How to Accept Compliments Without Feeling Awkward: 5 Steps

Why do I deflect compliments?

You deflect compliments because they don’t match what you believe about yourself. Modesty has little to do with it. Praise that your self-image can’t back up feels wrong, and your first reflex is to correct it.

You probably know the scene. Someone says “Great presentation today,” and before you’ve had a chance to think, you hear yourself say “Oh, it was nothing.” Three seconds later you’re annoyed with yourself. Waved it off again.

If this happens all the time, it’s usually more than a habit. It’s a window into your self-doubt, and that’s exactly why it’s worth starting here. A small change in behavior that can make a big difference.

Downplay, deflect, hand it back: the three escape moves

Almost every deflection follows one of three patterns. The first is downplaying it: “I just got lucky.” The second is passing the credit on: “That was the team, not me.” The third is firing it straight back: “Oh, you too.” The compliment gets passed on like a hot potato.

All three moves have the same effect. The praise bounces off before it reaches you. The other person feels corrected. And once again, you’ve proved to yourself that there was nothing worth praising.

Watch yourself for a week. You probably have a favorite move. Many high achievers give the credit to the team or to circumstances. It sounds generous, but it costs the most, because you’re teaching yourself not to see your own work as your own.

Why do compliments make me uncomfortable? It isn’t modesty

The real reason runs deeper. Your inner critic has the final say about who you are, and a compliment challenges its version of you. That creates tension. Waving the compliment off ends the tension instantly. That’s why deflecting feels right in the moment, even though over time it keeps you small.

Modesty would be a free choice. This isn’t one. It’s a reflex.

There’s a simple test. Can you accept a compliment when you want to? If yes, that’s modesty. If your mouth waves it off before you can think, your self-image is in charge, not your good manners.

What deflecting costs you

Every compliment you deflect is a missed chance to talk back to the thought “I’m not good enough.” Every day you get small pieces of evidence that people see you, and you write them off in seconds. So the old self-image goes unchallenged, however much positive feedback actually comes your way.

There’s a social cost too. If you always block praise, sooner or later you get less of it. Not because your work falls short, but because complimenting you starts to feel uncomfortable.

What the research shows

The research shows two things. Compliments have a bigger impact than we think, and that impact depends on whether the person receiving them lets them in. In a series of experiments, Boothby and Bohns (2021) showed that people consistently underestimate how good a compliment feels to the person receiving it and overestimate how awkward or intrusive it will seem. The title of their paper sums it up: “Why a Simple Act of Kindness Is Not as Simple as It Seems.”

For context, the Boothby and Bohns studies used US samples, some of them with strangers on a college campus. Whether the effects play out exactly the same way in other cultures or workplaces is still an open question.

The second study is about you as the person receiving praise. Marigold, Holmes and Ross (2007) asked people with low self-esteem not just to hear a compliment from their partner but to describe what it meant: Why did they say it? What does it mean for the relationship? Afterwards, this group felt as valued and secure as people with high self-esteem, and the effect could still be measured two weeks later.

In short, the compliment isn’t the problem. How you process it is. And you can train how you process it. You can read how we turn findings like these into our approach on our science page.

The self-image gate: what happens in your head

Your brain doesn’t treat information about you neutrally. It prefers whatever confirms your existing self-image, even when that self-image is negative. This principle is called self-verification. Swann (1997) describes how people hold on to their self-views because those views give them a sense of stability. A familiar bad picture feels safer than an unfamiliar good one.

To this system, a compliment isn’t a gift. It’s a data error. The gate comes down.

What matters is that the gate can be opened. Kille, Eibach, Wood and Holmes (2017) showed that people with low self-esteem are more likely to dismiss compliments from their partner, especially when they immediately relate the praise to their whole self-image. What helps is the approach Marigold and colleagues (2007) tested: consciously making sense of the praise and putting its meaning into words instead of reflexively pushing it away.

In practice, that means you don’t leave a compliment stuck in the moment. Ask yourself briefly: What does this praise say about the way I work? That gives it weight beyond the one occasion. If praise immediately makes you think you’re about to be found out, that’s a separate pattern, and we look at it more closely in how to stop feeling like a fraud at work.

