Perhaps we don't like to show our emotions quite so clearly. In a recent meeting, a colleague was being heavily praised by an American and said, 'Please stop, we are British and it's embarrassing!'
In a different life I used to help teachers who had to deal with pupils with very challenging behaviour in mainstream schools. Inevitably, by the time these children had reached secondary school age, they had learned to get attention by exhibiting all sorts of outrageous behaviour. At that stage the teacher interaction was usually lots of 'sit down, stop messing about, put that chair down!' and so on.
Without being critical of teaching methods, it was in truth very difficult to catch these children behaving well so that they could be praised. However, when you could do this, the results were often dramatic, and the child's behaviour changed radically.
I am not suggesting that this is easy to achieve or that it worked perfectly every time. But I do believe praise is a wonderful tool.
Working with a headteacher who was at one time trying to develop praise as a positive management tool, we also encountered a different problem. His challenge was to find three occasions in the day when he could praise a member of staff. By the third day, the union representative arranged a meeting with him to ask whether everything was safe for the future of the school - because staff were suspicious that the head was acting so out of character.
I think we all love praise, either personally or professionally, and we should use it more. Obviously, it needs to be appropriate and real, but with so many demands made on everyone in the early years sector, it can also be easy to forget to praise people. So tomorrow, or even today, catch someone doing something good, and praise them.
Then see whether they look at you suspiciously or accept it happily.
