The Power of a Compliment

The power of a compliment cannot be underestimated.

It's interesting. Words are free (well, except for the fancy words you pay to go to college to learn, like "icthyology" and "antidisestablishmentarianism"), yet so often they are grudgingly bestowed, as if there was a physical cost to giving them.

Without the compliment - without the recognition of effort or sincere note of congratulations that are implied - the situation one is in will, over time, become unendurable. As time goes on, one lets go of any sense that one's efforts will do anything to effect a difference in what one is doing, or that one is becoming more skilled at what one is doing, or even a sense that one is even occasionally doing something correctly.

Without the compliment - and its accompaniment, gratitude - situations turn into long tunnels of dull effort without any sense of change, hope, or excitement.

I'm sure that some experts somewhere have carefully analyzed why this is so, and that complimenting (or even thanking) people "too often (whatever that is)" leads to a diminishment of the power of the words, a creation of the mediocre becoming acceptable instead of the excellent recognized, a dispersal of the power and authority of the one granting the words.

I strongly disagree. If one only hears how one is never doing the task correctly, or performing the task and then having it immediately brushed over to move to the next task, people will simply lose heart. When people lose heart, they lose their spirit, their motivation, their fire for trying harder. And when heart is gone, people may go through the motions but the enterprise, the relationship, the endeavor is doomed to fail.

So give a compliment, give a "thanks" today. It's cost is nothing more than the muscles of your vocal cords and face; the effects can be beyond anything you can imagine.