Confidence above almost everything else will determine if you’re going to be successful. A specific type of confidence is essential to achieve your goals in business and life. This is not a confidence in your skills so much as it is confidence in your ability to achieve your goals.
We call this type of confidence – self efficacy. Self-efficacy is defined as: our belief in our ability and capacity to execute the behaviors necessary to produce specific performance.
You can be confident in some areas of your life but not have self-efficacy.
Positive psychology recently had a great article written offering some tips to improve and increase self-efficacy. You can visit the full article here!
The fact is, we love this article so much we STRONGLY recommend you visit the site and read about it. Not only does it discuss self-efficacy it focuses in on self-mastery which is a journey we discuss all the time in the Entrepreneur Mastery Lab. If you’re unfamiliar with the lab you can request to join our private community here!
We also encourage you to check out our podcast if you haven’t. This blog topic was inspired by our conversation around confidence in our most recent live Q&A podcast episode. You can listen in here! Or on any of your favorite podcast apps!
In the mean time here are two very simple tips to start building and improving your self-efficacy and confidence!
1. Divorce yourself from your short term results.
We know this can be a crazy idea to a lot of people but it’s important to recognize that a lot of our results will not be a reflection of how capable or good we are at what we do. Often times individual results do not correlate with our longer term goals and the results we are trying to achieve. If you get too caught up in short term individual results you run the risk of reducing your confidence when you might very well have been well on track to hit your bigger goals. Keep perspective and don’t let poor individual results hurt your confidence.
2. Break down your goals as small as possible.
There is a reason people talk about micro-habits and establishing very small wins early in the day like making your bed. It’s because by achieving one small goal of waking up early, making our beds, or flossing our teeth daily will translate to a lot of small wins. Those small wins will build on each other and build up your self-efficacy and confidence. Enough small wins and all of a sudden you’re winning the bigger wins too! A big goal can be daunting. When broken down into a single activity or an hourly goal it becomes much more manageable.
Use these tips to continue to develop your own self-efficacy!