The Compliment You Did Not Say Out Loud

Actions speak louder than words, and the saying is fair, because doing the thing takes courage and effort while saying it takes a moment. But words are not therefore weightless. They make and break relationships, and how a person expresses themselves can accelerate a career or quietly end one.

The poet Maya Angelou made the point that what lodges in somebody is not the deed or the sentence but the feeling they were left holding. And the feeling somebody is left holding is assembled largely out of the words used near them and the manner of their saying.

The imbalance

Everything moves quickly, thoughts and words included, and there is a gap between the two that shows up in one direction only.

The small compliment, the greeting with some warmth in it, is thought and then not said, because there was a rush on. Meanwhile the piece of criticism finds its way out easily, particularly on a day when we are having a bad one or are hurting about something unrelated.

So the unkind words clear the gap and the kind ones do not, and neither is a decision. That is the part worth noticing, because a habit can be altered and a character cannot be argued with.

The things we assume are known

How often do we stop and tell somebody what we appreciate about them? Usually not, on the reasoning that they must already know.

They generally do not. And even where they do, being told is a different event from knowing, in the same way that being paid is different from being owed.

Words carry more weight than we credit. The same sentence can be the thing that gives somebody the strength to keep going, or the careless one at the wrong moment that persuades them to stop.

Four that cost nothing

When something good happens, tell somebody. We are quick to pass on a bad experience and slow with the other kind, and the asymmetry is entirely habit.

Send a message to somebody you have lost touch with in the ordinary rush. Say you were thinking about them and what they mean to you.

Give somebody a compliment, and find a particular way to thank the people who do things that make your life easier, because those are precisely the people taken for granted.

And acknowledge ability and effort out loud where you see them. Somebody who has decided they are not good enough can be talked part of the way back. Be the person in whose company other people feel they are getting somewhere.

The one qualification

This only works while it is true. Praise handed out indiscriminately stops carrying information, and people can tell. Say the specific thing you actually noticed, and say nothing on the days you noticed nothing.