Practical examples of how to say the difficult things

When you’ve been too busy to reply to someone’s email:

Sorry! I haven’t been attending my emails. I have been,and still am, snowed under. [Give brief details, e.g., I’ve been on-call all week at the hospital. . .)

When someone sends a follow-up email becasue you haven’t replied to their first email:

Sorry! I have been rude– but not intentionally — just haven’t got to it yet. (give brief reason for your busyness.) It’s with the other 100 emails to attend to now I’ve [got this talk out of the way–or whatever].

What should I say–and shouldn’t say–to someone with a serious illness?

Answer: Check out these ideas by Bruce Feiler and Mia Freedman.

Bruce Feiler had bone cancer and wrote about his experience in the book The Council of Dads.

Mia Freedman, a journalist with the West Australian, wrote up Bruce’s Do’s and Don’ts of what to say to someone with a serious illness.

Don’t say:

  1. What can I do to help? (Don’t ask, be proactive.)
  2. My thoughts and prayers are with you. (A cliche.)
  3. Did you try that mango colonic I recommended? (Leave treatment advice to the doctors.)
  4. Everything will be OK. (You don’t know that.)
  5. How are we today? (Sick people aren’t mentally diminished infants.)
  6. You look great. (Don’t focus on the externals.)

Do Say:

  1. No need to write back. (Keeping up with correspondence can be overwhelming.)
  2. I should be going now. (Short visits are best.)
  3. Would you like some gossip? (Distraction is helpful.)
  4. I love you or I’m sorry you have to go through this. (Honest expression of emotions are a powerful gift.)

Mia Freedman’s friends added some more helpful ideas:

“I so appreciated the people who just quietly dropped food on my doorstep unprompted. With treatment, it can be hard enough to eat, let alone shop and cook. And I had a family to feed! Meals were a godsend.”

“People often feel guilty talking about themselves but I love it! I’m so tired of discussing my health. Whether you talk to me about the jeans you found on sale or some outrageous bit of Hollywood gossip, it’s a relief to shift the focus off me, even briefly.”

“When I see a friend who’s going through a tough time, I always open with, “We can talk about it for as long as you want, or we can not talk about it at all. Your call!” And it makes people instantly relax to know they’re not expected to go through the whole spiel. Because when you’re going through cancer or a divorce or miscarriage, it can be exhausting to feel like you have to tell the same story again and again.”

Cynthia Banham, a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald who lost her legs in a plane crash, wrote about how annoying trite one-liner platitudes are to listen to from concerned others. Her two most hated were:

  • “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” (Friedrich Nietzche’s famous quote)
  • “There but for the grace of God go I”. (Translation: Had not God smiled on me, I might be where you are now.” not exactly a source of comfort for those presumably God chose not to smile upon!)

Banham said she did like one thing someone told her:

“While I was still in the burns unit, struggling to come to terms with what had been dealt me, a very wise man, now a friend, counseled me to ‘focus on the things you can do, not the things you can’t’.

I’ve returned to that piece of advice many times since, and its power to lift me has never diminished.”

from The language of suffering

How to acknowledge beauty and excellence in others

“That person is so self-centred! She only talks about herself; she’s never interested in what I’m doing.” 

 
“He is such an exploiter. He’s always looking for a way to profit from someone else.” 

 
“She’s such a coward — always too scared to have an opinion or try something a bit risky.”   

And so on … and on … and on! 

It’s so easy spotting  flaws in others. Our brains do it effortlessly – – at least my brain does!  

But why is it so difficult to spot excellence in others?  And to pass on this positive feedback to those people directly?  

For the last three years, on and off, I’ve been practising the uncomfortable art of acknowledging excellence in others.  

I started doing this after reading  the 24 character strengths in Martin Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness (a life-changing book for me).  One of the 24 core character strengths is Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

Here’s how Martin Seligman describes it:  

You stop and smell the roses. You appreciate beauty, excellence, and skill in all domains: in nature and art, mathematics and science, and everyday things. When intense, it is accompanied by awe  and wonder. Witnessing virtuosity in sports or acts of human moral beauty or virtue provokes the kindred emotion of elevation.” (p  154)  

I decided to set myself the personal challenge of actively looking out for beauty in others and to pass these observations onto them.  

Acknowledge beauty in others actually is a hard thing to do. Try it yourself, and you’ll see what I mean.  

Spotting the beautiful behaviour is hard enough — I really do need to force my brain to look for it. It has become easier with practice, but I still have a long way to go.    

Passing on the “grand compliment” to the beautiful person is definitely scary!  I feel extremely self-conscious doing it, and I worry that my beautiful person might be “creeped out” by what they consider to be an inappropriately personal and  over-the-top self-disclosure by me.  

I’m fine giving  simple, low-grade compliments such as:    

“Gee, I like your new hair style, dress, house, garden, etc.”  

I find complimenting someone on their skill a bit harder but I’m OK about it:  

“Wow! You two do the quickstep so well!  You move so effortlessly!”  

But I find complimenting someone on their virtuous behaviour decidedly uncomfortable.  I suspect my technique is less-than-perfect! I sometimes get strange — almost punishing — responses. I also suspect  my receivers feel self-conscious receiving a compliment about their character as this is probably an unusual compliment to receive.  

In the beginning  — less so now — I used to worry about my motives or worry about what the other person might think my motives were:  

“Am I just sucking up to this person?”  

“Am I giving them this gushy compliment just to make  them like me more?”  

“Am I engaging in inappropriate self-disclosure and  “boundary-crossing” behaviour?”   

