flattery

Flattery has always been and remains one of the most effective tools for influencing people. It is used everywhere - at work, in business, in the family, when communicating with friends. Because many people love to be praised, no matter how sincere and deserved that praise is. Moreover, in some situations, the most effective flattery is rather crude and obvious flattery, which pleasantly fills people's souls and plunges them into a world of dreams. Despite this, people usually do not like to admit that flattery has an impact on them, that they succumb to it and become its victim. This is understandable, no one wants to feel weak, and the tendency to flattery is just the same manifestation of weakness. Flattery is obsequious, often completely insincere, and even hypocritical, praising someone in order to please him and win his favor. She is one of the most common ways to manipulate people. In this article, dear friends, we will talk about why many people succumb to flattery, how to recognize it, how to react to it competently and how to use flattery for your own purposes.

So first of all, let's find out why people succumb to flattery. It is important to pay attention to both your own feelings and the behavior of other people in order to explain the person's need for flattery. You probably know that people want to think well of themselves, and, in fact, if everything is in order with their self-esteem, they think so. And they naturally want others to think of them as well and even better. Therefore, they love to be praised, when some of their qualities are extolled, when they are distinguished from the rest. It gives them confidence, increases their self-esteem, inspires, calms them down, helps to cope with depressive moods, and so on. Thus, when we flatter a person, we are essentially telling him what he thinks about himself or wants to think. And he wants to think so because it is important for him to be significant. And to be significant means to be appreciated by people and to be in demand by them, which in turn allows a person to count on his acceptance by society and on the help of other people. That is, everything ultimately rests on the main human task - survival. And a person can survive in this world only with the help of other people, so it is important for him that people think well of him. Flattery is confirmation that a person is satisfied and that he is an important figure in society.

In general, when we talk about the influence of flattery on people, then we need to understand where it, flattery, draws its strength from. And its strength lies not in the fact that people love when they are praised, but in the people themselves, or rather, in their lives. You and I live in a world that is not always friendly to us. Many of us live surrounded by people who have absolutely nothing to do with us and will never get a kind word from them. But for a sense of social belonging, the recognition of other people is very important. But imagine a situation in which you are praised from childhood, telling you that you are the best. Imagine that no matter what you do - everyone is happy with you, everyone is delighted with you, everyone admires you. I understand that it is difficult to imagine, since in the life of most of us everything happens quite the opposite - we are more scolded, criticized or completely ignored. But still, try to imagine it. Now ask the question - when will you get tired of this, when will you lose interest in those people who constantly praise you for everything? It is quite obvious that sooner or later you will become boring and you will no longer perceive other people's praise as something valuable. The reason is an excess of this very praise, an excess of human attention, an excess of positive emotions, an excess of admiration from people. That is, a lifestyle in which you feel like the navel of the earth will make you practically, if not completely indifferent to flattery. That which in our life is a lot - we are not valued and not noticed - we are indifferent to it. But, at the same time, one must not forget that people get used to flattery, therefore, even if there is a lot of it in their life, they do not stop appreciating it. They just start to consider it the norm.

Can you guess now what the power of flattery is? The fact that a person lacks attention, praise, respect, recognition, love, admiration from other people. Therefore, when someone begins to flatter such a person, then for him this flattery is worth its weight in gold - he perceives it as a sip of cool water in a hot desert. We value what is little in our life and what we need. So good flatterers just give people what they need. But there is another side of this issue - those people who have a very high opinion of themselves and love to be obeyed and obeyed are also greedy for flattery. For them, flattery is not something in short supply - for them it is the norm and a manifestation of obedience on the part of other people. Therefore, they only surround themselves with flatterers, not tolerating those who reread them in something and reproach them for something. In this case, vanity makes flattery not just sweet for a vain person, but the only true form of communication of other people with him. After all, there are people in our society who have a certain power and authority, who want to live and live in their own worlds, and in these worlds they do not want to see anything bad, nothing that contradicts their beliefs. Moreover, they do not want to see their weaknesses, shortcomings and mistakes. Therefore, they remove from themselves everyone who can somehow disturb their comfort by their disagreement and bring those who are ready to tell them every day about their greatness, beauty, strength, outstanding intelligence and the like. Of course, in such a life there are a lot of shortcomings - at least it relaxes a person and makes him inadequate. But while the pleasure lasts, many people simply do not think about it. Therefore, flattery is not only a scarce form of behavior that people need, but also one of the forms of obedience.

