Hello! Seiiti Arata. Self-Efficacy is the belief in the ability you have to organise and execute tasks to meet your goals. If you are having a hard time achieving your objectives, it means you need to improve your self-efficacy.
And how can you improve your self-efficacy? By increasing your belief in your own self-efficacy. It looks like circular logic, but there is a technique that will help you increase your self-efficacy that consists of introducing mini habits.
When you complete easy tasks, you start to believe that you are effective, capable of organising yourself and of executing your tasks with a final objective in mind. And, this way, your self-efficacy increases.
What you cannot do is to maintain the belief that you are not able to meet your goals, because that is when your self-efficacy diminishes.
Self-efficacy if the belief you have in your ability to achieve results.
That is why you need to believe more in yourself. But, in order to believe in yourself, you need to base that belief on facts. One thing feeds the other. It is useless to think that you are capable when, in fact, you are unable to achieve any big goal. Your belief needs to come from positive results.
But, how can you achieve those positive results? The secret is thinking small and acting small.
Small habits increase your self-efficacy because they create positive and continuous results.
Be aware of the problem created by big goals! For example:
You want to earn more, be fit, move and live in your dream house, have the perfect loving relationship, be fluent in a foreign language and speak it like a native…
And the more you use your imagination and creativity to visualise the tiniest details of those dreams, of those fantasies… somewhere deep down appears the fear that these goals are too big and therefore unreachable.
When an objective is too big, we run the risk of giving up midway. After a while, we create another big goal, try it out for a bit and shortly after give up again.
The problem is that every time that cycle repeats itself, you lose a little confidence in yourself.
With time, you stop believing in yourself. Until you reach a point in which the moment you create a goal, you are already expecting to fail. Or you simply give up.
This cycle is so common that it has even been the subject of study of several scientific studies in the psychology field. For example, it is even used to foresee who within a group will commit to doing aerobic activities and who will give up midway through
Self-efficacy is a concept that has been thoroughly studied by Albert Bandura and that has a great practical impact on our lives.
It is a way of putting all of that theory into practice and reaping real results so that you can increase your self-efficacy. You can try out setting small habits instead of large goals and, that way, little by little you will start believing in yourself.
Failure to achieve large goals can crush your confidence. And, in a similar way, success at achieving small things feeds your belief in yourself.
With every small victory, you feel a little bit more confident in taking another step onwards. And, this way, little by little, with time you get to reap even greater results than those you had created as part of your big goals.
You need to leave your ego aside to trust yourself again.
A dangerous obstacle to adopting small habits is our ego. Our ego likes to get delirious imagining that it can accomplish large goals.
Our ego likes to believe that it can change completely in a moment. We keep dreaming that we can get to the gym and lift two hundred kilos, or that we can fast for forty eight hours, or that we can learn five thousand words of a foreign language in one day. Those fantasies that our ego creates when we dream while we’re awake end up conflicting with the necessary humility to take baby steps.
That is why it is so difficult to commit oneself to adopting small habits. What fun is it to say that you are going to lift two kilos at the gym, instead of two hundred? Or to say that you will just not eat that little ice-cream instead of fasting for forty eight hours straight? Or to say you are going to learn five new words instead of five thousand?
Those small habits are not as seductive for our ego as the large goals. But, in practice, small habits are much more effective in boosting our confidence.
The mini habits, which are easy to do, train your mind to have good self-efficacy.
Think this way: are you able to lift two kilos at the gym? Are you able to learn five words a day in a foreign language? Those small habits strengthen your self-efficacy through practice and not through your imagination.
It is as though you’re continuously training yourself to believe in yourself more.
To believe more in yourself, your brain needs repeated success.
The human brain is able to learn practically anything that is put in front of it several times. It does not matter whether it is the lyrics of a pop song or a complex mathematical equation. If your brain is exposed to anything time and time again for a period of time, it ends up learning it.
So, this is the best way for your brain to learn that you are indeed able to reap practical results to meet your goals. Use small habits and start believing in yourself.
When you practice small habits, you avoid making the common mistake of creating goals that are too big and giving up. Instead of hurting your confidence with every failure, you do the exact opposite: you strengthen your belief in yourself with every little success.
If you are already in that phase of not believing that you are able to reach your objectives, you have probably fallen into the cycle of thinking too big and not being able to take action. You can change that right now by simply exchanging those big goals for small habits.
Small habits do not equal small results. You can reach large goals by taking baby steps.
You might not yet be convinced of the small habits strategy. You might be thinking that doing a push-up per day, reading a page per day or any other baby step will not lead you anywhere.
But that is not the objective of small habits. The idea is that you start really, really small and then evolve little by little. When you feel confident about doing a push-up a day, you can double your bet and start doing two push-ups per day. Then, double it again and do four of them. And keep always evolving when you feel confident.
Even your boldest goals can be split up in small steps this way. In the training Planning Your Life, for example, we show how big goals must be divided into a series of small individual actions and, especially, into small habits that will lead you from your current situation to your desired scenario. All you need is strategy, time and patience to see those small actions produce results.
Remember: your training is intended to increase your self-efficacy, to increase your belief in yourself, in your ability to produce results. In order to achieve big results, it is much more efficient to take small steps throughout a long period of time than taking long quick steps and getting tired at the beginning of the road.
Practically all of the most desired goals people have depend on a continuous action throughout time. It is in this way that you can change your body shape, amass a fortune, enhance your intelligence. This is how you develop abilities, improve relationships, abandon vices. Nothing can resist the hard work of small habits that are actually taken on.
In order to avoid falling into the temptation of going back to creating goals that are too big, remember that a small step truly taken will take you farther than those big dreams that only exist in your own head.
Self-efficacy is the belief in the ability you have of organising and executing tasks to reach your goals. If you have already tried to achieve big goals and you have failed along the way, the trust you had in yourself has probably been shaken.
In order to restore that confidence, try out a different approach. Try adopting small habits that increasingly produce a feeling of success that will feed your confidence in yourself.
In the training Planning Your Life we teach you how to include that technique in a complete life plan. A plan that covers everything from your highest personal values to the next practical step you need to take in order to leave your current situation and get a little bit closer to your desired objective. You can watch a special class from the training Planning Your Life right now by accessing this link