I had an interesting chat with a colleague today about spreading joy.  Making others happy can be really simple at no fiscal cost and requiring little effort.

Boosting someone’s ego through compliments requires only that the feedback be perceived as honest and heartfelt.  Most if not everyone feels some happiness or joy when others make positive statements about them.

Sincerity is Natural

Providing positive comments about someone’s activities and/or future predictions of their success and reward potential do not work unless they are presented with the associated tone, body language highlighting the fact you really believe it.

Acting sincere most often looks just like what it is – acting.  Generally, everyone has really good filters to identify phony sincerity (no matter how good our gushing is).

Praising someone, (i.e., recognizing positive attributes) is not hard when you do it naturally.  No acting effort required.  From a hard currency perspective, it costs nothing.

Joy to the World

We often jump to criticism.   The negative seems to be easy to share.  Telling others their shortcomings rarely brings real joy, even if they thank us for letting them know.

If you have something positive to share with others, why not bring a little happiness to the world.  A small touch of happiness repeated thousands of times becomes a bundle of joy.

Not only does boosting a person’s ego elicit positive feelings but as a side benefit it is much more motivational than criticism.

Years ago I had this realization, positive feedback works way better than negative.   I never include derogatory or critical comments in performance reviews of people I work with.   Not surprisingly this approach almost always leads to continuous improvement.