Kindness Challenge Roundup: Reflection and Next Steps!

This is the roundup post for the 14-Day Kindness Challenge held in Nov 2012, where we do different acts of kindness for 14 days. The challenge is now over but you can do the tasks in your own time. Visit the overview page for all the challenge tasks.

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Hello everyone! :D Welcome to the roundup for the 14-Day Kindness Challenge! ;)

14 Days. 14 Acts of Kindness.

It’s been 14 days. 14 acts of kindness. A whooping 810 participants, and probably hundreds more who did the tasks silently without officially signing up.

I thank you for sticking with me throughout the past 14 days and following through on the acts of kindness as you had pledged to do when you signed up for the challenge on November 1st.

Below are the 14 acts of kindness (plus Day 0’s task) in the past two weeks:

The comments sections for all Kindness Challenge posts will be closed this Saturday, Nov 17, 11:59pm GMT +8. That’s Singapore time. For those in East Coast, that would be Nov 17, 10:59am.

Use the remaining time over the next two days to share your reflections and mingle with the participants. This is your final chance to be part of the challenge and interact with one another!

Kindness Challenge Continues to Receive Support of Media!

Asia One (Nov 14, ’12)

We got a feature on Asia One yesterday, talking about how our kindness challenge went viral with over 800 participants! :D

It’s definitely a refreshing change to see the local online media cover more positive news like this rather than sex-for-grades, man-pushes-elderly-woman off bus or girl-argues-with-woman-on-train news, which are more negative.

Read the article online here: Singaporean’s kindness challenge goes viral. It’s a pity that they didn’t provide any hyperlinks to PE, though I’m grateful all the same for the coverage. Thanks Asia One for the coverage! :D

938 LIVE, Follow-Up Coverage! (Nov 15, ’12)

Daniel Martin (one of the 938 LIVE deejays) contacted me yesterday to do a follow-up story of the Kindness Challenge, as part of his “Making the Difference” segment. I shared the results of the challenge, the participant responses, and my plans moving forward!

The five-minute interview will be broadcast today (Nov 15), at four different time slots: 6:35am, 11:45am, 1:35pm, and 8:45pm (GMT +8). Tune in to 938 LIVE then (click on the Listen Live widget on the website!).

Update: For those who missed the interview, listen to the podcast on 938 LIVE. :D

My Day 14 Review: Do Something Unexpectedly Nice for Someone

The last act of kindness for the 14-Day Kindness Challenge was to Do Something Unexpectedly Nice For Someone.

As I shared in Day 14, I picked the Kiss92 deejays, whom I host my weekly Monday personal excellence segment with, as the recipients of the task!

From left to right: Maddy Barber, Jason Johnson, myself, and Arnold Gay

The reason why I picked Maddy, Jason, and Arnold is because I’ve been feeling very thankful to Kiss92 for the opportunity to speak to their listeners and (hopefully) touch their lives in the process. I’ve been doing the segment for four weeks and I hope they continue to have me back on an ongoing basis! On my end, it’s important that I give high value advice every week, so that listeners can take away new knowledge each time.

Since Day 14’s task is to do something unexpectedly nice, I wanted it to be extremely personal. I think the most meaningful gifts are the most personal ones. I dislike the idea of getting gifts for the sake of getting gifts—its simply a waste of time and money. You are also giving the person the burden of thinking what he/she has to do with the gift if he/she doesn’t like it or has no use for it.

So I asked myself, “What is the most meaningful thing I can do for them, within my personal capacity?” And I recall that my first episode with them was on bucket list (you can listen to my past Kiss92 episodes in the Podcasts section) and they had shared some of their hearts’ deepest desires during the segment itself!

Maddy said she wanted to be in South of France, learning how to make soap. Rather than buy her soap which I feel wouldn’t fulfill her real desire, I tried to look for soap-making classes in Singapore. I thought it would be a long shot since soap-making is such a niche topic, but I thought I would try my luck anyway. To my surprise (and luck), I found some soap-making workshops! I selected Soap Ministry in the end as they look established and booked a one-hour basic soap-making workshop for Maddy.

