This post is a summary of my upcoming book Only Human.

Introduction

What is Respect?

Respect is the paradoxical art-form of accepting life as it is and allowing people to live as they please while simultaneously living as you see fit and doing all you can to prevent others or life from interfering with your journey. Live and let live: you allow others to live their lives on the sole condition that they do not harm you or anyone (or thing) you care about.

What is Acceptance?

Acceptance is letting go of control by realizing that certain things are either impossible to influence, or there’s not enough benefit in influencing them to bother with it. It’s about focusing away from things that are too powerful or do not provide a healthy return on investment. This includes the truths of human nature (accepting people as they are) and the truths of the general universe (i.e. Fate) – working with these truths instead of hoping for some alternate reality for which there’s no evidence of existence.

What is Manipulation?

Manipulation is when one entity has an influence on another; changing in some way the original pathway it was on. In human terms, we use this word to describe affecting someone emotionally in a way that changes their behaviour. ‘Negative’ manipulation is when this is done with either malicious or selfish intentions, whereby the one being manipulated is harmed so the manipulator may gain some benefits.

What is Fate?

Fate is the pre-ordained future for the entire universe. Whether this is random, God-driven, or determined by mathematical formula, Fate is the name we give to the inevitable counterplay of variables against each other, so complex and intricate that no human mind has the ability to fathom it. Call it ‘luck’; it is beyond our comprehension. let alone our control. Like a leaf floating in the ocean, we must accept where Fate takes us because there is no other choice.

The Release Phase of the 3X Model of Confidence

The Release Phase describes the reflective observation and measurement piece of the confidence puzzle. Separate from the Explore Phase (decision making) and the Engage Phase (action taking), the Release Phase is where we practice the values of Respect and Acceptance, observing what we’ve done and what’s been done to us, what new truths have emerged, and measuring this data to best serve our future decisions.

Part 1: Respecting Yourself

What it Means to Respect Yourself

Self-respect is about treating yourself as if you love yourself and wish for you to do well in life. It’s about recognizing your right to exist and strive to make the most of life, and your basic entitlement to fight for that life to the best of your ability. It also means accepting your limitations, flaws and weaknesses, doing what you can to work with your strengths rather than pointlessly punishing yourself for being a human.

What it Means to Disrespect Yourself

Whether at your own hand, or allowing another to do it, self-disrespect is simply treating yourself poorly. This can mean asking too much of yourself and dooming yourself to endless “failure”. It can mean tolerating abuse from others when you could do something about it. It might mean de-prioritizing your health, and allowing yourself to indulge in behaviours that harm you mentally and physically. It’s any decision that allows you to suffer and fail more than necessary given your abilities and knowledge.

Only Human: What You Must Accept About Yourself

You cannot hope to enjoy life if you can’t reconcile your human limitations. While you can imagine an idealistic view of yourself, your real self is the one you must contend with. You will sometimes lack discipline. You will often make mistakes. You will allow your emotions to get the better of you. You will be tricked by others. You will knowingly make bad decisions. You will disappoint yourself time and time again.

You are human, and therefore you are flawed. The human brain is far from perfect, and is not designed to deal with the modern world. Your mind and conscious awareness will often be contradictory, and urge you to do things that feel good in the short-term but bring about long-term disasters. This wiring was not an error you made; you were born with it. You did not choose to be human, nor did you choose your parents, your genetics, your upbringing… or anything else that developed you into who you are right now. You must come to terms with the hand you’ve been dealt, because there are no other cards to play with, no other games to join.

Why Being Hard on Yourself is Pointless

Many of us were raised to believe that stress, pressure, and unkind treatment of ourselves is somehow productive. There is no evidence to back up this belief. Indeed, all evidence suggests that confident people who are enjoying themselves are significantly more successful and productive than self-loathing pessimists setting unreasonably unfair goals for themselves. If you want to succeed and feel confident, you must put aside the desire to whip yourself on the back and set yourself up to fail. There is nothing to be gained in doing this.

Where Helpful Intrinsic Motivation Comes From

Stress and self-hatred are discouraging, not encouraging. You succeed in spite of these barriers, not because of them.

True motivation is something that uplifts and inspires you to throw yourself joyfully into something without fear or self-consciousness. Such motivation comes from love, not hate. It comes from consistently encouraging yourself through recognizing the dozens of achievements you accomplish every day, and shamelessly giving life to your passions, strengths, skills and knowledge. It’s about using what you got and enjoying the process.

How Confident People Measure Themselves

Respecting and accepting yourself is decided by self-measurement. If you choose not to manually measure yourself, you will default to your autopilot: a measurement system that is unreasonable, inaccurate, and outright delusional in it’s expectations. Confident people choose how to measure themselves, and they do so deliberately and carefully.

