Learning to take a complement

A weakness that I have noticed in many of us, specifically I have noticed this with most of my Sri Lankan lady friends, is that we dont know how to take a complement. We often find excuses whenever someone says something nice. For example if someone says you’re wearing a nice dress, we say, oh it’s an old thing I got long ago, or when someone says you've done a great job, we say, oh anyone would have done it like that and so on...


Recently I noticed this when I was talking with a close friend of mine and complemented her, and as expected she made an excuse for her success. Then I remembered that I had also been told that I do this often, and it seems to be a common occurrence. Why do we have this need to make excuses for something good about us? Is it cos we don't feel worthy? I do believe that we are who we are due to the power that God gave us and not our power alone and also that we should not be arrogant, but at the same time, we should learn to accept credit gracefully when given, rather than making excuses. Our 'playing small' does not benefit anyone. It will simply undermine our own achievements.

So I told myself that next time someone says something nice I will just smile and say 'Thank you'!

I am who I am

As I was going through our Judge Business School news I came across this article ‘these bodies are beautiful at every size’ regarding glamour magazine starting to work with all types of models in all shapes, sizes and colors. This link was in our JBS news as an alum who is studying for his phd on ‘how women in the US, Canada and the UK respond to advertising images’ was also quoted in the article. He also runs a modeling agency for women of all shapes and sizes. http://www.benbarry.com/ I really like the tag line ‘every woman is a real woman’.

I’m very glad to hear about all these initiatives, as I think one of the biggest issues almost all of us have is this body image issue… and only seeing perfect airbrushed women on magazines and TV doesn’t help in self confidence… so I think seeing more and more campaigns with real women would help boost the self image of everyone…

After all we all age, and beauty is a temporary thing, so I think its important not to base our whole self worth on it... This also reminded me of the famous book Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wild about the hansom youth who gets a portrait of himself painted and sells his soul in order to look like the picture forever, young and hansom, while the painting withered and aged… so as time went by and he lived a sinful life his picture got more and more disfigured, but his face remained perfect… In the end, Dorian decides to kill his sins and his past by destroying the portrait, but in doing so he kills himself instead.

Ofcourse I think we should all try to look our best, men and women both, and make the most of what we have and be healthy, but there are certain attributes that cannot be changed such as height, body shape, colour and so on… so we just have to learn to be happy with what we have and who we are… that’s true self confidence…. To be able to go out into the world saying ‘I am who I am’ with your head held high…