Self-respect grows when your behavior stops embarrassing your private standards.

Everyone carries a private sense of how they would like to behave, usually unspoken and often more demanding than what they show the world. Self-respect is what accumulates when your actual conduct stops falling short of that private measure. Not perfection, just the closing of the gap that makes you flinch when you remember what you did.

Think of one recurring behaviour you would not want narrated back to you. Change that single one, not through a grand resolution but by handling the next occasion differently. Most of the weight people carry about themselves comes from a small number of repeated moments, and mending one of them shifts more than it seems it should.