Ways to be a better person and more productive too!

Hey there, Paula Rizzo here from ListProducer.com, and I'm joined by my friend Kate Hanley, who's an author and podcaster. Her book is called How to Be a Better Person, which is also the name of the podcast. Thank you for joining me. We're going to talk a little bit about how to add the right things to your to-do list, how to be a better person, and how to make sure that you're not draining yourself from being too much of a good person and using up all of your good energy. So tell me, how did you come up with this concept? Why did you think that people needed to be a better person?

Right, well, you know, a couple of years ago, not too long ago, for the first time ever, be a better person was the most popular New Year's resolution, which was, I thought, so inspiring because this survey came out in January or December of 2016, so the national election had just happened and a lot of people were feeling upset for a lot of different reasons and just sort of wondering like, how are we gonna get along here? And the fact that people wanted to be better, I just, found really heartening, and I was like, I want to be a part of that. I've written about stress relief for like over a decade in my career, and I had come to realize that it wasn't stress relief for stress relief's sake. When you're less stressed, you can actually, you know, take a moment and do something that helps another person, or take a moment and not yell at somebody because you're not stressed, you know, like, so reducing your stress level sort of leads to this being a better person, and I loved this sort sort of fresh way of talking about that.

Sure. It is very counterintuitive because people think, oh, well, if I'm spending all my time helping and caring and doing, then I'm depleting myself. But it's actually not true. That kind of— that does help to enrich you.

It does.

It does.

You know, you get such a rush when you do something nice for other people. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that Be a Better Person is all about being selfless and giving and depleting like you're saying. I mean, yes, of course, we want to give back. We want to be there for the people that matter to us and just the people that we run into, encounter in our lives. But a big piece of being a better person is really self-care. And self-care, again, is a big buzzword, and people are talking about it a lot. And even though it's becoming more and more mainstream and accepted, I think a lot of people hear it and they're like, eh, indulgent.

Right.

People get it wrong, though.

I mean, I think, you know, I talk a lot about self-care from my book Listful Living. And I'm always saying, hey, we get it wrong. It doesn't have to be a spa day. 7-day vacation or a $300 massage, like, that's nice, but that doesn't have to be what it is. It could be, you know, having 5 minutes to drink a cup of tea by yourself.

Absolutely.

Or calling a friend, or, you know, to your point, doing something that would be, you know, enriching to the environment or whatever, you know. So why don't you give us a couple of ideas? Because I think that's— people don't know what they don't know until they hear about it, you know. So some simple things that we can put on our to-do list to be a better person.

Well, I was just thinking about this actually today on my dog walk because I'm still sort of noodling around with what my New Year's goals are. And the thing that I'm putting on my to-do list, I'm giving myself a little bit of slack. I'm saying that I want to do it 5 days a week. So maybe 2 days a week it just doesn't work. It's a crazy day, whatever. No guilt, right? But it's just do something nice for my body. I think it's nice to have something. I mean, specifics are always great. And as a writer, I love specificity. It makes a story come alive. However, If you make something too specific and then you don't do that exact same thing, then if you do something that's sort of close or has the same benefit, you might not give yourself credit. You might feel like—

Ah, I see. Right, like it doesn't count exactly, right? Right.

You can't necessarily cross it off. So if you make it sort of open-ended, like do something nice for my body, well, that could be sitting and drinking your tea. Right. It could be lying on the floor while you watch TV because your back is killing you and you know when you lie on the floor it makes you feel better. It could be doing something—

So in categories almost in a way, right? To have a category and there are other things you can do within that. Right. Do you schedule them? Like, do you have in your schedule, like, oh, on Tuesday at 4 o'clock, I'm going to do this thing?

Or how do you— Yeah, certain things. I've definitely found that I often need to make appointments and show up somewhere to do something. So I have, you know, a standing date with a trainer. I joke that I work out once a week, whether I need it or not. But otherwise, you know, I'm not doing that every day for many reasons, including expense. But, you know, but I definitely try and do it first thing in the morning because I, I mean, this is something that people say over and over again, but I really do find that it's true that if you don't do it first thing in the morning, then the day just gets away from you.

That's how I feel about meditation. If I don't do it in the morning, you know, I use the Calm app. I do it for 10 minutes every day. I do it before I eat breakfast because otherwise then I'm checking my phone and I'm doing this and doing that. I'm doing 100 other things. So it makes it easier to just check it off the list. I had wrote a blog post years ago about how to do something nice for somebody else, or how, you know, a list of nice things to do, or I forget what I named it, but it was one of the things was like when you're in New York City and people are just trying to give you the flyer, you know, like whatever, store opening. Bless their hearts.

