Daily Blog Challenge Day 8: Hide

Introduction

I hope you enjoyed reading the blog posts over the weekend. I really enjoyed writing them. I want to confess to something straight up as we move into Week 2 of the challenge. My content creation blog has fallen from the challenge. I am finding it too difficult to write them both, especially over the weekend. But fear not! this one is going to continue. 

Today’s theme or word is ‘hide’!

You are good at this!

As a group of people, I think almost all of us are not very good at accepting praise or shouting about what we are good at. We are very good at criticising ourselves and saying how we need to improve, but when it comes to actually celebrating I think we all find this difficult. One of the reasons for this is that we never want to open ourselves up to criticism. If we say that we are very good at something and then fail, we are left with the ‘egg on the face’ situation where we are often made to eat humble pie.

Growing up I have had to learn a lot of strategies to cope with social interactions. These I have learned in order to interact as society wishes. For example, when someone asks me how I am as we pass in the corridor at work, this is meant as a pleasantry and the person asking it is not really necessarily interested in my well-being so there is no need to explain or share my current list of ailments. In a similar way, I have learned, or told myself, that when someone gives me the praise I am to smile and say thank you. Too often I would embark on a senseless ramble about the good and bad points of my performance, lesson, talk which resulted in the person smiling and trying desperately to escape.

When I was a teacher I often used to share this tactic – smiling and saying thank you, not escaping -to my class. This wasn’t necessarily to be integrated into the social interactions of society but more because when I say something is good, I mean it!

Other posts
Daily Blog Challenge Day 8: Hide
Daily Blog Challenge – Day 7 – ‘magic’
Daily Blog Challenge Day 6 – ‘perspective’
Daily Blog Challenge – Day 5 – ‘experience’
Daily Blog Challenge Day 4: ‘watch’
Blog Every Day Challenge: Inform
Blog every day Challenge: Day 2: Chance

Hiding our lights

Being modest is not necessarily a bad attribute or personality trait but it is one that encourages us to hide our lights under our lampshades. Initially, we don’t want to put ourselves into the position of being criticised, but secondly, we rarely celebrate what we are good at.

As a teacher, providing feedback on a child’s work, I always used to ensure that I didn’t use ‘good’ as a throw-away remark. If it was good, I would use the word, but if it was not good, then I wouldn’t. If I did say something was good, I used to feel quite offended if the reply came back that it wasn’t! Was my assessment or comment not correct? Had I misjudged the final outcome? And so, knowing that neither of these questions was correct, I used to teach the children how to respond in this situation. Smile and say thank you.

We all have our strengths and skills and often these can be overlooked or not even acknowledge but they are our strengths. We should compare these to others saying they are better or worse than me because they do not have the unique collection of skills and abilities which make us, us!

So do me a favour. Stop hiding your skills away from people, let’s get them out in the open and celebrate them and, if everyone says -“you are really good at this!” -remember to just smile and say thank you 😁

Conclusion

Bit of a waffling one that, but I got to my point in the end. Tomorrow’s is a hard one so definitely, some evening thought needed to be given to it. 

Remember if you are enjoying these daily blogs then please consider adding a comment below and saying well done on Twitter – links at the top of the page!

Until tomorrow then!