Purpose




Thoughts of a messed up Christian saved by God's grace





Thursday, July 19, 2012

Accepting a compliment

Too many people are like me. We have a hard time accepting a compliment. Example:
Person: "I really enjoyed your piano special this morning."
Me: "thanks, but my sister plays much better than me".

That IS true, she can play better, and I am pretty sure I replied with that more than once in my life.

Why do we have a hard time just accepting a compliment with a simple "thank-you"?
One reason could be that we are raised to fight against pride, and we fear by just accepting the compliment, we will appear, or actually be, proud. For me, I have fought low self esteem and image all my life, it is actually hard for me to believe I am any good at something, and the people are just trying to be nice.

I was talking about this with someone recently, and they made a good point. They said something like this: "you not accepting compliments is a slap in the other persons face..    your making THEM feel bad for being kind to you.  accept the gift they are giving...   you would never just say no thanks at Christmas and birthday right? So often you don't want to be prideful but its not about YOU, think of how THEY feel, and get over yourself..." (Pretty much verbatim there)
They had a good point. We may as well tell them they are wrong, and don't know what they are talking about. Sound rude? We may not intend to be so, but we are being so. And maybe not all people giving the compliment will be bothered by that kind of response, but some will.

It had made me think and decide to turn over a new leaf. From now on, when I receive a compliment, I shall just politely say "thank-you." It is NOT pride to do so, and it will make the other person feel better than if you shrug the compliment off. So someone else is better at it than you, or you made one mistake while playing or singing? So what. Get over yourself and accept the compliment. It is what you'd want done if you were complimenting.

No comments:

Post a Comment