When someone compliments you, how do you feel? Are compliments always a good thing, or can they actually sometimes be bad? These are the questions I set out to answer. The other day, I complimented as many people as I could. I then asked a follow up question to the people I complimented: what is your opinion on compliments? Some of their answers actually ended up surprising me.
Before I started my little experiment, my guess was that most people really enjoy compliments and think people should compliment more often. At the very beginning, this was true. A few people were very touched by my compliments. One even almost teared up a bit. Their response was then to compliment me in return which also made me feel good. However, as the day went on, I discovered these kind of people to be the minority.
The most common response was awkwardness or the assumption that I was just fishing for a compliment myself. These people had the opinion that we compliment people too much, and after listening to them, I realized they were right. For instance, whenever my mom tells me she is proud of me, I don’t think much of it. But when my dad tells me he is proud of me, it makes my day. This is because my mom compliments me a lot more frequently than my dad does. Therefore, if you compliment someone too much, there isn’t much substance to your compliments in the future.
I also found that some people do think compliments are a good thing, but they need to go hand in hand with criticism. When you tell someone good job, that doesn’t do anything for them except maybe make them feel good for a moment. Instead, when you tell someone they did a good job but in the future can improve in a certain area, it helps them out more in the long run. This was something that never occurred to me. Sometimes we get so caught up in trying to make people feel good that we actually end up hurting them. I learned that it’s okay to give constructive criticism, and it isn’t something we should feel guilty about.
So overall, I discovered there is a balance. Sometimes we don’t compliment enough. Sometimes we over compliment. And sometimes we need to actually tack on a bit of constructive criticism with that compliment. I learned that I need to work on the latter two. Which ones do you need to work on?
Amy's Questions 