Otheresteem: Building Relationships by Valuing Others

Monica Diaz has written a short but key book on developing productive and sustainable relationships. Otheresteem is about how valuing others can enhance your work, your family, your business and yourself.

Otheresteem is a word to describe the value you have of another person and the feeling that that view brings out in you. It’s begins by taking responsibility for the quality of the relationships you have with others. Diaz says that otheresteem is a practice that involves four behaviors:

Acceptance: Valuing others for who they are now. Not trying to change them, but to understand them.

Appreciation: Valuing others means that you can—and make an effort to—see things that you value in them. “If we can learn to appreciate something in the other person, we can build a relationship different from competitiveness, from hatred, from alienation.”

Expectation: Valuing others not just for what they are, but for what you know they can be.

Gratitude: Feeling and demonstrating gratitude for the relationship you have with another is a natural result of acceptance, appreciation and expectation. “As with appreciation, being grateful for my relationship with you does not mean I approve of your every move…. It means I have become wise enough to find some small jewel in this exchange.”

In building your otheresteem remember, “You are working on yourself, not them. The primary intention is to change the way you perceive and treat them, to build on the value you place on them as collaborators.”

Understand that you are only to change yourself, and that is exactly what you are setting off to do: change the way you value this person, regardless of your past experiences together and without a set agenda of how you expect them to contribute to the cause. The more you let go of preconceived notions of what the other must do, the more effective your quest for collaboration and mutual learning.

Through examples and the lessons learned from them, Diaz demonstrates how otheresteem is possible in not only the workplace, but anywhere you find people in your life. It is not unusual for people to wonder, “Yeah, but if it am busy valuing others—especially in the workplace—then what about me? Don’t I get left behind?” As odd as it seems, otheresteem—esteeming others—is the antidote to the question, “What about me?” By esteeming others you are building your self-esteem—and we greatly improve the world we live in.

Why Otheresteem? Because of the kind of person it makes you.

Of Related Interest:
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