If you want to be respected, liked, and taken seriously, your actions matter more than anything. You see, I spent years working with the top business owners and starting my own multi-million dollar business. So, I have seen firsthand the differences between the people who get respect versus those who get overlooked.
So, these are the five ways to make anyone respect you. First up is the big question. Do you want to be respected or do you want to be liked?
I am a natural people pleaser and I think this shocks people who meet me today because I don't have traditional peopleleasing qualities any longer and that's because I have made active choices for the last decade to not choose to be liked more than I want to be respected. You see, when you don't know which one of the two you're going after, you can get confused because when you're meeting people and you want to please people, you can end up pleasing the wrong people. And I can honestly say that until my early 20s, I always prioritized people liking me and what people thought about me more than choosing the right people to respect me.
And what happens when you prioritize people liking you is you compromise. You spend time around people who do things that you actually disagree with. But because you want to be liked, not respected, you don't say anything.
You don't change the environment. Heaven forbid you don't correct them. You just keep going on agreeing to things that actually make you feel like you're compromising in order to be respected.
The first person who has to respect you is you. So when you think about who you spend your time with today, are you making compromises? Are you feeling like you have to make people happy or like they have to like you over the things that you know you need to do in order to respect yourself?
When I first went to college, I wasn't really the partying type. However, the friends that I was hanging out with did like to party and they like to drink more than I like to drink. But I didn't know how to stop spending time with them.
So, I just fell into this role where I would be there. I would always be the sober one, but I was wasting all of my time trying to get them to like me or think that I was cool because I was still in the environment. It took me longer than it should have to extract myself from that environment.
And not that there's any judgment that I have for people trying to figure their lives out while in college, but I know that for me, I was making decisions at that time based off of what somebody else thought and what somebody else wanted me to do instead of prioritizing the decisions that I knew would allow me to respect me. Remember, without respect, your voice just gets drowned out and your authority will be entirely ignored. No matter how friendly or charming you actually are, you have to establish clear boundaries, show competence, communicate with authority to start to earn respect.
Number two is next. Consistency over long periods of time creates confidence. It is easy to just go into the gym for a couple of days and you get all excited about it and you buy your cute workout clothes and you start to think, man, I'm going to finally take control of my health and wellness journey.
But if you fast forward two weeks and you're no longer in the gym, your confidence and your ability to stick to your word goes down. That is the exact same thing that happens with the people in your life when you tell them that you are going to show up for them and you are going to make it to dinner and you back out last minute because you don't feel like it. You don't want to.
You don't feel good. You are not going to build confidence that you are the type of person that does what they say that they're going to do. So every decision that you make, whether it's consistent or inconsistent, is giving somebody an understanding of how much confidence they can have in you.
Now extrapolate this to the work that you do. Whether you're a team member, you own a business, when you say that you're going to get something done, do you do it by that time? When you say that you're going to follow up, do you actually follow up?
You see, people learn by how you follow up, by how you show up over long periods of time if they can or can't count on you. I know instantly who I can and can't count on. And the people who I count on are the people who always follow up with me.
And if they follow up with me consistently for 6 months, if they happen to miss something, I'm not that worried about it because I know by their actions that they are a consistent person. But if they sometimes follow up, sometimes don't follow up, sometimes do what they say they're going to do, sometimes they don't say what they're going to do, I'm just going to bypass them. And when you bypass somebody in an organization, all of a sudden you start to ask yourself, well, why do I need this person if I'm going to end up having to do their job because they aren't consistent?
And yet when you talk to the person, all they want is more opportunity. They want to be trusted with more. They want to handle more.
They want to make more money. They want to do big things, but they can't even handle what's in front of them. This is actually why respect doesn't just happen overnight.
What is so cool about being consistent? It is in your control. If you say that you're going to do something, and what's also cool is you don't have to commit to something if you have no intention to do it.
That's fine, too. Next is number three. You have to set clear boundaries.
One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn is not just setting boundaries, but is actually getting other people to respect those boundaries. There's two steps to boundaries. The first is creating them.
The second is enforcing them. When it comes to setting boundaries, the first thing that you have to ask yourself is, what are you not willing to tolerate in your environment? Pull out a piece of paper, maybe the notes app on your phone, and list the types of behaviors that you will not tolerate from people who work with you, who spend time with you, who are friends with you.
What are the things that are absolute nos for you? From that list, you can then start to create the list of characteristics that you would expect of the greatest people who would come into your life. So you have a list of hard nos, but then you also have a list of this is what I would expect of the best people, people that might not even know who I am to represent and bring into my life.
Once you have that list, you then have to look at how do I spend my time and do I spend my time that's in alignment with this list? Because if you don't have great people in your life, it might be because you aren't living in the same value set as the people that you want to bring in your life. So of course, they're never going to want to spend time with you.
When I first started wanting to spend time with Elena Cardone, I realized that if she hung out with me for a day, I would have to tell her and talk to her about things that I was interested in and things that I was doing. At the time, I wasn't working out consistently. I didn't hold myself accountable to goals that I was setting.
I was wishy-washy about what I did or didn't want for my future. I wasn't able to clearly communicate the personal goals that I had for myself. And so I spent six months becoming the type of person that Elena would want to be friends with so that when I did have the opportunity to meet her, to spend time around her, we had similar shared interests.
