For about 2 years I delivered a one day Leadership Essentials program for the human enterprise in a major public sector organisation.
One of the features of the program is pointing out what people are doing right.
We touch on compliments, and ask people to do a short exercise where they compliment each other (sincerely). They find it difficult for several reasons:
- they feel awkward complimenting a stranger
- they feel awkward being complimented by a stranger
- they don’t know how to accept a compliment
Generally I suggest they accept a compliment by saying “Thank you”.
So I appreciated this opinion piece on how to accept a compliment.
In the context of the training program I know that it’s NOT as a conversation starter that we give compliments, and in the context of the world, I’m on board with the author of this piece that it’s a conversation starter and rapport builder.
I sincerely love, then, this piece which talks about WHY we find compliments so hard to take (image below is taken from there, so that you may follow it and be enchanted) 🙂
And then put it with this piece about how complimenting people actually makes a difference!
