It is often assumed that we give compliments and acknowledgement for the benifit of the reciever. But consider the other side of the coin: what does giving compliment do to you the person giving compliments. I would like to argue that giving professional compliments is as important for the giver as the reciever, but in different ways.

Rayya Ghoul once shoved me a training exercise called nag-nag-nag which I’ve found immensly useful. Perhaps you would like to try a little experiment based on this exercise. The next time you encounter someone who nags and complains about something. (and preferably when they are not nagging about you, that makes the experiment too difficult) As they are complaining, keep quiet for a few minutes and just listen, don’t comment either positively or negatively. After a few minutes, when there is a gap in the nagging, do some magic. The magic is to give the person sincere compliments about things you heard in the nagging. That’s right: sincere well-grounded compliments. And real ones too, they should be derived from someting in what the person is saying.

…could you do it? Amazingly this is quite possible to do. If you did the experiment, how did you find compliments to give? You probably did so by listening differently. You hear resources: commitment, observational skills, sense of what’s right, willingness to do the right thing, coping skills, ambitions, aspirations, honesty etc. Would it be as easy to hear these things if you had not decided to give sincere compliments after a while? Probably not. Your ears would be hurting from all the negativity, itching to either encourage or discourage. So, the commitment to give sincere, real, compliments, tunes you in to seeing and hearing resources, the positive in the negative. In this sense the solution focused practise to end a conversation with acknowledgement, validation, and compliments works both ways. For the giver, it trains you to listen differently be receptive to resourses, skills and positive intentions. For the reciever, if it is well done, it acknowledges and validates.

So, the next time you meet someone who nags and complains. Be thankful for that they give you the opportunity to train yourself in constructive receptivity. And this is something completely different than new-agy positity. Remember, it is the positive that is included in the negative. The negative is still there. But it is this positivity that we need to cope with the negative.