What is Self Respect? Self respect is the recognition and valuing of one’s own worth and dignity. It involves maintaining personal boundaries, setting standards, and refusing to accept mistreatment or compromise one’s principles. Unless your parents instilled self respect in you from a young age, you may not have any. This can be a harrowing experience since you would have no boundaries and no standards. As we grow older and wiser, we recognize what self respect means and that it is something which must be consciously practiced. Especially if you acquire it during adulthood.

Through self awareness and introspection, you too can establish boundaries and habits that encourage self respect.

To help you get started, if you want to know how to have self respect, here are 6 self respect basics. Don’t feel bad if you are lacking in some of these points since these are things that should have been instilled in us by good parenting as children. The points below are all things I struggled with personally. You can decide if you have them or not.

1. Minimal basic hygiene

When you leave the house every morning, do you at least put in a small amount of effort to appear presentable? You don’t have to wear makeup or put on a suit. That would depend on your standards for what you consider presentable. Did you brush your teeth? remove the sleep from your eyes? or wipe away any drool? is your hair wild and unkempt? Does your shirt have a stain on it? do your fingernails have dirt under them? Simply asking yourself these questions and seeing if they apply to you is enough to begin fostering self awareness around self respect.

2. Development of Standards

As mentioned in the first point, having standards will contribute to developing self respect. Your standards might be high or low, but they need to be there to begin with. These standards can be imposed on yourself or on anyone you interact with. Just like setting goals, when you set a standard, they should be realistic and attainable. Sometimes people set very high standards for themselves, but they lack the discipline and consistency to maintain it.

On the opposite side, some people have incredibly low standards and are frustrated as to why they keep attracting the same types of people or experiencing the same types of scenarios. There is nothing wrong with having high or low standards, as long as they are doing more good than harm. You don’t want standards so high while finding a partner that it limits you to about 5% of the population. Inversely, you don’t want standards so low that you’ll take the first person who comes your way.

3. Honouring your values and principles

If you don’t know what your values and principles are, you really need to get an idea of them. The earlier you do this the better. Knowing what they are or what you’d like them to be is one thing, and living by them is another.

Nothing is more off-putting than a hypocrite or a person who claims to be something they are not. For example, don’t tell people you value their time but you always show up very late to plans. Don’t tell someone you live by the word of God but then you are out there defying every single word in that book. Sticking to your principles and values means that you can’t accommodate what everyone wants. It means saying no to certain activities and interacting with certain types of people. Upholding your values and principles is essential to self respect.

4. Know where your limits lie

Simply knowing where your limits are, allows you to challenge them when you think you are ready to. This allows you to not make a fool of yourself in any setting. For example, if you are at work and your boss is giving you too much to do; don’t just agree to take it on if there are other people who are capable around you. If you take on the workload and can’t complete it, it makes you look incompetent. Your boss will have that at the back of their mind when your name comes up for consideration in the future.

Another example is something like drinking. If you know you get completely wasted after three shots of vodka, then why take a fourth or fifth shot? Especially if consuming more makes you lose all self control. I’m sure I don’t need to list examples of what can happen if you drink too much, but the possibility of making a fool of yourself increases drastically. If feeling embarrassment isn’t something you can handle, it’s best be honest and know your limits.

5. How you let others treat you

A lot of times, those who lack self respect are extremely respectful and thoughtful toward those around them. I would go as far as to call them people pleasers. To this, I would say to be conscious of how your friends, family, coworkers, or significant other regard you.

Do they always show up late? Do they respond to messages in a considerate manner? Do they make plans without you? Do they ghost you? Are they only available when it’s convenient for them? Do they openly cheat on you? Do they give credit to someone else for something you’ve done? Do they only discipline you for things that everyone else does? Are they bread crumbing you? Do they only reach out to you when everyone else is unavailable? Be honest and seriously consider these questions. Do you always make excuses for them when they do these things? Always question what is said, and believe what you are shown.

6. Listen to your body

If people around you do something that makes you feel physical, emotional or mental discomfort; do not ignore that feeling. For the love of yourself never ignore it! If doing a certain task at work causes you physical pain, let your boss know and stop doing it. If they cannot accommodate you, they don’t respect you. If someone says something that makes you feel uncomfortable don’t ignore that either.

For instance, there is a coworker who tells me, “I love your mom to pieces, but sometimes I want to punch her in the back of the head.” Every time she mentions my mother that feeling drops into my stomach. Because she is being disrespectful toward the woman who brought me here. Since this is at work, I have to be polite in my response, but I’ve said to myself if she says it again I’m going to be stern instead so she’ll stop saying her contradictory statement.

This will obviously result in her becoming offended, but as mentioned in point 3, you can’t make everyone happy. Nor should you, especially if they didn’t bother to consider how their words would affect you.

Conclusion

All these points tell us why self respect is important and it will require you to self reflect and become self aware. Addressing this in yourself will contribute to becoming well rounded in a way that suits you. Recognizing when you are being mistreated and when you need to remove people from your life is paramount in maintaining your self respect.

A lot of people who are toxic in your life will not respond well to your newly formed boundaries. But don’t worry! They aren’t people you want around to begin with. You will feel guilty for implementing standards, values, principles, and boundaries if you have never had to before. But this feeling will pass and you will be surrounded by those who respect you at the same level in which you respect yourself. Which is a valuable and priceless thing to have in your life.

Works Cited

Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich. New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2005.