You measure what you actually did, not what you “should have” done. You measure it compared to zero, not compared to others or what you hoped you’d achieve. You measure what you did as a reflection on your integrity – how well did you live by your core values? You only measure the “outcomes” – the reactions to your actions – as feedback on your methods, not on your worth as a person. The only measurement that matters is: did you try to be the person you’re trying to be?

Journalling and Self-Measurement Techniques

The simplest way to measure yourself is to journal daily. List the key experiences you had, focus on what you did and why you did it, and compare this to your core values. Congratulate yourself when you lived with integrity, and demand reparations from yourself when you failed to do so. Do not ask for the past to be changed – regret is a delusion. Instead, ask that you make up for it with yet another valued behaviour.

Part 2: Respect with Others

Integrity vs. Manipulation

When it comes to social interaction, the key to confidence is to win the battle between your integrity and the manipulation of others. This does not mean people are necessarily trying to influence, but that you are influenced by them due to your own insecurities, like your desire to be liked, or thought of as intelligent, or to get some outcome like sex or money from someone. To sacrifice these petty desires in the name of your integrity is to win the war.

How to Know When You’re Being Influenced by Others

There is a path you’re on: the unfolding of your life if you are able to maintain your integrity. If you deviate from this path because of emotions that arise in reaction to other people – even just in thinking about another person – then you’re being manipulated, whether they mean to or not. If your honesty is dependent on how much you trust another, then they control you. If your courage is limited by perceived judgments from others, then they control you. If you only do something good when you’re being watched, they control you.

Responding to Manipulation with Boundaries

Boundaries are the fence keeping your property safe from intruders. They are set with words, and enforced with actions. Setting is not enough – telling someone how to treat you is only the warning shot. If they then continue to treat you poorly, you must move into enforcement. This does not mean punishing them with an eye for an eye style of justice. Enforcing a boundary means to protect yourself without requiring their co-operation. In it’s most common form, it means removing the privileges you bring to another’s life, things like attention, effort, extra kindness, support, and resources. Only respectful behaviour gets privileges.

Accepting Manipulation: Why People Are Like This

While you cannot tolerate disrespect, you are unnecessarily harmed if you get angry about people being disrespectful. Boundary-crossing is a natural human behaviour. It will always happen. You must accept this.

Confrontations and enforcement are a consistent need. People will often be rude, inconsiderate, harmful and abusive. Not all people, and not all of the time, but often enough that boundaries are as much a part of life as breathing. If you can accept this, then you will not have to endure the extra pointless suffering that comes with raging against this human nature. Nor do you need to become misanthropic (people hating) – you can just use boundaries to get the best behaviour from people while weeding out the worst.

Addressing Your Own Judgmental Nature

People will only upset and disappoint you if your expectations of them are unrealistic. No unmet expectation was ever realistic, because by definition reality cannot be wrong. If you wanted people to be one way and they ended up being another, what you wanted was clearly unreasonable, no matter how you felt about it. To be judgmental is to have an inaccurate and unhelpful view of people that only leaves you with less: the more judgmental you are, the more disappointed, frustrated and lonely you will become. Pay attention, and calibrate your expectations to meet reality, especially the reality of human nature.

What it Means to Respect Others

In simple terms, if they’re not harming you directly, then their lives are none of your business. Let them be, in the same way you wish others would let you be. If what they do offends you, find someone else to watch. If what they do does no injury to you or your loved ones, step aside and allow them to do it unheeded. Yes, they may not live the way you wish they did, but you also live in a way that displeases others, so it’s only fair.

Part 2: Respecting Fate

What it Means to Let Go of Control

Many people equate letting go of control with giving up on everything entirely. This is a false dichotomy. Letting go of control means removing the attention and effort you put into influencing things that you can’t or should not bother to influence, and refocusing that energy on the small element of control you actually have: the power over your own decisions and actions. Letting go of control means allowing things to play out as they will, and managing your reaction to these things rather than the things themselves.

How to Know When to Let Go: What Truly Matters?

Everything divides into two categories: what you should try to control, and what you shouldn’t. In the Shouldn’t category are things you can’t influence with much success (e.g. global events, other people, your own emotions), and those things you could influence but aren’t a good use of your resources. Before decide on any action, you must try to remember what truly matters to you, what kind of person you wish to be, and what your long term goals are. Anything that can’t be moved or doesn’t contribute directly to your integrity, relationships and confidence should be avoided.

Control vs. Flow: Making it Happen vs Letting it Happen

To be controlling is to try to make an outcome happen; to bring about your predicted future. It means your efforts are focused on future events rather than the present. You’re trying to push everything towards a desired conclusion. It means seducing a date towards sex, pushing for a sale, or trying to force your plans to go through regardless of unexpected new setbacks.

