You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode four.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. This is where strong people, just like you come to have honest, open discussions about anxiety, depression, and frustration, but we don't stop there. We go deeper by learning and applying mindset management tools to once and for all break free from the pain. So we can actually enjoy our lives. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you joined us.

Hi, my strong friends. Well, here we are at Episode 30, and I don't know if you remember when we did episode 20, I shared with you that on all of the 10 spot episodes, the tens, the twenties, the thirties, and so on. I was going to be sharing with you the most favorite pieces of coaching that my clients have had. So they've let me know how important this one concept was to them.

And so today I'm going to be sharing another one of those super important life-changing types of concepts that I have shared with my clients over the years. And this one is specifically on being respected. And it's a really simple concept. So I'm going to do a little bit different approach with this. So I have several coaches that helped me, and I really appreciate them because when we go out into the world and we're trying to do new things, if we don't have any kind of a feedback cycle, it's really hard to know if we're getting it right or not.

And so I have this one coach and he knows who he is. He's going to recognize himself in this, that he has challenged me on how I even present in my podcast. So as you know, I give a very structured approach to how I do things.

And a lot of people love that. That's why they're drawn into these podcasts because they feel like they don't have any structure. They're kind of swimming around not knowing what direction to go. So when there's step-by-step instructions, it makes it a lot easier. But some of the feedback that this particular coach gave me was that maybe I am providing too much structure and that sometimes it's fun just to have a conversation.

So I'm all about experimenting. You know that, and I love to sit down and have conversations with friends and just let it go and see where it goes. I mean, you guys are all my friends. You're my strong friends. You get how the world is. And part of when I was in the corporate environment is everything was really structured. We were taught how to put everything together in a certain order so that we could convey information like in bite sized pieces.

And so to get up and just like have a random conversation, it wasn't quite a luxury that we got to have, but it feels really good. So I have decided to take his advice and just give it a try, just experiment. It would be great to find out what you guys think of a non-structured approach to this podcast. Because really when we're talking about respecting ourselves, we've got to think about what are the things that we actually love. And now I love me. Some structure don't get me wrong, but I love sitting down and having those conversations where after say 10, 15 minutes, you're like, wait a minute. How did we even get over here? And then it's like, we trace our way back trying to find where it was that we started at. And then we kind of laugh at ourselves like, oh my gosh.

But getting to that final place that we were talking about was such a great journey. And a lot of times we start talking about the things we actually needed to talk about instead of showing up and thinking, we need to talk about this one thing, and then we go there. Instead, we just let that conversation flow organically of where is it that we need this to go? And usually, bite-sized there's a lot of diamonds along the way. So today, let's just have a conversation. Let's just see where this goes. And you can let me know if you liked it or not. And if you liked it, then you know, I'll keep doing it this way. If you like the structure better, we can do the structure, too. I am all about giving you what you need most. And since I like it both ways, it works for me too.

Respect Yourself First

So being respected. Here's the key message. Like if you didn't even listen to the rest of this podcast, just this one message sums up the whole thing, which is if you want to be respected by other people, you have to respect yourself first, you have to role model what it looks like to respect you anymore because you teach other people how to treat you by how you're treating yourself. 

And it's not always an easy concept. I mean, I don't know how you were raised, but I was raised to go out and give everybody else a lot respect and not think about how they're treating me back. And I kind of had this concept that if I gave them a ton of respect, that they would respect me so much for giving them so much respect that they would eventually show me respect back. Now that hasn't always worked out for me.

Sometimes it does actually, probably more times than not it has helped a lot. But there are some cases where people will just like, go yeah, respect me and do all this stuff for me. And they never think about me in return. I'm not quite sure why people think that or why they act in that type of manner. Yeah. There are some people that might have been raised to think, you go out and you get you some respect and that's it.

Like they don't ever talk about the reciprocating respect back to other people. Like that could be one of the things that's hard. Like I've seen people that go out in the world and man, do they demand respect? You're going to do this for me. You're going to do that for me. You're going to respect me because I'm a queen or I'm a king. And yet how they're showing up in the world is disrespecting everybody else. And then there's the people like me that are showing up giving tons and tons of respect to other people and not expecting it in return. Or not even allowing it in return.

