Monday, July 13, 2015

Join a Force for Good



1.Free the Mind and Heart
When we’ve learned to clear our mind and calm our heart, we can begin to overcome fear, anger, or any of our other destructive daily emotions. To become better at helping others, we can question our self-defeating emotional habits and learn to face turmoil in a calm and reasoned way. There are many techniques to train the heart and mind, but we can start with the steps below.
Understand our emotional patterns—our personal map.
Practice “emotional hygiene” to minimize the spread of destructive feelings.
Pause before acting on impulse.
Combine a calm mind with a warm, giving heart.

2.Embody Compassion
Kindness toward others is part of our biological makeup and can play a larger role in our lives. The first step is simply to recognize that compassion is good for us: Our own well-being lies in the welfare of everyone. Genuine compassion calls for us to transcend the small differences that define race or tribe or group and embrace the commonality of all human beings. Understanding the principles below can help guide us to that goal.
Humans have an innate need both to give and to receive affection.
Caring for others improves our own emotional state.
Our “circle of concern” can gradually extend beyond our own group to include all people.
Compassion is a crucial moral rudder as we tackle the world’s problems.

3.Educate the Heart
A goal of education could be to create not just good minds but good people. This requires a fundamental rethinking of how teachers prepare children for the challenges of adulthood. It can start with “social and emotional” learning: helping students learn how to recognize and master their turbulent feelings and to acknowledge kindness as an essential ingredient of everyday life. This fresh approach to education rests on the precepts below.
Education should be rooted in both knowledge and ethics.
Social and emotional learning should be based on sound science.
Techniques for emotional self-mastery are as fundamental as math.
An ethics-based education is one key to solving our global problems.

4.Oppose Injustice
Being compassionate does not mean being passive. Living by the principles of fairness, transparency, and accountability—the three pillars of an equitable society—sometimes requires us to act on those principles in the face of injustice. Beyond sympathy with victims, we are moved to speak out in their defense, to come to their aid, and to shed light on the source of the injustice. This “muscular” compassion is rooted in the simple ideas below.
Do not allow anger to be be a spur to action; compassion, not anger, is a better guide.
Act without hatred or resorting to violence.
When confronting injustice, oppose the act but don’t give up on the person.
Recognize that restraint and nonviolence are not signs of weakness but of strength.

5.Choose Humane Economics
Business can both do good and do well. But acting on this principle requires us to reframe our notions of profit, wealth, and success. The ultimate measure of economic strength—on local, national, and global levels—includes the well-being of all people, not just an elite few. Humane economic policy reduces financial inequality while allowing for entrepreneurial dynamism, and it respects the truths listed below.
Loving relationships of all kinds and meaningful work, which yields more than money, are keys to happiness.
Economic freedom can be balanced with altruism.
Humane economic policy is guided by compassion, not self-interest.
Businesses cannot be a force for good when profit is the only yardstick for success.

6.Help Those in Need
Being a force for good means extending our hand, our heart, and our intellect to serve the neediest among us. This may mean leaving our comfort zone to address the misery of others head-on, with selflessness and compassion. The hard work of helping the defenseless, the disabled, and the impoverished entails more than just charity—it asks us to get to the root of those plights. We can start with the following steps.
Recognize that the origins of poverty are not just circumstance but also mind-set.
Give people the tools they need to help themselves.
Advocate against the inequitable social policies that cause poverty and dislocation.
Support the advancement of women in leadership roles.

7.Heal the Earth
“A genuine concern for humanity,” the Dalai Lama has said, “means loving the environment.” His words highlight an elementary truth: our well-being links to the ecological well-being of our planet. This holds especially true for the poor, whose lives tend to depend more directly on nature and its dwindling resources. Because environmental degradation is a slow-motion event that easily escapes our notice, we can take the following measures to understand and minimize our role in it.
Advocate for “radical transparency” that exposes the ecological impacts of what we buy and do.
Embrace tools that measure the ecological “true cost” of a product or service.
Encourage finding better solutions to man-made problems, and remain focused on progress—not doom and gloom.
Extend our compassion to include both people and the planet, in equal measure.
8.Connect Across Divides
When we stop thinking of the world in terms of “us and them,” battle lines disappear and dialogue can begin. The simple act of talking, person-to-person, across divides can defuse conflict and dissolve prejudice, humanizing those whom we’d considered our enemy. Peace on the ground starts inside ourselves, with the acceptance of the core beliefs listed below.
War cannot resolve differences; only dialogue can.
The traits that unite humans far outnumber the differences that divide them.
Hatred is learned and can be unlearned.
True compassion has no national, ethnic, religious, or sectarian boundaries.

Source:
http://www.joinaforce4good.org