·Do an anonymous (匿名的) act of kindness for someone. ·Leave a smile card behind to encourage them to pay-it-forward. ·Share your story here to spread the inspiration. ·Change the world, one kind act at a time.

ORDER SMILE CARDS

To request Smile Cards, please fill out the form below. A volunteer will mail you an order of ten cards within two weeks. Smile Cards are offered to anyone who requests them on a pay-it-forward basis. That means there is no charge for a set of cards. Someone before you have paid for your cards, and you are invited to keep the chain going and pay-forward whatever you wish for the next person! For special events or circumstances, you can also place a large quantity of request.

Note: When using a Smile Card, remember not to just hand it out by itself. The idea is to do something kind for someone and then leave the Smile Card behind, so that they know someone reached out to them, and that they are invited to pay-forward the kindness and1 keep the ripples going!

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ABOUT US

KindSpring is a place to practice small acts of “kindness”. For over a decade the KindSpring user community has focused on inner transformation, while collectively changing the world with generosity, gratitude, and trust. The site is 100% volunteer-run and totally non-commercial. It is a shared labour of love.

Please tell us what inspired you to order Smile Cards, and give us an example of a kind act you’d like to do using them.

The famous Spanish painter Pablo Picasso once said, “I always do what I can’t do so that I can learn how to do it.” It strikes a chord with me because that’s exactly what I’ve done these years.

One of my earliest memories of doing before learning is of baking scones (烤饼) when I was about 10 years old. I wanted to bake them to surprise my mother when she returned home.

Before that I’d observed how my mother baked them many times. As I started to try, I didn’t know I shouldn’t handle the dough with my hands too much once I’d added the baking powder. However, I knew exactly how to roll out the dough and use a cookie cutter to cut the scones, because my mom had already taught me.

By the time my mom arrived home, the smell of freshly baked scones welcomed her into the kitchen. They were baked to golden brown perfection-flat, as a result of over handling the dough, but they tasted OK. My mom sweetly praised me for my attempt, rather than scolding me for the state of the kitchen, which was like a tornado had just blown!

Have my attempts always been successful? I wish! Some of my kitchen disasters were of such proportions that even the dogs wanted nothing to do with them. My gardening failures didn’t live to see another season.

But my habit of doing before learning is still helpful. Whatever computer program or application I have to learn, I do so by simply starting to use it. I do, learn, and improve. So if you ask me whether I regret that I tend to do first and learn later, I’d say I don’t, because what I have discovered from those is the wisdom to know when it’s OK to do and then learn, and when it’s probably better to learn and then do!

There is increasing alarm about the extent of microplastic pollution, which has been found everywhere from Everest to the Arctic. However, it turns out there’s an even smaller and more toxic form of plastic pollution entering remote reaches of the globe. A new study published in Environmental Research found significant quantities of nanoplastics in ice samples from both the North and South Poles.

“Now we know that nanoplastics are transported to these comers of the Earth in these quantities. This indicates that nanoplastics are really a bigger pollution problem than we thought,” study lead author Dusan Materic said in a press release.

Nanoplastics are plastics that are smaller than a micrometer in size. Their small size means they are more difficult to study than microplastics, or plastics between five millimeters and a micrometer. But they may be even more dangerous.

“Nanoplastics are very toxicologically active compared to, for instance, microplastics, and that’s why this is very important,” Materic said.   

Materic and his team used new methods to measure nanoplastic pollution in ice samples from Greenland and Antarctica. They sampled a 14-meter-deep ice core from the Greenland ice cap and sea ice from Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound. They found that there were an average of 13. 2 nanograms per milliliter of nanoplastics in the Greenland ice and an average of 52. 3 nanograms per milliliter in the Antarctic ice.

But what was even more surprising than the amount of nanoplastics in the remote ice was just how long they had sat there. “In the Greenland core, we see nanoplastic pollution happening all the way from the 1960s. So organisms, despite the lack of the solid evidence, likely all over the world, have been exposed to it for quite some time now,” Materic said.

The study also looked at the types of plastic present in the samples. Half of the Greenland nanoplastics were polyethylene (PE), the kind of plastic used for plastic bags and packaging. A quarter came from tires and a fifth were polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used for clothing and bottles.

As the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) has gone global, we’ve watched professionals fail as they try to improve their emotional intelligence because they either don’t know where to focus their efforts or they haven’t understood how to improve these skills on a practical level. In our work consulting with companies and coaching leaders, we have found that if you’re looking to develop particular EI strengths, it helps to consider areas for improvement others have identified along with the goals you want to achieve-and then to actively build habits in those areas rather than simply relying on understanding them conceptually.

The first step is to get a sense of how your self-perception (how you see yourself) differs from your reputation (how others see you). This is especially true for the development of EI because we can be blind to how we express and read the emotional components of our interactions. For example, most of us think that we’re good listeners, but very often that’s really not the case. Without this external reality check, it will be difficult for you to identify the ways that your actions affect your performance. Getting feedback from others can also provide proof of the necessity of shifting our behavior and motivation to do so.

To give you the best sense of where the differences lie between your self-perception and reputation, you should use a 360-degree feedback assessment that takes into account the multiple aspects of EI. The key is to find one to give you feedback, which is focused on development and not on performance assessment. And that can give you a detailed understanding of how other people’s assessments of you differ from your own assessments.

Secondly, when you get your feedback from an assessment, let that inform what you want to improve. But also consider what your goals are. When it comes to cultivating strengths in emotional intelligence, you’re at a huge disadvantage if you’re only interested because others say you should be. Your emotional intelligence is so tied up in your sense of self that being intrinsically (内在的) motivated to make the effort matters more when changing longstanding habits than it does when simply learning a skill.

That means the areas that you choose to actively work on should lie at the intersection of the feedback you’ve gotten and the areas that are most important to your own aspirations. Understanding the influences of your current EI habits relative to your goals will keep you going over a long period of time as you do the work of strengthening your emotional intelligence.