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You’re at a party, and a stranger tells you your dress is amazing. You immediately say that you scored it on a super sale.

You’re having drinks with a girlfriend who wants to toast to your recent promotion at work. You fire back a bunch of compliments about how much she’s accomplished in her career, too.

Your bestie and her boyfriend are at your place for dinner and rave about your cooking. You pick apart every last dish, going into detail about how it all could’ve been better.

What is it with women and compliments? No matter how confident and comfortable with ourselves we feel, it can be downright impossible to accept a compliment without deflecting the praise, explaining ourselves, or even totally ignoring it. Case in point: When Comedy Central’s Amy Schumer filmed a hilarious sketch depicting what a posse of pals do when compliments start flying, it went viral. Women everywhere cringed—and couldn’t help sharing the video because they could relate. Here’s the (NSFW) clip:

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“In our culture, there is this unspoken rule that women are supposed to be modest,” says Alyson Lanier, a psychotherapist and life coach in Wilmington, North Carolina. “If we accept a compliment fully, the fear is that it’s going to come off as bragging.” And every girl knows what happens to girls who gloat. (Buh-bye, friends—hello mean-girl glares.)

So what’s a girl to do if she wants to get better about acknowledging a little admiration—without coming off as arrogant?
 

Understand Why It’s Hard to Just Say “Thanks”
Before you get down on yourself for not being great at accepting compliments, there are actually a few very good reasons why even the most confident among us have a tough time taking in praise:

Reason No. 1: All women do it. “All of us learn to talk in ways we hear other people talk, so the main reason women play down praise is because other women do it,” says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and author of You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. “We want to be just like our friends, and imitating behavior is one of the ways we do this.”

Reason No. 2: We’ve been conditioned to do it. Avoiding praise is something most of us have been doing since the time we were learning how to play nice in the sandbox. Think back to your kindergarten days for a moment. Typical chat among the boys went something like, “Oh yeah, well my daddy can beat up your daddy!” Girls, however, put a lot more effort into downplaying their abilities because girls tend to criticize other girls who are confident, says Tannen. And as anyone who’s been through junior high knows, that’s a trend that only gets worse as we grow up. 

Reason No. 3: Our inner critics are obnoxious chatterboxes. There’s a little voice inside most of us that hurls insults our way all the livelong day: You’re not thin enough. You have awful hair. You’re a rotten mom. You’re a lazy sloth. And because that mean self-talk comes fast and furious, the nice stuff we hear doesn’t have a shot at actually sinking in. “Oftentimes, that negative chatter is so loud that it’s hard to truly feel impacted by the outer world,” says Lanier. “That internal analyst actually shuts down the compliment before we can fully receive it.” Hence the self put-down (“Oh, this old thing?”), the insta-deflection (“No, your shoes are amazing”) or the skepticism (“Really? I thought I sounded so nervous!”).  

So how do we change this? Because after all, isn’t this part of the reason why we plonk down our plastic for new clothes and shoes, spend time (and more money) getting our hair and nails done, and generally try to wow everyone at work, home, and everywhere in between? Don’t we want other people to notice what stylish rock stars we are?
 

How to Start Basking in the Praise
…Or, at the very least, learn to take in the compliments and respond with an appreciative “thanks.”

1. Notice what you do when someone pays you a compliment. Do you deflect the attention? Deny the compliment? Put yourself down? “You have to be aware of what you tend to do in order to change it,” says Lanier.

2. Remember that there’s something genuine behind every compliment. When another woman tells you something nice, it’s usually an attempt to bond, says Lanier. “When women compliment other women about surface stuff, like clothes and how they look, it’s really a simple social behavior in an attempt to connect,” she says. “It’s almost like it doesn’t even matter what she’s saying—the translation is, ‘I’m not going to hurt you, I want you to know that I like you, and I want to feel a little closer to you.’” When you think about it that way, it might be a little easier to open up rather than shut the interaction down.

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3. Try pausing before you say anything. Though this can be challenging to put into practice, make an attempt to take a deep breath after the next compliment you receive. “You might even repeat the praise to yourself silently,” says Lanier. “Just take a breath and say to yourself, ‘There’s a person in the world who thinks I look fab today.’ Then track how it makes you feel.” Can you mute your inner critic for a hot second? Can you allow yourself to feel happy and acknowledged? “This can make you feel really vulnerable,”  says Lanier, “but it’s part of the process of making room to receive praise.” 

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