Reflections on self respect

I remember looking at my wife and realising she was worried about me.

That was about 25 years ago. I’d become seriously burnt out. She wasn’t sure what to do, and neither was I.

What made it particularly difficult was that I hadn’t been behaving recklessly. Quite the opposite, really. I was trying to do the right thing. I was working hard to build a career, provide for my family and be someone they could rely on.

Somewhere along the way, though, I’d left myself off the list of what I was looking after.

I found myself adapting to environments that didn’t quite suit me, pushing through things that were taking too much out of me, and accepting, or perhaps assuming, that this was simply what responsible adults did.

Eventually, I ran out of steam.

Looking back now, one of the lessons seems obvious. I needed to learn how to care for myself as well as everything else. At the time, though, it didn’t feel obvious at all.

For many of us, looking after ourselves can feel strangely selfish. There is always somebody who needs something: a deadline approaching, a client waiting, a staff member with a challenge or a family member to support.

So we keep going. Sometimes that is resilience, but sometimes it’s just a slow depletion that we haven’t quite recognised yet. The line between the two can be surprisingly fine.

I saw another version of this about a decade ago.

I woke one morning with a scratchy throat, but I had commitments that day, so I carried on. By the end of the day, my voice was very sore, but a small part of me was still proud of the fact that I’d soldiered on.

The following morning, speaking was incredibly difficult.

What followed became years of specialist appointments and eventually a diagnosis of spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition I still manage today.

One of the things that experience taught me was how differently we can treat ourselves from the way we would treat someone else. If a friend had woken up struggling to speak that morning, I doubt I would have said, “Come on. Toughen up. You’ve got commitments.”

I would have told them to look after themselves.

Yet somehow I didn’t think to offer that same kindness to myself.

I think about that quite a bit, because I think a lot of people underestimate the consequences of pushing too far and too hard. Burnout isn’t necessarily something we fix with a day off. Recovery can be complex and take much longer than we expect, particularly when we’ve been depleted for a long time.

Most of us readily understand that other people get tired, overwhelmed, disappointed, uncertain or stretched. But when it happens to us, we might wonder what’s wrong with us and simply push on through.

I saw something like this with a client recently.

He’d become rather irritable at home and at work and was pretty disappointed in himself. It would have been easy to start with the behaviour and try to make some changes. How do we make you less irritable? How do we get you to be more patient?

But once we looked underneath it, the irritability actually made a lot of sense.

His business had grown enormously, and he was tired from the journey. At the same time, the business had become less dependent on him, which was part of the plan, but it had also left him questioning his purpose.

He’d achieved a lot of what he once wanted and didn’t feel as happy as he thought success would make him. That can be a really confusing place to find ourselves.

So the more useful questions were these: What does he actually need at this stage of his life? What does he want his role in the business to look like now? Where might he find a renewed sense of connection and purpose, within the business but also outside it? And what might a little more peace look like after years of pushing?

None of these questions excuse poor behaviour, but they give us somewhere better to begin.

And that, to me, is an important part of self-respect. It isn’t about letting ourselves off the hook. It is about meeting ourselves where we actually are, rather than where we think we should be, and becoming curious before becoming critical.

One client told me recently that the work we’d done together had saved her marriage.

We’d barely spoken about her personal relationship. What we had worked on was her business.

She was overworking, carrying too much responsibility, feeling frustrated and exhausted. We changed some of the ways she worked, improved the fit with clients and staff, introduced some additional support, and helped her create a lighter relationship with the business.

As the pressure reduced, something else returned: her patience, her presence and her softness.

Not long later, her husband went through some difficulties of his own, and she had enough space to support him in the way she wanted to.

She didn’t become less ambitious, and her business didn’t suffer. She simply stopped building a successful business by continually depleting herself.

And I love that distinction, because self-respect can sometimes sound like something inward-looking, as though taking care of ourselves means sacrificing success in the world.

And on one hand it is inward-looking. But on the other hand, the way we treat ourselves eventually finds its way into our relationships, our leadership, our decisions and the environment we create around us. It has a ripple effect.

When we are permanently stretched, the people we love often get our leftovers. When we have a little more space, we get to enjoy connecting more deeply with the people we care about.

Perhaps that is why I no longer think of self-respect as something we do once everything else has been taken care of.

The reality is that everything else will never be completely taken care of. There will always be another task, another opportunity, another person who needs help.

Sometimes we do need to keep going. But sometimes the opportunity is to notice that we aren’t giving ourselves the attention and respect that we deserve.

These days I try to remember something simple.

The people I care about matter.

My work matters.

My responsibilities matter.

And I matter too.