Keep a small text file or note somewhere called something like kindness.txt. When someone gives you a meaningful compliment or recognition for an achievement or personality trait you have, add it to the list.

A helpful format can be:

# Kindness.txt

## Date 
* Comment
* Person who said it

As you add new items to your list you will begin generating a self concept from external data sources.

If you are very hard on yourself, keeping a kindness.txt has a few benefits.

As a Reminder

Humans need the social bonding and intimacy hormone oxytocin as well as the confidence, comfort, and stability inducing serotonin hormone to thrive in social systems. Reviewing these statements reinforces the intimate relationships you have created, and positive external influence you have on the world.

As an External Data Source

The ego and “I” is a subjective experience that evolved pessimistically. That is survival > thriving from the evolutionary neurobiology perspective. Now that we live in a time of weaponized addiction for profit, control, and influence we are more vulnerable than ever to self-sabotage and the inner tyrant of psychic masochism. Having objective facts and data can allow you to short circuit self-defeating and self-chastising behaviour.

As a Nostalgic Storehouse

Keeping this type of document allows you a central place to capture comments you don’t want to forget. A way to revisit past moments and an origination point to express gratitude to meaningful people in your life. There isn’t really a great place to capture fleeting moments of human experience or kindness besides our brains. However, unfortunately, our brain is more of a hard disk drive than solid state. This means as we age, in lieu of life extending medicine, we will lose these moments. These moments are the thread that stitches together our life experience and you probably want to hold onto them if you can.