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!

Being fully present requires focus and concentration. In a world of millions of distractions, we are continually provided with a stream of stimuli that is poised to distract us from whatever we are setting our minds to achieve.

But society (especially Madison Ave. advertising agencies) are perpetually working our lives with FOMO. (Fear of missing out) So when we are bombarded with opportunities for the distraction, a large part of why that distraction is so effective is because we are risking absence from the benefits of that distraction by staying focused on what we are doing at that moment.

Part of that personal discipline required to tune out the distractions and stay focused stems from an intense desire to fully participate in whatever it is that we are doing. Part of it stems from the desire we have to benefit from the outcome of what we are doing. And I believe part of a determined quest to be really present should stem from an internal desire to be the kind of person that wants to immerse oneself in the conversation, task at hand or other commitment with all that we have so that the other party feels your presence, the task gets your best attention and your outcome is as opportune as it may be.

Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry, simply known as de Saint-Exupéry, was a French writer, poet, aristocrat, journalist and pioneering aviator. He became a laureate of several of France’s highest literary awards and also won the United States National Book Award. His passion for being a pilot before and during WWII was his focus, but he is best known for the children’s fable for adults, The Little Prince. The poetic and mystical tale of a pilot stranded in the desert and his conversation with a young prince from another planet, it was written and illustrated by Saint-Exupéry and published in both French and English in the United States in 1943, and later in more than 200 other languages. It is considered one of the greatest books in the 20th century and is one of the bestselling books of all time.