The Buddy Refusing The Buddy System

So a couple of years back, I went to a conference in another state and several of my co-workers went with me and we ended up in different hotels. And I remember one of the people I was with, she was in a different hotel. And after our evening out on the town, there were two of us that were staying at one hotel and she was staying at a separate hotel that was probably about, I don't know, 10 blocks away. And the two of us that were in one hotel, we decided we'd walk her back to her hotel. And she was trying to talk us out of it.

It's like, this is the middle of the night in a state that we've never been in. And she's going to walk in the dark 10 blocks to get to her hotel. And I thought, no, it's because we respect you. And we care about you, that we want to do the buddy system and walk you to your hotel. Now, she was all about walking us to our hotel. Like she loved the buddy system that way of making sure that we were okay, but she was not going to allow us to do the same for her. So luckily we're all kind of cut from the same cloth where it's like, we have it so ingrained in us to respect people that we didn't back down. We're like, no lady, you are going to allow us to do this for you. And she fought us the whole time.

It was, it was so precious. I mean, like when I say fought, it's not like she was being mean. She was just trying to let us know that it wasn't necessary, that it wasn't necessary for us to respect and care about her, but it was. And I find myself doing the same exact thing is that there are people that might show up offering to respect me in some way, like respect my time or respect my resources or my knowledge. And I almost like wave them away. Like, oh no, you don't need to actually respect me. Like, that's okay. I'm gonna just do all of this. And you don't need to give any respect in return.

Now, how is that actually going to help us in the long run? Because if we keep showing up where we're not respecting ourselves and we're not allowing people to respect us, we're teaching them how to treat us. So for example, if this one woman had succeeded in teaching us not to walk her to her hotel, when it's dark outside and she's 10 blocks away, then the next time that she goes to walk to her hotel, she's going to be walking alone because she convinced us that that was how we were supposed to treat her not a great thing for her. I mean, later on, she's going to be wondering why is it that nobody cares about me and walks with me and helps to keep me safe? Well, because she taught us that she didn't want that.

The Salary Employee Giving Too Much Personal Time

I have another example of someone that she wasn't someone that I was supposed to be coaching. And this was back in the corporate environment. She just happened to be like in a collective group of people that I was helping. And what we were going through at the time was a company that was looking to scale back on the overhead expenses. So specifically, do we need the same number of people because they had to reduce their costs because their product needed to cost less money. So they have to look at all of their expenses and try to minimize them.

So with most businesses, the employee expense is going to be a big one. So if they can reduce that, then they can pass on the savings reduction to the product itself. What was happening was that there was this one woman within the group that had been getting assigned tasks by her boss. And she was a salaried employee, which means she gets paid a certain amount to show up and work, you know, a regular 40 hour week. And she is supposed to get all of this work done and that if she works overtime, that's fine. She doesn't get paid any more for it, but she's just expected to do the tasks.

It's kind of a downfall with having salary positions. So what was happening is she was being asked to do a lot of tasks because the company would decide to reduce one head count. So the task still needed to get done and they would get reassigned to people. So she was taking on a whole lot of extra tasks problem though, is that her bandwidth, her plate, to be able to handle all of those tasks was exceeded, right? If you have 40 hours in a workweek to complete all of your tasks and you're giving tasks that take 60 hours, you either have to figure out how to do it with less time. Or you have to say no to a bunch of it, or she chose. She would just take it home. She'd do the work at home, but she wasn't providing that feedback back to her boss.

So what it looked like from the outside was that she was able to complete all of these tasks in the regular 40 hours. What they didn't see was that she was putting in at least 20 hours a week in overtime because she's sacrificing her personal time, her time with her kids, her time with herself, her time with her relationships. And this wasn't necessarily what the boss was asking. The boss was just asking for these extra tasks to get done. It was always within this woman's control to be able to say, Nope, I have enough tasks on my plate. I can't complete more. But her mindset got in the way.

