One of the 24 character strengths
Managing your own impulses — being able to hold to something you decided, after the wish to do it has worn off.
Self-Regulation is the strength of holding to something after the wish to do it has worn off. The deciding is easy; this is the part afterwards.
Everybody decides things. This strength is what operates at the point where the decision meets a Tuesday evening, a tired week, and something easier sitting right there. It is a small, repeated act rather than a large one.
It generalizes further than people expect. Somebody who leads here tends to be steady about money, about temper and about what time they go to bed. All three are the same mechanism running on different material.
None of that means the wish went away. The pull toward the easier thing is felt at full strength here, and the whole of the strength is in what happens next.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentA reply arrives that is unfair and quite rude. The response gets written, read once, and deleted. The one that goes out is sent the next morning.
Control is tiring and the supply is not endless. Everything gets held together for a long stretch, and then let go of all at once. It also turns inward: this is a strength that is quietly severe with its owner in a way they would never be with anybody else.
It gets read as being joyless or rigid. What is usually true is that the restraint is aimed at a small number of things that matter, and somebody who leads here is often perfectly happy to be talked into an unplanned evening.
Nearly all the questions behind it ask about losing control rather than keeping it, so a placing near the top partly reflects things somebody does not do. That is a real reading of a real scale, and it is narrower than the name suggests.
Both look like restraint. Prudence is thinking about what follows; Self-Regulation is the brake itself, applied in the moment the impulse arrives.
Both are about holding on. Self-Regulation resists an impulse now; Perseverance keeps going for months.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentselfwyse helps you reflect and connect — not to diagnose, treat, or predict any medical, psychological, or mental health condition.
