Why You Need High Self-Efficacy?

The ability to persist to see your goals realized is causally connected to your self-beliefs. The more you believe that you are built for the challenges of life, the greater your chances of overcoming the odds and achieving your dreams. This is known in psychology as self-efficacy; or your beliefs about your capabilities to succeed.

The beliefs you have about yourself will determine whether you will confront your fears or submit to them. If you believe that you have the inner strength to march on, then you will keep fighting. But if you believe that you don’t have what it takes, you will give up and change course. Appropriately enough, Henry Ford said,

“Those who believe they can and those who believe they cannot are both usually right.”

In this respect, it’s not an overstatement to say that self-efficacy is single-handedly responsible for your success or your failure. In fact, study after study have shown that people who score high on self-efficacy tend to outperform those with low self-efficacy on all goal-oriented activities including career goals, academic goals, and personal goals such as weight loss and exercise.

In this light, we can be confident in saying that the beliefs you cultivate about yourself; whether true or false, are quite directly responsible for how you respond to your life. For example, many people hold the belief that working on their goals shouldn’t be hard. Accordingly, they choose to work on their goals when they’re comfortable. As soon as inspiration strikes, they’re busy working but as soon as it fades away, they lose concentration and get busy with trivial things. They struggle to get back to their work and they eventually write off their abilities and give up. That’s what people with low-self efficacy do. What do you do when you come across personal or career challenges?

Do you take a break and hope you will be inspired to make progress sometime soon?
Do you worry that you don’t have the education to become successful?
Do you blame your parents for the way they raised you?
Are you afraid that you don’t have the confidence to sell your ideas to your clients?
Are you not moving forward because writing a business plan is just not your thing?
Do you think it’s impossible for you to set personal goals, or any goal for that matter, and actually realize it?
Do you get bored easily?
Are you afraid that people are going to make fun of your goal when they learn about it?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I urge you to address those beliefs head on. Why? Because that’s what people with high self-efficacy do. They develop strategies to overcome such challenges and move on to the next step. In this sense, people with high and low self-efficacy start the race together, but while some give up, others find solutions. To that effect, I would like to pose the following question to you: what plans, strategies, techniques, and ideas are you going to use to persevere when things are NOT going well?

1. People with High Self-Efficacy Follow Through

People have low self-efficacy because of their beliefs, not only about themselves, but also about certain processes. They believe a few mistakes here and there won’t damage things much. They allow themselves to slack off and tell themselves they’ll handle things better next time. However, many businesses fail because owners and their employees simply don’t follow through on their promises. People also fail to stick to their goals because they don’t show up when they must show up. Not only do such people not follow through on their major goals, like building a business and persevering when the times are tough, but they also don’t follow through on smaller goals, like eating more veggies with dinner every day.

In fact, people with low self-efficacy tend to be much more vulnerable to lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes 2, heart complications, alcoholism, kidney malfunction, drugs and other self-inflicted diseases and conditions. And that’s because of the poor choices they make on a consistent basis. So it’s really not that one bad meal you had, or that one cigarette you smoked, or that one drink you bought that ended up throwing you off course. It’s a series of poor decisions. But you still have the choice to not make poor decisions anymore. I suggest that you start building your self-efficacy by building your self-discipline, and since I’ve already written about this issue I am going to refer you to my article on the topic here .

On the other hand, following through for people with high self-efficacy is a priority. They show up all the time. In fact, the most intelligent and the most successful people I’ve ever had the chance to work with always showed and they showed up earlier than anybody else. How do I know? I was there earlier than everybody too. They never missed a meeting and they delivered on their promises every single time. So, contrary to what you might believe about certain processes, missing one deadline, breaking one promise, and losing one customer can be the beginning of bad business as well as the beginning of decreasing self-efficacy. So don’t make promises if you can’t keep them, and over-deliver if you make them.

2. People with High Self-Efficacy Ask for Help

A lot of people shy away from what they don’t know.