Her mindset was telling her that she wasn't good enough at her job. If she couldn't get all of these tasks done and her fear would jump in that she would be the next person let go if she spoke up saying that she couldn't complete those tasks on time. Like if she said, no, I'm not even going to do those tasks, she was worried that she would be the next one to be let go.

But when you're looking at logical stuff of the tasks have to get done, why would they let go of the person who actually knows how to do the tasks and can do them? So I went and I had just like a heart-to-heart talk with her because I really cared about her. And I was like, why are you not being honest about what this is really taking? And so that's where I knew some of the mindset stuff that was popping up. And so I could help her with that. And I told her, well, if you want them to respect you, you have to respect yourself first.

Because one of the things that she was talking about her boss was that he didn't respect her. And he didn't care about her because if he did, he wouldn't be giving her all of this stuff. But the thing was is that she wasn't respecting herself by being honest with him, about how much time it was taking. So in a sense, and although it's a hard pill to swallow, he was treating her the way that she was teaching him to. She was letting him know that it was okay to continue giving her all of this because she hadn't decided to respect herself and her own time first.

Because if she had, she would have been willing to speak up and she'd have to probably work through a lot of those fears, a lot of the mindset stuff, but she didn't have anyone that she knew that even knew about mindset stuff until I happened to observe. And I happen to know about this stuff. So I stepped on in and I was like, let me help you with this. Let's help get through all of the mindset stuff so that you can actually respect yourself and see tasks are just tasks. They don't mean anything about you as a person. And that was huge because a lot of people will take things and they'll make it mean something personally about them. When it's not, it's just a task, it's just an activity. It's just the number of hours that it takes to do something. And there's always other ways of doing things that will make a task take less time.

But as long as our mind is having us focus on making a task mean something about us. We're never going to actually focus on where we can change things. So she had a big turnaround after talking about this. And it's interesting, she's not the only one that has feelings about their employers and how they're being treated.

So recently I had a client that had presented about an employer that needed him to work like 24/7, like around the clock, like on-call, but this time the employee was an hourly employee instead of a salaried employee. So hourly employees have a different set of rules. They're supposed to actually get paid for all of their hours. Now, this person thought, okay, well, the time that I'm actually there doing the job, that's what I get paid for. And that made sense, but it was the fact that the company had asked him to be away from his home, close to the job site, and on call. And he was getting called throughout the night. What kind of compensation should he get for that? And so the employee didn't actually ask for any compensation and the employer didn't provide any compensation.

Now, to me, this sounds like a law violation. Yeah. I spent most of my years working as an exempt employee. So it was really easy to just sweep those needs under the carpet because you're getting paid a bit more than an hourly employee so that they do have that access to your extra time. But when you're an hourly employee, employers don't get that luxury. So I looked up the California Labor Laws because this employee happened to be in California.

And it turns out that he actually is entitled to get paid for all of that time, that he was requested to be away from his regular life and to be there on call. And an extra caveat that was in there was that an employee does not have the right to waive their rights under the law. That one was an eye-opener because there are some people that they really have a hard time showing themselves respect and speaking up for what is rightfully theirs.

Like this was this person's time. And he did not sign up to work for free and give up his whole life to be able to go and do this for an employer. Like that's really nice, but what was the employer doing for him? Other than letting him still have a job? Like, that's a nice thing, but he's not getting paid. So what's the point of the job at that point. So hourly employees are entitled to get paid for all of their time that the employer is requesting and under the law, because lawmakers, as much as we like to complain about them, they understand that there's a lot of people that have a hard time showing themselves some respect.

So they put in the laws that the law will respect you for you. Like we understand that sometimes it's hard for you to respect yourself, but for the law, we will respect you until you have the strength to respect yourself. I thought that was pretty cool.

