Resilience, Confidence, and Positive Thinking

3How to Raise Your Self‐Efficacy

Four Sources of Efficacy Beliefs

So how do you raise self‐efficacy, the foundation for your confidence? Professor Albert Bandura believed that the following four sources of efficacy beliefs could be used to increase self‐efficacy:

1. Mastery experiences
2. Vicarious experiences
3. Verbal persuasion
4. Psychological and emotional states

Among these, the most effective is mastery experiences. Taking on challenges yourself and accumulating experiences of accomplishment and success are highly effective in increasing self‐efficacy. But challenges that do not go well may result in feelings of failure with a loss of confidence. Therefore, the other three sources need to be employed to balance out the weaknesses of any one alone.

By combining the four sources together, we can steadily increase our confidence. In the next part, we will look at various approaches and ways of thinking to increase self‐efficacy based on these four sources.

What You Need to Tie Accomplishments to Self‐Efficacy

As mentioned above, mastery experiences involve going through the actual experience. The experience of achieving a goal you set for yourself strengthens your outlook—that you can do it, even if the next challenge is difficult. In particular, the experience of persevering and ...