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I spent years swallowing disrespect until I realized that I was literally training people to walk all over me. And Now I'm the CEO of acquisition.com. i help thousands of business owners to grow because I stopped tolerating that bull and I started commanding respect through actions. Number one is that respect starts with you. Let's start with the biggest lie that you've ever been told. Respect is earned from others. You don't earn respect. You set the standard for it. And most people set the bar way too low. Self respect is built, it is not begged for. And chasing respect is actually the quickest way to lose. Every day, people walk into rooms, begging, pleading, being desperate to be respected. Okay, maybe it's a boss because they undervalue you. Maybe it's a partner that doesn't honor you, or they don't respect you, or maybe it's a friend that just takes you for granted all the time. But the truth is this, okay? You do not get respect by asking for all these, like, tips and tricks videos, teaching you how to get respect with, like, long stares and body language. They are stupid and they're not reality. The real foundation starts with the fact that you don't even respect yourself. And so you get it by becoming the person who wouldn't tolerate that disrespect in the first place. Because if you tolerate it with yourself, then you'll tolerate it from other people. Respect isn't earned from other people. It's actually maintained within ourselves. And then other people catch onto the respect that we already have with ourselves. So people respecting you is actually a lagging indicator of you respecting yourself. Meaning the world catches up, but you're the one who has to go first, right? And so you have to respect yourself before anybody else is going to. And the fastest way to lose respect is to beg for validation from people who don't even respect themselves. I had a woman that came to me, it was about four years ago, and we had a meeting And I had 40% of my room was female executives. 60% was male executives. And one of the female executives came to me and she said, oh, you know, Larry doesn't respect me. It's funny, because the way that I actually saw the conversation go was that she has such little respect for herself. She didn't advocate for herself in the room. She. She didn't speak like somebody who respected herself. And she taught other people in the room how to talk to her. Because of the way she showed up, she didn't have certainty. She didn't advocate for herself. And she allowed people to speak over her so many times that we catch ourselves pointing to the other person. And it's so often in the workplace, especially with women, we're saying, well, that person doesn't respect me. It's like, well, have I actually learned how to respect myself? Do I even know what self respect looks like? And I asked her that question, I said, do you know what it looks like to respect yourself? And she was like, I actually don't. I really don't. And it's a loop a lot of people get caught in. Someone disrespects you, it makes you feel small. You know, you feel pissed off, you feel frustrated, you feel angry. And then you think, I've got to prove everybody wrong. So what do you do? You try harder to prove your worth and then what happens? They might actually respect you less, not more. And that's exactly what happened to her. She kept trying to prove that she needed to be respected. I saw she would escalate in the room, she would raise her tone of voice, she would do all these things that they weren't respecting. Respectable, they were actually rude, they were mean. They seemed like somebody would do those things if you were talking to an enemy, not somebody on your own team. And then here's what happens. When she realized that was her behavior, she lost more self respect. And that's what happens in that cycle. Then you lose more self respect because you're trying to appease another person rather than yourself. And then you repeat the cycle. I know what you're thinking, which is like, if I stop trying to earn other people's respect, doesn't that make me look arrogant or selfish? But here's the thing. Respecting yourself doesn't make you selfish. It makes you stable. Because when you respect yourself, your boundaries are clear. You have standards that are non negotiable and people around you know where they stand. And ironically, it's like one of the kindest, most generous things that you can do because nobody has to guess who they're dealing with. They understand what your standards are and how you treat yourself. And trying to earn respect by tolerating disrespect is like trying to get healthy by eating cake and hoping your body's just not going to notice. We want to break that cycle and that takes us to our next point. Point number two, we measure people by what they cost you, not what they say. Just because somebody talks up a big game doesn't mean that they should be in your life. So here's a good decision making Filter. If somebody makes it harder to behave like the person I respect being, they are too expensive to have in my life. Like, no matter how charming, how connected, or how important they are. So here's the questions that