Cultivating a healthy sense of self-efficacy can be vital in building a sense of stability and confidence in life. How confident do you feel in yourself? How competent? How much do you trust yourself? Consider these questions in specific areas of your life. Do you feel stronger in one area over another? Is your professional sense of self-efficacy thriving while in your personal life you are experience doubt and worry? Self-efficacy moves beyond the limitations of self-esteem, our estimate of worth and how we view ourselves, into our abilities to cope and thrive in the shifting and challenging circumstances of life.
Philosopher Alan Watts states in his lecture on choice: “Worriers are people who think of all the variables beyond there control, what might happen. Choice is the act of hesitation that we make before making a decision. It is a mental wobbling. And so we are always in a dither of doubt as to whether we are behaving the right way, doing the right thing, and so on and so forth, and lack a certain kind of self-confidence. And if you see you lack self-confidence, you will make mistakes through sheer fumbling. If you do have self-confidence you may get away with doing entirely the wrong thing.”
This is the idea that we can create self-efficacy through believing in ourselves. We make mistakes, we learn, we grow. We learn how to trust ourselves. We learn to trust our intuition. Even if all of the answers are not clear, even if the path before us shady and uncertain, we learn to trust ourselves and our ability to thrive in any circumstance. But it also requires the ability to be honest with ourselves. We all have strengths and struggles. What are yours? What are some of the things that you just aren’t good at?
If you struggle to trust yourself, or to be able to notice your own strengths, start to look at why. Where does that self-judgment come from? Where does that doubt come from? Is it helpful to you? And begin to look at all the ways and times you have been successful in adversity. Celebrate all of the successes no matter how insignificant they may seem. You are strong and possess your own inherent wisdom that you have acquired through all of life’s experiences. Start to trust that. Trust yourself.