Thus, on the one hand, those who lack confidence in themselves and who lack human attention, love, respect and recognition are susceptible to flattery, and on the other hand, those people who have all this, and they are not so much love flattery. even need flattery, how many are simply accustomed to it and consider it the only correct way to communicate with other people. So the range of possibilities for flattery, as a way of manipulating people, is quite large - with its help you can influence different people with varying degrees of success.

Now let's talk about how to recognize flattery and how to respond to it competently. Here you need to turn your attention first of all to how you generally treat any praise addressed to you. It doesn't matter what you are praised for, and who praises you - if you really love praise, then you are not protected from flattery. You will be flattered and melted, thereby allowing people to rule you. And flattery is not so difficult to recognize - if you are praised and extolled, then it always says something. The only question is what exactly. People may be happy that you have already done something for them, or they may want to get some action from you. Look for the reason why other people speak well of you. It's just that no one praises anyone. And it's not even that important whether there is a reason for someone to praise you or not - you should always look for the reason why people say something good to you. You need to understand their motivation. Remember that of all the poisons, it is flattery that produces the most vertigo. Therefore, if you have a need for praise, for recognition, for admiration from people - be more attentive to those who give you all this. After all, even well-founded, well-deserved praise can allow other people to pave a path to your heart. And who knows what the ultimate goal is pursued by a person, telling you what you want to hear. On the one hand, it is, of course, not bad when you are praised. Thanks to someone else's praise, you get confirmation of the correctness of your actions in the eyes of other people. It instills confidence in you and inspires future achievements. But on the other hand, I repeat once again, you should always think about what is behind someone else's praise - sincere admiration for your deeds, which helped people in some way, or an attempt to “soften” you and make you pliable for something else - some then requests, suggestions, concessions.

Thus, on the one hand, those who lack confidence in themselves and who lack human attention, love, respect and recognition are susceptible to flattery, and on the other hand, those people who have all this, and they are not so much love flattery. even need flattery, how many are simply accustomed to it and consider it the only correct way to communicate with other people. So the range of possibilities for flattery, as a way of manipulating people, is quite large - with its help you can influence different people with varying degrees of success.

Now let's talk about how to recognize flattery and how to respond to it competently. Here you need to turn your attention first of all to how you generally treat any praise addressed to you. It doesn't matter what you are praised for, and who praises you - if you really love praise, then you are not protected from flattery. You will be flattered and melted, thereby allowing people to rule you. And flattery is not so difficult to recognize - if you are praised and extolled, then it always says something. The only question is what exactly. People may be happy that you have already done something for them, or they may want to get some action from you. Look for the reason why other people speak well of you. It's just that no one praises anyone. And it's not even that important whether there is a reason for someone to praise you or not - you should always look for the reason why people say something good to you. You need to understand their motivation. Remember that of all the poisons, it is flattery that produces the most vertigo. Therefore, if you have a need for praise, for recognition, for admiration from people - be more attentive to those who give you all this. After all, even well-founded, well-deserved praise can allow other people to pave a path to your heart. And who knows what the ultimate goal is pursued by a person, telling you what you want to hear. On the one hand, it is, of course, not bad when you are praised. Thanks to someone else's praise, you get confirmation of the correctness of your actions in the eyes of other people. It instills confidence in you and inspires future achievements. But on the other hand, I repeat once again, you should always think about what is behind someone else's praise - sincere admiration for your deeds, which helped people in some way, or an attempt to “soften” you and make you pliable for something else - some then requests, suggestions, concessions.

