Nice words
An old oak in my yard fell a few weeks ago, and after I cleared the brush my kids volunteered to help rake up twigs and bark. My six year-old declared the job somewhat difficult, to which my three year-old replied, "It's not hard for me." I was a bit snappish and couldn't let that braggadocio go uncorrected, so I told him, "It's easy for you because you're not doing anything, you're just telling everyone else what to do." He paused for a long moment. Then he said, "But you are doing a good job!"
The little guy is a born manager. My friend Joe has a term for that kind of response from a leader. Years ago I was pulled off a project to work on a more urgent project that the whole dev team was swarming on to finish by a deadline. During it, I wrote some convoluted code that would have been more intelligible if I'd had time to refactor the underlying code, and when a reviewer called me out on the mess, I lamented that the situation didn't afford cleaner code. The next morning, the project lead had left the comment, "You’ve been doing a lot of awesome work Eric! Your contributions, insights, and suggestions have really helped the [project] effort. Thanks!" When I told Joe that story, he called it "affirmation bombing".
Acquaintances have related to these anecdotes of people addressing complaints with compliments. When praise is used a tactic to assuage a frustration, it not comes across as disingenuous and unearned. Worse, it can to backfire. When the receiver sees through such praise, it can sound like the giver saying, "Your negative emotions have given me negative emotions, so I want them to go away. If this bit of positivity doesn't give you positive emotions, you must either hide your negative emotions or go away yourself." If taken that way, a negative feeling deepens into personal rejection.
Because of this, I've tended to be sparing with praise. I want it to be authentic and not a veiled "shut up." But as a dad, I've had to learn to be more generous with kind words. They still have to be spontaneous and genuine, not tactical, but I've learned to be more sensitive to what's worth praising. Baby steps. Keeping a screwdriver in the head of a screw. Trying an unfamiliar food.
The same goes for myself. As an analytical type, it's easy for me to discount praise, see it as motivated, know it's part of a scheduled review cycle, wish it was more substantive. But rejecting all praise can lead to long, dark moods. It's important to recognize kindness from others. It may often be tactical, but it's rarely outright dishonest. Kindness prompted by a complaint is still kindness.
At one company I worked for, we collected anything positive a client said about us and emailed them out to the whole staff in message titled "Nice words". Eventually I adopted that practice for myself. Whenever someone gives a nice word, even if it was affirmation bombing or a farewell when changing jobs or an annual review where the boss more or less instructed reviewers to make reviewees feel good, I write it down. Tim Ferriss does something similar with a "Jar of Awesome". I keep a digital version. Every now and then I come across one I'd forgotten. "You have a nice reading voice." "We should all be using your terminal setup." "You've been a huge inspiration to me." "I love the Eric notes." "What you did is how I want this department to behave." "You're probably my favorite writer." I can quote the project lead's original affirmation bomb word for word because I wrote it down in my nice words file.
Some nice words were offhand comments, and while I may still discount statements that pop out of someone's mouth as polite manners, I do write down a remark if I find myself thinking about it later. Fading memory doesn't mean the emotional boost of kind words also has to fade.
When I was a teenager, my father made me read Sean Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, which used the metaphor of a relationship bank account: you have to make more deposits than withdrawals, and unlike an actual bank account, in relationships a deposit tends to evaporate and a withdrawal turns to stone. The same happens in our relationships with ourselves. For decades we remember an embarrassing moment, a typo in a tweet, a negative comment on a blog post, but we forget the compliments and nice words. Keeping a jar of awesome or a document of nice words is a way of combatting that human foible. Beyond that, documenting the positive things people say about you shows what others perceive to be your strengths, which can point you in a direction to strengthen them.
Sure there are bad days and low moods, but you are doing a good job!