How many of us ever really come to know the true limits of our capability? How often do we test those limits? How many of us take our potential to the grave? The often-touted claim that we only use ten per cent of our brain may in fact be a myth. However, many of us will admit that at some time in our lives, we’ve passed on opportunities for extension; opportunities that would challenge us and push us beyond the edge of our comfort zone, but on the positive side, lift us to new heights, lead us to resist defeat, to discover new capabilities, to excel or just capture a bigger piece of the action.
Our willingness to step up to a challenge, according to Albert Bandura who studied academic efficacy in children and adolescents, is directly linked to self-efficacy or the belief that one can produce the desired effect as a result of one’s actions. Without that belief, there is little incentive or motivation to take action. Bandura claims that self-efficacy, and its underlying belief system, influences our “aspirations and strength of goal commitments, level of motivation and perseverance in the face of difficulties and setbacks, resilience to adversity, quality of analytic thinking, causal attributes for successes and failures, and vulnerability to stress and depression”.
There are always a few rumblings about the factors that negatively impact the development of self-efficacy: the flawed education system, the teachers who beat or humiliated us or parents who didn’t understand the power of positive reinforcement. Or perhaps our biological or physiological make-up is flawed. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence to support the link between early socialisation and efficacy in adults. And no-one would dispute the physiological component […]
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