Positive Self-Regard: Believe in Your Inherent Worth
Your thoughts create your feelings, my darling. And if your brain is used to thinking that you are anything less than amazing and magical, then you will feel that same way. The truth is you get to decide what you think about you. No one else’s opinion matters. And when you think the very best of yourself, when you believe it in your heart, you are living with positive self-regard and will take the courageous action you want and need to take to live the intentional life of your dreams.
What I’ve learned in my 20 years in coaching, health and wellness is that if you don’t have and take action in this world from a place of love, life can be really challenging.
And when I’m talking about love here, I’m talking about both self-love and unconditional love for the world.
Unconditional positive regard is a concept developed by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers and is defined as, “The basic acceptance and support of a person regardless of what the person says or does.”
Do you have unconditional positive regard for yourself?
Do you show up for yourself each and every time with radical full on acceptance and love? Or are you like so many people, so many of my clients and the folks I work with who are their own worst and most vocal critic? Do you find yourself believing all of the negative things the world tells you about yourself? The negative things you tell you about yourself?
Or are you rock solid in loving who you are exactly as you are? Do you accept yourself for all of the things that you may want to change? Do you
accept yourself and accept the things that are beautiful and amazing about you? Breathe into it. These are challenging questions. Do you have unconditional positive regard for yourself and do you want to have it?
So my beauty, it is a decision and a choice to say, “Regardless of what my family, my boss, the world tells me, I have got my own back. I get to choose to believe in my own friggin’ awesomeneess.” That’s right. You get to choose the way you want to look at yourself.
And I do mean, yeah, when you look in the mirror, are you criticizing your own perfect human body? Are you criticizing your thoughts, your feelings, your decisions, your actions, your results?
Choosing positive self-regard, really learning to believe deeply in your own value and worth is absolutely life-changing.
And as always, I also want to recognize that this work of looking at how you think and feel about yourself can be really challenging at first. You’re always going to think the thoughts you’ve always thought until you pause, bring awareness to your own thoughts, going back to our good old friend the watcher here.
As a kid, I got the message that I was a constant F-up. Too loud, too boisterous, too emotive, too gregarious. I am a Leo after all. Too fat, too much, that I didn’t fit in, that I wasn’t like the other kids. And all of that was painful to carry, and informed so many of my ways of thinking about myself and the world as I made my way into adulthood. I found myself constantly apologizing, taking things personally, looking for all the ways that, “Oh sorry, it was my fault.”
And as a kid, I blamed myself and I made myself the little villain because it felt safer. And this may sound paradoxical. It made a certain kind of sense to my child brain to blame myself because child brains need to believe in their adults for their own safety. Because they can’t take care of themselves because they’re children.
I came to understand that as a kid, it was easier for me to feel bad about myself because I couldn’t lose faith in the grownups around me. Questioning the emotional or physical safety of my caregivers, my teachers, my grownups felt scarier to my child brain than blaming myself because of the math of being a kid.
If you question your adults and they desert you or abandon you, then you’ll be kicked out of the village and will effectively be left to die cold and alone on a mountainside.
So I, we, develop all these stories in which we blame ourselves that we’re adaptive then. Stories that you’re wrong or bad or unlovable, too fat, too thin, too loud, too quiet, because it felt safer to just believe that you’re unlovable and to work hard to prove yourself rather than to think your adults won’t take care of you.
Those thoughts are maladaptive as an adult, which is to say they don’t serve you now because you can take care of yourself. You now have that developmental capacity and you can choose your next adventure with full embodiment, empowerment, and faith in yourself if you want to.
So, the more acceptance I could bring to the fact that I felt bad about myself as a child as a protective mechanism, the easier it was for me to move through the feelings of sadness, to hold space as an adult for that pain, and to then choose thoughts for my adult life that serve me better.
In short, don’t feel bad about feeling bad. Don’t shoot that second arrow, my love. It never serves you.
So I can feel sad about having these stories in my past and I can grieve for my inner child and everything she went through. And when these same stories pop up in my adult life, for example, not asking for help, that was a big way it showed up for me, having this like, I can do everything on my own kind of story, I can have compassion and understanding about where they came from, versus judging myself for having these thoughts.
I don’t need to be mean to myself about the fact that those thoughts are there in my brain. Neither do you. I’ve said it before. Monsters under the bed are only scary until you turn the lights on.
All those stories of negative self-regard, again, I’m too fat, I’m too thin, I’m too loud, I’m too quiet, whatever those stories are, bring them to the light of day, my darling.
