Your needs, wants, and desires are important.

I know that you don’t want to seem overbearing or come off as a bad person, but everyone has the right to personal boundaries, self-respect, and privacy.

If you’re NOT taken seriously by your:

• Co-workers
• Friends and family
• Significant other
• Classmates

Then a change is needed!

With this article, I’m going to walk you through a few things that you can do to make people take you more seriously in life.

Finally, you’ll get the respect you deserve. You won’t have your wants or needs walked over by others, or worse, laughed at by your friends.

1. Examine Your Body Language and Tone of Voice.

Before we get into the nitty gritty reasons why people don’t take you seriously, let’s start with the obvious one, your body language and tone of voice.

Your body language has one purpose: to tell others what you’re feeling.

Other people will draw conclusions from your body language regarding how you feel about them, yourself, events, and the current situation.

To put this into perspective, I want you to watch the social experiment video below starting at 20:50 until 22:53.

After you watch this video, you’ll instantly see why body language and tone of voice pay a major role when people are deciding whether or not to take you seriously.

Do you see what I mean???

One simple change in body language and tone of voice caused random strangers to obey this individual’s commands. Pretty powerful stuff, huh?

If you have weak body language and a timid voice, you’ll never be taken seriously. People will walk all over you because they can sense that you aren’t going to put up a fight.

In order to be taken seriously, you first need to fix how you’re communicating. After you do that, then we can get into some of the other ways to get people to pay attention to your wants and needs.

You should study:

• Eye contact
• Pacifying gestures
• Submissive postures
• Confident postures
• Smiling

A good book on this is The Definitive Book of Body Language: The Hidden Meaning Behind People’s Gestures and Expressions.

2. Set and Respect Your Own Boundaries

If you don’t take your own personal boundaries seriously, then other people won’t either.

I’m not talking about taking them seriously from an intellectual or logical perspective. I’m talking about from an emotions and actions perspective.

Let me explain.

Let’s just say that someone does something that makes you angry because it is an invasion of your personal boundaries. Maybe they touch you, talk to you in a way you don’t like, or make a request that you’re not comfortable with.

Inside, that action could make you feel angry, annoyed, or upset. But, let’s just say that you don’t DO anything about it. You don’t speak up. You don’t assert your space. You don’t defend your boundaries in any way.

Despite the fact that it made you upset, you didn’t do anything about it.

Two things will happen as a result of this in-action:

1. That feeling will fester inside of you and you’ll think about it for the rest of the day. You’ll complain about what happened to your friends or significant other.
2. That person won’t be aware of your boundary, or if they are, they will think it’s not a big deal. It’s the same way with laws… no one takes some of them that seriously.

When you were little, your Mom or Dad might have called the school to complain about a teacher and how that teacher treated you.

That’s THEM defending your boundaries. They stuck up for you. They put up a fight.

Now that you’re older, you have to be the one to defend your own personal boundaries.

You must make it very clear to someone else that they violated your boundaries. You must be willing to verbally and if needed, physically, assert your boundaries.

If that person continues to violate your boundaries, you must cut them out of your life. If that’s not possible you must take every action possible to enforce consequences on that person.

I hate to say it, but people are usually left alone when they are willing and able to fight back.

3. Don’t Be Needy, Or Else…

When someone emotionally, financially, or physically NEEDS someone else, they must make sacrifices and compromises in order to appease that individual.

In order words, their needs, wants, and desires are subordinate to that individual’s feelings. To a certain degree, they are submissive to that person.

Now… that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We all have our own bosses of various forms. We all need to appease others to some degree if we want to live a happy life. You can’t be a dictator and get away with it.

The problem comes when that person SENSES your weakness and uses it as leverage point in order to get what they want.

When you meet someone like this, typically, the person who cares least has the most power.

Because that individual doesn’t assign much value to you, they can easily walk away from you if you don’t meet their demands.

Usually, you believe that if that person were to leave you, then your happiness, power, or sense of well being would decrease. This creates FEAR OF LOSS.

Fear of loss is what causes you to compromise your boundaries or values in order to satisfy their wants.

