Has anyone ever told you that “you are beautiful?”

I personally, have always had an aversion to the compliment.

Undoubtedly, it’s flattering—one likes to hear that their natural features are pleasant to look at, but that’s all that compliment is: nature has influenced the way a person appears.

Saying someone is beautiful doesn’t tell anything  particularly special about a person or something particularly special what they’ve done. It’s only a recognition of someone’s exterior, an uncontrollable phenomenon, which says nothing of the person within.

We can’t change the way we look, and so we shouldn’t be praising something that has no merit to the actual personality inside the body.

Granted, we can hardly expect everyone to go around each day saying an individual is generous, possessing wit or being overtly positive. Some rare gems of spirits do make the effort to give such compliments, but these people don’t come around so often in the every day.

Instead, many people revert to run-of-the-mill compliments pertaining to beauty. The intention behind these words may be good, but the phrase falls a little flat.

There’s nothing a person can do about being beautiful—or not.

Recently however, I realized a compliment that could take the place of one’s beauty. A stranger gave me a compliment that turned my day right around. Instead of commenting on my physical features, the person gave me a compliment which actually complimented my personality.

He said, “I like your style.”

There’s something so different about this compliment than “you are beautiful.” In this compliment, I had a hand in the matter, and this stranger was complimenting me on my choice in that matter. I choose which clothes I wore that day, how I had styled my hair, and how my general appearance was constructed. That was all me. Nature had no hand in the matter, and this stranger had noticed.

It made me feel great. It made me feel attractive. It made me feel worthy—worthy of such a compliment so much more so than I am beautiful.

I would like to open this compliment up to all of you as a substitution to benign compliments. I’d also like to include some additional options,in case you don’t care for the above compliment.

Perhaps you can find one below that will be more suiting to the person you choose to praise:

You have a great aura.

You smell fantastic.

You seem quite understanding.

You give off warmth.

You have presence.

These phrases—and all other variations that you can think of—will no doubt brighten someone else’s day.

Believe me, a stranger did that for me—and today, I’ll choose to do just the same for someone else.

Will you?

~

Author:  Brittany Ann Bandemer

Image:   Pixabay & Cayce / Flickr 

Editors: Sara Kärpänen; Yoli Ramazzina