00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 168, "Accepting Compliments." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright, hello there, my cute friends! So glad to have you here with me today. I love what we're going to talk about. But before we start, I would like to just thank you for being here and thank you for sharing this and thank you for moving forward into a better space. A lot of you, I will probably never know what you're doing with this and how this is working in your lives and I just appreciate the fact that I get to be a part of your lives and and help you through some tough stuff and help you have better relationships with yourself and with God and with other people. And so thank you for being here. 

01:00 

We're going to talk today about accepting compliments. So here's a question, do you have a tough time accepting compliments? Alright, if you say "yes" then I just have to promise you you are not alone. I have noticed a lot of women really struggle to know what to say when they are being complimented. It's funny that we are often taught that giving sincere compliments is such a valuable skill to have and yet when we do give them, they are very often discounted or when other people give them to us, we often discount those compliments as well. And I think the main reason why I personally feel uncomfortable accepting a compliment is because of a lack of self-love or a lack of self-acceptance. Isn't it fascinating how much of what we talk about seems to come back to this to this this element of self-love? So let's kind of put these pieces together, shall we, so that I can show you how this works. 

01:58 

So if you go back and listen to Episode number 87, it's called "The Law of the Lid." It's going to go into this first part of this concept a little bit more deeply, but let me just give you a quick overview. Basically, the Law of the Lid states that the love we have for ourselves acts as a lid of sorts for all of the love that we can feel for others and that we can feel from others. So everything is based from the love that I have for myself. Let me give you an example. When I love myself at, let's say, a three out of 10, I can only comprehend all love in my life at a three, which means I can only really love others at a three. It also means that when people love me, I can only feel love at a three because that is all I am capable of comprehending. Even if they have a level eight love to offer me. All I can feel is a three. That is why so many people can feel unloved when they have a host of people around them who love them desperately, because we don't feel other people's love. Love does not jump out of one person's body and into another's. If you love me, I don't feel your love. You feel your love. Your love doesn't come and morph into my body. The love that we perceive that we feel from others is actually our thoughts about their actions that are in our circumstance line. So someone does something, a circumstance, and we have a thought about it. And then we have a feeling such as love. So our ability to feel someone's love has nothing to do with them, except for their actions, and it has everything to do with our ability to perceive and to create that love within ourselves. Hence the Law of the Lid. I can only create a feeling of love in myself to the amount that I can understand love in general. And all the love that we have in our lives is created by us and in us. Whether it is our own love, feeling love for another person, or feeling loved by another person. 

04:17 

So getting back to accepting compliments, when we have a serious lack of self-love, someone can give us a beautiful, sincere compliment. That is a circumstance. And our thought will end up being something like "they can't really mean that," or "that's not true." And we think those thoughts because we don't think those thoughts about ourselves. We don't love ourselves enough to compliment ourselves or to see the amazingness within us. Seeing our own amazingness, feeling self love does not mean that we are arrogant or self-centered. Arrogance comes when we are comparing ourselves to others. Self-love comes when we truly appreciate and accept the person we are, the struggles and the triumphs, the weaknesses and the strengths, all of it. When we fully accept our journey as imperfect and as crooked as it is, and we embrace that it is the perfect journey for us. When we appreciate that we are always seeking to do our best even when we don't and we mess things up. When we embrace our humanity as who God created us to be and as part of our process in life to grow and move forward. When we can learn a piece at a time to move into these spaces, our love, self-love will grow and expand.

05:38 

And when our self-love increases, so will our confidence in our ability to engage with the world in the way that we want to. When we see our own greatness, as imperfect as that greatness may be, then we can also begin to accept when others see that greatness. When we refuse to acknowledge our own greatness, then when others see it and share it with us, we can't even begin to see it and it makes us feel uncomfortable. When we see it, then we will see what others see. This is one of those times when it always starts with us. So the first step to accepting compliments is to learn to increase our self-love. We have to believe it first. We have to accept it in us first. We have to learn to not only see our own talents and abilities, but to appreciate and accept them as well. I have so many podcasts on self-love. Go look at them, look at the list, go give them a listen if this is something that you want a refresher on, that you feel you need to deepen in yourself. 

06:44 

Sometimes, though, even when we have a lot of self-love, we can still struggle to accept compliments. And here's one reason why I believe this is. I think that we may feel that we are bragging or that we are prideful if we accept other people's compliments. And honestly, when we have practiced and practiced and worked our butts off to become really good at something, acknowledging that we're good at it does not mean that we're arrogant. Arrogance comes when we're saying that we're better than others. It is laced with comparison. So if Michael Jordan says something about how good of a basketball player he is, or if Pavarotti mentions that he's a great singer, do we get all over them about being arrogant? No, because they are. They are some of the best at what they do, and there is nothing arrogant about stating a fact. If we complimented them for their talent and their ability, and they denied us in saying, "oh, I'm really not that good," it would be really strange and awkward, because we all know that they're good, and we know that they know that they're good. And it would be weird to have them say, "no, I'm really not that good." 