After much soul-searching,  I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. In fact,  I’m often tempted not to give the highly personal compliment to save myself some squirminess.  But  then I usually “steel” myself to do it because something deep inside me sincerely believes that this person behaving excellently deserves to be told. I consider it, in fact, almost my duty to tell them!  Excellence — especially character excellence —  is so beautiful and so good for the world  that it must be acknowledged. If we don’t acknowledge it, the beautiful people might get discouraged and stop behaving beautifully!  

As uncomfortable as it is for me to give it and for my beautiful people to receive it, I will keep persisting, for these two reasons:  

  1. I think it’s important people hear this positive stuff about themselves. I believe my positive message will get through and do good, regardless of how uncomfortable the receiver might feel and  what they might think of the  peculiar messenger and her motives!
  2. Giving this positive feedback makes ME feel really good!  No kidding! Martin Seligman is  correct. I do feel “elevated”. Immediately afterwards, I always feel like I have done the right thing and feel pleased I have done it.

What are some real-life examples of my acknowledging beauty in other people?  It’s a bit tricky giving real examples of how I have acknowledged beauty and excellence in others. My compliments are usually given to  people important to me. If I reproduced the compliements here and those people saw them, I might be sullying my self-claimed pure motives by getting mileage out of  presenting the compliments on this very public website for illustration purposes! 

“I knew it!  Anne wasn’t sincere after all! She just said this nice thing so she could use it as an example on her website!” 

I can give these two examples though, because they are compliments I gave to perfect strangers. The two people are unlikely to stumble across this post!  

1.  The beautiful doctor

My friend had a medical problem that was proving difficult to diagnose, causing my friend much concern. My friend hates visiting doctors and having medical procedures done.  Her GP referred her to a medical specialist. After her first visit to this doctor, my friend told me that she found the doctor so awesomely lovely that at the end of the consultation she wanted to give him a hug!  She said she’d never felt like hugging a doctor before.   She didn’t hug him — of course! You don’t do that sort of thing! 

The doctor arranged for her to have a scan. My friend wasn’t looking forward to it. But afterwards, she told me excitedly how the lovely doctor phoned her up a day after the scan and spent several minutes on the phone patiently explaining the scan results and reassuring her that she had nothing to worry about. My friend was so chuffed that the doctor had phoned her (unheard of!) and that he spent all that time discussing her results and answering her questions without charging her and saving her the trouble of having to come in for a special follow-up visit! 

My friend was obviously impressed with this doctor — and so was I!  I decided  he sounded like  one of  life’s “beautiful people” so  I had this compelling urge to tell him so!  

So I  wrote him this card:  

Hi Dr  XXXX  

 Thank you very much for being so kind to my friend recently.  

She was so impressed with how competent and caring you were. My friend usually feels uncomfortable with doctors and had been pretty worried about her problem which was proving impossible to diagnose. 

 I just wanted you to know that your good doctoring and kindness  has brought someone a lot of joy.  

 I didn’t tell the doctor my friend’s name or my name as this information isn’t important. What’s important is that he hears that he’s “done well”. He needs to know that! 

2. The author whose beautiful book “spoke” to me:

I read a lot of books. Every now and then, a book will “speak to me” and probably change my life in some way. I recently read a book on philosophy that “spoke” to me. 

I thought at the time, “I love this book so much. I want to thank the author and tell him. I wonder if I could find his email somewhere?” 

Finding his email was easy — he had a website with a “contact me” feature. So I emailed him. 

I thanked him for writing such a wonderful book that made the teachings of famous philosophers so interesting and easy to understand for me. I said I  had tried reading books on philosophy before but they were always  too hard to get into.  

I also told him I found some of the ideas he covered in his book very personally useful and comforting for me at that time.  

I sent off my email, and within a  few hours I was thrilled to receive this reply:

Dear Anne,
 
I’m so glad you enjoyed my book. How beautifully and personally you responded to it. I agree that XXXX and XXXXhad ideas about friendship which put us to shame, in terms of how advanced and nuanced they were.
 
Thanks so much for reading me and for letting me know …

A few weeks later, the strangest thing happened. My brother told me he had just finished reading the same book and that  he loved it too!  My brother and I had a wonderful conversation about our favourite bits in the book.  I felt a  real “meeting of minds” with my brother during that conversation. For me, it feels like walking on heaven to come across someone else who loves a book I love and for us to be able to talk about it and develop the ideas together further .  

I felt that this book had brought my brother and me closer together. I was grateful all over again to the author so had another urge to write and tell him so!

 The author sent back this lovely reply just a couple of hours later: 

What a beautiful and heart-warming story.  

I love the idea of your brother taking off for the day to read some philosophy in a cafe and of how you and he communed around my books. 

What an honour for me.
So thank you so much to you both – and with very good wishes for the coming year …
 
      

 

If ever I had doubts about the power and goodness of “acknowledging beauty in others”, I certainly lost them after reading  those lovely and appreciative replies from that author. 

Acknowledging excellence in others is such a win for everyone — it’s a win for the receiver of the good news, a win for the deliverer of the good news, and a win for the world in general. 

A touching video to get you thinking about acknowledging excellence and beauty in others:

YouTube Preview Image

Note: It’s best to turn the music off or way down to make it easier to read the words. This video actually started life as an email that quickly went “viral”, ending up being read by millions. “Passing on the blue ribbon” is now a movement!

     

Quotes on the value of acknowledging excellence and beauty in others (there are surprisingly few!):

  1. Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. (Voltaire)
  2. Next to excellence is the appreciation of it. (William  Thackeray)
  3. We are so often caught up in our destination that we forget to appreciate the journey, especially the goodness of the people we meet on the way. Appreciation is a wonderful feeling, don’t overlook it. (unknown)