The Big Divide between Self-Efficacy and Self-Confidence and Why It Matters!
😊🧠⭐️👉🏼(I've made a commitment to write a meaningful post every couple of days so here we go). Today's topic: Self-Confidence VS Self-Efficacy. One can be self-confident but lack self-efficacy. Self-confidence is a general belief that you are smart/competent/attractive. But self-efficacy refers to your belief in the ability to accomplish and see to the end a specific task the solution to which is not apparent at first (or even second) sight. For example, one can be sure that they are very intelligent, but when actually faced with a problem the solution to which is not obvious, especially if that problem lyes outside one's domain of expertise (there is an issue with the computer for example, and that person just does not see themselves as a computer-expert by any stretch of imagination, or a problem involving math unexpectedly presents, and that person just doesn't think of themselves as a "math person"), that generally self-confident individual will either immediately through their hands up in the air or, at best, give the problem a couple of superficial attempts just to clear his/her consciousness that they tried, and start either looking for help, or seeing how they can "do without" whatever it is that's not working out.
I noticed that this is often the case with me. So, I started forcing myself to stay on tasks that I believed I did not have enough knowledge to complete. As a result, I was amazed to discover that a strange thing happened: what I expected to be a painful and hopeless experience all the way to the end, very shortly after starting and staying on it, moved from it's painful, hopeless initial phase to a real state of flow! Yes, an inspiring state of flow while working on the thing I initially desperately avoided, despised, hated, got frustrated and annoyed about! It was such a revelation the first time it happened that after that first experience immediately went ahead and did two more things that I was putting off until I could find someone to help me with them, and succeeded at them all! But let's face it, yes, success is not always guaranteed, no matter how self-efficacious you become. But it's not just that! Another example: With my newly found (or forced, initially) self-efficacy, I tried to remove a very sophisticated computer virus that I've lived with for almost a year (it doesn't destroy your computer, but just remains there no matter what, and causes small annoyances, and no, you can't just delete it and remove it from the recycling bin). With no real online tutorials on its removal available, I set out to destroy it myself. After checking and altering every possible function that could influence this virus it did seemingly disappear but then re-emerged a few days later. I still live with it, but in the process of its removal I learned so many functions and settings that I did not suspect existed or that I thought were just automatic and I had no control over! I now customized my computer in a way that is just right for me, and discovered a lot of functions and settings that may prove useful in the future. So whether or not you succeed at a given task, self-efficacy is always a good thing, and failure, if it happens after these kinds of real, patient, purposeful attempts to succeed (and not just surrendering right away), is a learning experience! It is precisely THIS kind of failure that all the motivational quotes talk about when they say that failure is a stepping stone to success. Self-efficacy should not be confused with self-confidence. Without self-efficacy, any self-confidence turns into shallow, surface-level self-assuredness, which actually leads to avoidance of any challenging tasks as they risk to undermine that person's façade of intelligence and expertise (closely related to this is the concept of fixed mindset). Even writing this long post took some self-efficacy as, at the beginning, I just had a few amorphous, disorganized thoughts in my head about how self-efficacy and self-confidence are different things and a couple of my own experiences, and I believed it's been too long since I wrote anything non-directed, of my own accord, but I just started and continued and here we go!
