"People should respect you for who you are." What is a better way of conveying the message?

Nobody will respect you for what you are not.

I yam what I yam.

Do unto others

Should they? That’s my question…but assuming that they simply should respect one for who they are…you can better say ‘one should be respected for the person they are’

You can say what ever you want to others it is whether it is true and or they will believe you let alone respect you for your words is another story. People I find are generally un-trustworthy of others especially strangers and you have to demonstrate, prove and earn their trust and even then don’t expect whole-sale investment in what you have to offer. Full-on trust takes years to earn and seconds to lose.

People should respect you because you are – what you do and the messages you send will determine whether you deserve to keep that respect.

I have spent ___ years becoming who I am. Simply surviving all that is worthy of some respect! : )

The best way to convey something is through your actions.

Respect and trust must be periodically re-established over a lifetime.

The statement strikes me as silly at best. “You’re a child rapist, a wife beater, an embezzler, and you steal candy from babies. People should respect you for that.”

Are you saying “don’t try to make people conform to your idea of what is good?”

If so… I only partly agree. @ratboy captures my issue with the statement nicely.

“Go ahead. Make my day!”

—Harry Callahan from the 1983 film Sudden Impact.—

Unless being yourself is about harrassing or doing evil onto others deliberatly then there is nothing more you can say outside of “People should respect you for who you are”. Why I hate self-help books.

Perhaps it’s not the message that you ought to be conveying. Beyond a certain base value (perhaps residual, from other people in a person’s life; “I respect your parents, and you by proxy”), respect is earned, not given. Some people – quite a few, really – comport themselves more or less respectably. Others do not.

I work as part of a four-man team; we are rotated through a single job, three per sixteen-hour day. One guy always worked fast and well, in spite of a tendency to lock eyes onto certain of our customers’ backsides now and then at the expense of all else. I respected his speed and skill. Another guy managed to do everything wrong, even little things like preparing boxes, or showing up the day after we got paid. He stopped coming to work before I was able to find something about him that I could respect, beyond basic personhood.

Perhaps “People should respect you in accordance with who you are.”

@ratboy‘s answer, resonates with me. It is right on the money. I am thinking when people say that, they are not thinking ”...even if you are a sociopath”. I think they are thinking ”...no matter what race, religion, ethnicity, etc.” So, in order to avoid misunderstanding what should the statement be?

Tolerance is the appreciation of diversity and the ability to live and let others live.

@mattbrowne Criminals love to be tolerated, right?

Tolerance is about respecting different tolerant opinions, actions and world views (ability to live and let others live). It is wrong to tolerate intolerance. I don’t. I fight intolerance with the power of my words.

If we are doing bad things we want people not to tolerate us, I am sure. Not to live and let us live, so we can stop doing the bad things.

Yes, that’s what I mean. Doing bad things is a special form of intolerance.