Immunity to Kindness

Do you struggle to actually believe and internalize positive feedback about yourself?

I’ve been there myself, and 100% of my high performer clients fall into this category – despite being some of the most competent and kind people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

Here’s what I think is going on. See if any or all of these might apply to you:

• We misattribute our successes to the fact that we’ve always been really hard on ourselves – without looking at other possible causal factors. We fear “losing our edge” or becoming complacent if we allow ourselves to relax and enjoy positive feedback, even briefly.
  
  
• Cultural values around humility get stretched to an extreme – to the point that allowing in ANY sense of pride or appreciation feels like egomania that invites the other imaginary shoe to drop (the “pride goeth before a fall” paradigm).
  
  
• We fear that if we let in even a little kindness we’ll become totally dependent on it. Generosity from others gets filtered through a lens that says needing encouragement from others is a crutch that will eventually let us down. Better to not get used to it.
  
  
• We don’t believe the positive feedback is credible. Maybe the feedback seems superficial, or like the giver just hands out compliments to everyone like candy, or maybe you even suspect they have an ulterior motive.
  
  
• We’ve been regularly subjected to harsh criticism from people close to us in the past. If someone who knew us well was constantly able to find fault with us, it creates a mistaken belief that anyone who has something positive to say must just not be paying very much attention. They must not know the REAL us, otherwise they’d have something worse to say. This creates a very pervasive and foundational impostor syndrome.
  

Finding the right approaches for you to unlearn this will depend, in part, on understanding why you struggle to incorporate positive feedback in the first place.

• So which of those resonates most with you?
  
• Are there other explanations I missed?
  
• What might help you begin to deprogram some of those unhelpful filters that are blocking you from being able to believe and savor the good things about yourself?
  

Journaling, affirmations (counter-programming), and intentional practice exchanging feedback with another trusted person are some of my favorite approaches. 

I also love guiding my clients through an exercise to unpack all the positive factors that contributed to some of their key successes. It’s amazing to see, after a little teeth pulling, what a rich tapestry of gifts they already possess. They inevitably end up shocked, and a little emotional, to see all the goodness they’d intentionally blinded themselves to.