Flattery - 2/2

It always hurts when someone criticises you. I don’t believe that anyone is immune to hurt from criticism. The little ditty “Sticks and stones will hurt my bones, but names will never harm me!” is a lie. Unkind or harsh words can kill the spirit, stunt our growth and trigger all kinds of ugly stuff, especially when the criticism comes from those close to us.

I don’t believe for one minute that the likes of Helen Clark or Hillary Clinton is totally impervious to criticism like she makes out. I think that those in higher places learn to act, to put on a mask, to deal with criticism, knowing that the price for power is that they just have to take it.

Earlier in my career, I was forever worried about what others thought of me. I had a low self-esteem and over-reacted to criticism, usually by withdrawing and sometimes by getting defensive. This sometimes set me up for situations of even more failure as all it would take was for some smart-talking conman to flatter me a little and I could be tempted into bad business decisions.

This idea of flattery is really quite evil. It touches on issues such as interpersonal manipulation, power games, deception and a whole bunch of other stuff that gives me the spooks. Nope, try as hard as I might, I don’t think I’d make it as a politician.

Getting deeper into subject of flattery we have to ask ourselves WHY one person wants to flatter another, and we generally see that we try to flatter someone in order to gain their trust or else get them to like us. This has the potential to get into an area of deception where we can present ourselves in an unrealistic way to others.

As I’ve matured in my business practices, I’ve developed a far more direct style of communication - calling a spade a spade, much more often than I would have in the past. For many, it is a breath of fresh air. To some it is shocking, but to many it is the no-nonsense, no-BS, open and honest approach that makes it easy to do business together.

The upside of this approach is that everyone knows where they stand, and trust is much more easy to develop in the relationship. The downside is that if people are not playing straight, that there is less opportunity to get away with it and they generally go elsewhere. Some people can’t handle this environment, because their flattery and façades get blown away. From my perspective, that’s just fine by me.

Conmen use flattery brilliantly. People who can spin a yarn and get others eating out of their hand only to get stung, as the conmen wander on and leave others to pay the bill, abound. They always have. These guys are the pretenders, the manipulators and the greedy. I don’t like them. I’d much rather be a little straighter, and be able to sleep at night.

The other thing about shooting straight and avoiding flattery is that our conscience is a lot cleaner when it comes to accountability, especially in a vertical sense to our heavenly Father.

Adam and Eve got “done” by flattery - big time. “Wouldn’t you like to be like God and know all things, heh, heh, heh?” whispered some slimey little loser. And then all hell broke lose on planet earth as a result.

Paul was one of the first dudes that took his instructions seriously, I mean wouldn’t you, if you’d been on a mission to execute the whole of the Christian community and the Lord stopped you in the same way that Paul got stopped?

Poof! One minute you’re on your way to sort things out the way you think they should be, and the next minute you’re blind as a bat and thinking you’re going batty hearing the Lord telling you to get up and preach the very story you had sworn to destroy on behalf of God. Whew!

Whatever he was before he got “zapped”, there’s one thing you can’t take away from him - he really knew what his mission was. He outworked his new-found Christian faith will all the passion, thought and integrity that he could muster.

The Good Book records his words about putting on facades and using flattery when he spoke to his converts in Thessalonica:

We are not trying to please men but God, who tests our hearts. You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed—God is our witness. We were not looking for praise from men, not from you or anyone else.
1 Thessalonians 2:4b-6

It’s a pretty confident guy that can say things like that. Flattery, masks, facades and suchlike is not an option.

It’s the VICTUS IN AMBITUS way to shoot straight. That means S - H - O - O - T     S - T - R - A - I - G - H - T.