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Recently, I was at a friend’s house on a day when she had whipped up a batch of soup. We were in the kitchen when her husband came for a bowl of it. After he tasted a spoonful, he looked up and said to her, “I love your soup. This is delicious.” She said, “Thank you,” then almost immediately added, “But you never liked my other soups.”
She took his warm praise, and yet in the very same moment added an old complaint to it, ruining the compliment completely.
A lot of us do this constantly. We are vocal with criticism, but silent on compliments.
In the last newsletter, we talked about how cheap it is to say no to an idea and how expensive it is to come up with one.
When it comes to professional and personal relationships, being open to people’s ideas is a key skill—and so is being able to take a proper compliment. Here are two small things that you can do to transform the way you communicate:
1) Omit “But” From All Your Compliments
“But” is the one word I know that causes the most damage when it’s used at the wrong time. Consider this:
You’re sitting with someone you care about, having a genuine and warm conversation, and you say, “You are one of the kindest people I have ever met, but I wish you would call your mother more often.” All the other person hears in that instance is the second half of your sentence.
Many studies have shown that one criticism can outweigh a whole handful of compliments. The word “but” acts like an eraser, eliminating everything said before it.
The fix here is to spend good time giving a compliment—and stop yourself from inserting a “but.”
2) Say the Small Things, Often
Relationships need more than big gestures: the special dinner the weekend away, the long speech where you finally say everything you have been holding inside.
It’s tiny daily moments that hold people together—the thank you for picking up the milk, and the compliments like, “I noticed how hard you worked on that” or “Your soup is delicious” . . . with nothing tacked onto the end of it.
John Gottman, a well-known psychologist who has spent 50 years doing couples research, found that the ones who remain together tend to keep five warm moments running for every cold one.
His advice, after all those years of study, comes down to three plain words: Small things often.
So why are we all hoarding them? If a kind word is so easy to give and so powerful to receive, why do so many of us have a hard time using them? It may be ego or insecurity that stops us.
Saying something genuinely warm, out loud, with no little qualifier is a vulnerable thing to do, and a lot of us would rather not feel that exposed with our compliments.
Praising someone with no edits can feel, in some childish corner of our minds, like it makes us smaller—as if there is only so much good in the room, and handing some of it to someone else leaves less of it for you. There is even research suggesting that one reason we swallow our compliments is a quiet fear that the nice thing will cost us, that it will make us look soft, or somehow lower in the pecking order.
The Bottom Line
What gives me hope is that the repair for this issue is so small it fits inside a single sentence. Say the kind thing the moment you think it, before the “but” has time to climb in behind it. Name the thing you actually appreciate out loud, even when it feels strangely exposing to do it.
Because the fact is most of us are never going to wound the people we love with one big terrible thing.
We are far more likely to do it the quiet way, by holding back the warmth we are capable of giving, a little at a time, every ordinary day, until one morning we look up and wonder where our relationships went.
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