21 Surprising Ways You Lose Respect At Work

Want more respect at the office?

Respect yourself first.

People who don’t respect themselves are negative and annoying. 

Negative and annoying people don’t get respect at work. Period.

Your co-workers will lose respect for you if you have low self-respect.

In simple terms, your self-respect is how much you respect yourself. It’s a measure of the level of confidence you have in your own worth and abilities.

Unfortunately, a lot of things can damage your self-respect.

Some of these things are external. For example, an unfair situation at work, a negative comment from a supervisor, or just a bad break in general can reduce your self-esteem. Other things are internal. Such as complaining and always apologizing for yourself. 

You can’t control the external things but you can control the internal things. You can also control your response to the external things.

This is good news because it means you are in control of your self-respect. The only person who can lower your self-respect is you.

If you want to maintain and even gain respect at work, you must protect your self-respect by refusing to do things that lower it. Here are 21 things that will lower your self-respect…

How People Lose Respect At Work

 1. Always being nice.

There’s a time to be nice and there’s a time to be not-so-nice. Don’t be afraid to ruffle people’s feathers at work. Being disagreeable can literally add to your paycheck. 

Studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology show a strong negative relationship between agreeableness and earning. In other words, the more agreeable someone is, the less money they will make. Rock the boat, make more money.

2. Being eternally optimistic only. 

In The Survivor’s Club, author Ben Sherwood interviewed hundreds of people that had survived a wide variety of catastrophic events and found that in prisoner-of-war camps, the people most likely to collapse and die were the eternal optimists who believed rescue was imminent and failed to plan for the possibility of long-term imprisonment.

Being positive is important but you shouldn’t be so blindly positive that you fail to take action. This is something that people with low self-respect do.

They rely on blind positivity over grit and hard work. And they do this because they don’t believe in their ability to get the job done themselves.

3. Complaining constantly. 

It might feel good to gossip about the boss or your coworkers at the water cooler but it comes at a price.

A study published in Developmental Psychology found that teenagers who vented to each other about their problems for long periods of time were more likely to develop depression, anxiety, and low self-respect.

4. Sweating the small stuff. 

People with low self-esteem get upset by everything. They get outraged by something they overheard a colleague say or they get offended by what their boss asked them to do. These kinds of people are miserable to be around.

People with high self-respect, on the other hand, don’t let the small stuff get to them. Guess what—it’s all small stuff.

5. Letting people label you.

Don’t accept negative labels. You might think that you’re being the bigger person by turning the other cheek to a passive-aggressive nickname or comment, but you’re not.

You’re being foolish and you’re letting that label stick. The longer you let a negative label stick, the more you will start to identify with it and the more it will start to ruin your self-respect.

6. Obsessing over your image. 

People with low self-respect obsess over protecting their image. But people with high self-esteem focus on improving their reputation.

7. Chasing praise. 

The most unfortunate of all people are those who need others to praise them in order to feel good about themselves. These people are unfortunate because they’ve given away all of their power.

The only way they can feel good is if someone else chooses to praise them. What a horrible position to be in.

8. Rejecting praise. 

Praise is not a bad thing and you should readily accept it. People who don’t know how to handle praise often have very low self-respect. They pretend to be tough and not need praise but really they’re too insecure and closed off to openly accept it.

9. Never praising anyone else.

People with high self-respect love to praise other people. They are so confident in who they are that they infuse their confidence into others.

10. Apologizing for everything. 

Constantly apologizing for who you are makes other people respect you less. It will also make you respect yourself less. Refusing to apologize for yourself, on the other hand, can actually increase your self-respect.

A study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology showed that refusing to apologize provides several psychological benefits, including empowerment, confidence, and greater feelings of integrity and self-respect.

11. Micromanaging other people. 

People who obsess over every little detail often have very little control over their own self-worth. They feel out of control in one area of their life so they compensate by over-controlling other, less important areas. In general, having control is a good thing. Just make sure you’re controlling the right things.

12. Thinking everyone is out to get you.

People with low self-respect are paranoid. They think everyone is trying to hurt them or keep them from their goals. They constantly feel attacked on all sides. But in reality, no one is even thinking about them.

The truth is other people are so busy thinking about themselves that they hardly ever think about you, no matter who you are. This is a good thing. It means you can focus on yourself and being the best you can be instead of obsessing over how others see you.

13. Always feeling left out. 

You know those people who freak out when they’re not the first to know something? Yeah, they have very low self-respect. They make up for their low levels of respect by trying to control everything, including events and information.

14. Feeling like an impostor.

Impostor syndrome is characterized by the inability to internalize your accomplishments. It’s that voice in your head that creeps up every now and then telling you that you’re a phony and it’s only a matter of time until people find out. Everyone has this voice. The difference is that people with low levels of self-respect give in to it.

15. Bullying other people. 

Bullying happens more than you might think. Studies reported in AskMen show that 49% of U.S. employees have witnessed or been the target of bullying at work. The good news is other studies published in Aggressive Behavior show that people with high levels of self-respect are less likely to be involved in bullying.

16. Being condescending.

People with low self-respect are condescending and act holier than thou because it protects their fragile ego. These know-it-alls have to win and be right because they just can’t handle being wrong.

17. Lashing out emotionally.

Studies published in Arts and Designs Studies show that emotional intelligence and self-respect are positively and significantly correlated.

Losing control of your emotions, or letting your emotions control you, is a sign you don’t respect yourself. People with high self-respect are passionate, but they let reason and rationality hold the reigns of their passion.

18. Completely avoiding stress. 

Stress is a key ingredient to growth. It has been shown to improve memory, enhance creativity, makes you more alert, and boost your immune system. A study out of the University of California, Berkeley shows that stress leads to cell growth in the brain’s learning centers, which is associated with high levels of self-respect and self-efficacy.

19. Taking failure personally.

An experiment in the Netherlands tested 313 children for self-respect and then had them play a fixed computer game that forced them to win or lose. Then, the computers gave the children either praise for their efforts or praise for themselves.

Compared to all of the other groups, children who lost the game experienced significantly higher levels of shame if they took failure personally instead of seeing it as a result they had the power to learn from and improve on. 

20. Laughing at the boss’s jokes.

Kissing up to other people is a great way to ruin your self-respect. Every time you pretend to like something that you don’t really like, you give part of yourself away. On a long enough timeline, you’ll lose your sense of self.

If it’s not funny, don’t laugh. People with high self-respect don’t laugh to get ahead or pretend something is great when it’s not.

21. Procrastinating and being indecisive. 

Studies reported in Personality and Individual Differences show that low self-respect is a significant predictor of decisional, behavioral, and overall dysfunctional procrastination.

People with low self-respect fail to accomplish critical tasks because they are too afraid to make a bad decision. But people with high self-respect trust their abilities to solve problems and do not hesitate to make decisions, even after failures and difficulties.

So, make a decision. Any decision. If you choose wisely — great! Learn from it and move forward confidently. And if you choose wrongly — great! Learn from it and move forward confidently.

What about you? What is one technique that you use to boost your self-esteem and gain respect in your workplace? 

Tell me in a comment below. 

I also write for Fast Company and Entrepreneur Magazine:

• 7 Toxic People To Avoid When Starting A Business
• 10 People Who Will Destroy Your Business
• The 10 Skills You Need To Grow Your Business

Get 2 FREE chapters of my book, Black Hole Focus: How Intelligent People Create A Powerful Purpose For Their Lives (Click Here To Download).