Foreword

Have you ever thought, what essentially you call as self respect?

When someone says against us, something within us gets hurt, or gets upset, and tries to defend itself or even fight back. We don’t know what it is, but name it as “Self Respect”. And if it is uncontrollably behaving, we call it “Ego”. Isn’t it? Have you ever sit back and analyzed this aspect of you? The dictionary defines it as a “pride or confidence  about self, and that one is behaving with honor and dignity”. Most of us, don’t even realize what the dictionary defines it. How is it relevant in a technology Industry? Will tell you in few minutes. Take the pain to read through!

Let us define what is “Self”, as much we understand from a pragmatic point of view. To the best of our ability, we can define, ourselves as our “Body” and “Mind”. Isn’t it? Both are alive and active, if I am not wrong!  Each of them are so dependent on the other, that they cannot exist without the other’s support. Each of them, to function to their fullest ability, they have certain needs. Let us look at the needs of each of them!

Human Body Needs :

Right Food: Oh yes, you know it! To perform without much glitch, any Engine requires right fuel and so does your body. The mechanism has so many filters to remove the unwanted substances that you ingest. The Liver, The Kidneys, The Lungs and so on, which continuously work on your food, water and air, constantly to remove the toxic substances. But isn’t it your duty to reduce the amount of toxic substance ingestion, to make the Body function better and last long?

Right Activity: We are in Knowledge Industry. Though the name is glamorous, it is doing huge amount of messing up to your physical system. Your body is not made to just sit and look at computer. But it is made to be active, moving, with 206 bones and 360 joints. If you are just made to sit and walk, I guess you just need about 20 joints and 50 bones. Now are you activating all of your joints, bones, ,muscles and the like, each day, at your work or otherwise? Certainly most of us don’t do. And eventually inertia of body parts takes over which creates lot of complications of health. Are you doing the right activity, after your work?

Right Rest: In the race of becoming millionaire, or to fulfill all your responsibilities, or just to safeguard your job, you are constantly depriving yourself of sleep, restfulness. In such cases, we end up eventually with lot of health issues.

So, with above can we take it as a thumb rule, that “you do not respect your body and its functions” ?

Human Mind Needs:

Oh yes, Mind also needs certain “Food for thought” . You must clearly know that Brain has Six abilities besides motor functions. Memory, Recall, Logical Deduction, Projection (Replay, Forward), Thought, Emotion.

1. Memory is just a heap of stuff that you gathered from all the senses from the day you were born. The events, people, places, things, environments, surprises, education. All this gets into your memory, through the senses, and it is just lying there.
2. Recall is the ability to pull things from the memory whenever you need, or whenever the situation arises. This requires you to be more and more attentive towards things that you come across.
3. Logical Deduction is the ability to process what is in your memory in a pragmatic way and deduce something out of it.
4. Projection (Happened and Fiction), is an ability to exactly replay what has happened in the past, or Something that has not happened but fictitious
5. Thought is that mental scene, with a permutation and combination of what is in the memory. Now if there are too many permutations that happen, without your control, you are moving towards delirium
6. Emotion, it is that juicy substance of the thought, that can make whole of your body and mind resonate with it, to make a positive, or a negative impact to you and others.

Now the question is. Are you consciously working on all the above 6 to make your brain work wonderfully well for you. You may not become an Einstein. But you can become “Best of yourself” . Are you even bothered to look at them? You need right memory to make right logical deductions and right projections, right thoughts and right amount of emotions. Are you feeding your brain right memory?

So, with this, can we question ourselves for the Brain part, “Am I respecting my brain and its functions”?

Now let us look at the “Self Respect”. Both the “Self” components are explained above. Do you respect them? Respecting your own opinions and stances, without fundamentally taking care of your “Self components” is more than ridiculous. To me Self Respect appears to be a “hypothetical protective layer, of the opinions and beliefs that we have formed after all the torturous things that we did to Self, both body and mind” . Do you agree? And now that deserves respect, is it?

Being in the Knowledge Industry, we are ignoring the fundamental needs of body and mind, which, when nurtured, can show you the fullest potential of life. Instead we are stuffing them with nasty things and hence are we, as individuals performing at the lowest level of our own capabilities.

We are to become leaders. A leader means, a people’s person, a leader means, the one who can set an example in the right direction. A business leader is the one who takes care of people and business in parallel. Because if you just take care of people, there is no business, and vice versa.  If you have established properly yourself in your body and mind, then can you deal with others who are your followers, or who gets you business. Otherwise, it is more than dangerous, isn’t it? Are you properly established? If not, start today.  If you respect your “Self”, I will respect “You”, and so do others.