How I Learnt to Receive Praise without Cringing

The Cheeky Girls.

Yep, when I was in year 8 at school (13 years old) I wrote a persuasive article about why they were the greatest pop artists of all time.

Don’t worry if you don’t know who they are, they were trash but very likeable at the time in a kind of guilty pleasure type of way.

I’ll never forget my English teacher at the time went crazy! He loved it so much he read it out to the whole class.

The thing is back then I was an empty vessel. The shower of compliments filled me with pride. I could receive the praise and feel at peace with it.

So what changed, why am I now becoming aware of the resistance to praise that I feel?

Why are ‘The Cheeky Girls’ the last memory I have of feeling completely at ease with praise?

When someone gives you a compliment or expresses gratitude for something and you respond by cringing—

You’re not only creating discomfort for yourself but also for the other person who is just trying to be nice.

We need to stop the mental sabotage and allow ourselves to accept peoples kindness and admiration. We are missing out on valuable opportunities to connect with people and increase our self-awareness.

Like many people I’ve struggled to accept praise for the majority of my life. Its only recently that I’ve considered the meaning of it both personally and for people in general.

Suspicion

When I receive praise I immediately become suspicious, like I’m a character in Game of Thrones and I’ve been handed a poisoned glass of wine.

I pause whilst holding the glass to my lips but not drinking it until I’ve fully finished my assessment of the persons intentions. Their face, tone, body language is scrutinised carefully.

All sorts of crazy schemes play out, I have to be sure this isn’t a Trojan horse being sent to infiltrate and tear me down from the inside.

While all this is happening inside my head I’m either staring at them silently or saying random disjointed words that would make a dysphasic stroke patient sound coherent.

Not the best way to make someone feel appreciated for their compliment!

Self Motivation

Being someone who is highly self motivated means that the effort I put into working comes from within myself. I’ve never really been one for doing something purely for the sake of impressing other people.

When I first became a doctor and people said “oh your parents must be so proud.”

I’d just say “yeah they are”… As much as I appreciate them, their pride has never influenced my motivation.

My own evaluation of myself has always meant more to me than other peoples.

I remember being introduced to the concept of being a role model at secondary school. I couldn’t understand it, why would anyone want to be like me. I didn’t think I was anything special.

The thought of anyone trying to be like me made me self-conscious and uncomfortable.

I suppose I had my own role models as well but these were all fictional super heroes. It was the ideas of heroism, intelligence, strength, moral justice and righteousness that I looked up to.

I didn’t feel like I was worthy to be among those role models in the eyes of anyone else.

Maybe my standards were too high. I didn't want to accept praise as I felt it would somehow diminish my motivation to keep growing.

Or maybe I've always been detached from reality and caught up comparing myself to the impossible ideals of fictional characters.

There's a spectrum of praise from "good job" to superlatives like "Amazing" or "Incredible". I can handle "good job", but I’m just a normal guy I don't think I deserve to be on the same level as Spiderman or The Hulk.

Dissonance

The way you see yourself plays an important role in how you respond to receiving positive praise.

Having low self esteem is generally accepted as being a cause of resistance.

When we tend towards a more negative self-image of ourselves and someone says something nice and positive about us it can be jarring.

It throws us into a temporary state of confusion where we are questioning our reality.

The greater the difference between your perceived ability and the complimenters perception— the harder it is to accept the praise.

Not everyone who cringes from compliments has low self esteem however.

Although I work hard to manage my social anxiety and don't like to be put in the spotlight I think my self esteem is generally quite high.

One of my favourite quotes from Bruce Lee describes it well.

Surprise

You are with yourself 24/7, no one knows you better than you know yourself.

What they see is an edited highlight clip rather than the full footage.

When your mind is occupied by the monotony of the full footage it can be surprising when someone praises a highlight that you were unaware of.

This sudden surprise can temporarily stun you.

No one enjoys being snuck up on. It might be funny afterwards but in the moment that surge of adrenaline that makes your heart pound can be quite uncomfortable.

This can be associated with a feeling of emotional vulnerability in that moment of unexpected praise.

Someone has rapidly changed your emotional state and you've lost control. You're options are:

1)Regaining control

2)Escaping the situation.

3)Being open and honest that you are taken aback

Regaining control is the typical unconcious reaction that people who resist praise go for and this is what causes the most awkwardness.

Take for example someone compliments your hairstyle, you may respond:

1. Oh, I haven't had time to get it cut lately, so it's kind of a mess."

2. "Really? I just woke up like this."

