Kia ora I am Christina Baird, psychologist and quiet rebel.

We live in a society that keeps asking more of women and telling us to work on ourselves when those demands wear us down.

I believe we can challenge those demands without becoming someone we’re not or giving more of ourselves. Radical Kindness is a way of living that questions what we’ve been taught to give, accept and believe about ourselves as women. It centres restoration, reclamation, rebellion and re-creation as ways of challenging and changing those expectations.

Rather than making ourselves the problem, we can recognise our power to change things as we go about our ordinary lives.

A Little About Me

I came to this work as a researcher studying gender in the workplace. But research alone wasn’t enough — I longed to make change in the real world, on behalf of women who struggled to flourish at work.

That took me into organisations where younger employees were told to adapt to established cultures that had no intention of changing. And then into workplace wellbeing, where exhausted people were sent to resilience seminars while the team dynamics exhausting them went unacknowledged. Women were particularly affected by these diminishing dynamics.

Radical Kindness is what I distilled when I reclaimed my voice, and passion for gender dynamics.

Radical Kindness in Practice

• I believe resistance begins with questioning whether you are the problem, or whether the conditions around you need to change.

• I believe restoring your passion and vitality, is an act of resistance valuing yourself enough to protect your wellbeing.
  

• I believe reclaiming your voice is not necessarily loud. It is the quiet, daily practice of trusting what you know, and who you are.

• I believe we are not here to just burn it all down. We are here to re-create — to build a society where being fully human is expected and supported, in all its diversity and uniqueness.

Receive my fortnightly letters about Radical Kindness, feminist rebellion and ordinary life. Join me as I question what women are expected to give, how they are required to accommodate and explore how we can challenge those expectations without giving more of ourselves.