How To Compliment

A genuine compliment is a powerful thing. It can change the entire course of the day, or even a life. So also can a complinsult (an insult masquerading as a compliment). One of the complinsults that has bugged me the most in life is the "you know you don't need makeup to look beautiful" after I've clearly spent time putting on my makeup to try to look nice. I haven't faced that in a while thanks to my wonderful family and friends but in my younger days (high school and college) I would run into it a lot. And it was always like a punch to the gut. It was as if the person was saying "you look terrible when you do your makeup." No. If you believe that someone is beautiful (which we all are btw) just tell them. Never qualify a compliment. It is no longer a compliment if you do.

As I was thinking about this this weekend and my mind was wandering back to high school I remembered one of the best compliments I ever got in those four years. It was from my dad. My dad taught at my high school so we would ride in together. I was not a morning person in those days so when I would get into the car my hair would be the rat's nest that I woke up with. I would sit there in frustrated silence as I brushed and combed and pinned and clipped and tried to make my hair presentable. I would then turn to my dad and say "how does my hair look?" to which he would always reply "very nice' and then I could relax.  Then one day, it must have been at the dinner table or something, my dad started to talk about this. "Kateri sits in the car working on her hair doing things that I can't fathom and then when she turns to me and asks how her hair look it always looks like something out of a magazine." Talk about an awesome compliment. It was genuine and it was not qualified.

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