How to Build Confidence in Your Abilities

The beliefs you have about your abilities shape your life. They affect how you think, feel, and behave. If you have a low level of self-efficacy, you’ll have a tendency to write off things you consider impossible. Then, for the sole reason you don’t believe you’re able to achieve your dreams, you’ll shortchange yourself instead of realizing your full potential.

Low self-efficacy will dramatically lower your chances of achieving personal success. Learn how it affects your life, including five common characteristics of people with a strong sense of self-efficacy and five common characteristics of people with a weak sense of self-efficacy.

The most important factor that influences your self-efficacy is what Albert Bandura calls the experience of mastery. When you complete a task successfully, your self-efficacy increases. On the other hand, failure to achieve a goal or performing inadequately can undermine and weaken your self-efficacy, especially if you don’t believe in your abilities.

Albert Bandura discovered that failure damages self-efficacy. However, risk-taking and its subsequent failures are essential to achieve anything worthwhile in life, and you can’t really avoid it. What you can do, though, while working on developing your self-efficacy, is to minimize the risk of failures by focusing on small, achievable goals.

Social modeling, or vicarious experience, which in simpler terms means watching and imitating other people, is the second factor influencing your self-efficacy.

Verbal persuasion – encouragement or discouragement – is the third factor influencing your self-efficacy.

Physiological factors like shaking, aches and pains, fatigue, fear, nausea, and butterflies in the stomach should have little influence on your self-efficacy.

Yet, for a person with a weak sense of self-efficacy, they add another barrier that will make a person doubt their abilities and affect their performance.

While there are dozens of techniques to develop more self-efficacy, there are only five fundamental rules that will provide you with more results than the rest of the little tricks combined.

No matter how much you remember from other lessons, the next five lessons alone will help you benefit from this course and develop more confidence in your abilities. The key, as with everything else, is to focus on the process, not the event. Self-efficacy can’t be built overnight, but these small blocks add up quickly to a strong foundation.

Let’s start with the first rule: Setting goals slightly above your ability.

People with low self-efficacy believe that tasks are harder than they actually are. Consequently, they don’t plan properly because they expect to fail. It’s a vicious cycle – you don’t plan your tasks because you think they’re hard, and these tasks are hard exactly because you don’t plan them.

People with a strong sense of self-efficacy take a wider view of their goal in order to create the best plan. It starts with breaking it into smaller parts, but what’s even more important is looking for the root of the problem.

Cognitive reframing is a psychological technique of identifying and replacing negative beliefs, attitudes, and ideas with the positive ones. One of the most important characteristics of people with high self-efficacy is that obstacles motivate them to keep going. Their underlying belief is that each obstacle they overcome is a step closer to success.

People with high self-efficacy believe that their own actions and decisions shape their lives, while individuals who lack a belief in their abilities may see their lives as outside their control.

In psychology, this concept is called locus of control – the extent to which you believe you can control events that affect you.

In the twelve lessons of this course we covered the most fundamental knowledge that will help you develop more confidence in your abilities. Yet, let’s be clear: This course alone won’t make any lasting changes in your life.