Every Monday, I bring you one mentor: a thinker, a teacher, a voice that has shaped how I lead, coach, and live. Not as a lecture, but as an invitation. A few minutes at the start of your week to think a little differently about who you are and how you show up.
Last week we sat with presence. This week, a harder question: what if the very thing you are most praised for is quietly costing you the most?
▍ The Story
"I don't like you. You smile too much"
Some 16 years ago I was given a harsh comment, the kind of feedback that shook what I had built for nearly 40 years of life: being nice. A fellow participant in a leadership program told me he didn't like me because I was smiling too much. It deeply upset me. It also woke me up from a lifelong slumber into a lifelong growth journey.
The truth is, he didn't get all of it. I wasn't only smiling too much. I was also saying yes to everything, agreeing even when I had other thoughts, helping even when I wasn't asked or needed, always being nice so that I belonged.
Before that honest feedback, being nice had always been rewarded: making my mother and my teachers happy, my bosses satisfied, and myself feel good about always being there to help, ready to rescue and save the day.
Until I had enough, exhausted or disappointed that I didn’t get the same niceness in return. Then I would get resentful, disconnected, aloof. With my dear ones, I would even get angry.
In my striving to be a good girl, educator, mother, manager, human,I had confused being kind with being nice, and I was dwelling in a loop that was brewing a self-sabotaging weakness.
It took a village and a long list of courses, books, and my Co-Active Coaching training to understand what was happening.
Today I want to shed light on one essential shift:
embracing kindness as a strength, instead of niceness as a mask.
But first, let me introduce you to someone special.
▍ The Mentor
Barbara Vercruysse is a Global Kindness Advocate, bestselling author ofThe Path of Powerful Kindness, and, I'm lucky to say, my mentor.
She doesn't just write and speak about kindness. She embodies it, in every interaction, business or personal.
The first time I heard Barbara speak, she reframed something I thought I already understood. She defined kindness not as a soft virtue but as a leadership intelligence, one that takes maturity, wisdom, and compassion to build. And she doesn't position it as an aspirational ideal. For her, kindness is the new baseline.
In every community and organization today, we need more maturity, more wisdom, more compassion. We need more kindness.
Barbara’s core conviction is sharp: kindness is not softness. It is not people-pleasing. It is thehighest form of strength.
She knows the ground she stands on. In her early thirties, a young mother of three, Barbara was battling stage 4 melanoma and given a very limited prognosis. Facing surgery and chemotherapy, she made a conscious choice: not despair, but gratitude for what she had. Her children’s smiles. Sunlight. Breath.
She survived. And she came out of this life challenge with a purpose she carries ever since, to leave the world better than she found it, through kindness.
▍ Kindness is strength, not weakness
This is the distinction that took me years to learn. Niceness, the kind I wore for four decades, comes from fear: the fear of not belonging, of not being enough, of what happens if we say no or if we take care of our needs first.
Kindness comes from somewhere steadier. It includes clear boundaries, the grace to say no, speaking truth with love and care, and refusing to internalize someone else's cruelty.
As Barbara puts it, real kindness takes self-discipline, self-confidence, and the courage to face your own shadows.
It is not the absence of a spine. Which is why her line lands so hard for the recovering people-pleaser in me:
“I can be kind, and still say no.”
Our response does not depend on the other person's behavior. Their unkindness is information about their inner state, not an instruction for yours.
Kindness, unlike niceness, does not need the other person's approval to hold its shape.
▍ What kindness does to the brain
Here is the payoff I promised. When I finally understood the difference between niceness and kindness, I discovered that the shift isn't just wisdom. It's neuro-biology. Barbara's philosophy is written into our neural wiring.
Research suggests that kindness engages systems associated with reward, connection and emotional regulation.
In plain language: kindness does not only affect the person receiving it.It changes the person practising it, too.
When you act kindly, your brain releases a trio of feel-good chemicals: dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins
Dopamine - gives you the rush of reward and pleasure, reinforcing the choice to be kind so you'll make it again. This is the core of the reward of kindness.
Oxytocin - builds trust and deepens social bonds, while lowering the stress hormone cortisol and, with it, your blood pressure.
Endorphins - act as the body's natural painkiller, producing a gentle sense of euphoria.
These fire in the brain's reward and positive-affect system.
Research by Zoran Josipovic at NYU shows that compassion, like love, activates the circuitry that lights up for other deep pleasures. The amygdala and insula handle the emotional read and let us feel our way into another person's experience, and the mirror neuron system means we get a dose even when we simply witness kindness in others.
Kindness is wider than giving
Josipovic describes kindness as a set of trainable capacities: empathy, compassion, love, and the ability to understand another person's mind. Giving is only one action that can flow from them, and compulsive giving, the kind I mistook for kindness, isn't on the list at all.
Because these are capacities, not fixed traits, kindness can be strengthened with practice, reshaping the brain much as a muscle responds to training.
That is the neuroscience quietly agreeing with Barbara, and with my own long detour: kindness is inner work, not a personality you're simply born with or without.
▍ Why this matters for how we lead
In a boardroom, kindness still gets filed under “weakness.” I hear it very often from the leaders I meet.
The research says otherwise. The same biology that calms our own nervous system builds trust, psychological safety, and loyalty in a team.
Kindness is not the reward you hand out once the hard work of leadership is done. It is the hard work: high-courage, high-EQ, and high-connection.
Domination is an illusion of power. As Barbara puts it, “there is a way to be powerful without having to sell our soul, without having to become a bully.”
Choosing kindness when it's hard isn't the soft option. It's the strong one, for the person across the table and, as it turns out, for you.
▍ This week’s practice
Think of one situation in which you are being nice because you are afraid of disappointing someone.
Ask yourself:What would kindness look like here?
It might be an honest conversation. A compassionate no. A boundary stated without anger. Or the decision not to return someone else’s cruelty.
Niceness asks:Will they still approve of me?
Kindness asks:What is honest, caring and responsible here?
▍ Share with us
What's one moment when someone's kindness changed everything for you?
