My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.

 ― Jim Valvano

In the last two chapters, we have talked about two basic human strengths that make it possible for us to overcome the obstacles that may get in our way. The focus of this chapter has a name that may not be very familiar to those outside of psychology. At the same time, it is hard to imagine anything that is more relevant to everything we do or that has been embraced more broadly around the world.

Self-efficacy is its name and this name was coined by the psychologist Albert Bandura who first studied it. Self-efficacy is easy to confuse with self-esteem and what we will be talking about in the next chapter – self-control. Whereas self-esteem has to do with how favourably we view ourselves, self-efficacy has a more particular focus and is defined as “your belief in your ability to do what it takes to reach a specific goal.”

There are two things to make clear about self-efficacy.

First, self-efficacy doesn’t have to do with your actual ability to do something, only your belief about whether you think you can do it. Second, self-efficacy is usually associated with a specific goal or activity, such as being able to pass a math class, stick to a schedule, or run a marathon; rather than about being able to do anything and everything.

Let me try to make the first point clear with an example. Let’s say that the basketball player LeBron James had a twin brother who was his equal in terms of height, speed, agility, intelligence, and the ability to dunk. Let’s say that they were on two basketball teams that were equal in every way and that they met in the NBA championship.

The only difference between LeBron #1 and LeBron #2 is that Lebron #1 has a stronger belief in his ability to play better than his brother LeBron #2. Even though the twin LeBron’s are equal in ability, experience, and everything else, the research on self-efficacy strongly suggests that LeBron #1 will play better and that his team will be more likely to win the championship.

This is the power of self-efficacy – the power of believing that you can do what it takes to reach a goal. Self-efficacy is one of the most powerful and useful concepts in psychology for two reasons. First, it has been shown to be important in all areas including mental health, physical health, sports, music, entertainment, art, education, medicine, and business.

Second, whereas it may be harder to change your ability or the amount of experience you doing something, it may be easier to boost your self-efficacy.

Think about that. We said that perseverance and grit can be great equalizers. Self-efficacy may often be an even greater equalizer. Do you know the story of when Susan Boyle went on Britain’s Got Talent to sing before Simon Cowell and the other hyper-critical judges? She sang, “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables. The beauty of her singing blew everyone away – including Simon Cowell! It took an incredible amount of self-efficacy – belief in her ability to sing – to do what she did, and she was richly rewarded for succeeding.

Before I tell you what you can do to increase your self-efficacy for reaching your goals, I want to first tell you what research has discovered about why it is so important.

1. Self-efficacy makes us more likely to approach a difficult task or goal as a challenge to be mastered rather than a threat to be avoided. In other words, we may be more likely to have a growth mindset that we can learn even if we fail the first time rather than a fixed mindset in thinking that we are just not cut out for it.
2. Self-efficacy makes us set more challenging goals and stay committed to them. It is hard to imagine a more challenging goal than making the most of our lives and living them to the fullest like we are focusing on here.
3. Self-efficacy can enable us to take a broader view of our lives and increase our creativity by giving us more options and ways to succeed. We will be more likely to see the big picture that includes the rewards rather than just what we are afraid of.
4. In Chapter 5, there was a special video that showed an extraordinary example of resilience when a woman running a race fell and got up to win the race. Another reason that self-efficacy makes us more successful is that it enables us to do the kind of thing that she dared to do after she fell.
5. This is the reason that we may least expect, self-efficacy makes us more successful because it reduces the stress and emotional distress we experience while engaged in a challenging activity. When we have the self-efficacy to believe that we will be successful, we literally won’t sweat it as much.

So, these are the reasons why self-efficacy is so important and one of the greatest contributions of modern psychology to successful functioning and having a good life. But the next thing may be one of the best lessons that we can ever learn, and it has to do with what we can do to increase our self-efficacy. There has been excellent research on what we can do to boost self-efficacy, and it boils down to five things.

The first is called “performance experiences.” For many of us, the best way to increase our confidence is simply to practice performing the task we want to master or something close to it. Even the smallest success on a similar task can increase self-efficacy. The other principle that can help in using performance experiences to build self-efficacy is to break down complex and challenging tasks into simpler “baby steps” that can be practiced and mastered one at a time.

The second way to increase self-efficacy is simply to watch or see someone else successfully working towards the same kind of goal that we have. This could be watching a good friend or family member, reading about a sports hero or famous person in history, or even reading or watching fictional stories. If you have lost your parents, when you see an orphan like Harry Potter come to believe in himself after he lost his – you are building your own self-efficacy.

The third way to increase self-efficacy is to imagine ourselves doing what it takes to reach our ultimate goal. But if we want to win a big fight like the movie character Rocky, it is not so much imagining ourselves winning the fight as it is imagining ourselves getting up early on a cold morning and running up and down those stairs. During the last part of this challenge, we are going to give you some wonderful tools you can use to increase your self-efficacy for creating a better future. Part of why they have been so effective is that they boost your self-efficacy by getting you to imagine a better future and what you can do to make it happen.

The fourth way to increase self-efficacy brings us back to the idea of strength in numbers that we talked about with resilience. This fourth way is to get positive feedback from others who encourage us in what we are doing in working toward our goal. This encouragement is most effective if it comes from someone we look up to and who knows about what we are trying to do, and they may be easier to find than you think. During the last part of this challenge, I will help you identify and enlist the kind of people who can do this for you.

The fifth and final way to increase self-efficacy brings us back to the connection between self-efficacy and our physiological state of stress or relaxation. Just as having self-efficacy leads to reduced emotional distress during a challenge, so too can decreasing our distress lead to an increase in self-efficacy. If you can simply use mindful breathing or one of the many other relaxation techniques available, you will automatically be increasing your self-efficacy as you become less anxious and more relaxed.

Thus, these five ways to increase self-efficacy may be one of the most important things for us to remember and try for ourselves. Self-efficacy is the belief that we can do what it takes to reach our goals – and doing these things will not only our increase that belief but also the likelihood that we will be successful.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

Here are the tasks that will help you better understand the power of self-efficacy, how to increase it, and how to use to your strengths to reach your goals.

1.There is a video of an amazing young man who despite having no limbs, being bullied for years, and contemplating suicide; went on to believe in himself and become an inspiration to people around the world. You will be asked to reflect on how self-efficacy may have enabled him to do what he does and how just seeing him do it and learning about his story may affect your self-efficacy.

2. There is a reflection question about a time you were at your best when your self-efficacy was high and what may have made it high for you. Identifying these kinds of experiences and reflecting on them will help you understand why self-efficacy can be so important and what may be some of the best ways for you to foster it.

3. There is a writing task that asks you to identify a goal or area of your life where you would like to increase your self-efficacy. After you identify it, the next step is to write about how you might use one or more the five ways to increase self-efficacy you learned about to do it. Since one of the five ways involves imagining yourself doing what it takes to reach an important goal, you will be increasing your self-efficacy just by doing the task.

4. There is another task that involves using one of your top strengths in a new way, but this time you are asked to use it to reach one of your goals for the future. The first part of the task involves brainstorming about how you might be able to use your strengths to create a better future and the second part involves doing one of the things you come up with and seeing what happens.