I think one of my skills that I'm most proud of is giving compliments. I've thought a lot about it and spent time working on it, and I'm pretty happy with how it's helped me.
To me, there's two basic components to giving a good compliment: sincerity and clarity. Your target should believe that you are sharing genuine beliefs and should clearly understand what you are feeling. Towards each of these, I have different basic ideas of how to achieve them.
For sincerity, I try to give compliments impulsively. The ratio of time spent thinking to amount said must favor the amount said. Your target must not believe it took you a while to think of what you say. Optimally, it feels off the cuff. Spoken from the heart. Direct emotion to sound. Practice makes perfect for this. And your practice subject may well greatly enjoy being your project.
For clarity, I look inward and try to analyze what I feel. The basic outline I try to include is "what am I complimenting", "a humble guess at how the target achieved it", "what i am feeling that compelled me to compliment it", "how i know im feeling it". I strive to be factual in this analysis. When you describe your own emotions, you must not leave room for doubt. You clearly feel this way, and it's clearly linked to something your target did.
On top of this, there's some art to knowing what to compliment. I think it's more important that it be something you feel strongly about or are strongly affected by then it be something your target specifically desires compliments for. But I think choosing something your target worked on can, when genuine, be supremely effective.
In any case. I don't think people give compliments enough. Maybe it's just my social group, but I think it's easy to not be genuine. It's easy to put up a shell and not let anyone in. It's easy to end up with low self esteem because you're always fighting. I think compliments are important, for that. I like making people feel good.