Finally, let's figure out how we ourselves can use flattery for our own purposes. Still, it is a rather powerful tool for influencing a person. The first step is to decide what exactly you want to achieve with flattery. The point is that flattering everyone just to please people is not a very good thing. Although many of us are greedy for flattery and love when honey is poured into their ears, flatterers often cause distrust in us. We know that the cunning fox has certain plans for us and therefore we are on our guard. In addition, your flattery in certain situations may be simply inappropriate. Some people know even without you how wonderful they are, while others may not be interested in your flattery at all, because they are not interested in you. And for someone, your flattery can cause aggression, because people have already encountered flatterers before and cannot stand them because of negative experience. So inappropriate flattery can leave a very bad impression on you. After all, your attempt to flatter someone, in fact, means that you want to manipulate the person, and not everyone likes it. Flattery should be, first of all, appropriate and for this you need to observe the person you want to flatter, and even better communicate with him in order to understand how he generally reacts to praise addressed to him. If he treats praise well and even very well, then he will treat flattery even better. Thus, you need to enter from afar, wishing to flatter someone, in order to do jewelry work in this direction and not arouse unnecessary suspicion.

Although, you know, friends, although I warn you that flattery is not always appropriate and that it should be used with caution, in reality, in most cases, which I have witnessed directly or indirectly, people either treat it normally, either good or even very good. Yes, some of us don't trust flatterers, but we don't get rid of them and don't hate them, that's what's important. And some people do, they only surround themselves with them. Everyone knows that flattery is in many cases toadying and sucking up, but many like it. People may tell you that flattery doesn't work for them, but they will treat flatterers very well. Therefore, flattery is a kind of career ladder. In almost any hierarchical system, for successful career growth, people have to flatter their superiors. Nobody needs honesty and openness - bosses like to be obeyed, to be obeyed, to be served faithfully and to agree with them in everything. And even when they are wrong about something, they don't want to know about it. Well, usually. There are exceptions. After all, you and I must understand that those people who have risen from the bottom and gained a certain power, opportunity, authority - have gone through all the circles of hell - they have endured so much, serving their superiors, gnawing and plowing their way up, that being at a certain level social pyramid, they need compensation for the psychological harm that has been caused to them during all this time. Therefore, they need those who will fawn in front of them just as they once fawned over their superiors. That is why flattery is a subtle art that opens any doors for a person, but not many people own it. She, I repeat, is one of the most important methods of manipulation.

If we talk about how to flatter correctly in order to please people [or a particular person] and get them certain privileges, then this is not so difficult if you apply flattery to most ordinary people. It is important to find in the person whom you want to flatter, something that he loves and appreciates in himself, and based on this, choose suitable words of praise for him. As Dale Carnegie wrote: to flatter is to tell a person exactly what he thinks of himself. And I add to this that it is also useful to tell a person what he would like to think of himself. That is, if you know a person well, if you know what he would like to be, what qualities he dreams of possessing, in what he strives to be the best, then it will be useful to help him see such a person in himself, praising him for the appropriate merits. And sometimes you can even praise a person for something that he never thought about, but that he will definitely like. To do this, you need to know him even better. Praise [flatter] can be done in different ways - you can immediately violently express your admiration for some person's merits, some of his deeds, successes, in order to instantly charm him, or you can do it gradually, showing him that the more you learn about him , the more you admire it. In some situations, when, for example, you want to flatter a tyrant boss, you can praise any qualities in him, as long as he feels like a god next to you. And in addition to this, you need to agree with him in everything, support him in everything and admire his every decision and action. The more bad a person is, the more willingly he believes in any nonsense about himself, if he likes this nonsense. Some people, as a rule, are somehow flawed and not very smart, are captivated not by flattery itself, but by the fact that they are considered worthy of flattery. These people are easy to spot by looking at their surroundings. If they are surrounded only by sycophants and saints, then you can safely use even the most rude and overt flattery against them - they will accept it with pleasure.

And yet, more often than not, people flatter someone based on the real merits of that person. That is, they do not attribute to him such advantages that do not exist, but simply exaggerate the existing ones, so that the flattery is not so obvious and rude. I advise you to be original in this matter. Try to flatter people in a way others don't flatter them to stand out from the crowd. Be the ultimate flatterer, praising a person's virtues that others do not see. Then he will like you more than others. This is especially true in cases where a person, for example, a big boss, is flattered by many in order to smudge him. You can beat your competitors in this game thanks to the originality of your flattery.

And finally, I will add that no matter what people talk about flattery, no matter how they use it against each other, we still have to admit that it often makes our life more beautiful, helping us to like each other. Therefore, people often use it not only in manipulations, but also in everyday communication, in order to win over nice people and feel very comfortable in their company.