World Kindness Day: Australians need compassion now more than ever

During the pandemic, three per cent of Australians (an estimated 770,700 people) credited acts of kindness from strangers for saving their life.

The research conducted by The Kindness Foundation also found about 85 per cent of people said merely hearing a story of kindness gave them hope and improved their mood.

Suicide is now the leading cause of death for Australians aged 15-44 and an average of almost nine people taking their lives in this country a day.

And with Lifeline estimating more than 65,000 Australians attempt suicide each year, mindset guru Ben Crowe said World Kindness Day on Monday couldn’t be more important.

“You only have to look what’s happening in the world right now, on a macro level or a micro level, whether it’s our neighbours or it’s the wars or the negativity around politics or referendums or whatever, the issue is to know that the whole world is in such a need to understand kindness,” Crowe said.

Crowe, whose mindset and life coach clients include women’s tennis world number one Ash Barty and wheelchair tennis champion Dylan Alcott, said spreading kindness started with self-compassion.

“We’re just so hard on ourselves as a human race because we’ve got this reptilian brain with a negative bias, it’s like velcro for negative and Teflon for positive,” Crowe said.

“The problem is if you don’t have self-compassion, it will be almost impossible to accept yourself.

“The antidote is to accept your imperfections and the imperfections of the world. And one of the ways to accept yourself unconditionally is through compassion and self-compassion.

“Being compassionate to ourselves actually enables me to be compassionate and kind to others.”

He said the power of sharing this message could not be underestimated.

“I did an episode on The Imperfects podcast which was around self-compassion that became the number one shared podcast in Australia in 2021 and number two in 2022 (according to Apple and Spotify),” Crowe said.

“I had nurses contact me from Sydney, London, Melbourne, who were contemplating suicide and literally listened to that three or four times through tears, and realised that (they were) worthy to be here and they learned to be kind to themselves, maybe for the first time in their life and reframe their life story.

“Kindness and self-compassion was at the core of that whole podcast.”

Former elite cricketer Kath Koschel founded the global movement Kindness Factory to “inspire ordinary people to do extraordinary things” driven by her own journey of resilience and the transformative power of kindness.

In her mid-20s, Koschel suffered a debilitating back injury, tragically lost her partner to suicide, and later endured another life-altering accident when struck by a drunk driver while cycling.

The Kindness Factory was founded on World Kindness Day in 2015 and has so far had more than six million global acts of kindness logged through the platform.

“We are now pushing towards our next goal of 10 million,” Koschel said.

“As an organisation, our main focus in Australia is driving kindness education in schools and celebrating community acts of kindness.

“In the last 12 months we have had a 60 per cent increase in the number of people downloading our free schools Kindness Curriculum with 17,000 downloads.”

Visit kindnessfactory.com