You’re at a party, and a stranger tells you your dress is amazing. You immediately say that you scored it on a super sale.
You’re having drinks with a girlfriend who wants to toast to your recent promotion at work. You fire back a bunch of compliments about how much she’s accomplished
in her career, too.
Your bestie and her boyfriend are at your place for dinner and rave about your cooking. You pick apart every last dish, going into detail about how it all could’ve been better.
What is it with women and compliments? No matter how confident and comfortable with ourselves we feel, it can be downright impossible to accept a compliment without deflecting the praise, explaining ourselves, or even totally ignoring it. Case in point: When Comedy Central’s Amy Schumer filmed a hilarious sketch depicting what a posse of pals do when compliments start flying, it went viral. Women everywhere cringed—and couldn’t help sharing the video because they could relate.
In our culture, there is this unspoken rule that women are supposed to be modest,” says Alyson Lanier, a psychotherapist and life coach in Wilmington, North Carolina. “If we accept a compliment fully, the fear is that it’s going to come off as bragging.” And every girl knows what happens to girls who gloat. (Buh-bye, friends—hello mean-girl glares.)
So what’s a girl to do if she wants to get better about acknowledging a little admiration—without coming off as arrogant?
Understand Why It’s Hard to Just Say “Thanks”
Before you get down on yourself for not being great at accepting compliments, there are actually a few very good reasons
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