How to accept a compliment without shrinking it

Emma hands in an analysis she spent three weeks on, and at Monday's meeting her manager calls it the best briefing paper he has read all year. Within five seconds she has produced three sentences: that it was nothing difficult, that Daniel from finance did most of the digging, and that a couple of loose ends are still in it anyway.

The manager nods and moves on. Emma feels she behaved well. Of the compliment that made somebody take the floor, nothing usable is left for her and nothing for him either.

The tag you add after praise is one of the quietest habits a person can have. It holds nobody up and costs nothing in any single instance. The bill arrives years later, when you have to talk about yourself out loud and find you have nothing to draw on.

Where the deflection comes from

The first reason is cultural, and in English it pulls two ways at once. You are expected to sell yourself on a CV and in an interview, and nobody wants to sit next to someone who is full of themselves. The compromise most people settle on is to promote yourself in writing and shrink yourself in person. Spoken praise arrives in the second setting, so the shrinking reflex is the one that fires.

British understatement has a whole vocabulary for it. Not bad. We muddled through. It turned out all right in the end. American offices lean the other way and produce the humblebrag, the boast wrapped in a complaint about how exhausting the flights to the awards ceremony were. The two look like opposites and admit the same thing: the credit is wanted, it just cannot be taken plainly.

The second reason is a practical fear. A compliment is also an expectation. Accept it and you confirm this is your normal standard, and next time it will be assumed. The tag pulls the bar down before anyone can raise it. Daniel, who says after a good presentation that he got lucky with the audience, is buying himself the right to disappoint later.

Third comes plain discomfort. Praise puts you at the centre of attention for a few seconds and the silence afterwards is hard to sit in. The tag fills it, pushes the attention elsewhere and lets everyone off. That is why it comes out fast and without thinking.

That this is a performance for an audience rather than a real conviction was suggested by a series of studies run by Mark Leary and his colleagues in 2000. People with strong doubts about themselves rated themselves markedly more modestly when their answer was going to be seen by somebody else. Filling in the same thing anonymously, most of the difference disappeared. Modesty was not what they thought about themselves, it was what they said out loud.

Can you remember the last compliment you were given? Try to recall your answer, and in particular whether you believed it yourself at the time.

Modesty leaves the fact standing, discounting erases it

You cannot tell modesty from discounting by how polite it sounds, because both sound polite. You tell them apart by what happens to the fact. Modesty leaves the fact standing and adds context: it worked, and I had a good team behind me. Discounting removes the fact, because after a sentence saying anyone could have done it there is nothing left to appreciate.

The whole test narrows to one question. Do you believe what you are saying? If you tell your manager it was nothing while you know about three drafts, two evenings past midnight and one phone call that saved the whole thing, that is not modesty. It is inaccurate information about yourself that you are spreading yourself.

The second test is quicker still. Would you say the same about a colleague who had done exactly the same work? Most people hesitate, because in somebody else's work the hours look like an achievement and in their own like the bare minimum.

None of this makes modesty useless. Sometimes the credit really does belong mostly elsewhere, and whoever claims the work of a whole team will not last long in it. The difference is whether you say the sentence about the team because it matches what happened, or because standing on your own for a moment is uncomfortable. In the first case your share survives the sentence. In the second it vanishes from it.

What the deflection costs over ten years

One instance does nothing. The damage is in the repetition, because praise is more or less the only outside source of information about what you can do. Weaken every piece of it on the way in and the evidence has nowhere to accumulate, which leaves doubt about your own ability with nothing to argue against.

This pattern has a name. In the account of what impostor syndrome is, it appears as one of the three sources of doubt and it is called discounting success. The second source is feeling like a fraud, the quiet assumption that your seat belongs to someone more capable. The third is luck and circumstance, the habit of handing your results to timing, chance and the people around you; there is a separate piece on why success keeps looking like luck.

Discounting comes with one more inconspicuous part: the moving bar. A goal you have met never gets counted, because the measure shifts the moment you reach it and last year's target is this year's starting point. The result is a person doing good work with a permanent sense that it is still not quite there.

The phenomenon was described by the psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978 in people with undeniable results who nevertheless felt like frauds. It is not a diagnosis and not a disorder, but a learned pattern of thinking. How common it is cannot be stated precisely: a systematic review by Bravata and colleagues in 2020 went through 62 studies and found prevalence estimates from 9 to 82 percent, depending on who the authors asked and how. The number alone says little. More useful is knowing where your own doubts come from, and a few minutes with the impostor syndrome test gives a rough orientation.

One side of this gets forgotten whenever modesty comes up. Take the compliment off the table often enough and it stops arriving. No malice in it, just the economics of attention: praising someone who rejects it every time is work with no effect. People give up, and you get an apparent confirmation that there was nothing worth praising.

Sentences that leave something behind

The smallest possible change is one word: thanks. And then silence. Whatever continuation occurs to you, keep it. For the first few days you will feel you are coming across as arrogant, while on the other side of the table nothing happens at all, because all they hear is a normal answer to a normal sentence.

When the silence is unbearable, fill it with something that does not erase the fact. A specific thank-you for a specific thing works well: thanks, the section on risk took me longest, so I am glad it reads easily. Such a sentence admits the work you did rather than a weakness, and the conversation can carry on from it.

The second habit concerns the bar. When something is finished, give yourself one day on which the measure may not move, and write down what you had to solve to get there. How many drafts, how many hours, what failed at first. Finished work looks easy even to the person who did it, because the result shows nothing of the route, and a written route is the one thing that reliably disproves the claim that it was easy.

Nothing in the right-hand column makes anyone sound arrogant. It carries the same information as the middle column, it just takes nothing away, and it gives the other side a reason to keep talking. Watch how fast the people around you learn: someone who gets a comprehensible answer to a compliment gives the next one more readily and in more detail.

The tag costs most in writing. A CV, a LinkedIn profile or a project summary exists to inform somebody about work that was done, so a shrinking phrase in it is not modesty but a missing fact. Someone who writes that they contributed to a project says something different from someone who writes that they led it, even when both did the same thing. A written tag cannot be repaired by tone of voice, because the reader has no tone to go on.

These sentences deal with only one of the three sources of doubt. Anyone troubled less by praise than by the feeling of not belonging in their own role needs a different route, and the techniques sorted by where the doubt comes from are in the piece on how to overcome impostor syndrome.

How to praise so that it can be accepted

The other half of this depends not on the recipient but on the person praising. General praise is easy to refuse because it cannot be checked. Tell Daniel he is talented and he has nothing to hold on to, so the tag fires by itself. Tell him his spreadsheet saved twenty minutes of arguing in the meeting and you have handed him a fact that is much harder to dispute.

It also helps not to fight the refusal. Answers along the lines of no really, it was excellent push the other person into defending their own modesty and the whole thing loops. Repeating the compliment once with a concrete detail and letting it go works better. A question instead of a statement works better still: what did you do to make it come out like that? The answer has to be a description of their own steps.

Managers have one tool a colleague does not, and that is the assignment. A harder task carries information about how you are seen, and that is harder to refuse than a sentence in a meeting. What usable feedback looks like is taken apart in the separate piece on giving and receiving feedback.

Seven days without the tag

Try one thing for a week. After every compliment you say thank you and nothing else. When the tag slips out anyway, note in your phone who you said it to and what it was about.

After a week those few lines usually reveal a pattern that is hard to see from the inside. Tags do not pile up evenly: they fire with certain people, in certain rooms and around certain work, while elsewhere the same person accepts a compliment without noticing. Emma from the opening counted ten in a week, nine in meetings and one at home.