A MOST IMPORTANT WORD: 
SELF-EFFICACY

Book excerpt from The Power of Doing What Matters

At the crossroads of knowledge and experience is self-efficacy. The broader your knowledge and experience, the greater your self-efficacy. The opposite is also true. Self-efficacy is a cornerstone for human joy and thriving. Underrecognized and poorly understood, self-efficacy has more scientific connections to happiness, pain reduction, and disease prevention than most any other factor.

Self-efficacy was first defined by psychologist Albert Bandura in 1977 as the belief that you have the capacity to execute behaviors toward a specific performance attainment. Self-efficacy can be, for many, an intimidating word. Unpacking the definition can help you understand the value and appreciate the potency of one’s self-efficacy. To believe in your capacity is an undertaking. In our time, it is harder than ever.

Your belief, at the end of the day, is dependent on and controlled by you. There is considerable history and complexity competing for it. Most notable and well established is the moment-by-moment information from the digital world. Self-efficacy requires relentlessly managing your attention amid this matrix of influences. Harnessing your belief will require constant wrestling and is a lifelong task. Many people and things are trying to influence your belief and, ultimately, your self-efficacy. That is what makes understanding it and keeping charge of it so valuable.

Consider the average two-year-old. They can be fearless: climbing on furniture, getting into cupboards, and launching into spontaneous runs. They might step off a table! Their belief in their capacity is limitless and sometimes hazardous. Then take your average eighty-year-old. They might be afraid with each step, and their belief in their physical ability is extremely limited and sometimes stops all exploration, ultimately ending further discovery. The magic is to do things that continue to draw upon our two-year-old mindset for exploration tempered with the wisdom we have learned in our years of discovery.

Capacity in the context of self-efficacy relates to your accumulated psychological and physiological domains and abilities. Are you mentally and physically fit for the task? The understanding of your capacity is likely underappreciated and rarely explored. Knowing your capacity requires repeated and reliable assessment. How well do you move? How well do you think? How strong are you? How inflamed are you? Many of us are resistant to assessment. This must be overcome if you want to improve. Emily Dickinson wrote, “We will never know how high we are / Til we are called to rise.” If you don’t get assessed by someone who understands where you are trying to go, you will never know how high you are. You will likely not rise, and also not know you need to.

Dr. Jeffrey Rediger is a psychiatrist, Harvard professor, and author of the book Cured. In this wonderful book on spontaneous healing, Rediger traveled the world and researched patients who had overcome fatal and devastating diseases: pancreatic cancer, ankylosing spondylitis, lymphoma. He proposed that some of the people healed through nutrition, some through faith healers, some by exercising, and some by changing their environment. He admitted that he fell short of a common variable or magic formula for curing disease and concluded that it is likely different for each person. Yet, what was present in all the cases he described was that each person improved and/or gained self-efficacy.

It is not merely saying “I can do that” or being positive about a situation. It is believing, congruently, that you have the ability to achieve or overcome. Especially when you are not achieving. Most importantly, when you are failing for long periods.

Self-efficacy is not self-confidence. Self-confidence is believing you can do something or overcome something even if you do not have the capacity to do so. We have all known individuals who are self-confident yet do not sustain happiness, health, or success. This key difference between self-confidence and self-efficacy may be the difference maker. Factors covered in the stories and concepts in this book help bridge the gap between self-confidence and self-efficacy: perception, commitment, congruence, and peace, to name a few.

If we want to improve the size and precision of the intersection of our knowledge and experience and our self-efficacy, we might consider the following foundational categories. For knowledge do: Read, Listen, Teach. For experience do: Move, Something Hard, For Others.

A prerequisite for becoming more self-efficacious is becoming more selfless. This requires genuine education and learning. When you are working on your self-efficacy, you are not only thinking outside the box, you are simultaneously growing the box too.