Learn to accept compliments: the “just say thank you” exercise and 4 more steps

You don’t learn to accept compliments by changing your whole attitude overnight. You learn it through small steps you can repeat. Start with a week of observation, then move through five exercises.

Getting ready, just noticing (week 1): For one week, you only keep count. Every compliment, every deflection: jot it down and change nothing. For example: “Tuesday, my boss praised my proposal, I said: ‘It wasn’t much work.’” Counting alone makes the autopilot visible.

If you’d also like to work on your self-esteem more broadly, here are some daily exercises to build your self-esteem.

The steps build on each other:

1. Just say thank you (weeks 2–3): “Thank you.” Smiling is optional, silence is allowed. The “thank you” may well feel like a lie at first. With practice, it can start to feel more natural.
2. Thank you plus echo (week 4): Repeat the core of what they said: “Thanks, so the preparation paid off.” This makes you actually engage with what the compliment says instead of waving it through.
3. Ask a follow-up question (week 5): “Thanks. What exactly did you like about it?” The answer gives you something to reflect on in the evening: What does this say about me?
4. Evening log (from week 2, alongside the other steps): Write down one compliment a day, plus one sentence about what it means. Two minutes, no more. This exercise is based on the approach from the Marigold study: finding the meaning instead of pushing it away.
5. Body anchor (from week 2, alongside the other steps): When you say “thank you,” feel both feet on the floor and breathe out once. This links accepting the compliment to a physical signal instead of to overthinking.

For the training to stick, you need to repeat it at fixed triggers. Our guide on how to build habits shows you how to make routines like these last.

One honest caveat belongs here. These exercises change a reflex, not your foundation. If deep self-rejection or a depressive episode lies behind the deflecting, they don’t replace psychotherapy. They’re a starting point, not a cure-all.

Learning to give compliments: the surprising effect on you

Giving compliments can make accepting them easier. That’s the surprising part. When you give one, you see the other side: a compliment is usually sincere, it often takes some courage to say, and there’s no strategy behind it. That experience makes it harder to dismiss other people’s praise as empty words.

The data from Boothby and Bohns (2021) offers another reason. Giving compliments felt less awkward than people feared, and the people receiving them were noticeably happier than expected. Maybe you hold back not only when receiving praise but also when giving it. Either way, it costs you connection.

In practice: one honest, specific compliment a day. “Your summary earlier saved the meeting twenty minutes.” At work especially, this small habit can change how people treat each other, and it ties into what we describe in finding fulfillment at work: being seen and seeing others.

The 3 most common mistakes

The most common mistake when you’re learning to accept compliments is wanting to agree with the praise right away, then giving up when you can’t. Watch out for these three traps:

1. Confusing agreement with acceptance. “Thank you” doesn’t mean “I think so too.” It only means: received. The belief comes later, not before. If you wait for the feeling first, you may wait a long time.
2. Starting too big. If you practice with praise from your partner (“You’re wonderful”), you’re starting with the hardest version. Begin with small, specific compliments from colleagues. They’re easier to practice with.
3. Reading setbacks as proof. Three weeks in, you catch yourself waving off praise again and think: This isn’t working. Not true. A reflex that has run for decades doesn’t disappear in 21 days. Count it, keep going. That’s all.

From compliment to self-image: your next step

The exercises train your reaction. But knowing all this doesn’t fully dissolve the reflex, because the pattern sits deeper: in the way you see yourself. That’s where hypnosis comes in.

In the free introductory hypnosis, you pick a ready-made hypnosis on a topic that fits you, such as self-esteem. Listen to it when you have some quiet, ideally in the evening, and notice how it feels not to push recognition away straight away. Hypnosis is a form of self-help and doesn’t replace psychotherapy or medical advice.

If you’d like to go deeper after that, a free 45-minute 1:1 analysis session with one of our top coaches looks closely at all 11 areas of your life. From that, we build Hypnotic Rise for you alone, with every hypnosis written just for you.