Me at the Soap Ministry (Orchard Central (#B2-07/08) to purchase the workshop ticket.
Here, you see one of their soap-making workshops underway!

For Jason, he said he wanted to learn archery. My guess was that he probably hadn’t had time to book his archery classes since the bucket list segment was only three weeks ago. So, I went to book an archery class for him.

This actually took a lot more time than I thought because I had to find a vendor which allowed me to book by proxy. (Many archery schools made it compulsory to fill in your I.C. and other personal details when you register! I wonder why? Maybe they want to have a record of people who want to learn archery, lest we have people going around shooting others in Singapore?!? o_O)

At the archery range at Home Team NS to purchase the archery workshop ticket.
(Address: 2 Bukit Batok Avenue 7, next to Bukit Batok Driving Center)

For Arnold, his bucket list item is to move to Alaska with his family, live in the wilderness, and go fishing!

I had to rack my brains for this one. Since it’s not exactly feasible for me to send him to Alaska (he still needs to be hosting the Kiss92 segment plus his wish is to retire in Alaska, not to visit Alaska), I decided—hey, why not get a photo frame with a picture of someone fishing in Alaska to remind him of his dream, always? This would be the vision board at work!

So I went to Google Images to search for pictures of people fishing in Alaska or at least out in the sea in Alaska. And after much searching, I found the perfect picture of someone who took a picture of himself WHILE fishing!! (See picture above.) This provides an amazing first-person view, which is SO adept for vision board purposes. So I promptly saved the image, got it developed as a photo, and bought a nice photo frame to frame the photo!

My gift for Arnold—A photo frame with a first-person picture of someone fishing who just got his catch of the day!

I then topped off the gifts with cards, where I wrote personalized messages for each of them.

Personalized cards for Maddy, Jason, and Arnold

The end result? I think they were pleasantly surprised and really liked the gifts. :D You can listen to me giving them the gifts on air at the last section of yesterday’s episode, “How to Handle Criticisms” (download in the Podcasts section).

The happy dynamic trio—Maddy, Jason, and Arnold with their gifts! (Taken at Kiss92 studio.)

Today’s Task: Roundup of the 14-Day Kindness Challenge

With the kindness challenge now coming to an end, I’d like you to do a roundup of your experience of the challenge.

Reflect over the following questions today, and share your responses in the comments section when you are ready:

How has the kindness challenge been for you?
What has been your favorite task(s)? Why?
What have you learned from participating in the kindness challenge? What have you learned about kindness? Elaborate.
How do you plan to integrate kindness into your life moving forward?
Anything you would like to see at PE moving forward? What is it?

The longer your answers, the better. I look forward to reading your responses. :)

Kindness Challenge in 2013?

Given the huge success of kindness challenge, some journalists have been asking me if I’ll be planning the Kindness Challenge next year!

I say, why not? :D I’m all for what helps others to grow and live their best lives. At the moment I don’t have any concrete plans to run Kindness Challenge again in 2013. It dependent on a lot of factors, such as the projects I’ll be working on, how my discussions with Singapore Kindness Movement go (and what upcoming projects we might be collaborating on), and what’s most relevant to the society then.

For now, let’s continue to enact kindness in our lives everyone! :D

Remember to share your roundup comments in the comments section! Once again, comments sections for all kindness challenge posts will be closed this Saturday, Nov 17, 11:59pm GMT +8. Use the next two days wisely to share your results (for those of you who have not completed all 14 acts of kindness), post your thoughts, and mingle with the participants!

Update: Wait, wait, there’s still more! To help you guys stick with your acts of kindness post challenge, I’ve asked my designer to create a manifesto of all the official acts of kindness we did during challenge. Grab it here: 14-Day Kindness Challenge Manifesto