3. "Thanks, but I think it's overdue for a trim."

4. “I'm not really feeling it myself.”

None of the responses accept the compliment. They either, deflect, negate or diminish to regain back control of their emotional state.

These protective reactions used to be my go to when someone praised me.

Fear of Expectations

When you receive praise for something it can set up a future expectation that you feel you must meet.

You might feel pressured to perform to the same standard consistently and that itself can interfer with your quality. You may feel that if you fail to meet this standard your already low self esteem will take a bigger hit.

In order to lower the expectations back into your comfort zone you reject the praise or pretend to accept it.

Since I started writing 3 months ago I've received compliments from people, but I could never fully allow myself to gloat.

I work really hard and spent a lot of time thinking and writing. Yet the praise I received was based on the final product. I feared that no one knew how much effort went into it.

I questioned what would happen if my writing wasn't consistently good;

1) I didn't want to make people feel wrong about their assessment.

2) I didn't want to get all hyped up just to come crashing down when I have a bad week.

Thats leads me to another realisation, in that I’m a lot more receptive to compliments on my effort rather than my outcome.

The effort is something that can be consistently replicated whereas there’s no guarantee that you achieve exactly the same outcome.

I read in the book ‘Mindset’, by Dr Carol Dweck, that one of the best ways to raise children with a growth mindset is to praise their effort rather than their outcome.

I’ve always had a growth mindset and valued the effect of hardwork, so I think that plays a role in the type of praise I’m able to receive comfortably.

How to Overcome the Resistance

As I’ve reflected on some of my own reasons for resistance to praise and some of the common universal factors I started to understand what I needed to overcome it.

Gratitude

You can never really go wrong with abit of gratitude.

What do you visualise when you picture your general state of mind most of the time?

For example some people may picture something akin to an Elephants Graveyard.

Whereas some people may picture Pride Rock during Simbas birth.

Gratitude is the sunshine and rainbows and butterflies and ice cream that turns the negative scene of an Elephants Graveyard into the positive scene of Simbas birth.

The thing is that Gratitude and Praise paint the same kind of picture in our minds.

When someone praises you they are introducing the sunshine and rainbows etc into your state of mind.

If your state of mind is an Elephants Graveyard and someone shines sunlight into it you are going to be blinded.

Whereas if you practice Gratitude you’re maintaining a positive state of mind constantly so that the sunshine of praise adds nicely to the scene you already have.

Openess

Stop being so obsessed with yourself.

This goes back to connecting with people and realising that they see the world from a different perspective than we do.

If someone thinks you’ve done something well, that is their reality. Even if you don’t agree, be open to seeing what you’ve done through their eyes.

Imagine how awful you’d feel if you gave someone food as a kindness but they ended up having a bad allergic reaction to it.

You’re choosing to start choking and swelling in dramatic fashion when you could just simply accept the kindness without anyone being traumatised.

Praise isn’t about you, its about how the person giving it feels about you.

Explore Associated Limiting Beliefs

Limiting beliefs can effect how we interpret praise to various degrees

For example,

Some people may hold beliefs where they perceive praise as a form of ‘babying’. Therefore they might interpret praise not as encouragement but as patronizing.

Some people might believe that praise is genuinely a prelude to some form of manipulation. I’m definetely guilty of that.

Some people may believe that praise always has to be reciprocated even if they don’t have anything genuine to say.

Some people might not even believe in the concept of praise at all.

Ask yourself why you can’t accept praise? When you get the strongest resistance reactions analyse them:

• What was the praise about?

• Who was it from?

• Where were you?

When you’re intentional about looking for the cause you might just unearth a limiting belief you weren’t aware of.

After the glory of my cheeky girls article and a few others my writing career took a massive hit.

The following school year the class was separated into sets for English and I was secretly devastated to not be put in the top set. My writing was judged against the exam criteria and I was only getting average marks. I hated having to write about the boring content that populated the school syllabus and restricted my freedom of thought.

Eventually I developed the unconcious belief that I was no good at writing. This is why however many years later I felt uncomfortable about receiving praise for my writing.

Correct your Limiting Beliefs and you will lose the resistance to receiving praise in that area.

Summary

Causes of cringing from praise:

• Low Self esteem

• Cognitive dissonance

• Surprise reaction

• Creating future expectations

• Cultural influences

• Negative beliefs about praise

How to recieve praise:

• Practicing Gratitude

• Correct your Limiting Beliefs

• Keeping an Open mind and acknowledging the perspectives of others

“Thankyou.”

Thats all for now

Lewis

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