12 Ways To Show Yourself Respect (And Teach Others To Do The Same)

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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).

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.

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."