Most people start a business or begin a certain pursuit and they work within their sphere of knowledge until they exhaust their personal resources, and that’s a good way to start. However, once they reach a particularly difficult terrain, they stop. Instead of asking for help, they begin to feel inferior for not knowing how to overcome the obstacle on their own, and they believe that asking for help will somehow confirm that inferiority. From this standpoint, it seems to me that people with low self-efficacy don’t ask for help because of the perceived negative effect it would have on their pride. And the more weight they give their pride, the lesser their chances of ever improving in their desired field. In fact, such a binary way of looking at things is self-destructive and many people with low self-efficacy wold rather suffer in silence rather than ask for help.

People with high self-efficacy, however, don’t expect themselves to know how to do everything. In fact, you already rely on others to do certain things for you. You go to a dentist to take care of your teeth, you go to an architect to build a house, and you go to a mechanic to fix your car. So it’s really the norm to ask for help when you can’t do certain things. But it’s also important to ask for help from those who are within your field. If you cultivate a growth-mindset and become flexible with yourself, then you will begin to see dramatic improvements in your business, personal life, and career.

And that’s what I did my entire life. I looked for teachers, and I was, and still am a humble student. When I wanted to become a better speaker, I joined toastmasters and asked for help from those who I thought were the best. To get better at analytical thinking, I spent hours in my professor’s office debating ideas and testing my skills. I also spent a lot of time asking rich and successful people how they made it, and I listened carefully. I never felt inferior. I felt I was growing. I also spent time with fellow students and I learned a great deal from those who were more experienced than me, and I didn’t feel inferior either (unfortunately, that’s not the norm in graduate school. Graduate students expect themselves to know everything and many never ask for help and thus never improve even after years in their respective programs).

3. Learn From Adam’s Story

Let me round off the discussion with one story that I think demonstrates the difference between high and low self-efficacy.

In one of the classes I taught at college, I required students to give a presentation as part of their grade.

Half way through the semester, one student, let’s call him Mike, came up to me at the end of class and said; “I’m sorry I missed my presentation, but I honestly can’t do it.” He further said, “I can’t do it because I have severe anxiety. I sought the help of a doctor and I just don’t think I can give a speech in front of a group of people.”

He then pleaded again and said, “I’m okay with a zero. I just don’t want to give this presentation.” So I asked Mike, “do you experience this anxiety when speaking to a group of friends? He said, “no.” So I said, “I understand that this is difficult for you, but I’m going to reschedule your presentation. But for the time being I want you to join the Toastmasters group on campus. I am also willing to spend time with you to help you practice your presentation.” Mike reluctantly agreed. Toward the end of the semester, I asked Mike, “did you join Toastmasters”? And he said, “No, I haven’t.” And that was the last of our interaction. Mike didn’t show up to his final presentation and I never saw him or heard from him again.

After a few years since that incident, I had the privilege to work with another student, let’s call him Adam. Adam had a speech impediment. He stuttered. And it was a serious case. Yet, when he heard about the presentation assignment, he gladly signed up. And on the day of his presentation, he showed up early and he also had prepared PowerPoint slides. I walked from my desk to the front of the class and introduced Adam as the presenter for that day. Adam got up and excitedly hurried to the computer desk and placed his notes on there.

Adam had an especially rough start. He began to stutter uncontrollably for the first 10 seconds. And I didn’t know if he was going to make it. I didn’t know if I should intervene. But I waited… I knew deep down that Adam could do it. As Adam struggled, some students laughed, but Adam looked at them and smiled. Slowly but surely, Adam began to speak more fluently and with less difficulty. And we all watched him persevere despite the hold of his speech impediment on his speaking ever now and then. At various points, however, I thought his speech impediment was going to get the best of him. But every time he got stuck on a word, he gave himself a minute, composed himself, then went back at it again, and he kept going all the way through to the end. I’ve learned a lot from Adam and I consider myself lucky to have met someone like him.