this is just a friendly reminder that the original point of this newsletter article was to provide practical help on building trust (basically an emotional state) in a relationship.
Okay, so about trust... I don't recall if it was mentioned in the newsletter, since November was a long time ago, and I'm too lazy to dig it up, but it occurs to me that trust is the main difference between fear and respect. Mathematically:
respect = fear + trust.
Fear (and I'm speaking in the generic sense of 'awe', or 'reverence', not in the Halloween sense of 'spooky'), is a recognition that the object of your fear has some degree of power over you, and an admission of your own deficit of power. This could be directed at something like a natural disaster, or a wild beast, or a health condition, or a politician, or a law enforcement agent, or an employer, or a parent, or even God... All these things have the power to potentially affect you in some negative way. If you can't
trust them with that power to act in your interest (or at least to not act against you), then you have reason to fear them. If you
do trust them, then you respect them. Say what you will about Trump, but it was watching people's polarized reactions to him that really cemented this relationship in my mind.
This also ties back to my two-axis system of categorizing alphas and betas as being non-exclusive traits, which I mentioned a while back in another thread. In some sense, a pure bad-boy alpha attempts to be feared, without necessarily earning trust, while a pure good-guy beta attempts to gain trust without being feared. Thus neither can be truly respected unless they can combine both aspects.
By the way, this is why telling someone to respect someone else often doesn't work. Respect depends on having both a healthy fear of authority, and a trust. Both of these have to be demonstrated and earned. They can't just be arbitrarily commanded (well, they could be, but it would result in a very shallow respect).
