Earning Respect vs. Losing Respect.

I have a question for all of you. Which do you say more often; that people “earn your respect”, or that they “lose your respect”?

There are a lot of reasons people would fall on the former. After all, earning is more positive than losing, so using that statement seems more strengths-based than the latter. We see an individual’s strengths and skills, and these earn them more respect. Much like a game where you earn points. Or a Likert scale of progress on a performance evaluation or appraisal at work. By thinking of earning respect – like the game or the performance appraisal – we can gauge the energy and socioemotional investment we will give them among the multitude of people we encounter in our lives.

There are also two implicit assumptions here (where assumption is being neutrally defined as preconceived and automatic notions) as there is with any fast rule-of-thumb that saves us time and effort. First, by saying they earn respect, we are fundamentally saying they are starting with none of our respect and earn it through our interactions with and observations of them. Second, it indicates we have our own definitions of “respect”, and the individual should essentially meet our criteria the more we connect with them.

For me, the statement of people “losing my respect” holds more weight, as it avoids these assumptions that go against what is often seen as a clinical skill and I hold as a personal value – Unconditional Positive Regard, or UPR.

I am going to go out on a limb and say everyone in the fields of mental and behavioral health know of UPR. Carl Rogers, the founder of the Person-Centered Approach in mental health, defined UPR as “…caring for the client, but not in a possessive way or in such a way as simply to satisfy the therapist’s own needs… It means caring for the client as a separate person, with permission to have his own feelings, his own experiences” (Rogers, 1957).

I openly confess that I believe all people are essentially good, my favorite example being the question – have you ever seen a “bad baby” right from birth? The focus is on the basic nature of a baby, the very nature that remains with us. What a baby misses – all the social, emotional and psychological learning borne of existing in the external world – is what gives this core all the actions, thoughts and conditional emotions they express. It is a naive belief…if we hold just that belief. However, we can hold the belief AND find the individual’s learned responses unacceptable and requiring change.

Let’s return to the two assumptions in saying people earn our respect. First, that they are starting at zero. Holding the belief that all individuals are inherently good implies automatically giving them a headstart in our positive impressions of the  simply by virtue of being a fellow human being and an entity in their own right. And this includes respect. So, we inherently begin with respecting them, and respect is lost not for who they ARE, but for what they say, how they act, and so forth. That, too, if it appears not as an isolated or rare event, but as one with sufficient evidence to say it has become an inherent pattern of how they relate to the world.

Now for the second – that we have our own definitions and criteria for “respect”. Token language, or the very words we use, are made by humans. As such, the dictionary or encyclopedia definitions of “respect” don’t always match our own personal definitions of the same. For one in Asian cultures, for example, keeping your eyes down when talking to someone of authority is a sign of respect; in Western cultures, it is a sign of disrespect. These definitions are further refined by our own experiences with others and are therefore individualized…with us as the evaluators. If this is the case, how is the other individual meant to know how to earn our respect, even if there are cultural and generic definitions? How do they earn points at a game when they have no idea of the rules? They CAN, however, infer, for the most part, our negative reactions to something they have said or done from our verbal, non-verbal and paraverbal communication.

So, next time you speak of respect for another, think ask yourself – Do you give respect…or do they already have it?