Be Positive
Some of us have a bad habit of adding qualifiers to our compliments or, worse, giving backhanded ones. An example of a backhanded comment would be, “Wow, I can’t believe you actually remembered my birthday!” You may not even aim to make it sound sarcastic or condescending, but the person receiving such words may feel that you are calling them unreliable or forgetful. Instead, you should rephrase such a comment as “Wow, you remembered! Thank you!”
Also, in a similar vein, you should choose positive words. For example, you might say “Your cooking isn’t bad!” as a way to commiserate with someone, but you are not saying their cooking is good either. The issue is that people will often focus on the negative part of a sentence than the positive section and can misconstrue the meaning, even if you mean well.
Rather than saying something like “They’re not bad looking,” say “They’re good looking.” Instead of “It wasn’t horrible,” say “It was all right.”
