If you have true self-regard, you can look yourself in the eye on your worst day and still believe in your best self.
What is Self-Regard?
Self-regard means liking the way you are, the good, the bad, and everything in between. It is related to self-confidence, but it’s even bigger. It is the essential starting place for emotional intelligence and leadership. You need to believe in yourself before others will believe in you.
When you have self-regard, you know your strengths and lean into them. You also know your weaknesses and compensate for them.
A lot of people feel that admitting weakness is, well, weak, but in fact, it’s essential to expanding your power and influence, and building a good team. The truth is, of course, that no one is good at everything. If you can’t recognize your weaknesses, you will make trouble on a team, micromanaging or trying to show you are better than other people, or getting defensive when someone else succeeds.
If you can recognize your weaknesses, you can find people who fill those needs better than you can. When you build a team of people who have real strengths in different areas, you begin to harness the power of teamwork and collaboration.
How Self-Regard Works
Imagine someone comes into your office panicked, saying, “What about X?” X could be finances, logistics, technical issues—anything that is outside of your expertise. Deep inside, you know you don’t have a good answer.
If you have not accepted your weakness, and are pretending to be strong in areas you are not, you will naturally have a stress response. As you move into fight, flight or freeze mode, one of the following may happen:
- Fight response: “Why are you coming to me with this? That’s your problem!” This can lead to dominating behavior and demeaning the person asking the question, diminishing other people’s trust in you.
- Flight response: “I don’t have time for this.” This can lead to blaming, passive aggression, or deflecting responsibility, again eroding trust and loyalty.
- Freeze response: “I… I… I don’t know.” This will probably lead to sharing the panic of the person asking and creating more confusion, ultimately making you seem like an indecisive leader.
On the other hand, if you have accepted your weakness and compensated, you are not threatened by problems you can’t solve by yourself. You can remain in control. You can calm the person down by saying: “That’s a great question. It’s not my area of responsibility but that’s why I hired Bill, here. Bill, come on in here and help us figure out what to do about this.” Now you can calmly begin to solve the problem.
Self-Regard is About Authenticity
True self-regard goes beyond our work strengths and weaknesses to the core of who we are. When you can be open and authentic about who you are, warts and all, you will have the kind of bedrock self-confidence that can’t be shaken. You can look yourself in the eye on your worst day and still believe in your best self.
We all have something that we don’t like about ourselves. Beyond our work strengths and weaknesses, everyone has personal flaws that we wish we didn’t have. For some, it’s a physical trait, for others a mental or invisible trait like sexual orientation, neuro-differences, or a personal or family history that we find difficult to accept and often try to hide.
Although these flaws feel unique to us, having flaws is universal. True self-regard means accepting even the parts of ourselves that we don’t like. It’s about being able to value yourself and your talents in spite of your flaws. It’s about knowing fully that no one is perfect and at the same time, knowing that perfection is not the point or the goal. It’s about believing that you are complete and whole as a human being right now and accepting yourself as you are.
If you don’t accept those parts of yourself that you wish you didn’t have, the parts of you that make you feel different or outside of the norm, you will feel stress any time that part of yourself is activated. Whether it’s a mistake, an inner desire, a comment from someone else, anything that seems to reveal what you had hoped would remain your secret will set off your fight/flight/freeze response.
Here’s what that looks like. Personally, I have a vision disorder that makes my left eye tend inward. It sucks. I don’t like it. I didn’t always have this condition, so it’s something I’ve had to get used to. Anyway, I have to keep people on my right to see them and I get disoriented easily, especially in a crowd.
For a long time, I tried to ignore it. Any time people noticed that I tilted my head to the left to get people in my field of vision, I would change the subject or get flustered and find an excuse to leave. Sometimes, I just skipped events if I thought I would have a hard time seeing.
But finally, I just started owning it. Now, whenever I see anyone trying to make sense of where I’m looking, I let them know I have a vision disorder and that I don’t make normal eye contact. I admit, usually, that it sucks, but it generally doesn’t get in the way of my job or my friendships. I never apologize for it. Instead I thank others for their understanding and most people are gracious about accommodating my vision needs. In fact, most people will go out of their way to help me compensate and that’s a huge help to me, enabling me to do things I otherwise couldn’t.
