WOMEN ARE notorious for deflecting compliments with an arsenal of well-practiced, self-deprecating replies.

Someone tells you that you look lovely today? It’s swiftly met with a practised list (no sleep, stressed at work, eating like a teenager) to prove that you are, in fact, just the opposite of the nice things someone’s just said about you. But why?

How often do men blush and deflect niceties? That would be never (or so it seems). In fact, it’s rare you don’t see a male chest puff with pride given even the most back-handed compliment. And more power to that bloke. It’ll be a shiny new era on earth when a woman swell with pride when a perfect stranger says something nice to her.

There’s a gap – a veritable canyon – between the way men and women receive compliments and (based on my anecdotal evidence) how confident they seem overall. It’s not difficult to ascertain there’s a link between seeming confident, being confident and liking yourself. Studies show that if you smile you’ll feel happier, even if you’re forcing the smile, right? So there’s a chance (I believe a very big chance) that the same is true of women embracing compliments.

The upturn in my dismal compliment-taking record was recent, in 2007 (told you it was recent). Adding milk to my coffee in a cafe  before sitting down, a man approached and said excuse me and that he didn’t have any desire to derive anything from the forthcoming compliment other than to say I had a face one could look at all day. THAT, without the disclaimer, would have been shady (and in the same class as ‘Are your legs tired? Because you’ve been running through my mind’.).

I mustered a gobsmacked thank you. What else could I do? He was a polite, and generally unobtrusive stranger (except for the compliment) and being a stranger there was no way I could saddle him with the usual list of reasons why his compliment was untrue (but I’m not symmetrical! I have a hooded lid! My nose is crooked!), the way I would with someone I knew.

Clearly the man had dished out his share of compliments to Western women (hence the disclaimer). He said what he said to be nice, wished me a lovely day and disappeared out the door to join his mates. I like to believe he meant it. I’m no model but, you know what, after such a bold compliment it was time for me to accept that I’m also no modern-day Quasimodo. Because of that one jarring (in a good way) compliment, I now think there’s nothing wrong with deriving joy from someone’s desire to let you know that they like something about you or something that you’ve done. It’s not boasting to be simply happy about something someone said, for goodness sake, but we seem to think it is.

I then realised that there was transformative power in not just a compliment, but the act of accepting a compliment. If perception is reality, what is so wrong with choosing to believe the compliment giver’s perception? Why not embrace that as your reality instead of the less rosy one which you’re grasping onto, the one where your brain refuses to believe there exists even a modicum of truth in said compliment?

If you start listening to all the lovely things people say to you – and you start to believe them – you’ll feel different about yourself. You’ll feel more like that person they’re talking about rather than the insufficient one that lives in your head. And that, dears, is a beautiful thing and will make you prettier than any product on the shelves in the shops.