What is Self Respect?
15 January 2007[Words: 882, Reading Time: 4-5 mins]Â
Having Self Respect involves looking after yourself; maintaining standards for yourself; holding your integrity; and knowing your own boundary.
You need to look after yourself before you can grow or give to the world. Looking after yourself is a way you create win:win situations in your life. If you’re not taking care of yourself you’re losing so someone else can win. While this may sound honourable (sacrificing yourself to the cause) you limit the amount you can give because sooner or later you’ll run out of energy and start sapping it from the world.
The most obvious example is that you physically look after yourself. Take good care of your body. If you have a cold, or are exhausted from a tough week, invest the time in resting up instead of rushing out to fulfil some commitment. Steve Pavlina has a nice post on triage for life about what you commit your time to which fits very well into this. I know at the time it might seem like the most important thing in the world but if it leaves you worse off why are you commiting energy to it?
Taking care of yourself mentality and spiritually means talking to yourself like you would to a friend. If a friend (or even a complete stranger) fell down would you berate them or help them up and encourage them to take another shot? If they had a victory in their life would you say it’s all down to luck or would you congratulate them? Treat yourself with respect.
Regarding standards: it’s important to define your own standards and what’s important to you. Maybe a certain salary is all you’re looking for, but if you feel the work robs you of your identity and freedom then you’re sacrificing your standards just to get by. The same can be true of relationships – don’t compromise on your values or personality in the hope of satisfying someone just because they’re good looking or well connected.
Ironically abandoning your values, beliefs and opinions just to please someone never works. If someone has no conviction and changes their beliefs just to attempt to please another would you respect them? People also like to believe they’re unique, so by holding them to standards you’re actually helping them. They know they bring value to your life because of some unique trait or contribution to your life rather than being a friend purely by accident or because there’s no one better around.
I’m not implying that you remain inflexible when it comes to having others sway your opinion. It’s perfectly okay to change your opinion after you’ve heard some new insights (hopefully this blog changes your thoughts on confidence) but bowing to someone in order to please them doesn’t benefit either of you.
Having integrity means staying congruent with your values and beliefs. Of course, the first step is clarifying your values and beliefs. That way, once you know them, you’ll see the situations where you’re likely to have those beliefs challenged and be better prepared to act in those situations.
Simply spending ten minutes with the question “What are my values?†or “What’s important to me?†can reveal a lot to you. I regularly look back at my core values when I’m in need of direction or I don’t know what route to take.
Just now I asked what’s important to me: My answers (in about 2-3 minutes of just thinking and typing)
Honesty, Freedom, Integrity, Success, connectivity, Intimacy, fulfillment, fun, excitement, laughter, peace, friendship, acknowledgement, acceptance, value, accomplishment, effectiveness (that I make a positive impace on those I meet). Love.
Invest in the time to find out your core values.
To have self respect is to understand your boundaries and constantly strengthening them. The way you strengthen your boundary is to say “noâ€.
An outward manifestation of this is saying “no†to people when they make requests or demands that weaken you in order for them to gain. This can be really tough at times, and even tougher if you’ve been used to capitulating to other people’s demands for so long. You might think yourself from being mean or cruel by saying no to people.
You can also say no to environmental factors affecting you. See “When do you have to accept something?” for more of this. If an event looks like it can cause you emotional pain you can say no to that pain before it gets inside your boundary. But once inside, you can’t say no to it, because that’s just ignoring your emotions. If you’re ignoring your emotions you’re not really taking care of yourself are you?
Having a boundary does not mean you cut yourself off from the entire world and refuse to allow anything in, as this is just as destructive as having no boundary in and allowign everything to affect you. Your boundary should be semi permeable, like the heatlhy cells of your body or the border of a country. Let in the good and mutually beneficial, but block the posionous.
For more information on your boundary Doctor Paul has some incredible insights into this.
To recap, Self Respect involves:
- Looking after yourself
- Having standards for yourself and those in your life
- Staying true to your integrity
- Developing your boundary
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