What is Self-Respect?
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009“If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Now what does that mean? What does it actually mean to respect ourselves? And what does that have to do with others? If others don’t respect us, doesn’t that mean that they are disrespectful people? So, what does that have to do with us? It’s them and not us!
It sounded excellent but never really made sense to me. That is until last year or so.
I found out that if my house was extremely messy, others (family or friends) who visited me would not treat it very well. For example, they might just leave the plates lying around, not bother taking their shoes off while entering the house and so on.
On the other hand, if my house was really clean, same people would be making sure they took their dishes to the sink, took their shoes off before entering the house, some even cleaning up their own dishes.
Now it made sense to me. If I don’t respect my own house, others won’t either. Same way, if I don’t respect myself, no one else will either!
If they see a messy house, they assume I don’t care about my house and they don’t feel a need to care for it either. Some because of their good habits may still do but there is no inclination to do it.
Even the messiest people coming to my house would not leave a mess, or not as much, if my house was extra clean.
I have friends who are strict vegetarians. In the beginning, people tried to persuade them to try to eat meat but they stood their ground. Now whenever they go out, those same people don’t even go to the restaurants unless they serve vegetarian food also.
That’s what it means to respect yourself.
Another example:
I am also a real estate sales person. Usually I would keep showing houses after houses to people just because they insisted they wanted to see them or just because they were my friends. And these were the houses that they hated but they still wanted to see just in case.
Time spent on that is the time I could be spending with my family or doing something else that I enjoy but I would still go on these showings because they kept insisting. If I said no, they would say that they really wanted to put in the offer this week and desperately need to see these houses. They would also make me feel quite guilty by insisting that they were only looking at houses with me because of friendship and trust even though they had a lot of real estate people in their own family. Needless to say I would take them.
Recently I’ve developed the attitude that if something doesn’t feel good, I don’t do it. So, I’ve actually started referring these people to others. It felt really uncomfortable especially because I’m not used to it. Another big reason is because I’ve been brought up with financial scarcity mindset. So, there’s always a hope that if I sell this house I would get some more money to pay some of the debts off and so on.
I am actually very happy with my decision! And I’ve learnt that this was another area that was contributing to me feeling depressed. More I start to be selfish and avoid doing things that make me feel bad about myself and my life, happier I feel!
Learning when to say no is the key!
