Self-efficacy is defined as believing in yourselves or one’s sense of confidence that she/he can accomplish the task at hand. The individuals have to belief themselves that they have the skills. Self-efficacy is believing you can grip whatever life flings at you. Gain more understandings and you will learn that you can handle it.
Self-efficacy is the strength of your opinions in your capability to complete a task successfully. It governs whether you will hold on or give up things while working on a task.
Having low self-efficacy means you will give up things halfway down thinking it’s not possible. Due to which you will live life thinking you are not respectable enough and forget to understand your full potential. Self-efficacy grows during childhood if nurtured well people will develop a powerful and strong belief in their abilities. People with good self-efficacy tends to consider challenges as something they can overcome. They take responsibility of their failures and control the outcome; they put more hard work and don’t give up no matter how hard the situation gets.
But a person with poor self-efficacy believes that tough goals are beyond their capabilities and thus they give up even without giving a fair try.
Building strong belief in yourself:
First of all, you must decide what it is that you want. Not what your family/friends/ next door neighbor or aunt etc. think you should be doing, being or having.
If you’re doing things to please other people or because you think you should do them, self-efficacy will be low.
You can progress a strong “self-efficacy” by:
- Having strong belief and firm confidence in yourself and your capabilities.
- Drawing on the serious success factors from your past experiences in life.
- Knowing what you want in life, through setting or achieving compelling, inspiring and long-range goals and objectives, covering all the major life proportions in your life.
- Mapping out your orderly game plan, with all your planned initiatives in place, from start-point to end-point.
- Acquiring recognized and effective tools and strategies to help you navigate the highway of life (including academic life if you are a student) with ease.
- Connecting yourself with smart people around you, so as to maximize your opportunities for learning, growth and change.
- Learning from consistent feed-back and feed-forward circles, with a view to regularly recover your performance.
Making growth in your forward path, not perfection.
- Executing by following-up and following-through all your pre-defined aims and pre-planned tasks.
- Reducing stress and increasing energy through simple relaxation arrangements, with slow but deep breathing routines, to help create a resourceful and superior state of mind, with a physiologically relaxed body to go along, at all times.
- Celebrating your wins.
Difference between self-esteem, self-confidence and self-efficacy:
Self-esteem: “I am a creature who has value and worth. I am happy with the way I am.”
Self-confidence: “if I put my mind to it. I have the ability to do the things I want to do.”
Self-efficacy: “I have the ability to learn new things, to handle unaware situations and to figure out how to deal with surprising events.”
Self-confidence is your belief about your capability to accomplish something. Self-efficacy is similar. it’s about how “well” you can achieve something. Self-esteem is how you feel about yourself universally as a person.
Self-efficacy and self-confidence are almost no different in meaning. Self-confidence and self-esteem though are somewhat different.
One thing’s for sure though is: without self-esteem, it’s not likely you will have self-confidence. You have to feel relaxed within your own skin. And feel respectable about yourself and the way you see yourself.
Without that, it’s hard to believe in something, or believe you have got what it takes.
Self-efficacy influences self-esteem:
Self-efficacy, self-esteem, self-confidence and self-image; they all affect each other.
If you are performing healthy at something your self-image (how you see yourself in the moment) goes up, which makes your universal person a net positive, and your confidence goes up because you know you can execute the task well.
Low self-esteem means that you will have a deprived image of yourself and this will result in a loss of confidence. Your confidence and positive attitude will allow you to look and feel your best.
Feeling hopeless is also a factor, being pessimistic is you feel that something is unchangeable or will not change.
So, if you feel hopeless about a task, it affects your self-efficacy in the negative way which will make a domino effect on those other aspects of yourself.
The best method to build confidence, which is the basis of self-esteem, is to prove to yourself you are good at or successful at things – which is ‘self-efficacy.’ Start small, with things you can mostly do, and work at more exciting stuff step by step. That has certainly helped me and most people I have worked with. If you try too much all the time, you fail frequently and that tends to be very damaging to both.
How you view yourself will affect how others view you and treat you. If you don’t care how other people view you, then you have had to establish a dense character by putting yourself in circumstances which shaped solid truths about yourself. If those truths are positive then you can build on those traits, if they are negative then you may have to dig deeper to realize who you truly are.
Causes of low self-efficacy:
Not having a concrete dream causes low self-efficacy. If you don’t have a dream and a direction, life circumstances and others will initiate you according to their ways. You will be pushed instead of pushing. I am not saying to be aggressive. I am saying find out more about what you truly want in your life and remember just about everything is possible if you have faith, implement, learn and repeat. Your dream will build your behavior.
Bandura categorization:
Bandura categorizes four factors affecting self-efficacy.
- Experience, or “enactive accomplishment”
The experience of mastery is the most important aspect determining a person’s self-efficacy. Success raises self-efficacy, while failure lowers it. According to Erik Erikson “Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement. They may have to accept fake strengthening of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but what I call their growing ego identity gains real strength only from reliable gratitude of real accomplishment.
- Modeling, or “indirect experience”
Modeling is experienced as, “If they can do it, I can do it as well”. Our self-efficacy increases, when we see somebody succeeding and it decreases when we see people failing. This process is most efficient when we see ourselves as similar to the model.
- Social persuading
Social persuasion usually manifests as direct inspiration or caution from another person. Discouragement is commonly more active at decreasing a person’s self-efficacy and encouragement is more active at increasing it.
- Physiological factors
In traumatic situations, people commonly display signs of distress: aches, shakes and pains, fear, fatigue, nausea, etc. Insights of these responses in oneself can modify self-efficacy. Before public speaking having ‘butterflies in the stomach’ will be understood by someone with low self-efficacy as a symbol of inability, thus decreasing self-efficacy. Where high self-efficacy would lead to interpreting such physiological signs as normal and unrelated to ability.
Signs of high self-efficacy:
self-confidence, facing the threatening situations, they know they can achieve what they desire and they do what makes them happy.
- They are confident
- Knows what he/she is doing
- They are very dedicated towards their work
- A willingness to listen
- Lack of ego-attachment to particular ideas or to being right. (After all, if you really want to be right, the best thing to do is to recognize and change your mind when you are wrong.)
- He/she has a very clear vision towards his/her goal
- They are honest to themselves
Some other signs I see in strong self-efficacy person are:
- Clearly made distinctions between things claimed as fact and mere speculation.
- The ability to connect data points together by projecting a cohesive pattern onto them.
- Recognition that understanding really is a projection of patterns, not a recognition of them.
- The recognition of the limitations of their own (and everyone else’s) minds which means I don’t have to preface every single thing I say with repetitions of, “My opinion is…” or “Based on what I know…”.
- A willingness to get to the point and not dally or get hung up on inconsequential details.
- The ability to mentally take ideas apart and substitute different “components”, much like a mechanic could physically take apart an engine and replace a broken part. This includes the ability to visualize the outcome mentally.
- The ability to take something phrased poorly and instantly return back a terse and clear summary of the real point in the communication.
- An understanding of how information flows.
Information is like a substance all its own, and strong people recognize that just like physical matter, information has to come from somewhere, and to change its nature we have to do things to it. We are information craftsmen/women, watching and guiding the flow of information.
These are the people I prefer to talk to when I’m solving a problem. They go straight for the goal and know exactly what they are looking for and how to get to it.
