#123: Weight Loss and Accepting Compliments

123. Weight Loss and Accepting Compliments

You are beautiful. I love the way you quilt. Oh my goodness. This is so delicious. I love it. You’re so talented. Okay. Do those comments make you feel really uncomfortable? Do you struggle with accepting compliments? Well, if it’s you, then don’t you worry, this podcast is going to help you so much. I’m Dara Tomasson, and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 123, Weight Loss and Accepting Compliments.

Okay. How uncomfortable were you when I was making those compliments? Be honest. Super uncomfortable? What was your reaction? Oh no, no. That was just a fluke that I was successful or yes thank you. The quilt’s pretty, but did you see the mistake? Like what do you do with compliments? I want to hear it. This is so interesting and I see this a lot and it was very interesting as I researched and found more and more reasons of why we don’t do well with compliments. So today’s episode is going to kind of blow your mind a little bit. It’s also going to give you a lot of relief because you’re finally going to understand why it’s so uncomfortable for you to accept compliments. So helpful. 

All right. But before we start this episode, I do want to compliment one of my clients. And the reason I do this, of course, is, you know we’re not very good at praising ourselves because, actually, it’s going to be one of the reasons we talk about compliments. And it’s hard for us to accept that we are actually good. And anyways, I want you to be like a five year old. You know, have you ever met a five year old who’s, you say, Oh, you’re so good at this. And they say, thanks. This is what I want. I want you to go back to that state of like joy and happiness. And so when I make compliments and I share wins in my program, it’s learning how to accept, yes, this is normal. This is wonderful. One of my clients, she had her gallbladder was taken, I think five years ago she said, and normally she has to take these special enzymes for digestion and things. And she’s been working with Love Yourself Thin for over a month now. And she forgot to take one, but she realized that she didn’t have the pains and the discomfort that she would have had before. So she realizes that her liver is healing and she’s really healing herself and she’s so proud of herself because it’s a lot of mental work when you’re not always turning to the food when you’re feeling frustrated. So I’m so happy for her and your bodies do want to heal. They do want to feel better and they have a lot of capacity to do so but if you aren’t helping your body, if you’re sabotaging by eating the wrong things for our body, a lot of refined flour and sugar. If you’re eating constantly, like snacking and things, eating late at night, then your body really doesn’t get a chance to heal. So I’m so happy for her. 

All right. So why do you think it’s hard for you to accept a compliment? Now they’ve done actually a lot of research on this. So there was a study conducted by Christopher Litchfield on praise and recognition. And that showed that 88 percent of respondents associate feeling valued with recognition. Nearly 70 percent also associate embarrassment or discomfort with the process of being recognized. So, we like praise, but we also don’t really like praise. And then in the the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2010, they published a study that revealed that people with low self esteem struggle to accept compliments because they doubt their sincerity. Not only do they feel embarrassed, but they assume they’re somehow being patronized. And think about your self esteem… and if you aren’t feeling very strong in yourself and you have a lot of imposter syndrome, then it is difficult to accept it. 

There was another study in 2015 and it was published in the personality and individual differences, found that people shrug off compliments because they hope to avoid having the bar set higher in the future. Interesting. So think of, if I did well this time, they’re going to expect me to perform better next time. All right. So how does that relate to you? Now in others research and is also anecdotally with my clients, a lot of women when they’re being compliment, they have an unconscious message that they need to be humble. They don’t want to be prideful. They don’t want to think they’re better than other people. But just like a five year old who learned how to make a sandwich by themselves and you praise them, you don’t say, Oh, but you should be humble. So, where did that line get crossed? Where is that point where you’re not supposed to praise yourself? You’re not supposed to accept compliments. You’re not supposed to accept that you’ve done well. I mean, when we go to work, we want to do a good job and we want to feel good about being paid, so where do you draw that line of being proud of what you’ve done and being prideful?

Another reason it’s hard to accept compliments is because we don’t have practice accepting them. I remember as a child being taught by my parents, when someone compliments, you just say, thank you. You don’t have to always believe it, but you can just say, thank you. And just like my podcast with no is a sentence, complete sentence. So is thank you. We don’t have to say, Oh, yeah, but you should have seen what I did before, or, Oh, you should have seen how hard it was for me. No, we could just say, thank you. And that’s it. 

Another reason we have a hard time accepting compliments is we feel like we have to reciprocate. So it’s a very conditional thing. And that feels like there’s strings attached. And that is difficult. I agree. So a lot of us deflect. We brush them away because it’s hard to be vulnerable. It’s hard to, especially if you don’t know the person very well. And if you’re not comfortable with having that level of vulnerability, it’s just, we’d rather just not go there. Right? And that’s okay. We feel like we have to reciprocate like I said. The other thing is when we accept a compliment, it feels like we’re not being honest. So for example, if we feel like we didn’t do our best job and someone says, Oh, you did a great job. You’re like, well, actually I didn’t do a great job. Or let’s say you procrastinated till the end and then you left it. And so then it was very stressful. So it doesn’t even feel sincere to accept the compliment because it actually wasn’t a really good experience. 

