How To Deal With Compliments As An Over-thinker

Whenever you get a compliment from someone, do you believe it? 

In my experience, as an over-thinker, hearing a complement was always an interesting experience. Hearing out loud something about yourself that you may not have noticed or just didn't believe made me question what I fundamentally thought about myself. When I was actively overthinking, my immediate reaction to hearing something positive about myself was to deny it, question it, and think about why it was not true. 

This realization opened the door for me to see that my core belief about myself was that good things about me were untrue. When someone would compliment my hair or my outfit, I noticed myself almost giving back the compliment. It wasn’t on purpose, and I hadn’t questioned if I had even noticed that I was very uncomfortable accepting something good about myself. 

As I was thinking about this idea I had learned, I paid attention as I listened to what people said to me about myself and I started to blindly accept it. Someone said this about me so it must be true. This is where I went wrong not having a strong sense of self, where I used to fully deny the compliment, I began to just accept what was said to me.

Where I once wanted a compliment from someone, turned into me discovering external validation. A compliment would be me knowing something, but appreciating someone else seeing this too. Where external validation would be, I don’t believe what I know unless someone else’s words or actions confirms it. 

Now, instead of denying these compliments like I said earlier, what I didn’t realize at the time was that I was looking for that confirmation from someone else. Learning I was doing this made me question how can I remove this need for external validation and learn to appreciate compliments? 

Reflection 

Reflecting on how I perceived feedback from other people, I began to understand that my opinion of my own self was second to the opinions of other people. I saw myself actively hearing something someone would say, and I would without hesitation believe that instead of having my own thoughts. 

This way of thinking can be dangerous. When you allow yourself to be sculpted by outside factors, leaving who you really are as a fill in the blank for anyone else but you to fill in. 

These two ideas of compliments vs external validation are really the same idea, except your perspective of yourself guides whether it’s healthy for you or not. When I am in the midst of overthinking and doubting myself is when I find myself wrapped up in behaviors that don’t help me. And at this time, that is where my head was at. 

When I realized a correlation between compliments and external validation was when I began questioning why I did things? Was it for outside validation or was it for my own self? What did I like? What did I do for me and not for others? How could I build a strong core belief about myself? 

Changing ideas about yourself is a practice and it sounds complicated, but when I was in my reflection phase of this fundamental issue with my thought process I simply asked myself these questions. 

Questions that helped me were why did I do the things I did? Was it because I enjoyed them or was it because I liked how it looked or what people said to me? What do I actually enjoy? From here I discovered I actually enjoy the gym, my alone time, and writing. What is something I do just for myself? I love to be creative as I learned this gets me out of my own head and I enjoy expressing myself creatively.

 And finally, how could I build a strong core belief about myself? I must figure out what is important to me and slowly build my own self up over time by changing this negativity bias I have about myself to a positive one. 

Reinvention 

Building a strong belief of who I was, was truly the turning point from me seeing words from others as compliments instead of external validation. Doing things in a performative way to present yourself in a way that isn’t what you truly enjoy does get exhausting. 

To know yourself is to learn yourself, and I took the time to do that. I spent time with myself, I asked myself tons of questions about what I wanted my values to be, how would I make decisions for myself, what made me feel like me, and what I did not want. 

I had spent a large portion of my life putting other peoples words and opinions over mine, and I owed it to myself to fill myself up with what I believed about myself first. There’s a strength that comes with getting to know who you are, and it’s a really powerful moment when you hear something and know with certainty it is either for you or it is not by your own thoughts. 

Learning all that I did I decided that in order to truly appreciate a compliment, I had to be the one to give and believe my own compliments to myself first. I am thankful to have learned that there is a difference between craving external validation and accepting a compliment. Filling your own cup up first, gives you the room to filter what’s poured into that cup from the outside world. 

I’ll end this on another question, when you compliment yourself, do you believe it?