It’s all too easy to be familiar with being underappreciated. Customers, clients, vendors, colleagues–we’d like them to notice and acknowledge our efforts on their behalf. When we pay attention to appreciation, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that there’s rarely enough.
Contrast this with the rare experience of being overappreciated. Getting more credit, support and benefit of the doubt than you deserve. The scarcity of this feeling highlights just how much we crave appreciation.
When rock stars and celebrities get hooked on overappreciation, it warps their expectations and becomes toxic. Getting credit where little is due, or reciprocation that isn’t deserved. This is the path to becoming a diva, and it afflicts more than just a few famous people. It’s easy to get spoiled.
If you end up hating your customers, begrudging your partners or insisting on more attention from customers, you may be getting dependent on appreciation.
How much do we deserve? How do we get more? You can see how the cycle gets us hooked.
There’s another way forward. Our search for appreciation, in whatever form, is a kind of attachment. Attachment is our focus on something we crave but can’t control. It robs us of our focus and worse, creates a cycle of never-enough. Appreciation can be more usefully seen as a byproduct of our practice, it’s not the point. We do the work because we can, because we have the opportunity to contribute. If appreciation results, that’s nice, but it’s out of our control.
With this freedom from external appreciation, we get to make a decision about where and how to offer our work to the world.
Each day, we get to make a new decision about how to invest our time, our attention and our effort. If a community that used to appreciate our work doesn’t respond in a way we are hoping for, we can use that information to reallocate our work. “Thank you” is an appropriate response to a lack of appreciation, because we learned something useful. The audience didn’t owe us anything, but if they don’t want to dance with us in the way we hope, we can choose to find a new partner.
The creator who feels trapped and in debt to their over-appreciating audience can make a new decision about their craft and the fans they choose to make it for. Screaming fans in arenas is an option, but so are discerning participants in a club.
The same goes for the vendors or partners or customers who aren’t showing up for us the way we feel we’ve earned. We can take umbrage and focus on the imbalance, or we can choose to make different work, better work, or work for a different group, one that might need what we have to offer. After all, there’s not a lot of use for surplus umbrage.
When we shift from a focus on what we are owed to one based on what we can contribute, we’re free to get back to work.