Self-Regard and Imposter Syndrome
A lot of people think being self-confident means believing in yourself all the time. Nothing could be further than the truth. We all have moments of self-doubt, even the most accomplished among us. We all know that tiny voice that bubbles up inside us saying, “you’re not good enough,” or “what makes you think you can do this?”
True self-confidence and self-regard means believing in yourself as you are, not expecting that you can do more than you can, but believing that you can find the inner and outer resources to achieve what you set out to do.
True self-regard means believing that you can find the inner and outer resources to achieve what you set out to do.
When my clients complain to me about imposter syndrome, I often find they are perfectionists. They expect themselves to be perfect in everything, know the right answer, get everything right. It’s a long process to help people see that no one is perfect, that in fact, as the old saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I help them tune into their strengths, accept that their weaknesses, and focus on how to work with others to solve bigger problems and achieve ambitious goals.
Self-Regard is Essential for Trust and Resilience
When I was an entrepreneur, I used to say that just when I got everything working perfectly, the world would change and mess it all up. That is even more true now. Besides a pandemic, we are all dealing with decades of social injustice, climate change, and now international wars. Changes outside of our control affect us and our work in a constant flow of events.
How can a business survive under such changing conditions? They need to initiate a cycle of trust in their workspace. That begins with trusting yourself and your own self-regard.
Leaders without self-regard will tend to be distracted by the stress caused by external factors as well as internal changes or challenges within their organizations. When stress pervades the office, no one can get down to work because, when you are in a stress response, the amygdala in our brain shuts down rational thinking, floods our bodies with adrenaline, and we shift into survival mode. That can be an everyday occurrences at some offices, which wears people down and leads to burnout.
The leaders who, even in the midst of a crisis remain calm, reassure others, and tackle real problems with cool heads, will always find better ways to move forward. Just like self-regard is the key to personal resilience in the face of threats, it is the key to organizational resilience and the cycle of trust. When leaders stop reacting to the stress and start working on exploring options, overcoming obstacles, and finding solutions, they recover more quickly. Leaders who can be trusted to keep their head even during a crisis are the ones others will naturally trust even in calmer times.
Build Your Self-Regard
Here are five tips for building your own self-regard.
- Start with your strengths. Make a list of your technical strengths and your emotional intelligence or people strengths. In difficult situations, use what you are good at to help bring options and solutions to the fore.
- Compensate for your weaknesses. Identify other people who you can rely on to contribute what you can’t. Make sure you recognize and appreciate them for what they bring and be sure to be there for them with the strengths you bring. Knowing what you are not good at will help you focus on common goals and keep ego or perfectionism from getting in the way of collaboration.
- Use an affirmation to accept your personal flaws. Find a sentence to say to yourself when you start getting stressed over not being perfect or being different. Make sure you use positive words that express how you want to feel. Something like: “I can rely on my strengths to get me through anything.” Train yourself to think positively to counteract the tendency to give into stress.
- Use empathy to increase your emotional awareness. Tune into the other people around you and gage how they are feeling. If they are stressed, let them know you understand and allow them to vent. There is no need to take on their troubles or stress, just listen and let them know you understand how hard it must be. Express your belief that they will get through this difficult time. Simply listening has a great effect of calming people down so they can begin their own process of getting back on track.
- Practice gratitude: Write down three things you are grateful for every day. Whether it’s on your calendar or in a notebook, write down what went right. If you are simply grateful that the sun is shining, that’s enough. No matter how hard or dire things are, find three things to be grateful for every single day. Practicing gratitude will help you be more positive about yourself and your abilities and reduce stress so that you can find the inner resources to solve problems, no matter how many changes or events come your way.
Build your self-regard and begin to see how it feels to have a bedrock of self-acceptance. There will be more calm and less drama, more performance and less noise. Over time, your results will begin to rise.