Complimenting without Bring in Beauty
I recently read a blog post by Chicago Tribune staffer Heidi Stevens, emphasizing some of what we try to do at our girls summer camp to focus on character development. Please see below for excerpts from her piece, “Can we compliment each other without bringing beauty into it?”
- “Your hair looks beautiful and so do you,” reads the first Facebook comment beneath a photo [a friend] posted of herself at the Roman Colosseum.
- We bring [Facebook comments] around to appearance an awful lot of the time, particularly when the photos are of women. I’m as guilty as anyone, frequently noting how positively gorgeous a friend looked at the pumpkin patch/wedding/climate march.
I’ve been trying to shift my compliments away from appearance ever since a colleague told me how much it vexed her to read a string of comments praising her friend’s daughter’s looks. - “All anyone can comment on is how beautiful the girl is,” my colleague said. “One today even suggested she should enter the fair pageant.”
- I wonder what we’re neglecting to say — neglecting to even take note of — when we default to complimenting each other on appearance alone.
- A summer camp in Putnam Valley, N.Y., has a “no body talk” rule to encourage the young campers — girls and boys ages 8 to 17 — to focus on each other’s character traits, not looks. “The specific rule is while at camp, we take a break from mentioning physical appearance, including clothing,” Eden Village Camp founder Vivian Stadlin told The New York Times. “And it’s about myself or others, be it negative, neutral or even positive.”
- I think it’s a worthy exercise, and I plan to employ a variation of it when I’m complimenting friends and acquaintances — online and in person — from now on. Rather than reflexively praising someone’s appearance, I’ll try to admire something specific about their accomplishments or their spirit.
The whole piece is at this link.