Since coming into the position I’m presently employed in, I’ve had to adjust to receiving compliments and enduring the positive regard of others. That’s not to say I was ignored in my previous position; I wasn’t. But it’s “different” in this job. Where I’d anticipated having to desperately keep up to do the job, I instead find most of it quite easy and receive praise for a job well done.
It’s awkward!
In a way, I can understand why entertainment figures (athletes, actors, etc) get their big heads and big egos, thinking they are “all that.” It’s a strange reality to get used to where your skill set is recognized and heralded so! I could easily see where I could get arrogant on the job because people have said so much about my abilities.
What grounds me? Well. I know more about how I’m doing on the job than those outside of me. I know where I am still learning (and struggling) where that may not always be visible. It’s a good reality check for me to recognize that while I may be good at ___________, I’m also working to grasp _________. I strive to take the compliment in stride, recognizing it in the moment and then I strive to simply let it go. Two separate quotations attributed to Epictetus in the Manual for Living strike me as worth posting too as they have also affected my mindset in dealing with the reaction that people have to me on this job:
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.
If you ever happen to turn your attention to externals, so as to wish to please anyone, be assured that you have ruined your scheme of life. Be contented, then, in everything with being a philosopher; and, if you wish to be thought so likewise by anyone, appear so to yourself, and it will suffice you.