The EQ Big Five: #3 - Self-Regard

We are halfway through our journey to discover The Big Five skills of Emotional Intelligence!  This week we learn about Self-Regard and the role it plays in how we see ourselves and how that certainly influences how we show up to others.

Other related episodes:

• Sara and John - On Being the Right Size
• The EQ Big Five:  #1 - Emotional Self Awareness
• The EQ Big Five:  #2 - Empathy

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Transcript

John Broer: 0:04

Welcome back to all of our friends out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation. This is your host, John Broer, and you are listening to part three five-part our series on the Big Five Skills of Emotional Intelligence. So two weeks ago, we started out with emotional self-awareness. Last week, you learned about empathy. This week, we're going to be talking about self-regard, and who will be joining us? None other than my friend and partner, Sara Best. She is our resident expert on emotional intelligence and an amazing resource when it comes to all things EQ. So let's not waste any more time and start to talk about the skill of self-regard as it relates to emotional intelligence. Here we go. The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, the talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Well, we're back with Sarah. Hi, Sara, how's it going?

Sara Best: 1:22

Hey, John, real good.

John Broer: 1:24

Good.

Sara Best: 1:24

It's a real good Friday. It's a real good snowy Friday.

John Broer: 1:27

It is. It's a little chilly out there. What better reason to stay indoors and listen to a podcast the Bosshole Chronicles in part three of our five-part series on the skills the big five skills of emotional intelligence. Last week you heard about empathy. Week before that, you heard about emotional self-awareness. If you haven't listened to them, go back and take these in order, because they don't have to do them in order, but I would think that they really kind of build on themselves. Today we're going to be talking about self-regard, one of the things you said before, Sara. This is kind of central to the work we do around self-awareness and so forth, but this we're going to talk about as it relates to emotional intelligence. What is self-regard other than what it obviously seems to be? Give us a better definition.

Sara Best: 2:17

My favorite definition, John, of self-regard is how comfortable you are in your own bag of skin.

John Broer: 2:23

Okay.

Sara Best: 2:25

How comfortable are you with the strengths, the things that you do really well, knowing your natural abilities and understanding and knowing the things that you don't do so well? Can you kind of be aware of both and not be overrun by worries and concerns about the things you don't do so well or over-emphasis of the things you do really well, Because it's kind of mid-zone level of comfortability that I am what I am, I know what I am and I can work with that. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

John Broer: 3:02

When we talk about people's superpowers and also their kryptonite. Is this related to that in any way?

Sara Best: 3:12

I think it certainly can be, John. There's a behavioral backdrop to probably everything that we experience, but I also think that self-regard, even though it's a capacity, it's a learned skill and ability. It is influenced by so much that we live. So lived experiences, family experiences, relational experiences there are so many things that contribute to how we feel about ourselves from one moment to the next.

Sara Best: 3:38

I think self-regard, if you think of it as a dial, these competencies, we've described them as dials. Our dial is going to get turned up or down, sometimes based on the praise we received after a great presentation or maybe the feeling of failure we have after we lose a client or get a piece of critical feedback for example.

John Broer: 4:01

So all that stuff.

Sara Best: 4:02

So that would be when we talk about the head, the heart and the briefcase. That might also be impacted by what we call the baggage, the things that we bring along with us unfinished business from past experiences. We all have it and we should reverence it. But I think the journey that probably most human beings are on is kind of achieving a sense of self-love and respect for what you do really well, what you don't do so well, and not making those things that you don't do well take away from the person you are. They're part of who you are. Does that make sense?

John Broer: 4:35

It does.

Sara Best: 4:36

I think the other good thing to know, John, is that self-regard is supported by the other competencies of emotional intelligence that we've been talking about, that's emotional self-awareness and empathy. And I'll tell you why. Emotional self-awareness handles what we would call the first critical component of self-awareness, that's internal awareness.

Sara Best: 4:56

What are my feelings? What are the thoughts that create those feelings? Why am I having those thoughts and feelings? What could I do differently?

Sara Best: 5:03

So the internal awareness is one part, and Dr. Tasha Eurich would say the second important piece of awareness is external awareness. So how is what I'm doing affecting other people? And that's where empathy comes into play. So kind of keeping an eye and an ear on how you're received by other people, balancing that with awareness of your feelings and emotions and thoughts and an insight, developing an insight about what are your strengths Like. Do you know yourself, do you know we? Of course, we talk about Predictive Index.