07:54 

So knowing that we're good at something is really just acknowledging that, listen, I see it. I get it. I've worked hard at this. We have worked hard for it. It's a fact that we're good at it. If someone tells you that you make a delightful pan of brownies and you do and you know you do, there's nothing prideful in saying "thank you. It's my favorite recipe." When someone compliments you on a project you did at work, there is nothing arrogant in saying, "thank you, we worked really hard on it." Owning what you're great at is not arrogance. It's confidence and it's self-love and it's beautiful. 

08:30 

So you may be someone who's been working on your self-love and you feel as though you've come a really long way. But accepting compliments still feels really foreign to you because you've always denied them. And even if you really believe the compliment, it still may feel awkward just because of the patterns that you've created in your brain of denying compliments over the years. So here are some ways that you can own your own amazingness without feeling weird. Okay, I'm going to give you four of them. 

08:58 

One: just express gratitude. When someone compliments you for an amazing project at work or whatever, rather than saying "it was all my team," learning instead to say "thank you. I'm so grateful I had such a wonderful team to work with," accepts the compliment and also expresses gratitude for your team, rather than deflecting the compliment away from you and just moving it to your team members. Remember that what we think and what we speak tells our brain what to think the next time around. When we tell our brain that it was all our team, that we had nothing to do with it, we are telling our brain that what we did doesn't matter, that it doesn't count. So be really careful what you tell your brain to think. 

09:41 

So a second way that we can accept compliments: emphasize your effort. We may be tempted to say something like, "oh it wasn't a big deal," when we receive a compliment. This is the type of phrase that can really downplay the hard work and effort that we have expended. Saying instead "it was a lot of work but it's been so worth it. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Thanks for noticing," acknowledges the compliment and the hard work. 

10:07 

Third: keep it factual. No need to go on and on about how amazing you are. If you've been working on your self-love, this would be all strange anyway, right? So saying something like, "you know what, I doubled my business in this last year," is a great way to acknowledge a compliment about how you're doing with your business. 

10:25 

And the fourth way: just about a good old-fashioned "thank you" and leave it at that. Or maybe an, "I appreciate the compliment, thank you." Receiving kind words isn't arrogant, it's actually very kind to accept them. When we don't accept others' compliments, it can often come across as demeaning and dismissive of the person giving the compliment, which is not our intent to demean others or to dismiss them. Let me give you a few examples of what this looks like. So if someone gives the compliment, "you did such a great job on your Sunday school lesson today," and your response is, "oh, I felt like I was bumbling all over the place. I couldn't say anything right," the implication in what you say is, "you actually have no idea what you're talking about." But none of us want to put across that implication. But in moving into this place of, I don't know, some kind of false modesty, we deny the other person. 

11:23 

Here's another example, a compliment. "Oh, I love your outfit today. It's so cute." Response, "oh, this is so old. I pulled it out of the back of my closet and I haven't worn it for years." Implication there is, "yeah, you kind of have really bad taste. These clothes are old and yucky," right? Compliment: "You've lost a lot of weight. That takes a lot of discipline and effort." And your response is, "I have such a long way to go yet." The implication of that is "what you think about my progress doesn't matter." If you're in the habit of refusing compliments, Please consider practicing accepting them gracefully. It shows respect and love for ourselves and it shows respect and love and gratitude for the compliment-giver. 

12:09 

And as we learn to see ourselves from someone else's perspective, it can help us with our own self-perception, which will impact our ability to accept and love other people. And it becomes a cycle. We love ourselves and then we can accept someone's compliment graciously and honestly, seeking to see their point of view. And then we can see ourselves more clearly and we love ourselves more fully. So many of us have practiced this false modesty our whole lives by deflecting compliments, by pretending we are less than we really are. And it's time to practice some God-given self-acceptance, accepting all of the good that God has graced us with. I truly believe that accepting compliments is one way that we express gratitude to God for the goodness, for the skills and talents and abilities that He has blessed us with. And it's a way for us to step into the amazingness that we are created to be, to step into our God-given possibility. Compliments from other people is one way to see ourselves more clearly and more honestly. 

13:16 

Would love, love to encourage you this week to pay attention to when people compliment you, and really move into a space of gratitude for that compliment, of acknowledgement of that compliment and loving yourself enough to love the compliment and accept the compliment. It's a great part of growing up, isn't it great? This middle-aged gig, something to sing about. I love it so much. Okay, my friends, I wish you the best, best of weeks. And if you need some help moving into a space of greater self-love, of really embracing these concepts at a deeper level than you have been, ready to just accelerate your progress in your personal growth...let's chat. You can contact me at tanyahale.com for a free 30 minute coaching, not coaching session, consult really, where we talk about how I can help you and how the process works and where we can move you into what we can do for you. It's a great, great opportunity. Coaching is one of the greatest blessings of my life. I'm so thankful for my coaches and for what they have added to my life and for the progress that they have helped me make in my own personal life. Alright, that's going to do it. Have a terrific, terrific day and I will talk to you next week. Goodbye. 

14:42 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!