I’ve come to learn that it can be very difficult to respect others when you don’t respect yourself, and that it takes self-love to have self-respect. Sadly our youth lacks this greatly.

If you loved yourself would you allow the next person to disrespect you? If you respected yourself (attention girls) won’t that naturally beget respect from others?

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These are some of the questions we can ask ourselves. Self-love is an essential element for living positively, and self-respect is an important aspect of self-love. The more you respect yourself, the more you are able to love yourself.

However, self-respect isn’t always as easy to come by as you might think. There are a lot of aspects of life that can lure you away from respect, fashion to name just one. As much as you might want to treat yourself with respect, there are often outside influences that can get in the way of treating yourself honourably.

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For example, here are a few situations that might tempt you away from respecting yourself: loving someone who doesn’t love you (or who treats you badly); having a “successful” career that makes you unhappy; wishing you could go back to a past time in your life; thinking you need to have X, Y, or Z to be happy, having people around you who doubt your abilities; wanting things simply because you think you “should” want them; thinking the lives others lead are better than your own; or living or working with people who treat you (or themselves) negatively.

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These are just a few of the reasons when you might find respecting yourself difficult, and, unfortunately, they can happen to almost anyone. Not all of these things are within your control (you cannot always control how others act or react), but what is within your control is how you treat yourself.

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