Good job! Great work! Well good!
We’ve all heard one version of this. You may want to call it a verbal pat on the back or just a simple praise for good work. The thing is, we need something like this at some point. It also feels good to receive one. If you are the one giving them, it will feel just right. You wanted to give the person a positive remark on a job well done but didn’t want to make a fuss about it.
So you throw a nice smile, look them in the eye and say “You did a good job!”
It feels nice, both of you walk away smiling for a few seconds and life goes on.
And that’s what it is, a “feel good” statement.
But it’s not for everyone, and certainly not for every occasion!
There will be times when a person deserves more than just a generic positive remark from you. This may be a teammate who has worked long hours for a brilliant presentation, or this could be a good friend who might need to understand where his strengths lie, this could be your spouse, your kids, or maybe even your boss who needs to understand exactly which part of his leadership is working and needs reinforcing.
In these cases, you need to level up your affirmation game!
That brings us to the first choice you will make: you can praise their outcome with your generic remarks, or you can choose to affirm the person’s efforts instead.
Affirmation intends to speak words towards a person (sometimes this could be you!) to maintain self-integrity and self-worth (Steele, 1988). Affirmation should therefore speak about their competence in areas that they care about.
Here are simple ways to make you give better affirmations:
- Ask them about it! — Affirmations start from you seeing or noticing their successes. The choice really is to just praise the outcome, or be willing to dig a little bit deeper about it. This means asking questions about how they felt working on it; what made them so proud about the result or what was the hardest part in the process. Throw open-ended questions as much as you can and focus on their process. Listen to their answers, because if you do, you are all set up for the second step.
- Notice their patterns — patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. if you are together with this person during the process, you could observe this but if you weren’t there, this could be coming from step 1 above. Noticing means you should listen to what they were worried about prior to them solving a problem; this could also mean understanding their frame of thought (i.e. mindset) and how they behaved all throughout the process (were they fast? did they take it slowly but surely?) that helped them get the result/s they care about.
- Articulate your observations — If you did the first two steps then you should be able to discern what is most important for this person. You should also have noticed some patterns that contributed to what was important for them. Wrap these observations in a concise yet positively phrased sentence or two and gift it to the person. Gift, yes, because your affirmation is a gift to the person receiving it.
BONUS: Knowing a person’s CliftonStrengths and allowing them to articulate how they were able to use it could pretty much make your step 2 a breeze! CliftonStrengths is a tool I use when I coach people to heighten their self-awareness about their patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that can be productively applied.
I hope these steps allowed you to level up your positive feedback from a generic “good job” to a more affirming language.
Will it be an effort compared to just saying “good job”? You bet! Will it be worth it? Well, if transforming how people see themselves and their competence is important to you…then you pretty much know the answer already!