Sara Best: 5:39

We use PI to help leaders and individuals gain insight about their natural behavioral motivations, not only what they would naturally do, but what they need to be successful and also places where they're probably going to struggle. So a good example for me would be attention to detail. You know, when it comes to projects that have a long timeline or encompass a lot of detail and elements, I need to get help, because my brain and the way I work out naturally focus on things like that, and I could pretend that I do, or I could beat myself up for not doing that, or I could be smart about it and say, hey, that is not a capacity that I handle as effectively as other people. What kind of support could I have on that? Dr Tasha Eurich talks about that.

Sara Best: 6:24

Two- you know the two aspects of self-awareness. I think they are certainly great aids to us improving or at least assessing more accurately our level of self-regard. But it really is. You know, hey, can I be okay with myself the way I am? If I don't, if I'm not wearing the pant size that I wish I was, do I ruminate on that? Do I beat myself up about that? Do I talk about it constantly? Do I try 15 different programs and methodologies every week or every month, you know, with no success? Like, am I ruminating on what I don't have or don't do?

Sara Best: 6:59

Well, or what I wish I could do well, or can I balance and leverage the strengths that I have? Like the people part, you know, for me it's engaging relationships and people. That will always be a superpower. For me, the kryptonite will be the details and the routine process. You know those are things that I just bumble around with, but it doesn't make me a bad human. You know, it's kind of data that I need to use to adjust and adapt the way I work.

John Broer: 7:30

So, using your own example, that is an example you could, as self-regard goes, understand and dial up and be focused on those. Relationship building can be the capacity to connect as truly something that you're wired for, that you do that well and you have a lifetime of doing that. And then the other part, though, is not letting the other aspect of it you know, the being at least realistic to the fact that I struggle with detail. I struggle with I mean, you and I both do, to a degree, struggle with detail, precision, accuracy, slowing down, but not letting it consume you, not letting it sort of darken who you are. Does that make sense?

Sara Best: 8:16

Yeah, it really really does. Here's a couple of questions that our listeners can ponder to just get a sense of the self-regard. Do you know and believe you have strengths? Do you know what they are? Are you comfortable with them and do you notice that you get to spend time working on those strengths? And when do you use them? What about you know how you work or what you do could benefit from development. Describe a situation where you had to overcome feelings of insecurity and where you felt low confidence. So I would just ask our listeners for a minute to think about hey, when was a time in your career where you felt like a rock star? You hit it out of the ballpark, you nailed it, you accomplished something really profound, you were successful, you did a really great thing. And just reveling that feeling for a minute.

Sara Best: 9:11

That's a healthy sense of your strengths, that's using your strengths. And then think of a time when you felt the opposite of that, you felt like a failure or like you totally missed the mark. And when you felt that way were you able to kind of objectively review what happened and say, gosh, I need to get better at that.

John Broer: 9:29

Right.

Sara Best: 9:29

Or did you disappear for a while and ruminate on what a horrible and awful human being you are, without objectively saying you know what I could do better there, and here's what I need to do to make that better.

John Broer: 9:44

Those also sound like examples. OK, there's part of it. It's kind of like the self-talk that we experience of, "Hey, that was awesome, I want to continue to do that, I want to work on getting better at this. And then the other part is wow, that was really difficult, I'm going to avoid that like the plague, or I'm going to work on getting better at it, but I will admit it's an area where I struggle. Ok, that's you talking to yourself.

John Broer: 10:14

Then you have the outside voices of people that would either be encouragers and say great work and then and I think unfortunately this happens a lot people that are saying why would you even try that? You're not good at this. I mean the voices that suppress or try to push down any effort on our part to try to get better at something. I mean I think about bossholes. I think about managers and supervisors, as an example, that are constantly critical. I mean not encouraging. I mean they are discouraging. They tear people down rather than trying to help nurture something that may be a struggle. I don't know, is that a correct way of looking at it as well?

Sara Best: 10:59

Well, if what you're saying is that people can do things to inhibit the healthy sense we have of ourselves, they can make it difficult for us to have belief in our strengths, to have confidence in what we do, because they're overly critical and mean yes. The other part of that is let's look at that leader for a minute. So this is a great segue, John, into something we talked about in a previous episode. So if our listeners ever heard us talk about being the right size, I think, that episode's called on being the right size.

Sara Best: 11:29

We talked about how leaders that have an unhealthy sense of themselves or they have low self-regard, they may over respond to issues of challenge or things that activate the fear they have that they might be making a mistake, and it's funny.

