When faced with a challenge, how do you react?
Do you feel helpless or do you feel empowered?
How you feel depends on the rule book about yourself that you carry in your head.
Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self–efficacy as belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations. One’s sense of self–efficacy can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges.
Some people believe they can achieve anything if they persist. Such people tend to:
- View challenging problems as part of life, not separate from it
- Develop deeper interest in activities in which they participate
- Feel a stronger sense of commitment to the activities they are involved in
- Recover quickly from setbacks and disappointments
On the other hand, people with a low sense of self-efficacy avoid challenges for fear of failure, dwell too much on non-achievements, and lose confidence quickly at the first sign of difficulty.
You can develop all the skills in the world but without self-efficacy those skills are useless. What you believe you can or cannot do will play a role in your outcomes.
How do we improve our feelings of self-efficacy?
- Train your mind to focus on the positive and to shut out the negative
- Befriend positive people who encourage you, not energy vampires who drain you with their own negativity
- Maintain a journal of your goals and progress; look at it from time to time to see how far you’ve come
- When there are setbacks, always treat them as temporary challenges that are meant to strengthen you, not permanent damages that are meant to destroy you
- Be in the company of friends who are better than you and can inspire you
As you achieve incremental success in your goals, you will slowly begin to believe that you are a doer and you can achieve almost anything that you set out to do.
As Steve Jobs says, ‘The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.’
About the Author:
Sandhya Reddy is a leadership & transformation coach based in Bangalore, India. She is the Founder and Principal Coach at Chapter Two Coaching, a coaching consultancy that enables everyone from CEOs to work-from-home parents to achieve their goals by replacing self-imposed limitations with enabling stories.
Many of us in our thirties experience a disquieting realization: what brought us to middle-management may not take us to senior-management. This is true. To chart a new career path, one needs to think and do things differently. This is where Sandhya can help. She is a coach. Life coaching, executive coaching, business coaching, personality development, leadership coaching… they are all part of her forte. Her Executive coaching programs helps tomorrow’s leaders set new goals, make new plans to achieve those goals, get that elusive promotion through a blend of knowledge, action and image-building, enhance influence among the leadership team, be more productive, get more out of one’s team, and be known in the company as an indispensable performer and future leader.