Underestimating Compliments Has Career Costs—Even When They Feel Weird
📝 usncan Note: Underestimating Compliments Has Career Costs—Even When They Feel Weird
Disclaimer: This content has been prepared based on currently trending topics to increase your awareness.
When you have difficulty accepting compliments (the truth about yourself), it can hamper your personal happiness and career success.
getty
It’s ironic, isn’t it? So many of us have ambition and drive, yet we undermine our careers in small, incremental ways without realizing it. Modesty is a great attribute to have. But in the extreme, self-deprecating reactions to compliments can prevent you from seeing the truth about yourself and your capabilities. Underestimating compliments with a flood of emotions like discomfort, disbelief or embarrassment, can lead to personal and career costs.
The Career Costs Of Underestimating Compliments
Neuroscientists insist that the human mind is like Velcro for negativity and Teflon for positivity. We’re hardwired to automatically accept the inner self-talk that focuses on our shortcomings and downplays our worth and ignore or dismiss positive feedback from others.
If you’re like most people, you find it hard to accept compliments because they don’t fit with how you see yourself. When you receive outside validation from others, it can create confusion. Flattering comments clash with the inner critical voice that you have on a daily basis. And odds are that you allow the critical voice to dwarf the compliment, so that the result is to dismiss personal and career potential.
When you receive a compliment, chances are the mental mismatch between how you see yourself and how others see you can cause you to return the favor to take the attention off of yourself. Or you might question if the compliment is genuine or wonder if they want something from you.
You might even feel uncomfortable because you think you’ve misled people. That dissonance adds another internal discomfort called impostor syndrome in which you call yourself a fraud and are flooded with shame and doubt. This underestimation of yourself throws you into a cycle of career disappointments, which in turn lowers the value you put on yourself.
Tips To Stop Underestimating Compliments
I spoke with Jon Gordon, author of 7 Commitments of a Great Team, consultant to numerous CEOs, NFL, NBA and MLB coaches and championship teams and an inspirational teacher. “The minute doubt comes in, take notice of it and then take notes on it,” Gordon advises. “Whether on a piece of paper or on your phone.”
“Then, next to those doubts, add words of encouragement that you would say to those doubts. That’s self-talk. I teach people to talk to themselves instead of listening to themselves. Those doubts are NOT you talking. DON’T LISTEN. Talk words of encouragement to yourself instead. It may sound silly but it works.”
He’s right. It might sound silly, but neuroscience backs that self-talk can boost career success. The neuroscience of self-talk shows using your inner voice in a certain way can mitigate your stress level, your response to setbacks and the degree to which you thrive on the football field or in your career field. Reflective self-talk while performing tasks gives you self-regulation and prevents the lightning-fast, reflexive emotional self-talk from making impulsive decisions that lead to errors and mistakes.
Gordon gives examples of self-affirmations–facts to say to yourself when feelings of doubt are clouding them–that are science-backed, too. They act as “cognitive expanders,” giving you a more objective picture of yourself than the emotionally-subjective view that clouds the truth.
- “I am strong and capable.”
- “I can overcome this challenge.”
- “I have the power to make a positive impact.”
- “I am resilient and will learn from this experience.”
- “I choose to focus on the positive possibilities.
Here are six more tips to become more comfortable when compliments feel weird and to start to accept the truth about yourself, reflected from the perspectives of others:
1. Develop a wide angle lens.
Keeping your eye on the big picture allows you to build on the many positive aspects of your workday. Think of a camera. You can replace the zoom lens—which devalues you—by putting on a wide-angle lens which helps you see bigger possibilities and potentials and more self-value. And for each heart-wrenching negative emotional experience, create at least three heartfelt positive emotional experiences that build your self-worth.
2. High-five your “tallcomings.”
When you constantly focus on your shortcomings, you become blind to the strengths and talents you have. To offset this imbalance, give that negative voice a name like “the under-estimator.” Then, learn to high-five your “tallcomings” alongside your shortcomings. When the under-estimator speaks up, make it a habit to throw modesty out the window and name as many of your tallcomings as you can—what you’re good at, the skills and talents you possess and what you’ve achieved that your under-estimator denounces.
3. Cultivate self-compassion.
Self-compassion is like a best friend that talks you off the ledge, bounces you back when you feel disheartened and propels you closer to your goals. It orders you the proverbial pizza when you need it. Pep talks, affirmations or an arm around your shoulder are good medicine to co-exist with your under-estimator’s oppression.
4. Practice story editing.
Story editing is a form of self-talk that preempts your under-estimator from seizing control with its bludgeoning feedback. When you hear the under-estimator’s made-up story circling in your mind like a school of sharks, observe it much like you would inspect a blemish on your hand. Story editing revises the under-estimator’s story just as you would revise a written report. And the under-estimator’s story is no longer the only story circling in your head. Story editing takes you out of the under-estimator’s perspective and catapults you into the objective, bird’s-eye perspective of an outside observer as if it’s happening to someone else.
5. Recall past victories.
Your mind is hard-wired to give the under-estimator the power to overestimate any career challenge. Studies show when you’re confronted with a challenging work situation and recall a time you mastered a similar hardship, it boosts your confidence and self-worth and helps you scale career obstacles. Point to lessons learned and underscore ways you grew stronger through previous hard knocks.
6. Be open to feedback.
You can’t have a front without a back or an up without a down. So consider requesting feedback from coworkers whose opinions you trust. After a performance review from a manager or supervisor, take the constructive feedback, instead of getting defensive, and turn it to your advantage. Asking yourself how feedback can improve your performance is in itself a building block to self-worth that can help you arrive at your career destination.
Nobody gets positive feedback one hundred percent of the time. One good habit is to reverse the automatic reaction of underestimating compliments and start overestimating compliments for the value they have in helping you recognize the truth about yourself.
