Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscera, and in today's episode, we are going to talk about developing self-respect.

More to come on that in a moment.

First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells. Okay, self-respect.

Now, I said we're going to talk about developing self-respect, but really we can look at this as re-establishing self-respect because I think self-respect is less about something

you cultivate and more about regaining something that is slowly lost over time or this is just a working theory, at least.

So we'll get more into that.

But the idea of feeling a sense of self-respect and the importance of that from my perspective

is that it's one of the most important factors for experiencing deep contentment. I've talked about this in

relationship to integrity as well. When we respect ourselves, there's a certain comfort we feel in

our own skin and a sense of being proud to be who we are, not in an arrogant way, but in an appreciative way, in a peaceful way.

We can rest in our own being rather than feeling resistant to ourselves.

So self-respect is not something to just be taken lightly.

I do see it on the same level and with lots of overlaps to

integrity. Now, there are a lot of reasons why we might lose respect for ourselves. And some of

these are out of our control. For instance, when we were young, our family or social circle may have

encouraged us to think, speak, or act in ways that didn't feel aligned with who we, who we were,

who we felt we were at that time, and we respect ourselves to be but the social pressure especially

when we're really young and are just trying to align with our family that social pressure was

greater than our inner resources to act in alignment with what felt right. And so there are ways that our external world can

influence us to act out of alignment. And again, the younger we are, the more forgiveness there is

for this, just because, well, at that age, we're primarily just

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