Nancy Guerra, left, and Kirk Williams.
Emeriti professors write the book on kindness, altruism
Nancy Guerra was 6 when she started questioning violence.
“Our parents’ generation was a different generation,” the former dean of the School of Social Ecology recalls. “It wasn’t considered child abuse to whip your kids, but I was a good little girl. And, if I did any little thing wrong, like take an extra cookie when I wasn’t supposed to, I'd get whipped with the belt. And, I remember thinking, why would you do that? Why would you hurt people you love? Even when I was 6 years old, I was thinking that.”
Guerra, emerita professor of psychological science, grew up to spend most of her professional career studying violence prevention.
When she was dean, she launched the school’s compassion initiative and still teaches a popular online compassion course that this fall enrolled 225 students and scores more are on the waiting list. Fittingly, Guerra and her husband, Kirk Williams, emeritus professor of criminology, law and society, and fellow violence researcher, wrote the recently released book, The 7 Virtues of Highly Compassionate People: Tools for Cultivating a Life of Harmony and Joy (Routledge, 2024)
In an altruistic act, Guerra and Williams are offering the digital version of their book for free, thanks to funding from the Living Peace Foundation. It is available on Kindle, Amazon and on the publisher’s website.
“We wanted to crystallize our thinking on compassion,” Guerra says, explaining why she and Williams wrote the book. “You have all these things out there that are good things like virtues, like kindness and altruism and empathy and mindfulness. And it's a little confusing. What do I need to do to be more compassionate? A random act of kindness? A gratitude journal? What? So, for my class, I developed this ladder of compassion as a way to put it all together in some connected way because all these things are interconnected. You don’t just do one. You don’t just do one act of kindness and you’re done. It’s much more. It’s about living your life in a kinder way, embracing our common humanity.”
Today’s world is troubling, she says. “There’s so much division and negativity and microaggressions. That’s what motivated us to write this book — to promote kindness and genuine caring for each other. The more you travel all around the world, the more you realize we're 99.9% the same. Everybody wants companionship and love and food and shelter and purpose.”
In The 7 Virtues of Highly Compassionate People, Guerra and Williams highlight cutting-edge research, inspiring spiritual teachings and their own life experiences to help readers understand how compassion is the key to a more peaceful and just world. They the seven virtues:
- Mindfulness
- Self‑awareness
- Gratitude
- Perspective taking
- Empathy
- Kindness
- Altruism
“Each of these virtues leads us to do good in the world, to develop kind and caring relationships with others, to respect ourselves, to act collaboratively, to be productive members of society, and to respect our planet Earth,” Guerra and Wiliams write. “Taken together, they provide a foundation not only for doing good but for preventing harm in any way we can, for preventing suffering in our own lives and the lives of others. Indeed, compassion focuses on the prevention or alleviation of suffering.”
The book provides easy-to-follow steps to living a compassionate life. The authors suggest three steps — declutter your physical space, reframe your thoughts and set your intention — and they explain how and why they work.
“Cultivating compassion is not a state to be achieved, an end product, or a destination,” they note. “It’s an orientation to living that involves a daily, disciplined practice, but one well worth doing.”
For those looking for practical tips, Guerra says: “put yourself in other people’s shoes and understand what they’re feeling and see their perspective.”
Listening might be the best tip of all, Guerra adds. “Hear people out and don't always be thinking about what you're going to say next so you can understand what they’re about. And, when you have a choice, what's the kind solution? How can you become kinder and more compassionate?”