Why does praise never really go in?
Committed Self-Doubters!
Before we plunge into this week’s deep dive, an 🔔*important feelings update*🔔
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We spent hours on the phone. It was delightful, it was intense, and it told us a *lot* about what people are looking for in this strange and tender club of ours. And...
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(*drum roll please*)
...later this week.
Watch your inbox for a special Big Feels announcement, and all shall be revealed.
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Now back to our regular programming... Why does praise never really go in??
We’re very good at dismissing praise
Sensitive types are very good at finding reasons to dismiss praise. We see all the angles, the reasons that someone’s praise doesn’t really count.
‘They don’t know what they’re talking about.’
‘They’re just being polite.’
Often I experience praise as a kind of pressure. It's why, if I've made a good first impression on somebody, I want to leave the room immediately.
‘Shit. They think I’m this charming all the time? Now I have to keep this up.’
We can even turn praise into criticism
Through this lens, we can even turn praise into criticism:
‘They think I need special encouragement.’
‘If they think *that* was good, they must have a really low bar for what they think I’m capable of.’
It's like a superpower. That makes you feel awful. Even when people are being nice.
(Yum.)
This is how I imagine praise works for other people:
You may be better at people than you realise (and that may be the problem)
Looking for hidden meaning in what people say, second-guessing their praise. These are highly developed communication skills. It’s just that you may have honed them a little too much.
In episode #001 of the Big Feels podcast, one of our guests Ian put it this way:
“Part of the reason that I can find things hard is because I overuse my strengths. I’m really really smart at looking for the nuance in things.
But I look for the hidden message in *everything*. It makes my life a bit complex, and I’ve learnt I need not to be so diligent at using my strengths.”
Yep yep yep.
When we second-guess every positive interaction, we turn potentially nourishing moments into a launching pad for further self-interrogation and doubt.
I call this ‘praise-shaming’. The act of taking well-intentioned positive feedback, and using it to highlight your own shortcomings.
Praise-shaming isn’t hard-wired
There’s good news here though.
At a certain point, you do eventually start to wonder if maybe (just maybe) you’re not full of shit.
For me, this has finally started to happen in the past year.
Maybe it’s that I’m 35. Maybe it’s that going through Big Life Stuff gives you a new take on things. Or maybe it’s a happy side effect of baring my soul through a fortnightly newsletter for 30+ issues.
The point is, this tendency to turn praise against myself isn’t as hard-wired as I thought.
Put enough wins on the board - have enough interactions with other humans that don’t end in you being publicly shamed - and you do start to wonder if you might just be an ok person.
You still won’t necessarily believe the praise that comes your way, but you won’t interrogate it either, you stop using it as a stick to beat yourself with.
The answer isn’t to fill up your praise vase
But here’s the thing. For sensitive cats, I don’t think it’s as simple as finding a way to finally believe people when they praise you. I don’t think it’s about plugging all the holes in your praise vase so you can keep it full.
I think that maybe, for sensitive cats, praise just isn’t the most useful currency.
The thing about praise is, it’s a form of judgement. And it tends to be very definitive.
Let’s say you’ve just done something difficult, like speaking in front of a crowd. Afterwards your friends might say...
You were amazing!
Oh my god that was so good!
Lovely stuff, but not all that nuanced.
Our inside experience is usually so much messier. I think I mostly did a good job but also there are ten things I’d change and I’m still not sure if that one particular person in the third row was hating every minute.
It’s not that praise is ‘false’, it’s just too simple
If you spend a lot of time in your own head, wondering why the world seems so simple for other people while your brain is going at a thousand miles an hour, then praise can often feel like a gross simplification of your inside experience.
So the praise feels ‘false’, not because the person praising you is lying, but simply because it doesn’t match your inside reality.
And since praise is so black and white, if that praise doesn’t ring true, it kind of makes sense that our reaction to it is to go drastically the other way. We think: ‘well if it’s not great, it must be awful, right?’
Not false, just fictional
So what’s the alternative, if praise doesn’t work for us?
There’s a funny thing that’s happening for me lately, when someone tells me they like my work, or they enjoy my company.
I’m less interested in it.
I think to myself, ‘oh that’s nice that they think that about this fictional Graham they have in their head. He sounds lovely.’
In other words, you bypass the praise vase altogether, like this:
Praise isn't really about you anyway
This way, there’s room for that praise to be what it is: an expression of how my friend is feeling in that moment, when they think about me. In some ways this is just another way of deflecting praise, but somehow it feels different.
By not taking praise personally, I’m not doing any favours for my self-worth, but that’s kind of the point. If every bit of praise sparks an internal referendum on your worthiness as a human, that’s not exactly a recipe for inner peace.
I can still hear the praise, I can acknowledge it has a degree of truth for the person expressing it. And then, I can leave it there.
(That's all for this issue folks. Remember, if you want a sneak preview of the Big New Thing coming later this week, just hit reply to this email.)
Update: I wrote a version of this for Tiny Buddha, and I liked how it came out after a few helpful prods from the editor there. So check out the ending of this one for some more thoughts on this topic.
