Self-Regard is part of the Self-Perception composite in the Emotional Intelligence model, along with Self-Awareness and Self-Actualization.
What is Self-Regard?
Do you like yourself? How accepting of yourself are you? Are you aware of your weaknesses?
Self-Regard is the ability to accept yourself the way you are. It is to be ok with you you are and accept yourself with both the positives and the negatives!
It is about having a balanced and realistic view of yourself, knowing your strengths and being aware of your limitations. It is important to know your strengths but it is equally important to know what you’re not good at. Sometimes people get stalled or derailed in their careers because they are not aware of their weaknesses.
What It Is Not
Self-Regard is not self-esteem, which focuses only on our positive aspects. We sometimes invest a lot of energy – consciously or unconsciously – to increase our self-esteem because it makes us feel good to think highly of ourselves. But beware of indiscriminate self-praise that is not grounded in real accomplishments. A healthy dose of self-esteem is indeed good to have but either excessively high self-esteem or low self-esteem may quickly become problematic.
If You Have It
If you have good Self-Regard you know your strengths and your weaknesses. You are feeling good about yourself. You have no issue acknowledging when you make a mistake. You feel fulfilled and satisfied with your like.
If You Don’t
If your Self-Regard is low you’re probably not feeling good about yourself. Instead you feel somewhat dissatisfied, or insecure, may be inadequate and are not very confident in yourself. You may be focusing excessively on your weaknesses and not acknowledging your strengths.
Try it!
Here is an exercise you can try to develop your Self-Regard. It will help your become more aware of both your strengths and your weaknesses.
Think about a great achievement that you had in your life. What are three strengths that were key in this accomplishment? Then think about a failure or bad experience. What are three weaknesses or limitations that contributed to it?
You can also do this exercise daily for a week by reviewing at the end of your day the “best” and the “worse” of that day and reflecting on how your strengths and your weaknesses played into these events.
Then, once the strengths are identified imagine how you could further leverage your strengths. With the weaknesses, imagine how you could mitigate them next time a similar situation occurs.