If you are willing to walk away from this individual and don’t care, then they lose their power.

It’s a tough stance, and you might actually have to cut them out of your life, but it will maintain your boundaries.

4. Be Willing to Disagree and Make People Angry

You should never make someone angry in a sadistic sense, but you should be willing to hold firm with your beliefs, thoughts, and overall perspective.

I find that people who have difficulty setting boundaries also typically shy away from making others angry or “making a big fuss.”

They will usually agree with someone else just to avoid a confrontation or an argument.

This is great lubrication for a smooth conversation and it’s awesome if you’re trying to make someone like you, but it won’t help with getting people to take you seriously.

If you have low self-esteem, a good exercise is to quite simply disagree with most of what someone else says and be vocal about it. Don’t be angry. Just be assertive.

Yes, you’ll make less friends this way, but it’s a good exercise to build your self-esteem. You’ll also find that you’ll make better friends.

Eventually, you can transition from this exercise and only disagree with someone when your beliefs or perspective are actually different from theirs.

When you disagree with others, this is what will happen:

• They will try to convince you to their point of view.
• They will try to put down your point of view.
• They might get angry at you or frustrated with you.
• They will like you less.

It’s important that regardless of how they feel, you maintain your beliefs and continue to try to convince them to your point of view.

You must be 100% okay with them getting angry, frustrated, or not liking you.

Eventually, your brain will realize that it’s okay to stand your ground, and it’s not as scary as you initially thought. You might actually convince some people of your point of view.

5. Master “Frame Control”

A person’s “frame” is simply their perspective of the world. It’s rooted in a PUA (pickup artist) concept where the stronger frame typically will convince the other person of the “reality” of the situation.

In other words, a frame is your mindset, perspective, beliefs, and overall sense of reality.

A person with a stronger frame will influence someone who has a weaker sense of certainty about a situation.

For example, let’s say that I’m a teacher and I tell a student “You should become a doctor. Doctors are smart, well-off, and girls love them.”

They don’t have a very strong frame. They aren’t sure what they want to be. They aren’t even sure of who they are.

I continue to press this idea into that student’s head by sharing stories of how girls love doctors, how my friend who’s a doctor makes a ton of money, and all of the reasons why the profession of a doctor is amazing.

I also put down the student’s original passion, which was writing. I tell them how writers don’t make any money and that they’ll never be able to support themselves.

Eventually, that student says to himself, “Maybe I actually was meant to be a doctor. It sounds pretty good.” They then rationalize, “Well, I did want to be a writer, but they don’t make any money. I guess for now I’ll get a good career and go to school for this.”

They go to school and eight years and thousands of dollars in debt later, they finally come to the realization that they don’t like the work of a doctor.

The only reason they were CONVINCED and gave up their own dreams regarding their career is because their frame was weaker than mine.

Having a weak frame causes you to be convinced and persuaded by people into a whole host of bad decisions, like trying out stupid businesses or developing beliefs about yourself that aren’t true.

When you develop a strong frame and have confidence in your own beliefs, thoughts, and decisions, other people will take you seriously because they’ll be convinced to your point of view.

6. Mirror Who They Actually Take Seriously

One simple way that you can get people to take you more seriously is to study the people they do take seriously.

In a workplace setting, you might find that the boss takes certain employees more seriously because of how:

• They dress
• Show up on time
• Treat their co-workers
• They make progress towards their goals.

All you have to do is begin to adopt the same strategy. You won’t see results instantly, but over time, you will begin to gain more points in the eyes of someone else.

A simple example of this for me was the relationship between speaking and authors. I noticed that people who have “books” tend to be taken more seriously by panelists than those who don’t.

For some reason, writing a book puts you head and shoulders above other speakers out there. So… I wrote a book!

By writing a book, I’ve been able to gain a ton more credibility in the world of speaking and people take me much more seriously. People treat me like an “author” rather than just another dude on the internet.

The process of writing a book did cause me to learn a bit more about the core topic, but it wasn’t a massive difference for me. It just made OTHER PEOPLE take me more seriously.