People Clap
My granddaughter was sitting in the middle of the living room floor at my in-laws’ home on the day after her first Christmas. Austyn was the nine-month-old wonder that had taken precedence over the sparkly packages underneath the tree. Her Aunt CC was sitting on the floor tossing her a little green ball that Austyn, who was anchored between her mother’s legs, would “catch,” together with her mom. Every time it happened the room erupted.
“Yay!!!!!” came the collective cry from the gallery encircling her. Then everybody clapped.
It didn’t take long. Three, four, maybe five tosses, until when Austyn made the catch, she would look up as if to say, “Is it coming?” And, of course, it did, time and time again with even greater vigor than before.
The outside world had found a vein. Fentanyl for self-esteem. Like that tower over in Pisa, from the beginning we seem to be built to lean toward public praise.
For almost 40 summers, I worked basketball camps where the opening session always began with mass fundamentals. The campers would be stretched out across the gym floor -- tiny seeds purposefully placed a predetermined distance apart. Our first teaching concept was called “triple threat” (the position from which exceptional individual offense grows) and the masses rarely wanted to bend their knees. In a gym full of wanna-be players, only three or four would look like ready athletes in a balanced, bent-knee stance with a make-believe ball held in the locked position in front of their dominant side. The rest looked more like leaning fence posts with a pizza box in their hand.
Repeating the instructions only sometimes worked. I could bark until I was hoarse. “Toe instep relationship! Bend your knees! Wrist over elbow, elbow over knee! Add your bookend!” and yet, very little would change the locked-knee slant of the little dreamers sprinkled across my gym.
Once the information was provided though, the trick for mass improvement was easy. All I had to do was catch somebody doing it right.
“Now, YOU look like a player!” I’d say, drawing attention to an eager listener who was crouched in triple threat. And a sea of tilted fenceposts would immediately fold into the ready position with an invisible basketball positioned delicately in their hands.
Everybody wanted what “she” got. And most improved significantly because they did.
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Praise does that. It elevates, motivates, quiets self-doubt, bolsters trust. And that, without our attachment to it, can be the pixie dust of achievement--or at the least, of forward progress. It might even, when we get it in the right position, be the turning point of a life.
Unfortunately, praise has a hard time staying in its lane. It’s like the giant, relentless blob that seeps into places where it has no business being. Then once it gets in, it wraps around our inside eye and warps the way we see ourselves.
Still, I cannot resist clapping when my granddaughter catches a ball. Or eats her peas. Or identifies all the things that are yellow on a page. I want her to know when she does something well. What I don’t want, however, is for her to need external validation to do it. When we rely on the world for confirmation—or for motivation--we miss it when it’s gone. What we’re left with, then, is silence that can both drown and starve us because we don’t know who we are.
That’s the scary part. The abyss that can form and then live within us when we don’t hear people clap.
In my early years at Oklahoma, I received quite the collection of hate mail. These were the days before social media when, if people wanted to tell you something, they had to want to badly enough to sit down and write it out, then find an address and buy a stamp and put it in the mail. Suffice to say, spreading spite was a bit more difficult then. We were 5-22 in our opening season. It was hard on those of us who lived it, and I learned quickly that it was also hard on those who watched. I had previously been a high school coach, I had no major college coaching experience, and I hadn’t inherited a winning roster. Getting good was a heavy, arduous climb.
During that slow-drip year of improvement, ugly letters began to pile. Some aimed criticism at my players, some at me and the way I dressed, some at the University that “hired a high school coach just to kill the program, finally, for good.” Some were matter of fact and mean. Others were less straightforward, but they all pierced right through my skin as if it wasn’t there. Many (though all were opened by my secretary with a knife-like tool that was a staple on every office desk at the time) were never even read, though you could feel the negative vapor wafting out of the tear on top. Eventually, I put them all in a folder labeled “Poison Pen” that landed in a drawer of my credenza out of sight.
Four years later when we won the Big 12 conference championship and advanced to the NCAA sweet sixteen, love letters started to arrive. By 2002 when we played for the national championship, they came in buckets and in bags. Some raved about our passing and our shooting and our depth. Some about my hair and the stilettos I chose to wear. Others said the decision the university made to hire me was the smartest thing they’d ever done. The internal draw to pull out every single one and read them slowly word for word was strong and it was fierce. Fortunately, I didn’t have the time. So, I tossed most of them into the file-- that had grown into a drawer-- with all the “poison pens.” The new label read, “Poison Pen/ Love Letters.” I let them all co-mingle and incest among themselves.
It’s not that feedback isn’t beneficial or appreciated. As a matter of fact, praise is a key component of driving desired behavior. We know it works— and that it feels like manna from Heaven when it rains down on our heads. It’s our attachment to it that is the turned-up corner of carpet we sometimes snag our toe upon.
Both praise and criticism can act as bumper guards that shape us. The problem is that external validation often comes coated in gorilla glue. And when you get it on you, it’s almost impossible to get off. Once we live to get it, it does more harm than it does good.
The hard part is extracting the sticky judgement. Especially our own.