"They were only being kind"

Your manager stops at your desk and says the report was excellent, exactly what the board needed. Before she has finished the sentence, your mind is at work on it. She's being nice. She probably skimmed it. The bar for these reports is low. Anyone would have done the same with the data you were given.

A month later the same manager says that one section of a different report was a bit unclear. That goes straight in. You don't ask whether she skimmed it, or whether she was in a hurry, or whether one unclear section out of twelve is a good result. You think about it on the way home, and again on Sunday evening.

From the inside this feels like rigour. Praise is cheap and people hand it out to be pleasant, whereas criticism costs something to give, so it must be sincere. Taking compliments with a pinch of salt feels like a way of keeping your feet on the ground.

Some of that is right. A fair amount of praise is politeness. And you're not unusual in feeling criticism more sharply. A large review of research, published in 2001 under the title "Bad is stronger than good", found the same lean across many areas of life. Bad events, bad feedback and bad impressions tend to have more effect on people than good ones of the same size. So everyone's books are tilted a little.

But look at the procedure you're using, because it goes beyond a tilt. You have two sets of rules. Praise is cross-examined. What was her motive, is she qualified to judge, what was it being compared with? Criticism is admitted without a single question. A fair process would ask the same questions of both. If you applied them to the criticism, you might conclude that she's right about the section, that it's fixable, and that it says very little about you. You'd be keeping the information and dropping the verdict.

The same double standard shows up in how you explain results. When something goes well, there's a long list of causes to choose from. You were lucky. You had help. The task was easy. You worked absurdly hard. They like you. The timing was good. When something goes badly there's one cause, and it's you. A shop that wrote down every refund and never rang up a sale would show a loss every year, however much it sold. Your record of your own ability has been kept by that method.

Why would anyone do this? One line of research, begun by the psychologist William Swann, suggests that people tend to seek out and trust feedback that agrees with what they already think of themselves, even when what they think is unflattering. Praise still feels nicer than criticism, to nearly everyone. It just isn't believed. Praise that doesn't fit feels false, and criticism that fits has the ring of truth. But the ring of truth here is only familiarity. The criticism sounds right because it matches what you already say to yourself.

It's worth taking the favourite explanations one at a time.

Luck is real, and every career has some in it. But luck doesn't arrive on schedule. If you've been "lucky" for eleven years, under different managers and on different projects, then luck is a strained explanation and there's a simpler one available.

Hard work is a strange thing to count against yourself. Being willing and able to work hard is an ability. Nobody paying you cares whether the result came easily.

"They like me" is no more damning than that. Being someone people want to work with is part of doing most jobs well.

"Anyone could have done it" is the one to be most suspicious of, for the reason given in chapter 4. Things feel easy when you're good at them. If anyone could have done it, it's fair to wonder why they asked you.

A quick test for any of these is to imagine a friend saying it about herself. She tells you her promotion was luck, her good review was kindness and her qualification was a fluke. You wouldn't accept that from her. You'd say she was being ridiculous, and you'd be right.

Some praise really is empty, of course, and you don't want to become a person who laps it all up. Fine. Weigh it the way you'd weigh any evidence. Praise counts for more when it's specific, when it comes from someone who knows the work, and when they had no need to say anything. What people do counts for most of all. Did the client renew? Did your manager give you the next difficult project? Do colleagues bring you their questions? People are polite with words and much less polite with their time and money.

Two practical things follow.

The first is to keep a record, since the one in your head can't be trusted. Use a notebook or a file, one line per entry, facts only. "Client renewed for a second year." "J asked me to look over her draft." "Report went to the board unchanged." Put the criticisms in too, in the same plain style. "Section 3 unclear, rewrote it." After a few months you'll have something you've never had, which is an account of your work that includes the good results. I expect the criticisms will turn out to be fewer and smaller than you'd have said.

The second is to change what you say when someone praises your work. Say "thank you", and stop there. Don't add "oh, it was nothing" or "I just got lucky with the data". When you argue with praise out loud, you teach the other person to stop offering it, and you hear yourself running the work down once more. "Thank you" is enough. It also happens to be polite, since they've just given you their opinion and you aren't telling them it's wrong.