That's me after most praise: "you say you like me because the stuff I can do will help you, or because you have some unstated aim to take advantage of me, or because you don't know that it could have been so much better". I don't know when, but at some point any expectation of honesty in praise just went out of the window. Because of that, obviously, I also don't praise people as much as I should, because I expect they would react like I do - with obvious repercussions on social interactions.
The mind can be a right bitch.
The new research/trend is to try to praise behavior rather than outcomes (or in addition). The other bit is to focus on their actions instead of it's impact on you. For example "I'm proud that you won that baseball game" places the focus on me and on the outcome of winning. Versus "I saw you really focused out there in the outfield, I know getting distracted between bats is easy and you've come along way."
It's a very new way of speaking for me, but the more I practice it the more natural it comes. My family aims to "catch someone in praise" a few times a day. We also celebrate celebration. I.e. if I say something nice about someone, then they turn around and say "you get a point for giving a point."
> The mind can be a right bitch.
Too true :(
Versus "I saw you really focused out there
in the outfield, I know getting distracted
between bats is easy and you've come a
long way."
example: "I see you working on those reports! There are a million of them coming in every day, and you're cranking them all out yourself."
You don't even necessarily need to praise them, per se. (Although honest praise is of course very cool) Just the act of letting them know, and noticing is super powerful.
A few years ago, I was managing the most impactful engineer I've ever been around (and I've seen a lot great engineers in my 30+ year career that included stints at several startups including my own, going through a a pretty big IPO, working at a FAANG as it came to dominate it's area, etc.). It was her first job and the team was stacked with high performers. We were directly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. Three weeks into her career, everybody on the team was going to her when they couldn't figure things out. Just a phenomenal mind with a capacity for dealing with technical complexity and finding business value that I would have previously thought impossible. Of course that led to a lot of praise from me and everyone else. Every time I praised her for an outcome, she withdrew further, eventually getting to the point that she wouldn't say anything in one-on-ones other than short answers to direct questions. A few months in, the CEO (without telling any of us beforehand) used a slide from one of her design review presentations to inspire the company with the kinds of technical->business wins we were now achieving as a company - it devastated her, making her want to change careers. A month later, she tried to reject a significant salary increase.
Nine months in, she made (and corrected) a minor technical mistake. I mentioned it to her in our next one-on-one. As I did, she leaned forward and her eyes got big. She peppered me with questions until she understood my perspective on it from every angle. The more I spoke about it, the more she perked up. After seeing this response, I decided to try to find deeper "criticisms" to bring up with her. She was so good that it was HARD to find anything at all. Eventually I thought of what level she'd be at in ten years and framed things as "here are skills you have that you're not fully exploiting to be as impactful as you could be." It instantly turned our interactions inside out. She went from zero trust in me as her manager to complete trust in me as a life mentor in ~30 minutes.
Later I asked her why that worked and she said it was one of the few times in her life that she thought someone understood her faults and still valued her. It's just what you're saying about letting people know you see them and what they're doing, not just the outcomes they are a part of and how it affects you. I'm lucky to have learned so much about engineering, management, and life from my interactions with her.
One of my heroes, Fred Rogers, was very good at this 50+ years ago, saying things like "I like you just the way you are."