When she wanted to go to the gym on the very first trip that we took together, I wasn't embarrassed by how out of shape I was because I had already started to go to the gym. So you have your list of the things that you want. And when it comes to the list of things that you don't want, here's the challenge.
When it comes to the things that you don't want and the boundaries that you are setting where you would kick somebody out of your life for violating those boundaries, it can be incredibly difficult to draw a hard line. I can't tell you how many people have to my face made disrespectful comments, have laughed at me, have lessened my role, have not taken me seriously. And in those moments, it's challenging to actually say, "You no longer get a spot here.
" Because they're already there for a reason. They're there because they're family. They're there because you've known them for a while.
Because you hired them, you thought that they were going to help you and they were responsible for something. And I have always found that if somebody is violating a boundary that I have, and I get rid of them in my life, my life has never gotten worse. It actually gets better.
But if you think that things are going to get worse, be challenging, everything's just going to melt down. When you get rid of people that aren't respecting you, then you're not going to get rid of them. But I can promise you, just trust me on this.
get rid of them and see what happens. You are going to be amazed because you will not go backwards. You will actually springboard forward because you don't have somebody constantly invalidating you.
Now, we're on to number four. One of my favorites. Master your craft.
The easiest way to get respect is to be great at something. If you aren't great at anything, it's hard to think about, but why should somebody respect you? You want respect.
Well, what have you done that would make somebody respect you? Is it the great person that you are? Is it that you're nice to everyone, friendly to people, you're a good person?
Well, what does that actually mean? If you are a mom and you want to be respected, the way that you get respect is by saying, "Hey, these are my kids and this is everything that I do in order to make sure that I am setting them up for success, that I'm being a good example to them and that I'm able to help them contribute positively to society. " If you want to be a great team member, you would be showing the fact that your team has improved because you are there.
The results show if you are somebody who actually deserves respect. The environment around you should improve because you are there. So when you look at your environment, you should ask yourself this question.
Is my environment better because I am there. If it's not better, if it stays the same, if it's worse because you get on the scene, then nobody should respect you because you don't do anything to make things better. On the contrary to that, if you do show up to an environment and you choose to make it better, you can then point to, hey, all of these things that are positive happened because I was there and that is why people respect you.
Now, I work with team members and business owners each and every day. And the fastest thing that I drive them to is a specific stat. What is the thing that we can measure that you did that you are great at?
I think about the social media team that I work with. They have ridiculous stats. Now, why do they have stats?
Because they've gotten good at one thing. How do we take video and create compelling messages for people to understand who we are, what we do, and what we're all about? See, those stats that they now have are actually in the physical universe.
It's not just that they happen to be good at social media. There are social media managers who cannot produce a single great piece of content that people actually want to watch. The difference between somebody who's average and somebody who's great is the stats.
But the fastest way to get confused is to think that you have to be good at social media at the exact same time that you have to be good at PR at the exact same time that you have to be good at some other form of marketing. Get stats in one area. People will then respect you for those stats that you have because you can say, "Hey, I did this.
I did this. I did this. I did this in order to make this happen.
" That creates confidence which ultimately leads people to respect you. to contrast my current social team compared to previous team members that I've worked with. I will never forget when one of my team members came in my office and she said, "The two of us are so overwhelmed.
We're so overworked. There's no way that we can create more content. It's performing as best as it can and it's just going to take time for it to perform.
" Well, fast forward. It was just her that wasn't performing because she didn't actually study the craft. She never decided that I'm going to be great to fully understand what is working on social right now, not what's working five years ago, not what worked two years ago, but what is actually working right now to drive engagement to create spectacular content.
And so we've changed up our team. And it's fascinating that all of a sudden this growth has happened all because our team is dedicated to picking one thing that they are great at. So how does this apply to you?
You pick one thing that you want to master and you go after that thing for the next 18 months or until you get undeniable results in that area. After that, you move on to the next thing that you want to be great at. And when you can show that you can deliver results over and over again by understanding the areas of your interest deeply, respect becomes automatic.
Lastly, number five, your actions will always speak the loudest. I still don't get the level of respect from people that I would like. The trick is to not use someone's lack of respect as a reason for why you should stop trying.
When I decided to marry my husband, I was petrified that for the rest of my life, people were just going to look at me as my husband's wife or I would be in his shadows because he is unbelievably smart, successful, and truly a business savant. And I thought, oh, for the rest of my life, people would just tell me, "Oh, you got lucky or you must not work very hard or what's it like to work in your husband's business? " even if I am working in the business 18 hours a day and driving consistent value.
But finally, I realized that people's lack of respect for me has nothing to do with the respect that I need to create for myself. I'm the only one who gets to see how I do or don't show up. You are the only one who gets to see how you do or don't show up.
So, do you respect the way that you show up? It doesn't matter that the world is going to judge you or say negative things or be critical because that's on them. But if you do what you know you are capable of, you go after your goals, it might actually be that you go through all of your life and never get the respect from others that you deserve.
And that is completely okay. Respect is ultimately about your actions and your results. So just put in the work.
Don't talk about it. Don't complain about people not respecting you. Nobody cares.
Put your head down. Prove to people over a long period of time that they should respect you because of the results that you are able to drive. If you do these things in just a short period of time, you could have all the respect that you want.
And if you like this video, subscribe to my channel and check out this next video on how to level up your respect with communication.
