Mental Fitness Mondays: Understanding Self Regard as a way to Self-Care
Positive self-regard…finding the Goldilocks amount
Welcome back to Mental Fitness Mondays from Real Clear. Our last post looked at resilience, particularly at how you might build your reserves of resilience up. Self-regard is our next mental fitness component and there are two key elements to it: self-awareness, and your self-opinion.
Both are important.
Interestingly, while it's good to have self-regard, sometimes people overdo it. They become self-conscious and self-critical instead of being kind to themselves. Can you relate to that? Or… some people have an over-inflated opinion of themselves, which isn’t the aim here! The key, as with many things, is finding a healthy balance, the Goldilocks amount.
Fundamental Skill
I think self-awareness is one of the fundamental first skills of mental fitness, after all no-one does anything about what they’re not aware of. The first part of Self-awareness is knowing how you think, feel and behave. It’s noticing your habits and attitudes, and the impact you have on others. The second part of self-awareness is doing something about it.
For example, if you become aware that you don’t listen well, and that makes other people feel like you don’t care about them, it makes sense to work on your listening skills. It’s not enough to say ‘I’m aware that I am a poor listener.’ That’s not being self-aware, that’s just lazy.
How you see yourself changes everything
The second key element, your opinion of yourself, can be life-changing if you improve it. As part of our mental fitness work, we get our clients to fill in our unique questionnaire so they can measure how mentally fit they are. I know from reviewing hundreds of these questionnaires, that when people don’t think well of themselves they tend to score low in all elements of mental fitness. This is because they’re failing to spot their own strengths. This doesn’t serve anyone. It’s good to know what you’re good at, so you can do more of that.
We’re all a bit negative!
We all tend to have a bias towards noticing the negatives more than the positives. Sometimes you might notice the negatives in other people more than in yourself, and at other times you will notice, and magnify, your negative traits. If you’ve ever looked in the mirror and only noticed the spot on your face, not your lovely smile, then you will relate!
When people improve their self-regard, they like themselves more, and are often more accepting of others too. They often achieve more too! I’d love you to build your self-regard if it’s a bit on the low side, I promise it’s worth it.
A coaching question for you: what are some of your strengths?