Sending Mixed Messages About Being Respected

So what are some of the other things that we do that conveys some mixed messages about being respected? So I talk a lot in podcast, Episode Seven, about growing love with boundaries. And that one is proven to be the most popular episode out of all of the podcasts I've done. And I think it's because a lot of us have a hard time knowing when to set boundaries, what those boundaries are, and then how do we enforce them? Right?

We know that we need to have some kind of consequence if someone violates our boundaries. Boundaries are pretty much so how we show ourselves some respect, what is it around us that is important to us and how we're treated, how our possessions are treated, our money, our safety, our mental health, all of those. All of those can have those types of boundaries.

But if we are not consistent with enforcing the consequences, then we're giving mixed messages. I mean, it's already hard enough to set a boundary and then to figure out what's the right consequence where someone would not want to violate that boundary against us. But if they do violate it and then we're like, oh, well, I know that I said, if you did this, I wouldn't be around you, but well, I really want to be around you. So I'm going to be around you anyway.

Well, now they're getting mixed messages. Like how are they supposed to treat you? All of this was supposed to be a learning thing. We're teaching other people how to treat us, how to respect us, but we're not even respecting the consequences that we have created to try to help people learn how to keep their boundaries to us. So where times where you're not being consistent with giving the consequence and how is that working out for you?

Because you gotta respect them too. I know this sounds really weird, but we have to respect other people with being very clear as to what the boundary is. So it's like, we're not respecting ourselves if we're not holding that boundary and we're not respecting them by being totally unclear in wishy-washy about if we're going to enforce that consequence or not. So just something to think about, all right. So this is kind of going all over the place, right?

So you get to, again, tell me what you think about this, but so I'm going to give you a couple more examples because I think examples help us to understand it better. So one of the things that I don't like is when people are speaking in really loud voices or like angry voices. I just don't like it, I prefer nice calm,and respectful conversations. And I was really proud of myself.

My First Time Holding The Line At Work

Like one of the very first examples that I remember of myself holding the line on that one was when I was 18, I was working in a federal position for the general services administration. So with this one, it was, if there was a federal building that had some kind of maintenance or repair issue, they would call over to this GSA, which is where I was working. I was the receptionist. So they could call say, Hey, we're having this type of a problem with this federal building. Can you send over a repair person to come and fix it?

Well, sometimes people would let their emotions get the best of them. And so they'd be all stressed out and angry and they'd call me, right. I'm just a helpful person. That's going to direct them to the right person and get them all taken care of. And they call me and they're angry at me and yelling at me, the person who's actually going to help them.

So I learned pretty quick in that position that I'm just talking on a phone and I have the power to hang up if I need to. And I had the thing that the person wanted. They wanted someone to come and repair, whatever it was that they needed to have repaired, but I just needed them to be able to talk to me in a calm, rational way. Like I want to help them, but that doesn't mean that they can come and just yell and scream at me. It's like, I understand that they're stressed and they're frustrated, but it's their responsibility to get themselves in check and to calm themselves down before they talk to me. So I had a guy calling me and he was just totally irate. I mean, I think he had a broken pipe and so it's flooding his building. So yeah, I get it.

He is stressed out, but that doesn't mean that he needs to call and scream at me. So when he called me and he's screaming, I let him know, nope, that is not how this is going to work. That I have. I really understand what you're going through. I can empathize with what you're going through, but you need to talk to me in a calm manner because I have some questions. I need to get some information from you. And if you can't tell me that, then I can't help you. So please call me back when you calm down. And so of course, what does he do? He starts screaming more. And so I stated again, call me back when you calm down. And I hung up on him. And oh my gosh, the first time I did it, I thought, oh my gosh, am I going to get fired for being rude to this person?

But reality was, he was being rude to me and I didn't need to be treated that way. So I needed to teach him how to treat me. So a few minutes later, he calls me back and he's still irate because now he's mad about his situation plus the fact that I hung up on him. So again, I explained to him, I didn't want to hang up on you, but you were talking to me in a rude and irate manner, and I want to help you. I need you to talk to me in a calm, cool, collected manner. And we will get that taken care of as soon as soon as we can. So when you're ready, call me back. And so he starts screaming again. So I just hung up. So he calls back again a few minutes later. And at that point, I guess it had sunk in that if he wanted help, he was going to have to talk to me like a person who was actually going to help him and be grateful for it.

