Self-Respect and Respecting Yourself

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Self Respect: Seven Quick Tips on How to Respect Yourself

Self-Respect is defined as pride and confidence in oneself; a feeling that one is behaving with honour and dignity towards oneself and others. Self-respect maintains and enhances our own positive, healthy, high esteem.

Here are seven tips on how to be respectful towards yourself:

1.) Make taking care of yourself a priority.
When we get burnt out, or run down, or our performance could be better, those are all signs that maybe we need more self-respect, to make ourselves more of a priority. Take care of yourself so you have more to give to others.

2.) Do your best, and compete against your own best self.
It can impact our self-respect if we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others, especially if those ‘others’ have more skills or experience or knowledge than we do. It may not even be a fair competition/comparison! This doesn’t mean that we don’t have goals. This doesn’t mean that we don’t compete against each other, because we do. We live in a competitive world at many levels. What we’re suggesting here is that self-respect is about choosing the first competition to be against your best, and how you can be better. This includes celebrating our own successes and progress. Here’s another way to look at this point: The competition against our own best self, is really the only competition that we can all consistently win.

3.) Respond to mistakes and the consequences as learning opportunities.
Most of us don’t intend to make mistakes. Most of us don’t like making mistakes. Part of self-respect is accepting that mistakes can and will happen, and embracing the learning as the way to moving forward.

4.) Recognize and share your own value and worth.
Part of self-respect is recognizing that we all have value and worth and it’s important that we share it. Part of this as well, is accepting that even though others may judge us negatively for what we share, that doesn’t mean that we have less value or are worth-less. Sure their judgment may mean that we don’t get a job or promotion or something like that, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have value and worth.

5.) Take responsibility for yourself, and what’s within your control.
Part of self-respect is owning our actions and decisions, and the influence that we have over ourselves and others.

6.) Respect others because that’s how you are, versus being disrespectful to someone because that’s how they are.
Part of self-respect is taking the high road. There’s a great anonymous quote, great from a metaphorical perspective that says “when tempted to fight fire with fire, remember, even firemen and women know water usually works best”.

7.) Get help when you are the target of repeated and/or serious disrespect, discrimination, harassment, or bullying.
Part of self-respect is accepting when you need help, and getting it.

Each of is worthy of being treated with respect, and that respectful treatment needs to start with ourselves towards ourselves.

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