Self-Respect by Health and Wellness

Compelling tactics for achieving and maintaining healthy changes

Conversion from one set of beliefs to another can be a big challenge. It has happened to me, and as a result, I learned some practical strategies to make personal changes more attainable.

I used to be a student of sociology. As such, I studied social behavior, patterns of social interaction, and institutions. In sociology, I used various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis.

Now, I have converted and become a student of the psychology of personal development. With this change, I focus on self-respect and personal transformation; my attention is on obstacles to developing new behaviors and justifications that ensure the maintenance of new behavioral patterns.

Self-Respect to Sustain Change

If you are struggling to find a path to change, you are also interested in sustaining that change in the long term. These strategies have a common core. They all rest on the central value of self-respect as a guiding principle.

If you were to gauge your self-worth preparatory to changing your habits, relationships, or career, you might ask yourself: How much do you like and respect yourself? Are you worthy of respect and consideration from others? When you think about yourself, are your thoughts positive, or do you edge over to the more critical ones?

Self-Respect and Confidence

This self-evaluation is essential because of its impact on your confidence in undertaking a change; it will be crucial to your success. If your self-respect is high, you will marshal the resources needed for change.

A healthy level of self-confidence can help you become more successful in all phases of your life. Research has found, for example, that more confident people tend to achieve more academically.

In my experience, the building block for future changes was improving health and wellness. In particular, the area where I felt most confident was weight loss.

Motivation and Control

When something is within your control, you are more motivated to take steps to shape and manage it. I felt this way about weight loss. After several years of effort, I lost 30% of my body weight, down close to my high school weight.

The first step was to be clear about my motivation. I saw weight loss as the best path to higher self-respect. And self-respect, for me, was a high value from an early childhood of disrespect and repression.

Suppose you know yourself well and at a deep level. If that is the case with you, I know you can better align your changes to leveraged strengths and not weaknesses.

And if self-respect is essential to you, but you want to grow its influence, here is a reference to help you do that.

Find Your Discipline

The no. 1 strategy that has worked for me in enhancing self-respect is applied self-discipline. For example, when applied to weight control, you must have a specific goal, record your progress, and have an accountability partner.

Discipline requires practice. It is a training or experience that modifies, strengthens, corrects, or perfects some activity. In the case of wellness, as in diet, exercise, and weight loss, you must change your behavior.

It would help if you strengthened your resolve, corrected dysfunctional habits, and motivated yourself to sustain change over time. This latter point is critical and often ignored: studies show that 80 to 90 percent of weight losers regain lost weight within a year.

What is missing is a set of rules to guide recovery from the inevitable relapse. In my case, I reduce calories and increase exercise until I regain the ideal weight.

These strategies work: they bring about a return to normalcy and preserve self-respect.

In summary, habits and behavior change happen with solid motivation and self-discipline. A marriage of these two factors assures that you will enhance self-respect.

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