Excessive praise can be dangerous

Praise is wonderful with warm glow inside and feel great. The quickest way to get round someone is to flatter them. You may have slightly uncomfortable experience of being praised for something you thought was just doing your job or for doing something ordinary. That discomfort points to some interesting aspects of praise.

• No one likes to be criticised all the time, and only told what they don’t do well. 
• Constant criticism can feel like bullying, and if you never get any positive feedback you can fall into self doubt and despondency.
• Excessive and constant praise can actually be damaging to self esteem and personal effectiveness.
• Praise and positive encouragement is something you can’t have too much of. 
• Like food or medicine what’s good in small or measured doses can be bad if taken too much of it.
• Constant praising can make someone addicted to praise. Like any other addiction, praise can be destructive. It can make you incapable of doing anything effectively. Constant praise in some ways backfires in a decidedly destructive manner.
• Too much praise can be really bad for children, for clients, for patients and for everyone.
• When children are rewarded for simply doing their own thing like drawing, playing etc, but when the rewards are discontinued, the children tend to lose interest in the activity. Contingent reward reduces the appeal of intrinsic reward. 
• Lavishing children with praise can create a very high self-esteem which in turn can lead to bullying behaviour.  Children become narcissists when their parents overvalue them i.e. when parents treat their children as more deserving than others. Such excessive praise can create narcissistic traits and narcissists are often bullies who totally lack empathy.
• Narcissism is not be good for them or for society. Narcissism is higher in Western countries and steadily increasing among Western youth over the past few decades.
• Rewarding with money or praise, for doing things one really should be doing anyway, can diminish genuine motivation. Excessive praise might be well intentioned, but it can work against people’s genuine best interests.
• Excessively praising someone could actually make them less happy in the long term because it can diminish their capacity to find intrinsic reward in anything. 
• Praising children for normal activities is poor preparation for a life of real excellence, because we are turning ‘normal’ into ‘excellent’ and genuine excellence thus loses its value.
• Praise children only for working things out for themselves, for showing compassion towards another person, for being empathetic, for their achievement that came from their effort and for coming through a tough time.
• Making a huge deal out of anything someone achieves may just be encouraging ‘praise addiction’. And being a praise junkie is an impediment to real success. 
• Children who were praised for ‘being smart’ stopped making an effort much earlier than children praised for ‘working hard’.
• Empty praise can make looking smart more important than being smart.
• Don’t over-praise people; Focus on the normality of the desirable behaviour; Don’t expect praise for everything and don’t always praise others; Focus on what is actually within a person’s control.
• The right kind of praise at the right time and in the right quantity can develop the habit of excellence, but a diet of uncontrolled praise won’t do any favours.

I learnt a lot from my critics and nothing from my admirers - Mahatma Gandhi