Self-efficacy is a persons’ belief in their capability to perform any task. When looking at self-efficacy we are not so much loooking at how correct this assesment is, but rather we are interested in the belief of the person.
We can enhance our sense of self-efficacy in four ways (Bandura, 1994, 2004, 2006b):
Mastery experience,
Social models,
Social persuasion and
Reappraisal of somatic and emotional state.
Our success experiences build up our sense of self-efficacy while experiencing failure lowers our self-efficacy. However, if our successes are too easily achieved our built up self-efficacy collapses at the first unexpected setback. A robust sense of self-efficacy comes from the experience of overcoming obstacles; good mastery experiences require effort.
We can judge what effort we expect to lead to what results in our own behaviour, by observing the behaviour of others. This social modelling depends highly how similar we judge the people we are looking at to ourselves. The more alike we think we are, the more our self-efficacy shifts depending on the efforts and results of the other. We look for social models that display the skills we desire and try to learn ways to achieve such skills from them.
Psychological boosts by social persuasion are easily deflated by reality and do not provide any resilience over time. However, persuading people that they are capable can create just enough of an increase in effort and commitment that it might lead to a successful mastery experience. Social persuasion is most successful when it focuses on teaching how to structure situations to maximize the chance of success and by prompting to measure success in terms of self-improvement instead of comparison to others.
We often interpret our physical responses and our mood-state as related to our capabilities in a negative way while this need not be the case. Persons with a high sense of self-efficacy can interpret a state of arousal as a motor to action whereas persons with a low sense of self-efficacy can interpret the same state as an obstacle to action, or even an indication to cease all efforts (Brooks, 2013). Learning to Reappraise your somatic or emotional state from negative (I am anxious) to positive (I am excited) can increase self-efficacy. Read more on reappraisal here: Keep your arousal high
Bandura, A. (1994). Self‐efficacy: Wiley Online Library.
Bandura, A. (2004). Health promotion by social cognitive means. Health education & behavior, 31(2), 143-164.
Bandura, A. (2006a). Guide for constructing self-efficacy scales. Self-efficacy beliefs of adolescents, 5(307-337).
Bandura, A. (2006b). Toward a psychology of human agency. Perspectives on psychological science, 1(2), 164-180.
Brooks, A. W. (2013). Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement.