Skill of the Week: Respect
Giving, Not Taking
The term, ‘respect,’ conjures up so many images of empowerment of a variety of minority groups (in every sense of the word) in western society who have historically been driven to the margins of society. It is a form of activism often compelled by a personal feeling of injustice and mistreatment. Often there is an air of justification that if ‘they’ are not going to give me respect, then I will just take it for myself.
It is a travesty that many individuals and groups have felt so perpetually sidelined and disrespected, sometimes deliberately in a power struggle; other times unintentionally through a lack of empathy and understanding. Alas, I disagree that getting in people’s faces really changes the way that ‘they’ will treat you or feel about you. There are stories on every media platform that demonstrates individuals and groups who have disrespected the people they are trying to convince to respect them: as if intimidation, humiliation and anger are going to convince an individual or group to actually lead to greater respect (fear, maybe but not true respect).
Rather than perpetuating a culture of fear (which respect was often synonymous with power), respect needs to begin from an education of universal moral values. Respect is the cornerstone of moral values. To show regard for the worth of everyone, even if they have a different: socio-economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, gender, occupation, family structure, buying habits, personal preferences, clothing, etc. To show respect does not require that you agree with everything they value, but that you value the fact that they have a shared sense of humanity: emotions, minds, bodies and souls. That alone should be justification for treating each individual as they are: fully human.
“Oh, but you don’t understand what they have done to me, Matt!”
The circumstances are irrelevant. Being respectful is not letting others walk all over you, but it is not being disrespectful back. Until one party or the other is willing to stand up and say, “I will stop being disrespectful,” the cycle of offended, offender will continue indefinitely.
Giving Respect
There are three objects of our respect that need to be addressed here:
· Self
· Others
· All forms of life and the environment which sustains them
Giving self-respect means giving yourself permission to be human. We all make mistakes, but it is important to attribute the failure (small or large) as a product of insufficient effort, information or resources, not that you should simply give up because your very being is a ‘no-good so-and-so.’ It means forgiving yourself for your faults and foibles. Self-respect means having a growth mindset: to see the opportunity through our weaknesses. If you strive for perfection at any cost, it will cost you your self-respect when (not if) you do eventually falter and fail.
If we have the humility to recognize that we are not self-sufficient super-humans, we can begin to give others permission to make mistakes, even when they affect us negatively. After all, you have negatively affected others by your errors and omissions, guaranteed. Respecting others means treating them with dignity and as having value regardless of individual qualities, values, or behaviours, much like we would want to be treated the same way despite our differences.
An extension of respecting other people is the natural environment including all plants, animals and habitats that support life. By not taking care of our only livable planet, we are making living worth less for other people on Earth both now and in the future. I simply invite you to consider how your decisions about how you use our limited resources will affect others, and how that demonstrates respect or disrespect towards other people in our time, and the time to come.
Final Thoughts
Yes, this article is rather optimistic in its simplicity, but a value of respect needs to be built on hope: A hope that our actions and decisions matter: making the world around us a better place to live.
Matt Bean