Be kind, not carpet. Kind people still have a spine under the sweater.

Kindness gets confused with compliance, and the confusion costs kind people a great deal. Being warm toward someone does not require agreeing with them, doing what they ask, or absorbing whatever they bring, and treating those as one thing turns a genuine quality into a vulnerability other people learn to use. Warmth and firmness sit together comfortably.

Practise disagreeing pleasantly this week, in your ordinary voice with no apology in front of it. Say the kind version of the hard answer. None of the kindness is lost by having an actual position underneath it.