
probably the two key things I'd like. And you can learn habits to notice kindness as well. It's not just a, it comes more easily naturally to some people than others. We do live in difficult times, we do live in challenging times. So even for those of us who find it easier, there are days when I find it really hard and I have to turn to ready-made sources to remind myself that it is there, it is there and it doesn't always, and it's...

it's important to believe in it. think that's the other thing.

I'm sure they will have done and you mentioned earlier on in our conversation about is it a newsletter so if people have any kind stories they can send them across to you.

Yeah, so it's the website, timeforkindness.co.uk, and that's got the links to the various social media platforms, but on the website and across the different social media platforms, we share kindness story, at least one every day. And there is also on the website, there's a submit your story form that people can use to tell me about examples of kindness they have noticed. It can be something you have done yourself.

Interestingly, what I find is people are really shy about telling me about kind things they themselves have done. And I just think it's fascinating that somewhere along the line we have learned to sort of feel a bit embarrassed and not want to show off. And yet being kind is really cool. Why would we not want to talk about that? But it doesn't have to be something you've done. It can be something you have seen. It can be something you've been involved in, you have received. Just lots of examples. So yes, that would be great if people

Speaker 1 (20:40.258)
can go to the website, check out. We also have some blogs on the website as well actually that talk about kindness and the kind of what if, what happens when we are kind and there are various different scenarios and so on. So there's lots of information on there for people.

Wonderful and just as with the study links that you mentioned before all the links will be on at the landing page if anyone's interested please go and check it out and I highly encourage everyone to send any kind stories to Sarah. Sarah thank you so much for coming on today I've thoroughly enjoyed our conversation and yeah I've learned a lot you go I'm going to go and look at those studies now you've made me think a more about this.

It's absolutely fascinating, there are so many of them, so good. I'm glad that you've, yeah, it's inspired some thoughts, but thank you too, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me.