Self-Efficacy

“Play the game—You know you can't quit until it's won,
Soldier on—Only you can do what must be done”
—John Parr, “St. Elmo’s Fire”

When you are confronted with a task, what is your paradigm: Do you view a potentially difficult task as something to avoid or something to be overcome? How you have learned and continue to learn new tasks is not solely done through the effects of your own actions: Instead, humans being the social creatures that they are, we learn through coding information that we see modeled in our everyday lives. New information has greatly become democratized in the world of today: Much more so than it was 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Our ability to take in this information and apply it towards our success has not increased along with the availability of the information, however.

Social learning has pre-requisites: Many of them being tied closely to the communication model of sender-message-receiver with their associated barriers. While many environmental factors can cause a person to be less apt to take in new information en route to success, there is—as is nearly always the case—at least one thing able to overcome any barrier to success.

Mental states are a vital part of the learning process: Intrinsic factors such as self-motivation, self-discipline, and a sense of—you guessed it—self efficacy all contribute to a person being in the proper paradigm to take away ample return from their learning activities.

Adults, for the most part, are experiential learners: We learn with a kinesthetic approach as opposed to visual or auditory. In most adults this not only contributes to the usefulness of a skill set, it also helps with retention and continued motivation: When you are successful at something, your proclivity at being successful increases: Success begets success.

Success is all about the behaviors that we have and how they converge with our environment. The relationship between individual, behavior, and environment are all intertwined in an interdependent yet causal interaction with one another: Each can have a bearing on any of the others in the triad. The individual can affect the behavior can affect the environment can affect the individual or the environment can affect the behavior or any other combination therein, for example.

The trick is to take charge and make the individual have more bearing on all else instead of allowing the individual to be controlled by all else.

So, the next time you see that task that you’ve been dreading think of it in terms of personal growth and having a high amount of internal drive with the end in sight.