SELF RESPECT AND SELF ESTEEM
"Do unto yourself what you would like done unto yourself!"
FINDING YOUR SELF WORTH
Component of Self Respect:
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Self knowledge.
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Self like.
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Self trust.
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Self value.
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Self worth.
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Self care.
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Self acceptance.
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Being kind to yourself.
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Balance.
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Holistic Health.
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Honour and decency.
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Not being too concerned about the opinions of others or whether others like you or not. Others change their opinions every day. We cannot base our self-respect upon the opinions of others.
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Humility.
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Acknowledging limitations yet daily pushing our boundaries and improving.
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Acknowledging our strengths and weaknesses.
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Acknowledging our virtues and vices.
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Steadily working on ourselves to improve our holistic health and happiness.
"Who is the happiest person? The one who understands the human experience and has enough skill to bring knowledge, love, and wisdom to others and thus help them to experience real holistic happiness."
SELF RESPECT AND SELF ESTEEM.
Our culture is concerned with matters of self-esteem. Self-respect, on the other hand, may hold the key to achieving the peace of mind we seek. The two concepts seem very similar but the differences between them are crucial.
To esteem anything is to evaluate it positively and hold it in high regard, but evaluation gets us into trouble because while we sometimes win, we also sometimes lose. To respect something, on the other hand, is to accept it.
I enjoy singing and do so quite frequently. As those within earshot will attest, I'm not very good but I love to sing anyway. During summer parties I frequently sing solo and play the part of the "moving ball," trying to stay just ahead of the music to provide the words for those who don't know the song. I am not saddened by my lack of talent. I accept the way I sing. Because of this acceptance, I am able to sing without being evaluative of myself or concerned with what others think.
The word acceptance suggests to some readers that our culture does indeed deal with this idea of self-respect; after all, don't we have the concept that it is important to accept our limitations? Aren't many of us encouraged "to change the things we can change, accept the things we cannot change and know the difference between the two?" I believe I could learn to sing better, so my acceptance is not based on my limitations. Nor is it based on resignation, since I am not resigned to the belief that I cannot sing well and am not committed to any particular belief about my voice in the future.
The person with self-respect simply likes her- or himself. This self-respect is not contingent on success because there are always failures to contend with. Neither is it a result of comparing ourselves with others because there is always someone
better or worse. These are tactics usually employed to increase self-esteem. Self-respect, however, is a given. We simply like ourselves or we don't. With self-respect, we like ourselves because of who we are and not because of what we can or cannot do.
Consider an interesting test of self-respect. If someone compliments us, what is our reaction? If we are very pleased, it would suggest a certain amount of uncertainty about our skill. Imagine that somebody whose opinion we respect told us that we were great at spelling three-letter words, or that our pronunciation of vowels was wonderful. Chances are we would not be moved. We know we can do it in the first case, and we don't care in the second. Because we were not evaluating ourselves, the compliment was unimportant. The more instances in which we don't "take the compliment," the less vulnerable we become to evaluation and insult.
My recent research points to the advantages of self-respect. Compared to those with high self-esteem who are still caught in an evaluative framework, those with self-respect are less prone to blame, guilt, regret, lies, secrets,
stress, and neurotic worry about the
opinions of others.
Many people worry whether there is life after death. Just think about it: If we gave up self-evaluation, we could have more life before death.
Self-Respect
Quotations
Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
Perhaps the most important thing we can undertake toward the reduction of fear is to make it easier for people to accept themselves, to like themselves.
A man who doesn't trust himself can never really trust anyone else.
The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.
Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.
Self-respect is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has a price.
No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves.
When I go into the garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.