That's got to be such a hard job.

Just take the flyer. Just take it. It's gonna make that person's day. One more thing checked off their list. I don't care if you throw it out a block away, you use it for scrap paper, just it'll make that person happy. Why, you know, it's a tiny thing you can do, right?

Love it.

Are there other tiny little things like that that you've come across that really will help to boost you?

Right. Something that I love to do is to remind myself to just let someone else go first. You know, if you're at the 4-way stop sign and people don't know who's gonna go, let that person go first. Or here in Rhode Island, we have this a funny driving tradition where if you're at opposite ends of an intersection and someone's taking the left, you're supposed to let the person taking the left go first because we have a lot of narrow one-way streets and it's like a left-hand turn can really bog things down. And when I first moved here from New York City, I was like, I'm not— you can't go.

But now I'm going.

I just give them a wave. I just give them the Rhode Island wave, like, go ahead. And it really does give you a little bit of a boost. So this idea of let someone else go first, I mean, it could be your kid or whatever.

It could be at home.

Yes, that really goes a long way. Something that's actually the topic of my podcast episode that's airing today, and this may not sound like something that's nice to do for other people, but bear with me for a second, which is when someone asks you how you're doing, just like take a split second to check in and say something that's actually accurate instead of just saying I'm fine. Yeah, you know, like I did this at the grocery store the other day. I was really tired one day, I'd been traveling, I had two early morning flights in a row, I was completely dragging and the checkout person said, "How you doing?" And I was like, "I'm tired." And she was like, "Me too." And then we had a little conversation about why we were tired and we had this little moment of bonding and it's just so uplifting, I think, when you get to connect with somebody that you wouldn't otherwise connect with.

Right, and to be real, right? And not just to go into the mode of everything is fine, everything's good, it's just what you say.

You're really smart, Paula.

You know, a little extra effort.

Yeah. And if you think about it, it helps you be a better person because it helps you check in with yourself. It helps you connect with somebody else, but it helps that person feel heard and connected with too. And then maybe the person behind you heard that interaction and was thinking like, oh, isn't that sweet? And then they're going to be a little bit more uplifted as they— they're not going to get frustrated when somebody leaves their grocery cart in the parking spot.

Right. Right. It's a little wake up. It's a little wake up call. I had done for a while where I would go into a store and having lived in New York, very fast paced here. You know, you're in an elevator with somebody, you don't even talk to them or look at them, you know?

It's like very—

but I would go into any store or anything, I would go in and just look at the person and smile. And even that moment, it made people so weirded out because they were like, "What is happening here?" "What's that crazy lady doing?" Totally! Totally! I was like, it's just a social experiment. I want to see, like, can I break them from the drone, you know, like, thing that they're doing. And you can. So even just doing that kind of thing, it did break people from that, like, "Hi, how are you? What's happening?" You know?

Right.

And it made me feel better. It does.

I mean, you know, there's science that shows that just smiling sort of changes your hormone profile, the kind of neurotransmitters that are circulating in your brain. So I love that.

Yeah, it's good science behind smiling. I love that. So tell us a little bit more about the podcast, because I want to make sure that people listen to it. OK.

It's a daily podcast. Yes. So it is, it's a daily podcast, 5 days a week, Monday through Friday. It's generally about 5 minutes. It's one simple thing that you can do to make a difference in yourself and the world. And I really try and keep it doable. I really enjoy hearing back from people too. I'm always asking people to let me know how something goes, like take a picture and post it on Twitter. I love seeing this stuff come in. One of my episodes was about importance of having fun and like talking about uplift, like do something fun today, like that's a great thing to put on your to-do list. And this woman posted a picture of herself on the swings and, you know, she's— it was winter, she's got a winter coat and a hat on. She lives here in Rhode Island, but she was out like walking her daughter to school and she was listening to the podcast and she saw the swings and she was like, I'm going for it! And it just like— the look on her face just made my day. So it is available, the podcast is available anywhere that podcasts You can listen to them. It's on iTunes, it's on Apple, it's on Stitcher, it's on Spotify.

It's everywhere.

And I'm having so much fun with it. And I just— if it's intriguing to you at all, just give it a listen. It's only 5 minutes. But I think—

That's what I was going to say. For 5 minutes, just to get a tip and that you can implement, it's sort of like a coach in your ear a bit. It's like, OK, go do this. And then you—

Yeah.

I love that.

Right.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. How to Be a Better Person. Is the podcast and the book. Kate Hanley, thank you so much for—

Paula Rizzo.

And I want you to go to listproducer.com to check out your free list-making starter kit so I can walk you through exactly how you should be making your lists. I want more list makers out there.

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