Sara Best: 11:49

We talked about this example and I think in the Emotional Self-Awareness episode. But again, I've been watching Suits and Louis Litt is the perfect example of a person who's too small on the inside and gets way too big on the outside. So, as a means to protect himself and with no sense of his own deep insecurity, he blows everybody else up, and so our leaders. You may not be doing exactly that, but when you hear something from a direct report in fact, I just encountered this very recently, John, in a conversation with two C-suite employees. One was a CEO and the other was a direct report of the CEO and the direct report was providing some feedback more or less, but being very vulnerable in doing so, and the CEO had this great opportunity to hear it, for what it really was Is this person, being honest and vulnerable and open and even admitting some of their challenge.

Sara Best: 12:56

But what the CEO heard was you're making me wrong and he got defensive.

John Broer: 13:02

OK.

Sara Best: 13:03

And then nothing really good happened after that for a few minutes, but I think that's the risk we run. So if we think about being the right size, what we mean by that is we can either be too small on the inside, which means we get hooked by what people say. We misinterpret what's happening because the filter we're looking at it from says, "I'm not enough.

John Broer: 13:25

Mm-hmm.

Sara Best: 13:26

I just, I you know, I'm not good enough, and of course, that's a baggage issue. For a lot of people that comes from an action or a decision you made as a little kid when something happened and you had no other choice but to say, "God, it must be me, I'm not enough, so we don't do the work of resolving that stuff by the time. We're responsible for the help and well-being of other people, we're gonna have some real trouble. Being too small means that we are susceptible to getting hooked to misinterpreting our actions or over amplifying mistakes our own mistakes.

Sara Best: 14:01

Okay struggling and being, you know, shut down because we're not perfect.

John Broer: 14:06

That's too small on the inside and that would be somebody with a low amount of self-regard.

Sara Best: 14:12

Yeah, so outing self-critical, unhappy or insecure, you know unhappy with themselves, insecure and lacking self-esteem, and so sometimes the signs of that are so obvious, sometimes they're not that obvious, because what can happen is they lash out and that becomes a person who's too big on the outside. And if you're too big on the inside, so this is the opposite end of that spectrum, John, that's when you're arrogant, conceited, potentially narcissistic or overconfident. And we know we've encountered some leaders who, who are there, they're own, and that means that they have no capacity, they're unable to or unwilling to accept that they might be wrong right.

Sara Best: 14:55

They're invulnerable. So on either end of the spectrum, we know we're gonna have a lot of challenges, but I think each and every day, John, you and I, you have the privilege of talking to great people who just struggle with "am I doing enough? Am I doing my job Okay? Is what I'm doing providing value? Am I making mistakes, you know? Is there something I could be doing better? And when we think about the competency of self-regard, it means that we have to work to become the right size.

Sara Best: 15:23

Mm-hmm and that's simply being more accepting of what we do very well, our natural strengths, and what we don't do so well, and stop making what we don't do so well take up so much space and time in our head. Yeah and having it influence in a negative way how we see others. The skill of self-regard is probably nothing more than coming to terms with, and even celebrating, some of those things that we don't do so well and Seeing them as opportunities to grow or learn right or even outsource them, but not to make that mean anything about our value as a person.

Sara Best: 16:06

Mm-hmm and I think that the confidence deal is is really important here too. Self-regard is is congruent with, or consistent with, our confidence in our own ability to navigate difficult things right if we don't have confidence in ourselves either, because someone told us we couldn't do it, we weren't good at it.

Sara Best: 16:25

Right we just have never developed the certainty that we are. We're gonna struggle, but it's so central. I, you know I do a lot of debriefing of the EQ-i assessment that we use and when the self-regard is low, oftentimes we see the empathy might be overly high. Mm-hmm, I am. I'm less confident in myself and maybe how I cope with that is I over emphasize you and how you feel and I over respond to your needs and I get really good at understanding how you feel, which is a nice diversion from trying to spend time, you know, navigating my emotions or my lack of self-regard, right?

John Broer: 17:04

That makes sense.

Sara Best: 17:05

Yeah, it makes, it makes complete sense it is true, John, that if we have a underdeveloped sense of ourselves or an unhealthy sense of ourselves, how we view everything that we do will be skewed mm-hmm and nothing more than to say gosh, always probably have.

