How often have you replied to a compliment from someone with these words:
“Yes but…”
Yes but…
“…they were only being kind.”
“…she just said it because she felt sorry for me.”
“…it was nothing I did really, lots of other people did far more work than me.”
“…they have to be nice to me, they are family.”
“…if he really knew what I was like, he wouldn’t have said those nice things.”
Ghastly, isn’t it? Believing such pernicious lies is a cognitive distortion known as
Discounting the positive.
Someone tells us something positive about ourselves, but our minds immediately filter those words through our own negative bias. We discount the positive and dismiss or ignore what is good about what the person is saying about ourselves and the situation. This is worse than simply overlooking positive comments – we actively dismiss the positive and put our own special negative spin on it, perhaps explaining away a kind comment by saying it was a fluke or just lucky. We minimise or dismiss our own role and the compliment falls flat on the ground at our feet.
We might undermine evidence that we did well, explain it away or minimise our success.
Discounting the positive like this is devastating for several reasons.
First, it stops us seeing who we ARE.
If all we choose to see is who we believe we are NOT, we live trapped in those negative mindset loops. We go round and round in our heads, reinforcing our own negative beliefs about ourselves and our own lack of worth because we choose to dismiss or minismise evidence that we might actually be doing ok. This is exhausting – I have written about this before, you can read more here.
And it is tragic because we are not free to live in confidence as the unique and amazing people we really are. Each of us has unique skills and abilities, experiences and achievements and each of us has a role to play in this life.
When people tell us the good that they see in us, and point out all that we do well, but we are discounting the positive, we rob ourselves of acceptance and self belief.
So despite plenty of evidence showing us who we ARE and what we CAN do, we choose to remain trapped in our own negative beliefs about who are are NOT and what we CAN’T do.
Psychiatrist David Burns describes discounting the positive as one of “the most spectacular mental illusions” and says this:
You don’t just ignore positive experiences, you cleverly and swiftly turn them into their nightmarish opposite. I call this “reverse alchemy”. The medieval alchemists dreamed of finding some method for transmuting the baser metals into gold. If you have been depressed, you may have developed the talent for doing the exact opposite – you can instantly transform golden joy into emotional lead.” (emphasis mine.)
Discounting the positive reduces motivation
Secondly, when we continually dismiss any positive feedback and don’t allow ourselves to see the good in us, we can end up feeling powerless to change. We feel stuck, we keep ourselves going round in negative circles and therefore –
– what is the point?
What is the point in trying because we are only going to fail anyway, our minds tell us. We don’t feel we have any control over positive things in our lives, because we dismiss and discount them. And this decreases motivation. We repeatedly discount the positive, and are biased towards the negative thoughts which we believe are more true and important to our identity.
It is sad and frustrating for the other person.
Imagine being on the receiving end of this kind of discounting the positive. You tell a friend that you really appreciate something about them. Or you try to encourage a colleague with positive feedback about something they did really well.
And they bat it back in your face.
It can hurt, can’t it? After all, it can feel like the person we are trying to compliment is essentially calling us a liar.
That sounds incredibly harsh.
But it can help us to see what is really going on inside our heads. Generally speaking, we wouldn’t call our friends liars. So if a friend or colleague says something positive about us, it can help stop the negative cycle in our heads by choosing to believe that they are not lying to us.
How to break this cognitive distortion.
That is one way – when someone says something positive to you, ask yourself if that person is likely to lie to you or feel sorry for you. If not, start to believe that what they are saying about you is true.
Notice your self talk. I say this a lot – when we become aware, we can start to make different choices.
Notice how often “Yes but” creeps into your conversation. Choose to stop, think, and say a simple “Thank you” instead.
Start to build evidence of what you CAN do, where you HAVE managed something, who you ARE. Gratitude is a great way to do this. Stopping for a few minutes at the end of the day to acknowledge what you are thankful for about your life, yourself, and what you have achieved that day. This is not to make us big headed, but it does help break the negative thinking patterns that automatically see what is not good and shift towards choosing to see what is.
As always, we have more control than we think because only we control what is going on inside our own heads. More on that here.
So this week, notice when you are tempted into discounting the positive and instead, choose to accept the compliment. Allow yourself to see and accept who you ARE and live with greater confidence as that wonderful, unique you.
If this has really struck a chord, there is more here on how to break negative thinking patterns.
And I have a free email resource that takes this one step further, which you can access here.