4 sources of self-efficacy and how you can employ them?
Believing in yourself matters at every stage of your life; no matter it is your academic career or your professional career or your everyday personal affairs, your self-belief determines how you think, feel or behave — it’s an important determinant of your success or failure in life.
Albert Bandura terms it self-efficacy and defines it as “one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task”. This concept has a major role in the development of Bandura’s Social Learning Theory.
Bandura proposed four sources of self-efficacy. If you are looking forward to improve your self-efficacy, then employ them for this purpose:
Mastery experience, or an accomplishment in a past performance, is a really very important source of self-efficacy — it is the most powerful source of high self-efficacy for anyone , as it is driven by himself or herself. Whenever we successfully accomplish a task, we move one step forward towards the journey of self-belief and our self-efficacy strengthens. And when we fail to accomplish a task, our self-efficacy weakens. In fact, it’s all about mental processing that occurs when we confront success or failure. “People process, weigh and integrate diverse sources of information concerning their capabilities. They then regulate their choice behavior and effort expenditure on the basis of the perceived self-efficacy” (Bandura, Adams & Beyer, 1977).
‘Success breeds success’, past success greatly influences the extent of effort and commitment towards a future task. That does not mean that the future tasks are somehow repetitive or easy; of course, they would be challenging but with high self-efficacy, strong motivation and right goals, they can be accomplished successfully.
So, how can you draw self-efficacy from this source? It’s possible in many ways; first of all, start with small achievements and perform under low competition, when you will be successful in this first step, it will give you courage to undertake big achievements and perform under high competition. Success in small achievements will build efficacy for big achievements in the future. And don’t forget to consistently remind yourself about your past successes.
And if you are working in the capacity of a mentor, coach or trainer then how can you help your students or trainees to draw self-efficacy from past performance? First of all, create an environment having low competition and set achievable and easy goals for them, once they successfully perform in low competition then gradually move them towards relatively challenging tasks and then encourage them consistently by reminding them about their past achievements, this will surely improve their self-efficacy.
Read the full article over at:
https://thinkdifferentnation.com/2021/04/4-sources-of-self-efficacy-and-how-you-can-employ-them/
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