The Compliment I Gave Myself Was the Hardest One to Mean

I had been working as a photographer in Bengaluru for four years and had developed, across those years, a standard of self-assessment that was consistent and limiting in a specific way: I was capable of recognising when my work was inadequate and incapable of recognising when it was good.

Not in the sense of being unable to identify technical success - I could do that with reasonable accuracy. In the sense of being able to feel that a piece of my work was good rather than only calculate that it met the relevant criteria.

Feeling it required an internal generosity toward my own output that I had not developed and that, I came to understand through a conversation with a teacher who had known many photographers, was an unusually common gap in people whose work required sustained creative self-assessment.

The exercise she suggested was simple and uncomfortable: I was to write, once a week for a month, three specific things about a piece of my work that I assessed as genuinely good, and I was to write them in the same specific and unhesitating language I would use to describe the good work of a photographer I admired.

Not 'this is okay considering' or 'this worked better than usual'. Specific and direct praise, in the language of full conviction, applied to my own work. The first week the exercise was almost physically uncomfortable to complete. I kept finding the language softening or qualifying before I could stop it.

By the fourth week something had shifted. The specific and direct praise was still effortful but no longer felt fraudulent. By month two I had developed a new internal relationship with my better work - not inflated, but genuinely appreciative in the same way I had always been appreciative of the better work of others.

The ability to recognise your own excellence, specifically and without apology, is a skill. I had not known it needed development. It had been limiting me for four years.