The Importance of Being Gentle

There are a number of values that have no other utility than showing our fellow human beings that we care about them and that we can be trusted.  I'm talking about politeness, attentiveness, cordiality, gentleness and kindliness. They have no immediate economic use. You can argue whether they are values or merely social skills. In the good old days, they were simply good manners; they were seen as key to climbing the social ladder.

Nowadays, they don't do well at school and on television. Towards children, the message is rather to be 'cool', 'tough' and 'authentic'. As if being polite or kind could not be authentic. The problem is indeed that these old school values have lost some credibility because they were not always lived in an authentic way. It would take another blog to explain why this happened.

Yet these values still play a very important role in climbing the social ladder. They should return to the schools' attention. They play a role where people meet to influence, to convince and to decide, in all places where trust is needed: in commerce, in politics, in about any aspect of daily life. Where rudeness is encouraged, e.g. by the press in politics, we notice trust becomes impossible  and collective decisions can't be taken decently.

Now that society has become more complex and involvement of "knowledgeable" people is always required, you may still force a decision with rudeness, but you can't convince your people any more to do something they don't believe in themselves. You need buy-in from people and you can't reach that without the mentioned social skills.

The reason is that these social skills are just an expression of something deeper: genuine respect. They are actually the only good way to show respect and without respect, you don't reach anything wholeheartedly from anybody. Most management literature confirms this. You should be very authentic and clear. But you should also stay kind and never lose control over yourself. Gentleness and kindness are the lubricants in society's economic engine.

I refer to my earlier blogs about education.

Picture: Oscar Wilde en Eduard Vilde in Tartu, Estonia: Dmitri Mehh / Shutterstock.com