Flow means reacting to what is already happening, and using your reaction to make the most of life as it is. Your efforts are focused on living with integrity right here and now, looking no further than your next move and ensuring that what you control – your actions – impress you, regardless of the effect they have on plans and outcomes. It means listening to your date and responding honesty, allowing a potential client to figure out what’s best for them, and changing your plans to work with setbacks and use them to your advantage.

Expectations: The Death of Happiness

To be happy, to enjoy a moment, depends entirely on your view of the world. Happiness is subjective. And it’s mostly decided by your expectations, even when you’re not aware of them. Disappointed, frustration, stress, and rage are only possible when your expectation is defied by reality. If your expectation is below reality, you will be happy. If it’s above, you will be unhappy. This will have nothing to do with what objectively took place. So rather than trying to manage outcomes, you’re better off working on managing your expectations.

What You Must Accept About the Universe

There are so many trillions of variables at play, from the laws of physics through to the whims of people and the weather patterns around the world, that it’s simply laughable to expect your plans will be executed perfectly. No plan could possibly comprehend all relevant influences. The universe doesn’t care about what you think is “fair” and “reasonable”. The idea of entitlements and rights is a fiction; you are entitled to nothing, not even life itself. Fate has the final say in all things, and if you fight against this truth you only suffer more than needed.

Focusing On Your Small Corner of Influence

Fate does not prevent you carving out a life for yourself. It will move around you and with, as you are a variable in the great flow of things too. So long as you train your scope on what you can actually shoot, you can influence life to a certain degree. The more good decisions you make, the more good results you’ll get. The healthier choices you make, the healthier you’ll be. Do what aligns with your values and you’ll create a life that suits them. Still, much will go “wrong”, but with consistent integrity you’ll ensure the least amount of available suffering.

Bringing it All Together

Recap on The 3X Model

The 3X Model comprises of three phases: Explore (confident decisions aligned with your values), Engage (bold action focused on living with integrity), and Release (rest, recovery, and measurement through respecting reality). To live confidently is to regularly flow through this model without getting stuck (e.g. overthinking, thoughtless busyness, or ruminating pointlessly), and without going backwards in the model (e.g. reflecting on thoughts without taking action).

Practical Application: How to Work The Model Every Day

Think, act, measure. Keep this flow going. Once you’ve got an idea of what to do next, thinking time is over, even if you still have doubts. Show up, start taking the action, and stop when you think it’s enough – don’t start a new activity once it’s done. Now you stop and measure what happened, notice the results both inside yourself and externally, and allow yourself to take lessons from the completion of the model. Then use this wisdom to inform your next decision, and around you go again.

True Life Stories of Successful 3X Application

John wakes up and thinks about what to have for breakfast. He debates between eggs and cereal, and notices that eggs seem the healthier choice (Explore). So before he can doubt himself, he starts cooking eggs, waits until they’re done, and then eats them (Engage). After finishing, he pauses for a second, reflects on his discipline for eating the less tasty but more healthy option, and congratulates himself before moving on to the rest of his morning routine (Release).

Susan is having a conversation with her friend Carol. While Carol is talking, Susan gets an idea for a story she wants to tell. But then she realises Carol hasn’t finished, and so lets her story go and pays attention instead (Release). When Carol stops, Susan thinks about what she said, and realises she has a different story that better related to Carol’s main points (Explore). She then shares this story (Engage).

In the middle of his workout, Luke starts to notice that his shoulder is getting sore. So he puts down his weights and decides to end his session early (Engage). On the drive home, he catches himself being unkind about doing less than yesterday, and counters it with acknowledging that he did what’s best for his long term mobility (Release). He then decides to mix up his workout and focus on other body parts until his shoulder recovers (Explore).

Trouble-shooting

As you go, things will play out unexpectedly and you’ll be forced to deal with new and unfamiliar experiences. This is why journalling is so important. Your first reaction to an unfamiliar experienced will often involve a breach of integrity, as you resort to old autopilot reaction systems rather than thinking things through slowly. This is not something to berate yourself about. Just learn from it.

Ask yourself, “In what way could I handle this better next time?” and note the lesson. And when there won’t be a “next time” in the forseeable future, ask yourself, “How could I redeem myself for this lapse?” and go engage in a behaviour that makes you feel like you got back on track, like eating a salad after bingeing on cake, or calling up your boss to talk things through when you spoke harshly to him.

Summary

Respect is one of the key pillars of confidence – you can’t be confident without it. You cannot control how others respect you, but you can take away their ability to behave disrespectfully by taking yourself away. Later, with practice, you can become skilled enough with communication to influence how they treat you, but what is more important is how you treat yourself. Live according to your values, accept what you can’t or shouldn’t try to change, and constantly take breaks to reflect, measure, heal and learn.