Self-Efficacy: The blueprint of our confidence and self-belief.
Self-efficacy has been widely defined as ‘the belief in one’s capabilities to achieve a goal or an outcome’. Higher levels of self-efficacy have huge benefits in life, sports & business such as resilience to setbacks and stressors, wellbeing habits, improved performance and educational achievement.
Take a look below at the four areas that allow our development in self-efficacy to give us confidence, resilience, mastery of skills and intrinsic motivation.
Enactive Mastery - The achievement and accomplishment of ’small wins’ or goal attainment can be the catalyst for further performance, meaning that athletes, students, coaches and clubs can build on previous successes with confidence.
Vicarious Learning - Watching a teammate succeed, seeing achievement demonstrated by others or even viewing high performance and success on TV, can strengthen our own beliefs in our abilities. In essence, learning from others’ positive experiences. This needs to be a conscious process in understanding how they achieved that success and what we need to do to succeed.
Verbal Persuasion - The positive impact that others’ words can have on our self-efficacy. For example, a coach telling you that you have the ability to achieve whatever you want in your sport and that you are capable of facing and overcoming any challenge that lies ahead, will encourage & motivate you as well as develop your self-belief in your abilities to succeed.
Emotional Arousal - The emotional, physical, and psychological well-being of an individual can influence how they feel about their abilities in a particular sport or situation. For example, if you are struggling with low self-esteem, imposter syndrome or anxiety in a sporting environment, it is notoriously harder to perform consistently well in matches, races or events. This is because mentally many negative and deprecating thoughts will be clouding your confidence, judgement & beliefs.