you ask yourself to evaluate. Is that person worth your time and energy? One, do I like who I am when I'm around them? Two, do they challenge me in ways that elevate me or in ways that confuse and derail me? Most important, does my behavior with them when I'm around them move me closer or further from my values? A lot of people say, I know my boyfriend cheated on me, but he says what he says he is causing you to lose respect for yourself by staying with him. And it's not about him, it's about you. It's not that he inherently makes you disrespect yourself. It's that you choosing to stay day makes you disrespect yourself. The same goes in the workplace. People ask me all the time, Layla, what do I do? My boss, I know they don't respect me. It feels toxic. It feels like they're constantly disrespecting me. How do I manage them up? You don't. You leave because you aren't going to change the other person. You just have to change the situation by changing how you've responded to the same situation over and over and over again. Person's not going to change because of you. People barely can get themselves to change. Think about yourself watching this video. You're trying to figure out how to respect yourself. You think for some reason you're going to have more pull over somebody else's behavior than your own. That's just not the case. And so you can't expect somebody's going to leave. You have to leave the situation. And I know that you're probably thinking, well, but this job, I can't get another job. Or like, this is my business partner. Like, I have to make it work or I've been married for this. Like, I understand. But at the same time, there's a quote that comes to mind every time I think of this, which is like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting a different result. The situation won't change unless you do. And you don't change by wanting. You don't change by wishing. You change. You don't change by feeling. You change by doing something different. Someone saying or doing something disrespectful doesn't inherently make them toxic. It's allowing the disrespect is that what makes it toxic is that you allow yourself to remain in that situation. Someone can't disrespect you if you leave the situation. And so allowing someone to continually disrespect us is when you give away your own power and then you lose respect for yourself in the process. Here's where things get interesting, is that self respect is a system, not a feeling. Okay, Most people think that self respect is something that you earn, but the truth is self respect is a daily set of behaviors. You don't feel self respect, you do self respect. So let's break down the behaviors that actually build self respect. Number one, keep your word to yourself. I don't know how many times I have to say this. Keep your word to yourself. If you don't keep your word to yourself and you are pissed that people disrespect you, then you have nothing to complain about. You don't respect yourself, of course they don't respect you. And you might say, oh, this person disrespected me by saying they were going to do something and then they did something else or whatever it might be. Okay, but if you don't even keep your word to yourself, how can you be pissed that somebody else doesn't keep it to you? This happens all the time in relationships. There's a saying that people say, which is it only takes one person to change a relationship. And that goes for this as well. Because if you change, the other person has to change their behavior. But a lot of people don't see that. They just see I need them to change for me to change or for me to feel better. But we don't have control over what other people do. We only have control over we respond to ourselves and what we do. The second thing you need to do is you need to leave environments that make you behave out of alignment. For example, When I was 18, I lived in a house with six people. And I realized that everything they did, smoking weed, drinking, partying, stealing, lying, cheating, it was all out of alignment with the person that I wanted to be. And so I left. I didn't say, you guys need to respect me by upholding these standards that I want you to have of your life, because for some reason that will make me feel better. No, I just said this. I'm leaving this situation. They can do whatever they want to do. I'm going to live my life, how I'm going to live my life. And so I left. And then I went and I lived in a house by myself. And because I Said it makes it harder for me to respect myself when I'm surrounded by these people. It's a question I ask myself a lot. Am I surrounding myself with people that make me lose respect for myself? Because maybe I'm tolerating stuff from them that I wouldn't tolerate from other people. Maybe I'm acting in a way when I'm around them that makes it harder for me to respect myself. Or maybe I feel that their disrespect for themselves makes it hard for me to respect myself around them. A really big one is when people are drinking and doing drugs. Like, I still, to this day, get uneasy when I'm around somebody that drinks a lot because I feel they don't have respect for themselves. And I'm like, I just hold myself to a higher standard of how much I