1. Figure out what makes you respect yourself.
First, look within and question what practices make you feel your absolute best. Then, pay yourself the respect of prioritizing them daily. For example, exercising regularly, starting every day with a green juice, and being under the covers by 10 p.m. are all ways I show myself respect.
2. Be honest about who you are and who you aren’t.
Once you know what makes you feel good, continue to prioritize it—not only with yourself but with others. Lead with honesty. This means that if you know working outdoors at a farm sanctuary is what you’re here to do, then you have no business working 9 to 5 at a desk job for the next decade. You’re disrespecting your talents and interests, and you’re keeping the desk job from someone who’d actually excel in that position.
3. Respect yourself by taking action around things that excite you.
Yes, taking action on the unknown can be scary stuff. We’re never guaranteed our ideal outcome, and that can cause us to retreat, big time. But the most successful people aren’t afraid to try something new. Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard, and the rest is history. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began Apple in their garage. You get the picture!
4. Stop trying so hard to be “normal.”
The only way to stand out is to be your idiosyncratic, real, quirky self. It’s easier said than done, but consider this: All those folks you look up to have taken ownership of what sets them apart and leveraged it to their advantage.
5. Don’t let other people define your boundaries.
Many people have good intentions, but their advice is often clouded by their emotional baggage. So when someone tells you “You’ll never be able to do that” or “You shouldn’t” or “You can’t,” ignore them until you have figured out for yourself what’s true.
6. Learn to say no.
Letting others know what isn’t OK doesn’t make you a bad person; it makes you a strong and respectable person. When you stop saying yes to things you don’t want to do, you create more time and energy to engage with the activities and people that do make you happy. Here’s some more advice about how to get into the habit of saying no.
7. Choose a partner who respects you.
You know the first place all of us tend to throw self-respect out the window? Yup, you guessed it: dating. I speak to countless people who have so much to offer but are stuck in a relationship that forces them to compromise some part of themselves and live in a state of numbing self-sacrifice. They need to muster up the self-respect to start over. Though scary, breaking off a relationship will be less painful than being with a partner who doesn’t want or isn’t capable of giving you what you need.
8. Let whatever you get done today be enough.
Show self-respect means not being overly self-critical, judgmental, or restrictive. It’s so easy to chain ourselves to a to-do list and then gauge our worthiness on its completion. Practice making purposeful shifts toward self-kindness by saying to yourself as you finish one task and contemplate the next: “I could do this, or I could not. If I choose to stop now, I will allow whatever I have completed today to be enough, and I will not beat myself up for it.”
9. Know that you are not your genes.
You could spend a lifetime untying the knots of your family life—but that’s your choice. Conversely, at any point, you can reflect on our childhood influences and declare, “This is not my story. I am not my genes.”
10. Apologize with self-respect.
Saying “I’m sorry” is seldom pleasant or easy to do, so if you’re going to do it at all, make it count! An important part of apologizing is learning not to make excuses because that’s just disrespectful to the other person and to your integrity. So next time you’re tempted to plead your case, lay a hand on your heart, check in with that inner barometer, and listen to the truth. If an apology is called for courageously, offer one (minus the excuses).
11. Be willing to accept reality.
You must be willing to see things and people as they are. It can be painful to acknowledge that there is a problem with ourselves, our loved ones, or a situation. But if you don’t deal with the problem with curiosity and courteousness, your situation will be prolonged. And that is not very respectful of your time and energy.
12. Write love notes to your body.
Our health, like everything else in our life, is a relationship. The more we pay attention to it and nourish it, the more our body thrives. Often when we consider becoming healthier, we find ourselves in front of the mirror looking at our bodies and wondering what we need to “fix.”
Instead of making self-deprecation your morning ritual, stand in front of the mirror and list three things you love about yourself. Later, write them down, preferably on sticky notes. Then pick the one or two that make you feel the way you want to feel every single day and leave these love notes on your bedroom mirror, in your wallet, on the TV remote, or anywhere you can read them every day.
Self-respect is all about treating yourself the way you’d want others to treat you. By focusing only on our self-perceived faults and flaws, we’re basically giving permission for the rest of the world to focus on them too!
