Treat everyone with politeness and kindness, not because they are nice, but because you are. — Roy T. Bennett

Treat everyone with politeness and kindness, not because they are nice, but because you are.

Author: Roy T. Bennett

Insight: Most of us have it backwards. We think politeness is something we offer to people who deserve it—a reward for being pleasant first. But that framing puts us at the mercy of everyone else's mood. The moment someone is rude, we feel justified in matching that energy back. We've handed them control over who we get to be. The real insight here is that kindness isn't actually about them. It's about maintaining your own standards for yourself. When you decide that politeness comes from your character rather than from someone else's behavior, you're no longer performing kindness conditionally. You're practicing it like a skill, which means it gets stronger the more you use it, not weaker. You stay centered in your own values instead of being knocked around by every difficult person you encounter. This doesn't mean being a doormat. You can be kind and still have firm boundaries. But it does mean recognizing that how you treat people—especially when they don't deserve it—says nothing about them and everything about the kind of person you're committed to being. That's where real dignity lives.

Source: The Light in the Heart, p. 32, 2014