Four Elements of Self-Love: #2 Self-Respect

If you're working on self love, this is a four part series about the four elements of self love and this is part two. Today I'm going to be talking about self respect. My name is Rachel Havocost, I'm a writer, a mental health advocate and I have worked on self love for the past 20 years. It's an ongoing process and after a lot of therapy and a lot of introspection, I came to this belief that there were four elements of self love and they all have a lot of overlap and without all four of them, we won't feel a sort of complete separate sense of loving ourselves.

So I've already talked about the first element which is self care. Today I'm going to talk about the second element which is self respect. Self respect builds on self care as it has a lot to do with how we see ourselves and the relationship we have with ourselves. So this has a lot to do with things like our identity, knowing ourselves, our values. It also has to do with boundaries, setting and sticking to them, building a relationship of trust with ourselves. So self trust and self respect have a lot to do with each other and really being able to keep promises that we, that we make to ourselves and have a relationship with ourself where we go.

I'm really, really proud of the way I'm acting in the world. I'm acting in integrity with my values, my beliefs. I'm also doing the things I say I'm gonna do. I'm following up on my commitments, both to myself and other people in the world. I'm setting boundaries because I care about myself and I respect myself and I'm sticking to those boundaries. And the more we act in those ways, the more respect we have for ourselves, which builds self love. There's two activities that I have for building self respect that I really like.

The first one is a values exercise. I have a video on values on my profile. So if you're new to values, you can go check that out and come back here. They activity here is on a sheet of paper you make two columns. On one side you have values and on the other side you have actions. So make a list of your values. And this can be a list of like three to five core values. So these can be things like connection, altruism, adventure, success. Whatever your values are, you write them down on the left and then on the right side you write down what some actions are you can do that will express those values.

So for example, if one of my values, one of my core values is connection. Some actions I Can do that, express that value would be things like call a friend or go out to lunch with someone I care about, or go to a public park or a bookstore. Being around other people, going to a dance class, doing things where I'm connecting with other people in a meaningful way will give me a sense that I am living my life through my values, which builds self respect. The second activity I really like for self respect is an activity called keeping self promises.

So this is an act of, in the morning, making a small promise to yourself. So this is not about making huge life changes. This is about making one small promise that you are 95% sure that you can keep throughout the day. So this might be something like, I'm gonna drink 64 ounces of water today. That for me, is a reasonable promise I can make to myself. And then once I've done it, at the end of the day, I give myself a little gold star. And we start to do this over time. And what we're doing is we're building self trust.

And the more we trust ourselves, the more we respect ourselves. I like to think of self respect in the same way that I think of respecting others. So if I think about other people I respect, how are they behaving? Typically, they're. They're acting in alignment with their values. Even if I don't agree with those values, they're acting in alignment with those values. They're honest and true to what they say, they follow through on their commitments, they keep promises, and if they don't, they're really honest and upfront and they make apologies.

This will kind of come in in our next section, self compassion. They have good boundaries and they know who they are and they're not ashamed of who they are. Right? So a lot of times it's really hard for us to feel self respect if we also feel shame. So shame work is also a really good practice here if you're struggling with self respect. And I know often self respect is a really difficult one because it is much more involved with our relationships too, because it has to do a lot as well with boundaries and how we act with other people.

So I know this one can be a little bit challenging. And trust me, this is one of the most beneficial ones that you can practice. I hope this was helpful. Let me know if you try any of the activities and check out my next two videos for the next two elements of self love.