A parent struggles to accept a compliment about her dog-walking routine. The speaker argues we let a negative inner voice reject praise automatically, and suggests ignoring that voice instead of arguing with it. By accepting compliments ourselves, we teach our kids to do the same.
Hi, good morning to you. Today I'm going to be talking about accepting compliments. So I was walking the dog this morning and we bumped into a lady that we see quite often when we're walking the dog, and she was taking up— she takes a lot longer to walk her dog than ours because she's got one of the dogs really old, so she has to wait a lot. She said, She said, oh, I've been on this walk for at least an hour, but I've only come about half a mile or something like that in an hour. And I said, well, you must be a really patient mum to your dog then. And I meant that as a compliment, the fact that That she puts in the time rather than leaving the dog at home. She puts the time in, takes the time out of the day to walk that dog, and that is— that's kind of patience. That's what we do for the furry friends and the family and the people that we love, and that's absolutely To me, that's great. I just think we take that for granted, don't we? We take our own patience for granted sometimes. So when I said to her, you must be a really patient mum, I meant that as a compliment, but she didn't accept it as that. She said, well, that's what you do, isn't it? And we, we don't culturally— culturally, I don't think we're very good at accepting compliments. I remember I was on holiday once and been chatting to some people, uh, during the day on, on holiday, um, at the, at the restaurant, at the cafe that we went for lunch in the hotel, um, and then we saw them again at, uh, at night. And and this lady had a really lovely colored top top on. It's like a salmon, salmony orangey color. Lovely lovely top. Like my one of my favorite colors. And I said that's I've writ I think she was called Caroline. I think that top is absolutely. I absolutely love that. I love that top. I love that top. And she looked at me like I was. I don't know, she looked at me like, what, what are you on, you know, um, or that, or I was giving her an insult. And she said— so I kind of persisted, I persisted with the compliment hoping it would land, um, she said, are you, are you taking the mickey? I said, no, no, I had a, I had a shirt from Next similar sort of color to that 20-odd years ago, a polo shirt, and I loved it. I really don't know where it's— I really don't know where it went or whatever happened to it, but I loved it. And seeing that top that you've got on, I just thought it's a lovely color. And she still wouldn't accept— she still wouldn't accept the compliment. So I got 2 people not accepting compliments, one for waiting for the dog and one for having a nice top on. And I'm not very good at accepting compliments either, but I'm actually feeling quite shy about saying that. People say, oh, it's great what you do with parents and kids, isn't it? And I say, yeah, yeah, it is. And I kind of nod along with it and kind of move on. I don't kind of argue back at them that it's not great, but I just kind of take it for granted, don't we? We all do. So why is that? And there's a simple reason, a very simple reason, that we're not choosing. We're not choosing how we feel. We would choose to accept a compliment. So as my friend and mentor, a guy called Richard Wilkins, said, you know, if you had a choice, what would you choose? So I give you a compliment. Would you choose to accept it? Yes or no? If you could choose to, if you could, if you could choose. And of course you're going to say yes. So there's only one thing happening here: we're not choosing. And we're not choosing most of our feelings most of the time. So what is what is choosing? Well, it's that. That negative, that negative voice in our head, isn't it? And we've all got one. We've all got that negative voice in our head. People tell you that you can reframe it. People say that you can change it. People say that you can argue with it. But if you argue with it, that's just a continuation of the war in your head. The only thing that we can really do is I think my opinion is learn to kind of like ignore it, not take it seriously. Become, as my friend Richard says, you know, an opinion that we no longer value. But what a great gift that would be if we could give that to our kids. Wouldn't that be great? They could ignore the negative voice in their head. They could ignore the negative voice in their head. That'd be brilliant, wouldn't it? But here's the thing: we can only give what we've got. So if we want our kids to do better than us, we've we've we've got to be be better ourselves. If you like, we've well be better. We've got to learn more. I believe that you're already perfect. I believe that every one of us is already perfect. Just need to learn new stuff. I'm not one of these personal development guys that. that gets clients by saying, you're crap, your life— My life was great. My life was crap. Now it's great. Tell me what— pay me $497 and I'll tell you what to do. That's not my style at all. I already think you're brilliant. I just want to help you see your brilliance and resilience. Brilliance and resilience, somebody came up with yesterday. I've been on there talking about resilience, and this lady, Kim, I think it was called, spoke to yesterday. I was like, it wasn't— yeah, I spoke to yesterday. I spoke to a lot of people yesterday. She said, yeah, see our brilliance and resilience. Wouldn't that be great if we could see our brilliance and resilience? If we could see our brilliance and resilience, we can accept more compliments. Wouldn't that be great? Okay, see you later. Bye-bye. See you soon.
Weathering Storms With Joanne Morales, Jennifer Hartwig and Rebecca Dominguez
