Last week, I went to a Leadership Academy meeting with a bunch of winter sports athletes. Sometimes Leadership Academy can be a bit repetitive. We’re supposed to do A, B, and C and that will make us the perfect leaders. We get it. This time, however, we played a game that got me thinking.

The theme of the meeting was "respect", and before playing this game, we discussed what respect was and who the most respectful person we knew was, which is a lot harder to think about than one would think. Then, we were each given a card and told not to look at it. The man who runs the academy told us that an Ace meant that we were the “best” person on the team, in terms of most talented and most popular, and from there it went down the line to a two, who was the least talented, inexperienced and least popular. We were to hold our cards over our foreheads and walk around the room, treating the people we interacted with based on the card that they had. I could tell that my card was high because I was treated very nicely, and in some cases as if I was worshiped. Sure enough, I was a Jack. Not the highest, but very close to the top.

While this was just a fun and silly activity and it was funny pretending to be nasty to the people with low cards, it was a great reminder to be aware of how we treat others. Do you treat the worst player on your team with the same amount of respect as you would the best player on your team? Do you treat the dining hall employees and maintenance crew the same way you would treat your professor? How about the people you don’t like very much? Do you still respect them?

It is very hard to earn respect if you don’t give it. Sometimes it can be hard to respect someone who doesn’t respect you or respect someone that you do not like. If you do so, however, your attitude will be naturally a lot more positive and you will be very well received. You may also influence other people to be more respectful themselves, and the cycle would continue.

It does not matter what someone’s skill level or position is; the people to your left and your right deserve the same treatment from you. There will always be someone better than you at certain things; even Michael Phelps has been beaten and Michael Jordan outplayed, and there will always be someone worse than you in perhaps the same thing. How you approach the person who outranks you should not be any different than how you approach the person you outrank.