Professional life of people is affected not only by professional competence but also by their social and emotional characteristics. That means how they can effectively interact with their social environment and how they handle themselves. In our paper we deal with the relations of social competence and self-criticism. General social competence as a certain personality characteristics, influence the behaviour of the individual and is the potential for his/her socially competent and thus successful behaviour. Self-criticism as a way of dealing with oneself is connected with strong unpleasant feelings, social anxiety, depression, it further can interfere with social relationships and causes problems in professional and personal life. The paper setting out findings about the relationship of social competence, measured by the short version of the social competence questionnaire ISK-K (Kanning, 2009) and self-criticism, measured by the questionnaires FSCRS (Halamova, Kanovsky, Pacuchova, 2016) and LOSC (Thompson, Zuroff, 2004). Initial findings confirm the merits for deeper examination of the relations studied. Understanding characteristics and their relationships can be the starting point for activities related to improving the quality of work and personal life.
