The Modesty Pitfall

 

Most of us have been trained to be very modest. When it comes to saying something good about our selves we feel very queasy about blowing our own trumpet. Right, no body is asking you to do any trumpet blowing but facts have to be stated as facts.

 

If you are a music lover and have a good voice too, I can’t see why you can’t put it down like that itself. Why can’t you declare simply without sounding very proud that you have good voice? A pointer that you could bear in mind would be to add something like, “My friends think that I sing rather well.”

 

There now, you can’t feel too bad about something as simple as that. It is as good as saying “some people think that I sing well, but it is for you to decide whether I have a good voice or not.” Similar statements that you can work on and even add are given below.

 

• “Lots of people appreciate my cooking.”
• “I am no Rembrandt, but I enjoy painting.”

·         “I like decorating, and many of my friends think that my tastes are not too bad.”

 

So go ahead, if you really have a talent, you might as well as let others know about it, after all a talented person would any way like to be appreciated by a partner.

 

While we are talking about modesty, there is one question that I want to address right now. It is something that all of us are familiar with. If you have chatted with a stranger with whom you are trying to build a rapport you must have been confronted with the question before. The question is “what do you look like?’

 

I have often wondered about the sense of this question. The best answers that I could come up with are “I look like a cross between an orangutan and a Tasmanian devil” or “I have my mothers teeth, my fathers nose, my uncle’s eyes and my roommates’ shoes.”

 

But of course we cannot give such answers which funny though they might sound, might just rub the person in the wrong way. What the person actually means is, “are you good looking or not?”

 

A very tricky question indeed! How can you answer such a question with out sounding either super modest or extremely vain? The answer to that is not to tell them the answer directly. You can say something like:

 

• “I am as fresh as peppermint.”
• “I look like a bunch of fresh lilies.”
• “I have the appeal of a bowl of fresh fruit.”