It’s amusing to be strategic and do things nobody expects. Helping your enemy strengthens your personal standards by putting them to the test. If you can be kind to a bully, you can be kind to anyone.

Helping your enemy also diminishes your self-importance and humbles you. For a minute your ego will kick and scream as you help the bully, but then it will relax, and the better part of you will win! You will call the shots over the small self that would have do damage in the form of reaction and retaliation. Showing kindness to a person you can’t stand is a practice in self-improvement.

But how does kindness kill bullying, as in kill ‘em with kindness? Kindness takes down your ego, but it takes theirs down too. Here’s why:

Element of surprise—confusion is one aspect of boredom. Remember boredom is either understanding a thing too well or not well enough. And bullies HATE the confusion aspect of boredom because it makes them feel powerless. They’ll never see it coming when you do something nice and will be totally confused.

Kindness is also disarming because it’s difficult to be mean to someone who is kind, even for someone who prefers to be a jerk, like the bully. When you lead by example with kindness, they can either follow along and look like a sane person or double down and look like an even bigger jerk, who is has no good reason for it.

Kindness is a hallmark of confidence. Think about it…who would be kind to a bully? Who can afford the risk to be kind to a bully? Someone who feels safe and secure despite them. Someone who sees they are a paper tiger. A nothing burger. Someone who feels sorry for them.

The bully is not confident enough to be kind. Cruelty and disrespect, power plays and pettiness, always show weakness. They are weak, not confident.

Your kindness in the face of their cruelty makes them look terrible by contrast, as long as you’re not a chump about it. Clearly being “kind” for a certain outcome, to get the bully to be nice back, or to make others see you as a good person turns you into a dancing clown because it’s transactional—you trade your self-respect for their civility. It’s manipulation to do things for others with strings attached if you’ve never discussed it. So, don’t be kind to get something. Do it because it’s who you choose to be.

To be clear, your kindness is no reward to the bully. They might even perceive it as a slight, as long as you’re not sucking up to them.

They don’t want your kindness, they want the bullyfood, which is your power in the form of fear, timidity, reactions, conformity, stress responses etc. Giving them those things rewards them, and you can take that reward away with kindness.

Being your sweet kind self, even to them, shows them that no-one, not even big scary bullies, will keep you from being the bigger person.

Being kind to a bully is one of the harshest things you can do because kindness is their kryptonite.

HA!