Why?
Why not? How does it feel to participate in a life in which you do not respect yourself?
Perhaps you’ll become a person you detest and be in constant conflict with yourself, blame others and then cower from reality; powerless, angry, and vengeful.
ALTERNATIVELY…
When we act according to the things we respect (or value) we can arrive into a life that will be meaningful to us; rather than "how did I end up here?”. Acting according to our values directs our journey in a meaningful way where positive emotions affirm that we’re on course. The journey to a meaningful place requires a little guidance from negative emotions too. I’ve come to realise that my negative emotions work for me to fulfill my potential by harassing me when things are not as they should be. Seeing negative emotions with this perspective provides the opportunity to attend to them.
Perhaps we can think of negative emotions as ‘potential police’ giving a warning we can respond to before it becomes a sentence to which we forsake our identity. Acting according to our values (or those things we respect) defines our attitude to life and becomes part of our identity. Our attitude is the function that allows us to conduct our energy or ‘potential’ into the world. It is the blockage of energy that leads to ill health - mentally and physically.
The chrysalis pulsates as it pushes wings against the prison of its shell. It's this pushing and frustration that creates the wings strong enough to break out and fly. By Identifying what we respect and living a life guided by this we, like the butterfly, can break free from negative patterns with more strength than we realise and flyl. Often we identify the things we respect when imprisoned by habits we do not respect.
RESPECT
[ RI-SPEKT ]
ESTEEM FOR OR A SENSE OF THE WORTH OR EXCELLENCE OF A PERSON, A PERSONAL QUALITY OR ABILITY, OR SOMETHING CONSIDERED AS A MANIFESTATION OF A PERSONAL QUALITY OR ABILITY:
ORIGIN OF RESPECT
FIRST RECORDED IN 1300–50; MIDDLE ENGLISH NOUN FROM OLD FRENCH OR DIRECTLY FROM LATIN RESPECTUS “ACTION OF LOOKING BACK, CONSIDERATION, REGARD,” EQUIVALENT TO RESPEC-, VARIANT STEM OF RESPICERE “TO LOOK BACK” (RE- “BACK” + SPECERE “TO LOOK”)
How to identify what you respect?
Here are a couple of questions taken from an exercise from Dr James Loehr;
1. Think of someone you deeply respect. Describe three qualities in this person you most admire?
2. Jump ahead to the end of your life. What are the three most important lessons you have learned and why are they so critical?
HOW DOES WHAT I RESPECT RELATE TO MY HEALTH?
Take a moment to call to mind the leaders and teachers who have influenced you; what was it about them that inspired you to follow them?
We have various leadership roles in our lives, many of which can justify priority, but the fundamental leadership role you have is to the 30 trillion cells that make you you. Will you govern like the great leaders you admire, or will you ask for everything and give nothing in return?
Giving back is ‘doing what makes you respect you’.
So for a short time, let's imagine that we are the best leader (and follower) to ourselves that we can be…
NUTRITION
Bring to mind some life goals and make it clear that your ability to fulfill them is decided by the quality of what's on your plate. How much do you believe in your goals = the effort put into your meals?
If I laid a table with an assortment of ‘healthy food’ and not so healthy food my belief is that the high majority would be able to partition the contents into the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories pretty accurately. So it’s not a question of what - it's why.
Why respect the quality of the fuel which builds you and then drives you forward? Will power is not magic, it’s an equation that starts with fuel. Are you a leader who will invest quality in your team?
MOVEMENT
As I reflected on ‘respect’ I had to ask, what feelings and thoughts arrive when I encounter someone I respect?
Historically, when I am in the presence of someone with physical strength, sporting talent, and discipline, I wouldn’t be inspired (I didn’t have the self-belief for that), I felt envious, fearful, intimidated. Rather than articulating that, I threw the baby out with the bathwater…. “I’m not one of those people, I don’t like those people, I don’t belong here, I don’t even want to be here. They’re arrogant dick heads” So my respect wasn’t always translated into inspiration and instead ended up being avoided (stolen) rather than pursued. Moving your body well, taking pride in it, challenging it, designing it, is a gift that should not be stolen by the experiences of adolescence.
