A compliment is a great way to bring joy to another person’s life, but there are many ways to give a compliment, which has important implications in your life.
For example, have you ever handed in a report at work just to have your boss say, “good work”? Has it ever felt lacking in some way?
There’s a psychological reason for that: it’s because it’s socially expected that he says that, unless of course your work is truly horrendous. So while the comment may be genuine, its timing makes it perfunctory and thus of reduced value.
So how do you give a good compliment? There are just two secrets to do so.
Give the complement at a random time
The first secret to giving a compliment is to give it at a random time. In other words, go out of your way to give your compliment. It will be far more meaningful because you didn’t have to do it.
If a person is looking nice, don’t just tell them they look nice right after they’ve changed clothes. Instead, do it also when you’re talking about something else later in the day.
If someone shows you a creative work, of course you can tell them what you think right there. But also keep it in your mind and tell them something nice about their creation when they least expect it. By going out of your way, you are letting the person know that their effort has made a lasting impact on you.
By actually going out of your way, you put yourself in the situation of having to think about a person at a time when there’s no social pressure to do so. This has the added benefit of allowing you to think about the person when it’s not expected, thus giving your mind greater freedom to think.
Be specific
What exactly is a compliment? It’s an expression of how one person’s work or effort has improved your own existence. Therefore, you should articulate how it has improved your own existence. It does so through a modification of your experience, and that’s in turn because you noticed something particular about their effort.
If a compliment is vague — just “good work”, it doesn’t effectively demonstrate how the work is good unless it is accompanied by something else.
Therefore, the second secret to a good compliment is being open and honest and articulating that specificity that touched your own soul. That’s yet another reason to take random time out of your day to give a good compliment: it’s because it gives you time to absorb the experience and articulate your experience precisely.
Conclusion
A compliment is nothing else than the articulation of how your experience has been improved by the effort and existence of another. Therefore, in order to compliment someone, you must properly articulate that experience and be specific.
There’s also social pressure to give compliments and feedback right away. That’s just ingrained in our society. Not only that, it has been made worse by the internet that trains us for instant feedback and “likes”.
Therefore, to go beyond that, you must make a conscious effort to go out of your way to give compliments at random times. This will take the giving of the compliment outside the social script and really make another person feel that what you are saying is genuine.
Simple, right? Be specific, and go out of your way to give your compliment at a time when the compliment is not expected. I guarantee that it will help you in all aspects of your communication with others.