What it means to be considerate and why it matters

A month ago, I travelled solo to the hills for a workshop. As someone who often travels alone, I’ve realised that what fascinates me most isn’t the destination itself, but the people I meet and the lessons I gather along the way.

As the workshop began, I met a couple of people I instantly connected with and we ended up spending a lot of time together.

On the third day, as I was heading back to my room, one of these new friends quietly slipped a packed slice of cake into my bag. While I was in the hills, Mumbai was experiencing torrential rains and my home had started to leak. I was trying to coordinate with my family to deal with it, so I couldn’t join my friends when they went out.

This quiet act of consideration touched me. In such a simple way, my new friend was saying, “We went out, and we thought of you.”

On a day that felt particularly difficult, that small gesture stayed with me. It made me think about how we underestimate—or overlook—the impact that acts of consideration can have. It’s a beautiful feeling when you realise that someone thinks of you even when you aren’t present and then communicates that thought beautifully.

While we do use kindness and consideration together to describe people, I feel being considerate involves kindness at its core and then goes a step further by being aware of the other person’s thoughts and feelings. It has a quality of attentiveness and care built into it.

Beyond kindness

It’s odd but I haven’t found a singular definition for “considerate” among psychologists, although we do have definitions for kindness, compassion and empathy which are similar concepts. An act that comes from a place of consideration immediately makes us feel seen, evokes warmth, belonging and most importantly, gratitude along with a reignited trust in how one sees the world.

The gesture stayed with me because this was a new friendship. I hadn’t expected anything, and certainly not that someone I had only recently met would remember my love for desserts and bring me something they knew I would enjoy.

In my experience as a therapist, clients talk about how the absence of consideration in friendships, at the workplace, and in intimate relationships is what hurts them. More often than not, people don’t have the vocabulary to articulate it. Sometimes people who have good intentions and want our well-being can still not be considerate. I see this play out very often in the context of family and couple dynamics. Sometimes people can be kind and generous, yet not considerate.

Social attunement

For us to be considerate to someone, we need to operate from a place of social attunement. We need to pay attention, notice what they are saying, the verbal and non-verbal cues and most importantly, put energy and time into understanding where they are coming from and their needs. While kindness and generosity are crucial, consideration feels extra special because through their choice of words or actions people meet your needs in real time and then respond in a way that feels truly personal

When people are caught up in their own world because they have limited capacity for awareness, a lack of curiosity or difficulty empathising with and appreciating another person’s point of view, they are less likely to be considerate.

In those moments, it’s often not a lack of kindness that gets in the way, but a lack of attunement to someone else’s experience. When this happens, people feel hurt, unseen and invalidated because communicating what one wants in these moments can be particularly tough if the other person is not attuned.

We need to ask ourselves how we can hike our capacity for consideration. We also need to examine if we are getting in our own way by not letting others know our needs or by not trusting the world. Both of these can prevent us from being open to the quiet acts of consideration that others extend to us.

Sonali Gupta is a Mumbai-based psychotherapist and author.