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Let's Learn About Self-Efficacy

“Self-efficacy is the belief in your ability in performing tasks successfully. Self-efficacy is a sense of competence, efficiency, and the ability to cope with life.”

Your sense of self-efficacy begins to form in early childhood, as you deal with a variety of experiences, tasks, and situations. Your sense of self-efficacy evolves as you learn, experience, and develop both physically and mentally.

Sometimes it’s challenging to differentiate self-efficacy from other colloquial terms we use on a daily basis such as self-esteem, confidence and motivation and resilience. The information below shows how self-efficacy differs from each of these terms.

SELF-EFFICACY
VS RESILIENCE

While experiences of success certainly make up a large portion of self-efficacy development, there is also room for failure. Those with a high level of self-efficacy are not only more likely to succeed, they are also more likely to bounce back and recover from failure. This is the ability at the heart of resilience, and it is greatly impacted by self-efficacy.

SELF-EFFICACY
VS CONFIDENCE

Although self-efficacy is also positively related to confidence, the term confidence is more general than self-efficacy. While confidence refers to your strength of beliefs, self-efficacy refers specifically to your belief in your in your competence and capabilities (Bandura, 1997, p. 382).

SELF-EFFICACY
VS SELF-ESTEEM

Self-esteem is conceptualized as a sort of general or overall feeling of one’s worth or value (Neill, 2005). While self-esteem is focused more on “being” (e.g., feeling that you are perfectly acceptable as you are), self-efficacy is more focused on “doing” (e.g., feeling that you are up to a challenge).

SELF-EFFICACY
VS MOTIVATION

Similarly, although self-efficacy and motivation are deeply entwined, they are also two separate constructs. Self-efficacy is based on an individual’s belief in their own capacity to achieve, while motivation is based on the individual’s desire to achieve. Clearly, those with high self-efficacy likely have high motivation and vice versa, but it is not a direct correlation.

Self-Efficacy Development

Self-efficacy can be developed and formed in more multiple ways. Four major components that heavily influence your self-efficacy are mastery experience, social modeling, verbal persuasion, and psychological response.

1. Master Experience

Mastery experiences refer to the idea that successful experiences help people to build up confidences and strength to overcome challenges.

Sample: Sam, once participated in a Hackathon, and wins the final challenge. This mastery experience boosts Sam’s self-efficacy. As a result, Sam is actively looking for new Hackathon to challenge himself and is assured in his skill as a Computer Scientist.

2. Social Modeling

Social Modeling refers to the idea that through observing people similar to oneself succeed, it raises the observer’s belief that they too have the capabilities to succeed.

Sample: Linda is an international student from China and she is not comfortable with her English skills. However, Linda’s classmate Jack who is also from China and is fluent in English shares his experience with Linda and the challenges he overcame throughout the years. Seeing Jack’s success today, Linda is willing to challenge herself and believes that she can also overcome the language barrier one day.

3. Verbal Persuation

Verbal persuasion refers to the idea that people could be persuaded to believe that they have the skills and capabilities to succeed by families, friends, instructors and so on.

Sample: John is struggling in his technical writing class, but his professor keeps on encouraging him through one on one conversations, writing assignments and always telling John that he can be a great writer if he put his minds into it. As a result, John never gave up on trying and ended up improving his writing skills and is now confident in his technical writing skills.

4. Psychological Response

Psychological responses refers to the idea that moods, emotional states, physical reactions, and stress levels can all impact how a person feels about their personal abilities in a particular situation.

Sample: Amy always wants to learn a new programming language and attempts to teach herself during the school year. Due to heavy workloads from school and social events, Amy becomes highly stressed and isn’t able to focus, becoming frequently frustrated when she encounters challenges during her learning process. When Amy tries again during her summer break, she finds her learning more enjoyable and has more patience to troubleshoot when she encounters challenges.

Negative Effects
of Low Self-Efficacy