How to Gain Respect and Admiration
Endlessly trying to figure out how to gain respect and admiration is not the path I’d recommend to any man. You must learn to go without the need of validation from others. You can’t be dependent on it for your happiness.
However, knowing how to gain respect and admiration is still an essential part of life as a man. Because like it or not, as humans, like most mammals, we’re social creatures. And as men specifically, we need to be respected. It’s not even that we need to be liked. If we’re liked cool, if we’re not then oh well. But we all need our respect.
Respect is everything. Think about how important it was to be respected as man evolved and came into the civilized world. Without respect from other men, your chances of survival in your tribe would have dramatically decreased. A lack of respect means less men will want to hunt with you or come to your aid if an enemy attacks. It also means you have less to no options for reproducing.
Now that we’re “civilized”, we can have higher quality of lives. But our natural programming is still the same. The importance of knowing how to gain respect, let alone admiration, is still critical or our success in this world.
Respect vs Needing Validation
Should you seek out respect in an active way? No, that’s how you end up becoming addicted to the dopamine hit of likes on social media, matches on online dating apps, and in general, obsessive amounts of validation from others.
But you should know how to gain respect and admiration just by the way you conduct yourself.
Because a man whose not respected is a man whose going to have no one to do business with, no relationship prospects, no friends, and is cut off from the world. You don’t need to become a social butterfly, it’s fine if you prefer time to yourself. A man should be comfortable alone.
Don’t Burn Bridges when it’s not necessary
Never the less, cutting yourself off completely from the world socially will hurt you in the long run. Having meaningful relationships with others, having people who want to do business with you, and feeling like you’re contributing to society, all all normal, healthy parts of a man’s life.
It’s healthy and normal that a man wants respect and even admiration. Admiration is just the extreme end of being respected.
This ensures that your position in society and others is stable.
Imagine a man with no respect. People treat him terribly. No one will buy from his business. Women don’t want to date him. His friends are nonexistent or betray him at the first opportunity. No one has his back.
As men, we all instinctually understand the importance of respect. In most of our evolution, a lack of respect would result in death or infidelity, and often still does today. That’s why we care so much about it. When we know how to gain respect by conducting our lives properly, we greatly increase our chances for survival and thrival.
Conduct yourself in a way that brings respect
It’s not your job to hate others, it’s also not your job to need them. As a man with some kind of purpose or mission in life, it’s your job to help lead.
That’s the important point here. You don’t need to actively seek out respect, because then you’ll end up just as a validation seeking machine. On the other hand, having respect is necessary if you want a good position in life. The way humans work and interact with others all comes down to respect.
The best method to learn how to gain respect and admiration from others – and therefore put yourself in a favorable position – is to carry yourself in a way that brings it bout.
- Speak with Conviction – commit to your words
- Always remain unbothered
- Value your Time
- Be inspiring – Do something with your life
- Master your craft
1. Speak with Conviction – commit to your words
Never say weak things. People who complain, say “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” or “I can’t believe he / she said that” are indecisive or complainers. Which is 90% of people.
By just not saying weak things, you will naturally say less. And when you do talk, what you say will have more power.
Be decisive, confident, and smooth in your speech. Feel no need to rush or impress anyone. Believe in what you say, and it’s generally better to say less than necessary. There are appropriate situations where saying more makes sense, but this must be at the right time.
However, more importantly than saying less and having strong speech, is actually being a man of your word. This is what it means to have integrity. To have what you say and what you do be one and the same. When you become authentic, you’ll naturally speak with more conviction. A man who has integrity and commits to his words is a man whose respected and admired by many.
2. Always remain unbothered
Never let anyone throw you off your center. Be impenetrable. Maintain emotional discipline and only use your emotions when it suits you. If you can do this, whether people love you or hate you, they will respect you. It takes a very disciplined man to be a master of his emotions and remained unbothered.
Remaining unbothered is often shamed today as “emotionally unavailable“. But despite the current rhetoric, an emotionally available man is just a man who lets his emotions control him. And while people may like that you’re emotionally a mess, they won’t respect you. As a woman they still might, but not as a man.
If you can master your emotions, people will trust you to lead them and will look to you for guidance. It’s human nature. If you want to know how to gain respect and admiration, you must become the master of your emotional states. Once you can do this you’ll always be able to remain unbothered. Nobody is perfect at this, myself included. However, even just having a high threshold before becoming bothered will do a lot for the respect that you get.
3. Value your time
When you value your time, you become the man you want to be.
By being the best version of yourself, you respect yourself, and therefore others respect you. It’s as simple as valuing your time.
Be productive with the time God or the universe has given you. Be focused on elevating yourself in your career / purpose. Even in your leisure time, spend it alone or with those who you actually enjoy spending time with. When you respect how you spend your time, you respect your life.
Because your life is simply a bunch of small moments happening back to back. When you value these moments, you value your time, you value your life, and you respect yourself, which commands the respect of others without having to think about it.
4. Be inspiring – Do something with your life
This ties into valuing your time, but it’s worth it to make it a point all by itself. You may value your time, which alone will mean your time is limited and people will respect you.
However, to gain a greater, deeper level of respect… be inspiring. You inspire others when you’re driven by a purpose that will positively impact others.
Whatever that is – whether it’s a business, a non-profit, or a comeback story, by having something you dedicate your life to, you become inspiring to others. Think to all of the people you truly respect. They all were driven towards becoming or doing something great.
Whether it was for them, for their family, for their community, for their culture, for the environment, being driven towards something causes you to be inspiring to others. And when you inspire others, you’re massively respected
5. Master your craft
Knowing how to gain respect comes down to understanding what people value. People value an expert. Because they can learn from that expert. He beings knowledge and understanding to the table. When you master your craft, you’ll gain the respect and admiration from those around you.
Those who seek to do what you do or learn what you know will look up to you. And once have enough mastery in your own craft, you’ll gain respect of others not even interested in what you do. Because mastery of a a craft takes a certain level of continued focus that most don’t have, and therefore all respect.
For example, if you play basketball then you have a great respect for Michael Jordan. But even if you don’t pla basketball, even if you don’t like it, you still will respect Michael Jordan for his abilities in his craft. Even if an NBA team came to your town and you knew none of the players, you’d still respect the work they put in to get to that position.
You can see an entrepreneur run a business that you have tons of interest in or no interest in. You could like the man or not like him. But you’re going to respect him because he’s mastered his craft.
Mastering your craft isn’t just for the status that brings respect + admiration with it.
It changes the wya you carry yourself. If you master a skill, even if others don’t know about it, you’re going to carry yourself in a way that a man that respects himself would. And when you respect yourself, others will follow suit and respect you.
Respect is Necessary
Again, you don’t need to actively seek it out. At the same time, you realize its importance in survival and thrival.
The key then is to act in ways that will naturally bring it out in others. And you’ll see that the 5 principles here really come down to respecting yourself. When you speak with conviction, you respect your words. Remaining unbothered and valuing your time are both manifestations of respecting your life energy and the use of it.
Doing something with your life should be a natural step for any man who respects himself. And mastering your craft is a result of respecting yourself enough to focus your efforts in 1 direction.
When you learn how to gain respect and admiration from others, what you’re really learning is how to respect yourself. Once you respect your own life, others will naturally follow your lead.
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