Giving Respect

Has anyone ever said to you, “You have to earn my respect”? I know when I have heard it it didn’t feel very good. Why not? There is an underlying message. It means that I start out from a place of no respect. It means that I don’t respect you until you prove yourself worthy of my respect. It means I am not worthy. And that doesn’t feel very good.

It further means that there are levels of respect. You may be worth more or less respect. It means you may be worth more or less. Your personhood is being evaluated and deemed worthy. Your personhood is being deemed worthy of consideration. And if you do not earn your respect, you may be unworthy of consideration.

This is conditional respect. It is no different than conditional love. It means you are not seen in your perfection at all times and fully accepted for who you are. It means you are only accepted for what you do, not who you are.

The confusion arises with our need to evaluate a person’s skills. Here, respect means our regard for a quality or skill a person possesses. I do want to evaluate a plumber before he takes apart my sink. I need to know his skill level. If he is a true craftsman, than I will admire him. But this is about what he does, not who he is. He is always worthy of my consideration for his personhood, independent of his skills. My love is separate from my admiration. I may not admire everyone, but I can love everyone.

We have become so obsessed with doing as a culture, that we may forget to see the person doing it. Just as they do to themselves, we think that they are the things that they do. They are as loveable and respectable as the things they do. Admiration is about the doing. Respect can also be about the doing. But it also has the sense of love.

What if I said, “You have all of my respect from the start. You are going to have to work really hard to lose it”? How would that change your life? And the world?

How could you lose my respect? If you push hard enough, you will find some place inside me where I don’t respect myself. If you manage to burrow down to the bottom of that hole with me, then in that dark place you will lose my respect. Because there is none there. For me or for you. There is no love there, either. And if you have pushed me that far, I will assume it is because you are not respecting⎯or loving⎯yourself. So there we will be, two people with no love or respect for ourselves sitting in the dark at the bottom of a hole. Pretty bleak. No way out.

How do we get out of there? It takes someone to come along who respects themselves deeply⎯meaning more than us⎯to bring some light to that place so we can begin to see ourselves again. With that glimmer of light, we can start to see again, and find our way out of the hole.

So bring on your respect. Show up with your respect full-on. There are a lot of people around us who do not respect themselves as much you do. Let them see themselves reflected in your respect for them. And may that moment be a turning point for them, when they caught a peek at themselves beyond their doubt. Let it be a moment when the lie dies, the lie that they are not worthy, for a lie cannot sustain itself once it has cracked. And let that be the start to all of us finding our way back to our full love and respect for ourselves.