Respect for yourself and the people that provide your opportunities, which is everyone you come in contact with guarantees success.
We use respect or lack of respect to give things, people and situations value.
How you value yourself is really important and the more value you assign yourself the more empowered you will be.
Society makes it hard to have self-respect because it wants you to respect everything else first and definitely does not want you to be truly empowered.
That was a pretty harsh statement, implying society does not want you truly empowered, but it is very much true.
Let me explain why –
Empowered people take risks and risks scares the crap out of people that are anywhere near that person.
This is why your parents and friends make you feel bad when you take any sort of risk and they try to lead you down their paths, for example the majority of kids follow in their parent’s footsteps when it comes to career choices. Parents steer their kids into the safest, minimal risk choices as much as possible.
This is called conditioning and we are all conditioned from babies to follow our parent’s paths, there is nothing wrong with this if that is what you truly want to do with your life but if you want more then it is up to you to do something about it.
When you develop your own self-respect first you open your mind to travelling your own path not somebody else’s.
When you understand that the primary purpose of our brains is to keep us alive and taking risks is something that we subconsciously avoid at all costs you can understand why our immediate family and friends behave the way they do, they don`t mean it, they just cannot help it.
Once you have a very high value of yourself you will become empowered, you will start to take more risks and the more risks you take (within reason) you will start to make your own path in this world.
With Empowerment also comes clarity, you need to be clear on the path you want to take for yourself and this part is very important, it is the respect that you show others that helps to remove some of their fear and all of a sudden they will want to help you along your path and not surprisingly will want to come along with you for the ride.
Opportunities do not get you to be successful, Respect for yourself first and then the Respect for people that provide your opportunities will put you squarely on the right path to success.
Everyone has opportunities big and small, when we bury our head in self-pity we don`t see a clear path all we see is our name in little tiny writing at the bottom of a page instead of looking up and seeing our name in big massive writing in across the sky.
Everyone struggles with the value they assign themselves from time to time, but if you look up more than you look down your path will become a lot clearer and trust me it is a lot cooler to see your name written huge right across the sky than in tiny writing at the bottom of a page.
Stewart Whicker
Head Coach/Program Director
Expert Racquet Academy