Recognizing these stories, seeing where they came from is super vital in building a positive self-regard so you can let them go. You can’t change the stories you can’t see, so my love, give yourself permission to feel sad that you haven’t had positive self-regard in the past, and know that you can choose a different path now. The path of acceptance and radical self-love.
Pro tip on this one. If you’re a person who tends to ruminate and to get lost in thought and feeling, consider setting a timer. So when I’m doing deep thought work, when I’m working that thought work protocol about something that has historically felt very painful or challenging or is causing a lot of turmoil in my life, I’ll set a timer.
So I’ll give myself like, 20 minutes or a half hour to really dive in, really feel about it, have a good cry and when that timer goes off, I take those big deep, big belly breaths, do a little breathwork about it, reset, and take one more minute to get clear on the new thought that I want to practice, such as, I am working to have more positive self-regard.
Having a positive self-regard is important because it’s the literal lens through which you see the world.
Having negative self-regard is like wearing sunglasses at night. You’re seeing through a distortion or for myopic mammals with astigmatism like me, it’s like trying to drive without your glasses on. You can’t see what’s real.
The whole world looks foggy, wonky, weird. For example, do you have trouble hearing and accepting a compliment? I know for years if someone complimented what I was wearing, I would immediately dismiss it. I would say stuff like, “Oh, this old thing?” or, “I got it on sale.” It was a way to not let the compliment and the evidence of someone else’s positive regard for me end, to not receive it.
My negative self-regard buffered, acted as a filter against anything positive getting in because I didn’t know what to do with it.
But the reverse is also true. Having positive self-regard sets you and your brain up to see and believe positive things about you. Not only that, it acts as a loving emotional shield against other people’s thoughts, opinions, and stories and all the messages we get from our culture, from our society that we’re less than, that we’re not enough, that there’s some inherent problem with you.
Perhaps you’re a person of color, you were assigned female at birth, you’re queer, you’re trans, you’re differently abled. The world loves to tell you to tell us that we are something less than magnificent.
Having this positive self-regard helps to buoy us up so that we can move through the world not taking in other people’s stories, letting them wash over your back like water off a duck.
Again, I’m not here to say that shit doesn’t hurt. It hurts and that’s okay, and you get to turn back to your own self-love to find the way to support yourself and to decide what thoughts you want to believe.
It is my positive self-regard that allows me to remember that the only opinion that matters is mine.
If I think I’m foxy and the perfect size and shape, then I am. And these days, I don’t even really think about my weight. It’s simply not part of the story of valuing myself, of my self-worth, of my self-regard.
Now I understand that I can choose to focus on things that increase my self-regard. That’s right, my love. You get to decide what you think about you. No one else’s opinion matters, truly. Not at all. It’s just their thoughts creating their feelings. You get to have your thoughts to create your feelings.
The point here is that to learn to radically love and accept yourself exactly as you are is liberational.
Because when you start from there, then you get to parse out all the stories coming in. You get to filter them. You get to decide for you what you want to believe, understanding that you will take action based on the thoughts you have and the feelings they generate.
So whatever you’re trying to line yourself with and accomplish is so much easier when you love yourself.
And I can already hear you being like, “I don’t want to be some self- absorbed, self-righteous narcissist.” This is the pushback I get when I say that you can love yourself without question. It’s so funny. We spend all this time and money and effort trying to convince other people that we’re like, completely amazing, we have all the right trappings, right?
And when the invitation is for you to think that you are amazing, your brain goes right to like, pathologizing, right? To being like, oh, if I think I’m amazing then I’m going to be some egotistical narcissist. But it’s just not true, my angel.
We want other people to think we’re amazing because we think that that will make us believe it ourselves, but that’s the trap.
It doesn’t ever matter what other people think about you because you just get to choose your own thoughts, always. And I get that it can feel impossible if your long-held stories that you’re unlovable and not worthy of love, but truly, coming to the world, to your work, whatever it may be, coming to your driving why, your passion, taking courageous action and loving the people in your lives from a place of positive self-regard, that is so beautiful.
You’re putting more love out into the world. You’re helping to heal the collective unconscious, and I promise, this will not turn you into a self- absorbed, self-righteous narcissist, seriously. It’s really important to talk about why people resist making this change, this shift to wildly, radically accepting yourself beyond this surface story of “I don’t want to be some ego maniac.” You’re not going to be just because you love yourself.