So, as you know, I love providing a worksheet for everyone. And so if you go to the, the worksheet of accepting compliments the question I have here is what is the difference between being boastful and feeling proud of an accomplishment? And that’s a really good question to ask yourself. And then I have a question of what messages were you told about saying good things about yourself when you were a kid? And then when did that change? So I want to leave you with life is to be enjoyed and celebrated. So what would it be like for you just right now, I just out loud what are ten things about your life that are amazing and wonderful? And I’m gonna I’m gonna just give the first ten that come to my mind and when I share this I’m curious are you thinking, wow, Dara, you’re super boastful. Wow. I can’t believe you’re saying that. So I’m just gonna say mine. 

Okay. So first of all, I have electricity at my house and I love electricity so much. Electricity is the best. That’s an accomplishment I have because I actually pay my electricity bill every month. That is something I’m very good at because I really love electricity. So I’m really proud of having electricity. I’m also really proud of having clean water. I’m also really proud of having five kids and I’m really proud that I’ve like kept them alive and I fed them and I nurture their talents. I’m like really proud of that. And I’m also really proud of my teeth. I have spent a lot of money on braces and I have prioritized my jaw, I used to have like locked jaw problems and things. So I’ve put a lot of effort into making sure that I have good healthy teeth and I’m really proud that I have invested that time and then I’m very pleased with how I take care of my teeth. And so that’s something. I’m also super proud of my creativity and I right now I’m actually working on, I’m recording this back before I go to quilt market and quilt festival and I bought some antique quilts last year for my birthday present. And I’m making these really cool clothes out of quilts. And I’m super proud of myself for doing that. I’m also proud I’ve made my bed every day since I was 16. Because I heard this guy at church talking about habits and he compared it to putting a ring in, you know, those bulls that are ginormous and they can be controlled by a little ring in their nose. And so he said, what are habits that are controlling you? And I thought, I actually really hate walking in my room and my bed isn’t made. So I just made a decision right then and there that I would make my bed every single day. And I’m really proud that I graduated from university. I’m really proud that I am a life coach. I’m really proud that I’ve published a podcast episode every week for 123 weeks and that I’ve, that I pay people to help me do the things that I can’t do. I’m really proud that I make these worksheets for you. Like do you think I’m being boastful right now? Like I did this, I’m doing this, I’m showing up.

There are things that maybe I could do better. Of course there’s things that I could do better on. But what is it doing when you accept the compliments you even give to yourself? And this goes to the core message that I want to share with you in this podcast. I really want you to enjoy your life. And recently I was writing some emails and I came across this thought and it was so fun. And I said, start to fall in love with your own life. And the more that I do this work and the more that I invest in my brain and the more that I, I allow myself to come across obstacles, I have lots of obstacles in my life, but the more that I can look at my obstacles as opportunities and the more that I look at strategies to improve and I just am constantly appreciating what I have accomplished and looking, moving forward, then I accept my own compliments. I acknowledge my own challenges and difficulties. 

There is a book that I, that I refer to every once in a while and it’s called The Gap and The Gain. And it’s a really interesting book, it’s by Dan Sullivan, and he talks about how if we are always evaluating our life out of a gap of not good enough, and if people really knew who I was, or you’re focusing on all your, the negatives. Then you’re not going to live a life that feels amazing and awesome. But if you are able to look at your life through the gains of like, look how far I’ve come. So one of the things we do every Wednesday in the lifetime membership, Is we do what’s called weigh in wednesday’s. Now some women, they don’t ever do it, it’s a trigger for them and it’s, it’s okay. I meet people for wherever they’re at, but it’s been really interesting, one of my clients just recently was putting in her weight and what we do is we say, what did we weigh when we first came to Love Yourself Thin. So you put that initial weight, so if it’s 202 or whatever that is, and then you put in your current weight. And so they can see the difference. And I had a client I was just coaching just this week and she had gone to a quilt retreat and she was excited because she was so good. She really made such good choices. And when she came home. She had lost, I think she said she lost one pound and she was a little disappointed. But then when she looked back at the month, her first month with, and it hadn’t even been a full month, she was down seven pounds. And when she saw that, she was able to look at herself a little differently and she was able to really celebrate what she had created.

So I’m very interested in your takeaways from this episode. And as you go throughout your day, now that you have this awareness of accepting compliments and some of the potential reasons why it’s so hard to accept a compliment, like you’re unconscious of being humble, you have to actually take practice in just saying, thank you and not make it mean anything, feeling like you have to reciprocate and then you feel like it’s like conditional or feel like you have to lie, you have to say something that you like about them. So then you feel pressured. Or maybe you feel like you have a lot of imposter syndrome and you really have low self esteem. And so it feels like it’s actually not like even true. There’s lots of those reasons. 

So I’m super curious about what are some of yours and as you do this work, as you listen to this podcast and as you start reflecting, I promise the more that you do that, the more powerful you’re going to feel as The CEO of your own life, and you won’t have to be so afraid of eating and feeling afraid of food or your body because you’re going to just love and appreciate yourself so much. All right. I’m so excited to hear your feedback about this episode. Please come over on my Instagram, Dara underscore Tomasson and share with me what you think. Or you can just email me [email protected]. Love to hear from you. Bye bye.