Sara Best: 17:23

We need to go to the gym. Last last week it was the empathy gym, I think, or the emotional self-awareness gym. This week it's the self-regard gym, where we're spending time thinking about and utilizing your strength capacities and then making the things that you don't do so well, mean less and yeah yeah, that's a great.

John Broer: 17:43

That's a great perspective. Yeah, Sara you're talking about. This makes me think about psychological safety and, as it relates to a team and a team leader and and the team dynamics itself, for example, we always think in psychologically safe environments people are encouraged. We want them to fail safely, fail intelligently. But we're not going to, we're gonna de-stigmatize failure. Well, how else do people get better at something where they don't have a high degree of confidence or perhaps self-regard, if they don't try it? And they try it in an environment that's safe and there's no harsh criticism and there's an opportunity to learn from it, versus the other sort of you know Bosshole scenario where it's like why would you even do? You know what? I'm gonna give this to somebody else. This just is not your thing. I don't think this is a good use of your time and your skills versus somebody that really wants to develop that. I totally see psychological safety woven into that.

Sara Best: 18:40

Absolutely. I think that's a really good point, John. The other thing I'll say before we wrap up here is you know there are 15 competencies in emotional intelligence.

Sara Best: 18:49

We're amplifying what we call the big five. Self-regard is connected to another skill we call self-actualization, which is our interest in and our capacity to learn and grow. And if self-regard is low, if confidence and sense of self is low, self-actualization it being challenged, being given an opportunity to try something and fail, or try something and succeed can be a way to boost confidence and boost self-regard. And one exercise that I know we often share with our clients has a lot to do with descriptive words. I mean, certainly you could take a behavioral assessment, for example, and just figure out, all right, what are the things that I'd call my superpowers and what are the things that are my kryptonite.

Sara Best: 19:39

And they're not bad, they just are different. I don't do that. We always talk about no pattern chaining, no pattern envy. Yeah, you're not gonna be like other people. So what can you celebrate about what you do well and what can you determine is not a good area, a strength area for you, but it's not the end of the world, like you can outsource that. So, taking a list of words and then identifying the things that you do well, for example, I'm just gonna share a couple of these words that we have on our list.

John Broer: 20:07

Okay.

Sara Best: 20:08

They're designed to help you grow in the sense you have of yourself and your strengths, but also maybe you pinpoint an area where you wish to grow further. I'm adaptable, I'm adventurous, I'm affectionate, for example. I'm agreeable, I'm ambitious. So adaptable, adventurous, affectionate, agreeable, ambitious you could look at those through your own lens and go, "oh, I'm definitely a lot of that, I'm not that at all. But you get to decide. Do I need to be that? Do I want to be that? Do I want to be more adventurous? Would that boost my confidence? Would that give me an opportunity to learn and grow. Generous? Okay, I don't feel like I'm very generous. Could I be more generous? Would that boost the sense I have of myself?

Sara Best: 20:55

And my being the right size disciplined.

John Broer: 21:00

Funny, I picked that one out of the crowd. Right, right yeah.

Sara Best: 21:02

I would say that is not a strength area for me, but it's something I can work on and it's also something I need to put in the right perspective. I'm not gonna be the book follower. Rule follower cross every "TEVERYI person ever. So I can stop beating myself up for not being that person and start saying okay, so what is good self-discipline? Look like in my life and in my work day.

John Broer: 21:27

Yeah.

Sara Best: 21:28

I think there's a nice tie, and so, said in more simple terms, if you lack confidence, then go learn something. Learn something that would boost your confidence, because the more we know, the better we do and probably the better we feel about ourselves.

John Broer: 21:42

Yeah, well, that's good, Sara. That is great. Self-regard number three what are we gonna talk about next week?

Sara Best: 21:49

Next week we're gonna talk about gosh, John. If this was a skill that everybody possessed at the right level, we might have a totally different workplace, but it's assertiveness.

John Broer: 22:01

Okay.

Sara Best: 22:03

Look forward to that one.

John Broer: 22:04

That'll be good to unpack. Thanks, Sara, and hey, everybody, check out the show notes because I'll put in there the episode on being the right size, which was something we did before. But thanks, Sara, this is awesome.

Sara Best: 22:17

Yeah, I guess we'll see you next time on the Bossh ole Chronicles.

John Broer: 22:24

We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bossh ole Chronicles and if you have a Bossh ole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at mystory@thebossholechronicles. com. Once again, mystory@thebossholechronicles. com, we'll see you again soon.