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During the recent Olympic Games in Rio the unexpected interaction between two female 5K runners, Abbey D’Agostino from the USA and Nikki Hamblin from New Zealand, colliding in their race made headline news and went viral on social media.
The story is well known by now. Immediately after their collision, Abbey stopped and helped her fellow runner to get up encouraging her to finish the race. A few moments later when Abbey collapsed from a resulting serious knee injury, it was now Nikki stopping and helping Abbey to get up and complete the race. They both finished their respective events to standing ovations and hugged each other with big smiles on their faces at the end. The selfless act of sportsmanship, kindness, and graciousness melted the hearts of many across the globe. And it reminded me that witnessing goodness in action is not only touching and gratifying but it can be intoxicating as well. We thirst for goodness.
Goodness isn’t a word that you hear too much anymore to describe people and behavior. But perhaps we should use it more often... and a lot more often.
What do we mean by goodness anyway? It is defined, in part, as...
1. Moral excellence; virtue.
2. Kindly feeling; kindness; generosity.
3. Excellence of quality.
If we want to improve our increasingly polarized, broken, and too often uncivil and corrupt world then we should place more emphasis on goodness as an important virtue to nurture in ourselves and in others as well. And in the spirit of the groundbreaking research of psychologist Albert Bandura on observational learning, we should attend to goodness behavior, model it, repeat it, and help people to be motivated to engage in it as well. We want to create a culture where goodness is highlighted, reinforced, and encouraged in all aspects of life and for everyone.
Being good and therefore, by definition, being kind, generous, virtuous, and striving towards high quality should be expected, nurtured, modeled, and encouraged by all and in all settings. We should start this training very early in life as well.
Goodness has its own rewards. People like and trust good people. People are inspired by those who seek goodness and behave as such.
The Olympic runners, Abbey and Nikki, certainly demonstrated good sportsmanship and were rewarded with flattering media coverage and a rare sportsmanship award given by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that has been awarded only 17 times in the history of the Olympics (and thus certainly much rarer than any gold medal).
But perhaps what people really related and responded to was the goodness that each runner demonstrated to each other and how much we desire, and even thirst for, goodness within our very troubled and broken world.
In the spirit of full and complete disclosure, I have been following the career of Abbey D’Agostino for several years as she recently graduated from Dartmouth College and ran track there while my son is currently a student on Dartmouth’s track team. It was also heartening to hear that my son, and others associated with Dartmouth Track and Field, were completely thrilled and inspired by Abbey’s behavior and mentioned that it was certainly very much in character for her.
There are many example of goodness out there outside of events as exciting and attention grabbing as the Olympic Games. Perhaps we need to attend to goodness more often and model it as much as we can for a better world for all of us. If we embrace, encourage, and reinforce goodness in self and others we could pivot our world towards a much better place.
So, what do you think?
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Copyright 2016 by Thomas G. Plante, PhD, ABPP