And so he did, and I was super gracious and I collected all of his information and I got him the help that he needed right away. And that was a moment that has stuck with me my whole life. That it is quite possible to help people learn how to talk to you with respect. And so that's something that I continued to use at various points along my working career.

Developing Being Respected While Developing Photos In A Lab

There were times that I worked in a photo developing lab when I was in college and people would come in, stressed out about, you know, their photos for some reason. And they would start like, you know, raising their voices and getting really rude with me, I thought, but I'm actually the person that's going to help you. Why would you treat me like that? And luckily I had my boss backing me up that no, you deserve as an employee to be treated with respect.

And yeah, you might end up holding this line of saying, I'm not actually going to provide service to you, that's why there's that sign. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Well, I got to decide who I would refuse service to, and it would be people that would come in and talk to me angry or in an irate or rude manner. And you know, what they wanted that service so bad, the film developing at that point that they learned pretty quick. In fact, after the transaction was over, oftentimes they'd actually apologize to me. All of a sudden they'd realize that, yeah, they actually had come in talking to me in a really rude way and that I was not the person that deserved to be treated that way. I was the person that was actually helping them. I was really proud of myself for learning that part early on.

Now, it was really hard to do that in relationships because I was so worried that whoever I was in the relationship with that, if I was to be really honest with how I wanted to be treated, that they wouldn't want to be in a relationship with me anymore. And I was so scared of them leaving. Like for some reason, I thought I needed to have them around, but it's a really interesting thing to start thinking about it. Do you really want the people around that are going to treat you that way, right. If they're going to be rude to you, or if they're going to ruin your stuff or not respect your needs or your health or your mental health, is that really the person that you want to have around you? Right? Because there's so many people that get scared of being alone.

Learning To Role Model My Respect

I'm not one of those. It took me a long time. Like, I mean, I'm 48 now. So it's, I've had a lot of years to figure this one out. There were times where I really thought being alone and not having a partner was like the worst thing ever. Cause that would mean that I wasn't relationship material, but after I went through enough relationships where I wasn't happy with how I was being treated and there would be like breaks in between when one relationship ended and another relationship started.

And I started to find a lot of happiness in that in-between of being alone because I didn't have anyone that was there disrespecting me all the time or, you know, talking to me in a way that I shouldn't have been talked to or talking to my kids in a way that shouldn't have been talked to.

And you know, I had this second husband that I don't talk about much because he was a pretty dangerous guy. And I haven't totally healed from that relationship yet. And the damage that it caused to me, or even like my kids and stuff. But after that relationship was over, I mean, talk about a calm, peaceful time after like the worst storm of your life.

You know, when someone's threatening to kill you or seriously hurt your kids, that is not a safe situation to be in. Now that's a bit extreme, right? There's, there's going to be lots of people in your life that are not going to respect you in different ways, right?

So threatening your life is pretty extreme versus someone who, you know, won't turn down a radio when you're saying, Hey, that hurts my ears, right? It's like your ears hurting, that's, you know, that's a pretty big severity, but someone actually threatening to kill you totally different.

But it still comes down to the same thing of what are you willing to allow in other people's treatment of you. And that comes from the respect that you have for yourself. And sometimes it has to get to a really painful spot before you're willing to stand up and say, no, I am not going to be treated this way, or no, I'm not going to allow my kids to be treated this way. Or I'm not going to allow my finances to be treated a certain way. Maybe it's your home or your possessions or your time.

There's going to be those extreme pain points that you realize that it's more important than having that other person around. And you get to decide what is that breaking point for you, but you can also decide before you even get to that breaking point that no, this is a person who actually is coachable. They can learn, right?

