Happy Tuesday, hope you had a great Easter break. We were in Iceland and it was amazing. It inspired me to write about different topics including respect and how to best satisfy this need for people who seek respect from others.
Respect is a fundamental human need. We all want to be respected. Some achieve this through their job, some through social connections, some through friends and relatives. But the most important influencers of our sense of respect is the family of our origin. That is how our parents respected themselves, each other and us as a child.
According to systemic family dynamics, unconsciously every child lives up to expectations of their parents. If parents have respect for themselves and each other, that means they allow space and opportunity to develop their own sense of being, and their child learns a helpful model of respect automatically. If respect is a family value, then a child grows up learning to respect themselves and others.
Generally speaking, respect stems from the sense of self-esteem. If a person has low self-esteem, they respect themselves rather little and allow mental, emotional and sometimes physical abuse by others. If a person has high self-esteem, they respect themselves and create boundaries with little tolerations to breach them. These emotional and mental boundaries are an important cornerstone for personal enrichment.
Psychology of human enrichment starts with raising our self-esteem and learning to respect who we are and what we have come with to this point in time.
By raising inner-respect, we learn to respect others. That, in turn, creates amazing opportunities to enrich our relationships.
So how do we create families with high respect that allow to raise people with high self-esteem?
First, we adopt respectful beliefs. For example, families that believe in and accept individual differences have more chances to create respectful behaviours for their children.
Second, we agree on principles. These can be cultural-specific or universal. For example, a principle in one’s family could be to allow no swearing or any oral abuse. A breach in principles would have certain consequences, for each member of the family who breaches this principle. The helps everyone in that family to understand, value and respect agreed principles, so they start respecting themselves through that.
Third, we agree on traditions and actions. These normally are around celebrations of the behaviours in which respect thrives. For example, one family adopts a tradition to spend one evening a week where they get together around the table and share wins and good things that happened to them during the week, thus allowing everyone to celebrate and see others respectfully.
The more we proactively think about respect as a value and a fundamental human need, the more conscious we will become to adopt helpful strategies to support the development of it in our families. And of course, it all starts with our own respect of ourselves.
So ask yourself, on a scale of 1-10 how much do you respect yourself? If the score is low, there might be an issue in your self-esteem and I would encourage you spend time raising that. Because without high self-esteem, you may feel your fundamental need for respect is not satisfied and that means you may be more likely to seek for it’s satisfaction elsewhere, externally. But it could be a trap. External respect is just a tip of an iceberg, which at some point uncovers itself to be observed in full scale below the water, and then, we will have to face our low self-esteem again.
So why wait?
Let’s raise our self-esteem and learn amazing strategies to create respectful behaviours now.
With love
Darya
P.S.: On this topic and slightly different (How to Raise Emotionally Intelligent Children), I have created a Webinar and I would like to invite you. It starts next Tuesday 2 pm London Time. Please use this link to see a short video and register – we only have limited seats left: https://daryahaitoglou.com/webinar-raising-emotionally-intelligent-children/
P.S.: If you don’t have children and just want to be happy and be in a good mood, join our 7-Day Positive Communication Challenge that starts 7th April. Click here to claim your spot: https://daryahaitoglou.com/7-day-communication-challenge/