I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man’s self-respect is a sin.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There were so many beautiful lessons to be learned in The Little Prince. If you have not read this landmark book, I highly encourage you to purchase the book and give it a read. It was lightyears ahead of its time.

So much has been written about self-respect and what it takes to maintain it over the course of a lifetime. One of these core prerequisites is the ability to enable yourself to listen to other people’s opinions of you without allowing those opinions to demean your own personal feelings about yourself. 

This certainly does not mean that you cannot learn from other’s perspectives. To the contrary, they are quite valuable. But it also must be tempered by your own filters of personal self-worth in order that you might garner the best of what they are sharing without enabling them to minimize you by viewing yourself through their estimation of who they believe you are.

Many people are incredibly fragile deep within. It does not matter what position of success they have achieved in life. If anything, the events of the last week show us that even the person who is capable of becoming the most powerful person in the world can have a distortion deep within that prevents an ability to process reality predicated upon their own mental perception of self-worth.

Separate and apart from protecting our own self-respect is the opportunity to help another in their personal evaluation of self worth. Kind things are meant to be shared. Less kind things must be chosen carefully, under the proper constructive circumstances, in order that the option to share them carries value to the receiving party, rather than tearing them down or hurting them inadvertently.

Happy Thursday!

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