Because remember we've taught other people how to treat us. And there were times in my life that I was like, the woman that didn't want to be walked back to the hotel room of, oh no, no, no. You know, it's okay. You know, treat me in a bad way because I don't want to inconvenience you. I don't want you to have to be uncomfortable in the type of growth that you have to do that I'm not worth it, but things change. You know, you're going to have those different coaches or inspirational leaders in your life where all of a sudden you're going to hear things and it's going to change some of your mindset. Some of those thoughts that no, I actually am worth it.

In fact, here's all of the reasons why I'm worth it. And sometimes why you're worth it is because there's so many other people out in the world that need you to stick around and that you're going to have respect for yourself so that you can be there for these other people that need you, like, why would you allow yourself to be treated in a bad way by this one person that will totally destroy you?

And now you can't be there for everybody else. And most importantly, you can't be there for yourself. You are given this one life to live. That's it. You have one life, however many years you have, you get to enjoy those. And why we choose to suffer with bad behavior around us, because we didn't feel comfortable setting up a boundary. Or we set up a boundary and then we weren't consistent with the consequences that we set because we thought we needed to have this other person around us, that wasn't going to treat us right.

Whether that's in a romantic relationship or an employer relationship, or a friend or a family member, why would you choose to have your life, that you only get one of, but to have someone treating you that way? You get to decide, how do you actually want to be treated? What is important for you? And then what are going to be those consequences if people don't treat you that way. And when you do those consequences that other person gets to choose, right? They get to choose, yes, I really want to be around you. So I'm willing to learn and grow like, okay. Yep. That was my consequence. Now I'm going to learn and I'm going to grow.


Or maybe there's a price of admission. I know that sounds really strange too. But you know, when we're talking about like team environments or even relationships, everybody has to put in a certain amount of contribution and that might be your price of admission. You know, if someone else has set up that boundary, are you willing to pay your price of admission, your effort, your resources, whatever, so that you can be there and you might worry that the other person isn't willing to do that, or they're not willing to grow.

But here's the thing you need to know is that you are incredibly valuable. You are lovable, you are worth it. People want to be around you. They're just waiting for you to let them know what the rules are. And then once they know what the rules are and you're consistent with what those rules are, they're going to know exactly how to treat you because they want to be there with you. And so are you doing a disservice, not only to yourself, but to the other person, by either not having those rules or not having those consequences being inconsistent and wishy-washy. Because you're worried that they're going to go away.

And yet, how they show up is in a way where you want them to go away. Well, maybe you don't, maybe you want them to be there, but you have to believe that you are worth it. And that those other people are willing to do this extra stuff, because they want to be around you so much. And they do. I know there's times, you're going to think that they don't, but they really do want to be around you. So help them out, help yourself out, show yourself the respect, first.

Role model what it's like to treat you with respect by you doing it first. And then you teaching them how they're going to do it. And if they don't, then you have a consequence so that they learn, oh, Nope, I didn't get it right that time. And then give them another shot because you've enforced that consequence. And they took the consequences and they grew because they've shown that they actually want to be around you. You're worth it, my friend. My strong friend. It doesn't mean that you need to be there, disrespecting yourself in order for people to be around you, you are worthwhile. And I care about you.

All right. So that's an interesting conversation. Isn't it? It just kind of went wherever it needed to go. No structure. It's just having a conversation. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did. I felt a little uncomfortable rambling on a bit, but it's something different. If you could send me a message through Facebook Messenger, let me know. What did you think of this style? That would be really great.

And if you’re someone that struggles with getting respect, being respected, or showing yourself some respect, reach out to me. I'm available for a free one-hour coaching consultation. During that time, I will coach the heck out of you because I believe in you, you deserve to know your worth and to feel it every single day. And if one session isn't enough, I have packages available. We could consider what is necessary for you so that you can live the life that you actually can enjoy.

All right. My strong friends, I will talk to you really soon. Have a great week. Bye-Bye.

Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I hope this podcast provided you some relief and some inspiration. If you know somebody else that can benefit from this podcast, please share the link with them together. I know we can make a difference. To access more podcasts and offerings. Please visit MyFreedomGrove.com until next time, take care of yourself. This world needs you.