respect my body, my mind, all these things. It's really hard for me to be around that now because I know what it was like. And so I don't sit there and try to preach to them. I'm not like, oh, you should stop drinking. I'm just like, I just won't be hanging out with you. I'm not even gonna tell them. I'm just not gonna be there. You don't need to make other people feel bad for the fact they don't respect themselves. You just need to respect yourself by leaving the situation. Now, the third behavior is that you want to choose discomfort over self abandonment. Most people, and this happens all the time, they would rather abandon themselves, their values, their principles, their sense of self, than be uncomfortable. Instead, we want to say this. I will choose discomfort if it means keeping the respect I have for myself. So I'll give you an example of when this happened to me in the workplace. So when I got a job at a gym when I was 21, I joined a gym. And it was the one that I felt like I could make the most money the fastest, which I had moved all the way across the country. I didn't have much money, so I was like, it, whatever. I'll just work here. And when I was there, I remember it was like four days in, and one of the managers, he was like, hey, you should go talk to those guys over there. And it was like this group of older men. And I was like, why? He was like, well, I think that those would be your ideal clients. And I was like, definitely not my ideal clients. My ideal clients are women in their twenties. Why? And he was like, listen, I remember he looked me dead in the eye, and he, like, grabbed Me on my shoulder. He put his hand right there and he was like, pull down your shirt, Pull up your shorts. Go talk to them in the moment. I was like, I don't even know what's happening right now. And I end up leaving later that day. I said, oh, I have a stomachache. I've got to go. And I just called them after and I said, I'm not working here. I'm done. And they were like, why? And I was like, not for me. I'd rather be uncomfortable knowing that I don't have the money, don't have all this, you know. Now I'm uncomfortable with the fact that, like, I don't know how I'm going to make ends meet, but at least I keep my dignity. At least I'm keeping my values. Like, that's just not how I roll. And by the way, if you roll that way, whatever you do, you. But, like, I just don't roll that way. And so I was like, I just gotta exit the situation. And doing little things like that over time, that's how you build respect for yourself. It's by keeping the promises, keeping the boundaries, and deciding it's okay to be uncomfortable as long as I'm aligned with my values. The fourth behavior is speaking truthfully without emotionally vomiting. This one's insidious. A lot of people lose respect for themselves because of what they say to other people. And then they walk away thinking, I shouldn't have said that. I think I said too much. I'm not happy with how I showed up. I don't know if I should have said that. And that's because they speak out of impulse and emotion. This is when people speak from unmanaged discomfort rather than speaking truthfully in alignment with the results, they want. A question that I ask myself all the time is, what do I want to have happen from this conversation? Like, what's the action I want this person to take? What would I like them to do? When we get done talking, I don't ask myself, how would I like to feel? I ask myself, what would I like to have happen? And that's a huge one. Because if you think about it, a good example is if you're mad at your spouse because they didn't get you the gift you wanted on your birthday, you say, okay, well, why am I mad? Because I'm uncomfortable with the fact that I think about them so much on their birthday. But I would never forget this, but they forgot it for me, and so I'm uncomfortable. I don't feel good well, what do I want to have happen? Well, I want them to think of me on my birthday. Then do you think emotionally vomiting all over that person is going to result in them thinking about you on your birthday? Or do you think it's going to result in them liking you less because you made them feel bad for something they didn't even know that was an expectation of themselves? And so that's why you have to ask yourself these things. And people go around in the workplace, in their friendships, in their relationships, emotionally vomiting because it feels good in the short term and it feels really bad in the long term because you don't build that self respect. And so if you think about it, self respect is like fitness. You just do it one rep at a time. Every time you choose not to betray yourself, and every time you betray yourself, you lose self respect. Every time you break a promise to yourself, you're showing the world how to treat you and you show yourself how to treat you. Because here's the thing, people who really respect themselves, they just leave situations. And people who don't respect them, they don't complain about it and they certainly don't YouTube, Google search videos about it. They just dick, they ghost them and they leave. So self respect is built in systems that make it easy for us to keep promises to ourselves.