It stands to reason that the strong, powerful, mobile, flexible avatar is going to do well in the game, not simply in how it can play the game but how it can maintain its vision and pursue the goal- an empowered, flexible, strong belief in destiny.
The body responds positively to effort not result - the result is your ego. We are the leader who respects the effort to bravely encounter challenges. Do we respect the effort to be stronger than we are?
ENVIRONMENT
A friend of mine is unsure if he wants to stay in Bristol or move back to rural Cornwall. He wanted my opinion. I asked which environment bought forward the person he wanted to be remembered for?
Humans are master adaptors. Many like to reference imposed social conditioning to answer for problems, but we have the agency to choose our environments even if we cannot control the adaption. For example, we can choose the chair to which the spine will adapt. We choose how we set up our living space, which dictates how long we stay there. We often choose environments that produce stress, the adaption that follows will change us - possibly into a person who behaves in a way we don’t recognise. We have some agency to choose how we react, but before then, we have the agency to choose the environments in which we have a ‘positive’ reaction - the one which produces self-respect.
If you want a clue to which environments you respect, then look at the photos you post on facebook.
SOCIAL
The language of respect.
Let’s say we want to change something in our lives - relationship, job, body weight, mentality. In order to make this change, we must accept that we are not everything we could be, that we could be more. That desire to be more is born out of self-respect - if you had no self-respect then why would you believe you could have, or even deserve more than you have? Finding that self-respect and actioning change is like learning a new language, it takes vulnerability, humility, hard work, faith, effort, I could go on. All of these can be identified as values or things we respect. If you really want to learn a new language then one option would be to move to the country and immerse yourself in the culture. To transform ourselves we must develop a new culture within ourselves, as Einstein said,
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”
We will not learn Spanish if we only holiday in Benidorm, we must surround ourselves with those who speak the language of respect and earn theirs.
REST
Did you know that every minute your body makes 1 million red blood cells for you? Can you respect that? It takes a lot to manage a complex system like you. Lucky for you you don’t need to beat your heat, regulate your internal temperature or digest your food, let alone build and repair, there’s a system doing that for you. How do you respect its efforts? How do you respect the efforts you put in each day? The system deserves to be paid and it gets paid in hours of sleep. If you respect your efforts in life, conscious or unconscious then it will be seen in hours slept.
MENTAL
What’s the ideal setup for mental health? Psychologically speaking, it might be to know exactly what you want, know how to get there, and most significantly, why it is meaningful to you and then pursue it. What emotions do we feel when our lives are oriented towards and moving towards a meaningful purpose? Positive. And when we’re positive we cannot be negative.
Fortunately for most of us, the pathway is not determined but years can go by and a grey cloud of limitation looms over life and In the darkness, an easy answer to a fundamental question slithers into our belief system…
The question, ‘Am I everything I could be?’
is answered with…
‘No, but that’s me and that’s life.’
If you listen a little more closely, you will hear a very different message coming from that inner critic and the negative emotion,
'I am loud because you are special. Seize the opportunity to show the world’
But that doesn’t tell me the best option for my life?
It doesn’t, but not knowing is natural and understandable especially armed only with self-imposed limitations on one hand and overwhelming options on the other. So…
Should you wait for inspiration? Should you battle the critic into suppression by accepting circumstances as you see them? Or do you get creative?
Picasso said, “inspiration exists, but it must find you working”. You may not know the best option, but by building your character according to the values you know you respect, then you’ll be the best person to make that choice.
If you want to know who you are; look at what you do every day. One cannot demand to be spoon-fed respect by the world; once an adult you need to feed yourself, so embody the things you respect most and define yourself. For when you are defined the universe can light your path, but first, you have to take responsibility and show her who you are.