A lot of the women I work with are fluent in self-criticism. It's often the quiet engine behind how they've achieved what they've achieved — the internal voice that says that wasn't good enough, try harder, don't get comfortable.
It's also expensive. Self-criticism doesn't sharpen you indefinitely. It depletes you, one small compromise at a time — a boundary not held, an opinion not voiced, a need quietly filed away as inconvenient. Enough of that, and you end up in what I think of as a spiral of smallness: each concession making the next one easier to justify, until you can barely find your own outline anymore.
Self-respect isn't the opposite of humility. It's the thing that lets you take up the space you actually occupy — no more, no less.
This gets confused with arrogance constantly, especially for women who were taught early that wanting things, saying things plainly, or believing themselves capable was somehow unbecoming. But arrogance is about inflating your worth relative to other people. Self-respect doesn't need the comparison. It's simply the baseline — the air you're supposed to be breathing the whole time.
You can tell the difference by what it does to the people around you. Arrogance tends to shrink other people. Self-respect, when it's real, tends to give other people permission to do the same for themselves.
If any of this is landing, it's worth asking: where did you learn that wanting things was the problem? That's usually where the real work starts.