July 2026 Kindness Calendar

It’s here: July’s Kindness Calendar! Each month, you’ll get a calendar that features one small activity each day, to show kindness to yourself or another. The idea is to cultivate kindness in your heart, so that you become a person whose first instinct is to act with kindness. Our themes for July are Celebration, Water, and Sparkly Fireworks. Activities range from telling someone "I'm proud of you" to gathering people together for a simple meal and a good conversation. You don’t have to do all of the activities—you don’t have to do any of them!—but when you try one, it might just change your day, and maybe someone else's, too.

What does this have to do with leadership and inner development? It turns out that kindness—both for others and for oneself—is an important part of being an effective and vital leader, the sort of leader people want to follow. What does this mean? It means that a leader using the wisdom of Miriam is one who shows empathy for others, who gives herself permission to be less than perfect, who models behaviors that reveal that other people (all other people) are valuable and important. Sometimes these behaviors are tiny, like pausing to hold the door open for the colleague with his arms full, and sometimes they are bigger, like starting a volunteer rota to make sure the beloved department administrator has hot meals after she comes home from her surgery. And because it’s easiest to behave in kind ways when we practice, I created the monthly Kindness Calendar to remind you (and to remind me!) to invest just a few minutes each day into practicing kindness.