The main reason people resist this is that it has to do with this false cognition.
This belief that it’s only by judging yourself, by having shame, guilt, or self-loathing that you’ll be able to make change. That if you don’t beat yourself up, you won’t be motivated, you won’t get things done. You’ll amount to nothing. I hear this all the time from people who are chronic procrastinators.
They say things like, “I work best under pressure. If I’m not waiting until the last minute, I won’t get anything done.” You know I don’t believe in all of that. They’re just thoughts. To apply this here, to the question of positive self-regard, it’s often this thought that you need to improve yourself, fix yourself, because then you’ll like yourself and then you’ll be worthy of your own positive self-regard.
What I offer you, my love, is that if you just choose to pause today, right now in this little moment and recognize that you are thinking about yourself as anything less than incredible human is simply wrong. And you’re willing to be wrong about that, then there’s space to acknowledge that the opposite is true. You are completely amazing; you were born that way.
You are so amazing. You living, breathing, moving, dreaming, doing, feeling, incredible mammal, you.
It truly is that your own self-critical thoughts that have you thinking you’re broken, need to be fixed, are actually what is keeping you from feeling good about yourself.
Your thoughts create your feelings. If you want positive self-regard, you get to release yourself from the grasp of those thoughts, so you can start to do the thing that you most want to do. You get to start there.
The further irony of all this thinking that being harsh with or hard on yourself, thinking that you’re stressed or anxious or overwhelmed, having shame, guilt, self-criticism, believing that all of that is going to help you create positive action, baby, that’s the opposite of everything I teach.
When you’re mean to yourself, you feel bad about yourself.
And then your actions are less likely to be aligned with what you actually say you want to do.
Positive self-regard not only feels better, but if we pull back and look at the think-feel-act cycle, it can support you to take courageous action.
One of the most powerful ways this has shown up in my life is in my own healing journey. Even though I healed my gut via getting rid of a parasite and taking all the supplements, the bugs came back. Not until I learned to manage my mind and live with more positive self-regard did my gut finally heal fully.
Hopefully you’re sold on this concept of the importance of having positive self-regard and you’re likely asking, “Hey Vic, how do I get more of it?”
It starts with awareness. Say it with me. Awareness, acceptance, action.
It starts with beginning to pay attention to when and where you are thinking about or talking about yourself in the negative, and where you’re taking actions that reinforce something other than positive self-regard.
Maybe you’re maintaining your old codependent or people-pleasing habits, which don’t actually feel good because they generally lead to the yucky yuck of resentment and don’t leave time for you to actually take care of yourself. And maybe it’s the more surface things. “Why did I wear this outfit?” Or looking in the mirror and judging the shape or size of your body.
You start with noticing when you hear your beautiful self-loving protector parts, the parts that are scared that if you’re too nice to yourself you won’t be successful or people won’t like you or they’ll think something negative about you.
Listen in for when that protector part shows up.
Maybe it’s when you wave off an achievement by saying, “Oh, thanks but it wasn’t that hard.” Or when you’re actively unkind to yourself with actions such as procrastinating, putting yourself down, saying yes when you mean no, worrying about what other people think about you, taking things personally, on and on, my love.
Remembering all these actions come right from your thoughts about yourself and as always, I want to say it clearly and once again.
There is nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t have a positive self-regard.
Your thoughts come from somewhere very smart and served you well at some point in your life, so give yourself love. You’re learning, you’re growing, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Your homework should you choose to accept it is to write an asset list.
An asset list is when you write out literally all the things that are amazing about you. So again, the super banal to the super deep. As a Leo, I’m obsessed with my hair. So the first thing I always put on my asset list is my hair.
And then it depends on my mood and my energy and where I’m trying to go with it. Sometimes I’ll keep it really surface and those thoughts feel really great, and sometimes I’ll go deeper. I’m really good at giving an apology. I’m really good at being really, really loving and compassionate and empathetic.
I highly recommend setting some kind of limit on this, so either I will write 40 things or I will write for 15 minutes. Because the neuroscience lets us know that brains like having a safe container for things like this versus like, I guess I’ll just free write for the rest of my life.
It’s a beautiful thing to be able to turn back to when you’re not feeling so much positive self-regard, and you may need a little support in remembering the thoughts that you want to think on repeat.
Understanding, because science, that our beliefs are just thoughts that we’ve thought again and again and again.
So why not choose the beautiful ones? The ones that leave you feeling amazing and full of self-love?
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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