Photo Credit: Geff Rossi Let’s see how much trouble I can get myself into today.  I wrote a couple of posts a while back about praise.  The first one, where I co-opted Chris Brogan‘s name was the closest I have ever come to going viral.  Well, maybe not viral, just a little sneeze.  Thank you, Chris.I’m writing this one because I feel a little bit vindicated. If it seems like I am sticking my tongue out, you have my permission to lop it off.Chris Brogan, Please Don’t Praise this Post Kissin’ Cousins – Praise and Blame A lot of the comments on that post were in agreement with the sentiment of the post and even so, still leaned toward “praise is perhaps sometimes good.”  Truth is that at it’s best, it doesn’t do any damage.

What do you think?  Here are some commonly recommended self-help/management/personal development techniques?  How effective are they?

Positive Feedback.Positive Self Statements.Positive Mental Attitude.

They are birds of a feather.  They just don’t fly.

As reported in New York Magazine, although many people believe in praising their kids, their employees, or their students because it helps to motivate them, it may actually demotivate, sometimes even demoralize.

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short.But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it. The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids

Psychologist Carol Dweck, cited in the above article, composed a study to test praise with children.  She has done others with adults.  In this study, kids, divided into two groups, took a fairly simple “intelligence” test.  The test was designed so that all could do well with ease.When the test was completed, one group of children was told that they must have been really smart in order to have passed such a test.  The other group was told they must have worked at it.  They were all then asked to take one of two other tests. One of them, so they were told, was harder, but that they would learn a lot from trying it; the other simple like the first.  Ninety percent of the students who were praised for their smarts opted for the easy test.My conclusion for this is twofold.  First, they understood that the first test was easy and they intuitively understood that the feedback was bogus; second, on the other hand, they chose to take the test that would garner them more praise.We all want to tell people when they have done a good job.  Most of of like both to give and get compliments.If we think, though, that something is going to improve because of praise, compleiments, or for that matter, positive thinking, we are sorely mislead.Time Magazine has an article this week that allows me to praise myself (smile with wink!).  Well, at least it leans toward supporting my claim

Many of us are reluctant to revise our self-judgment, especially for the better. In 1994, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a paper showing that when people get feedback that they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you try to tell your dim friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, he won’t think he’s any smarter; he will probably just disbelieve your contradictory theory, hew more closely to his own self-assessment and, in the end, feel even dumber. In one fascinating 1990s experiment demonstrating this effect — called cognitive dissonance in official terms — a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write hard-hearted essays opposing funding for the disabled. When these participants were later told they were compassionate, they felt even worse about what they had written. Yes, I Suck: Self-Help Through Negative Thinking – TIME (20 July 2009)

Is it possible that we innocently keep ourselves and others from succeeding?Could praise and positive thinking just be other ways we get in our own way?Here is another article worth reading -Third Wave of TherapyMy suggestion – bypass the image of therapy and think along the terms of personal development when you are reading it.