Respect - What It Means

Respect. It may seem like a simple seven letter word, but it is powerful enough to be seen as a complete sentence as well. Respect condenses within itself the power to sustain many relationships, it contains within itself the ability to show other people your emotions about how you feel about them, about a situation or even about someone you may not know personally. 

Let me explain myself a bit. One of the foundations of any relationship is the presence of respect in that relationship. Right from our childhood, we are taught that we need to respect our parents, our teachers and our elders and those are the building blocks of our relationship with them. Respect is the adjective that you use when you want to address people from stage. It could be “Respected Guests” or “Respected Judges” and that is the badge value of respect. 

Go deep into the healthy relationships of any couple and they will tell you that the reason our relationship is so strong is that we respect each other. Many broken relationships occur because one of the partners did not respect the other. 

In a professional set up, respect as a value comes into play once again and people like to work for organizations and bosses that respect them.

The beauty of respect is that it does not differentiate between strangers and familiarity or between gender or hierarchy. You could respect someone you do not know as much as how much you would respect people you know. When you react to a video of a friend who has done something that is admirable, you show respect for that. Similarly, when a soldier of your country shows an act of valour to protect you and your borders, you show respect for that as well, even though you may not know the soldier personally.

Respect is something that needs to be earned and one has to work hard for it. Often, our heroes earn our respect because of their acts and deeds, and sometimes they earn this respect at different stages of their lives. No one knew Malala Yousafazai when she was a young student until the time she got shot by the Taliban and then became a Pakistani activist at a young age. The world started respecting her from then on. Nelson Mandela become a worldwide respected personality only after he was sentenced to life imprisonment at the age of 44. 

              Respect is for those who deserve it and not for those who demand it.

While it is difficult to earn respect, it is extremely easy to lose respect. We see this many times when our heroes and our idols fail us and our first reaction is “I have lost all respect for him or her.” World famous cyclist Lance Armstrong lost lot of respect of his fans when he confessed taking drugs to improve his performance.  

They say that knowledge is power but it is respect that defines your character. A true character of a person gets reflected when he speaks ‘respectfully’ not only to his seniors or people who are higher than him in the economic society but also to his juniors and to people who are lower than him in society. So you may be very successful in life and maybe earning a lot of money but if you do not have the respect of others and if you do not show respect to others, then you are still very poor.

Another aspect of respect is that it is not only outward driven, but it is also inward created. That is what self-respect is – the respect that you give to yourself as an individual and that is a sacred wall that no one can trample on, because when people trample on that, it causes lot of hurt.

As the saying goes:

               Respect is earned. Trust is gained. Honesty is appreciated. Loyalty is returned.

While you may be a trustworthy person, a loyal person, an honest person but you would never call yourself self-good, self-loyal or self-honest but you wouldn’t shy away from calling yourself a self-respecting individual. That is the power of ‘Respect.’