Three strategies to increase your self confidence

In my last blog post I wrote about an article by Albert Bandura on self-efficacy, a synonym of sorts of “successability.” I shared how important it was for our motivation that we have confidence in our competence in order to stay motivated, by contrasting the behaviors of persons with high confidence in themselves to those with low confidence. In today’s blog posting I share with you strategies based upon Bandura’s article you can use to increase your confidence in your competence, your self-efficacy.

The three strategies to increase your confidence in yourself:

1. Create mastery experiences.

Successes build your self confidence. Failures can erode it, especially if you already have low self confidence. However, if the successes are too easy they can lead you to become easily discouraged when the string of successes don’t continue. To maximize the impact of your successes they need to be worthwhile successes, ones that you have worked hard on, and ones at which you have risked failure. (In the model for self motivation we know that the optimum level of risk is a moderate level of risk.

2. Observe successful people doing what you want to do.

Seeing people similar to yourself succeeding at the things you want to succeed at raises your belief that you too are capable of succeeding. Bandura refers to this as modeling. The greater the similarity between you and the person you are modeling, the stronger the positive impact on your confidence. There is additional benefit to modeling; it can result in you learning skills that you may not already possess. Modeling is a great use of your social environment.

3. Surround yourself with supportive people who believe in you.

Search out people who will support you in your journey, people who believe in you. This can be an individual or an organization of like minded people.

Bandura refers to this as social persuasion. He points out that people whose essential competence is affirmed by their associates are more likely to try harder and sustain their efforts in the face of adversity. They are also more likely to seek out resources from which they can improve even further. Those who are told they are incompetent by associates are more likely to not even try, or, if they do try, to give up at the first sign of adversity.

By using these three strategies you will increase your successability, your confidence in competence, and thereby increase your motivation. I suggest you spend a little time thinking about how you can put these strategies into play in your life. Is there some place, some organization you can join where you can implement all three strategies at once. Using your social environment to do this is a great way to leverage your motivation.

If you know of such an organization that can serve this purpose for you, please share it with your fellow readers by leaving a comment.

Self confidence and motivation

It was in an article by Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a prolific writer and thinker, that I first read the term self-efficacy. Bandura defined the term as “an impression that one is capable of performing in a certain manner or attaining certain goals. It is a belief that one has the capabilities to execute the courses of actions required to manage prospective situations.” A shorter definition I’ve read is a feeling of competence in one’s ability to deal with new situations.

If you are thinking this sounds similar to successability, your confidence in your competence, the second factor of self motivation, I agree with you.

Bandura had written the article, entitled “Self-Efficacy”, for the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. In it Bandura explained, among other things, the interaction between self-efficacy and motivation.

He writes that there are five major differences between people who are confident in their abilities and those who are not. These differences result in those who are confident being able to accomplish so much more in their lives:

1. The confident person approaches difficult tasks as challenges, in fact will actually create challenges in his or her life, challenges the person looks forward to meeting. The non-confident person perceives difficult tasks as threats, and shies away from them.

2. The confident person is able to maintain sustained effort in meeting their challenges. Set backs and failures are not devastating to them; they quickly recover and proceed on their path once again. The non-confident person is not as committed to his or her goals. When set backs or failures occur, they see themselves as incompetent and give up.

3. The confident person has lower stress because of their confidence in their ability to deal with situations that may arise. The non-confident person easy becomes stressed and depressed because of their perceived lack of control over events.

4. The stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the higher the goal challenges people set for themselves and the firmer is their commitment to them.

5. Confident people are motivated to achieve their goals; non-confident people have low levels of motivation.

Clearly we each want to be a person with high self-efficacy. It sure sounds a lot better to me! But what if we aren’t such a person? If we have low self esteem, are we stuck forever with low motivation? Luckily for us, Bandura not only wrote that we can positively impact our self-efficacy, but he tells us how to do it. Come back and read my next posting Sunday evening and I will share what he wrote.