Albert Bandura, a psychologist from Stanford University, defined self-efficacy as a belief in our own ability to succeed, and our ability to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. This belief has a huge impact [read more]]]> Self-Confidence and Self-Efficacy

Part of being self-motivated is having good levels of self-assurance, self-confidence, and self-efficacy.

Albert Bandura, a psychologist from Stanford University, defined self-efficacy as a belief in our own ability to succeed, and our ability to achieve the goals we set for ourselves. This belief has a huge impact on your approach to goal setting and your behavioral choices as you work toward those goals.

Being highly self-assured means you will set challenging goals for yourself, and it’s also a resiliency factor for when you encounter setbacks. If you don’t believe in yourself you’ll be much more likely to think, “I knew I couldn’t do this” instead of, “This one failure isn’t going to stop me!”

According to Bandura’s research, high self-efficacy results in an ability to view difficult goals as a challenge, whereas people with low self-efficacy would likely view the same goals as being beyond their abilities, and might not even attempt to achieve them.

It also contributes to how much effort a person puts into a goal in the first place, and how much he or she perseveres despite setbacks.

How Self Confidence Works

By developing a general level of self-confidence in yourself, you will not only believe you can succeed, but you’ll also recognize and enjoy the successes you’ve already had, which will inspire you to take action build on those successes. The momentum created by self-confidence is hard to beat.

Take these steps:

• Take time to stop and deliberately remember different achievements in your life. Do this frequently.
• Examine your strengths, to understand what you can build on.
• Determine what other people see as your strengths and key capabilities.
• Set achievable goals for yourself, work to achieve them, and enjoy that achievement.
• Seek out mentors and other people who model the competencies, skills, and attributes you desire.
• As you begin to recognize how much you’ve already achieved – and understand how much potential you have – you will have the confidence to set goals and achieve
• the things you desire. The more you look for reasons to believe in yourself, the easier it will be to find ways to motivate yourself.

Building self-confidence puts you firmly on the path to self-assurance and self-efficacy.

Positive Thinking, and Positive Thinking About the Future

“Your life today is the result of your attitudes and choices in the past. Your life tomorrow will be the result of your attitudes and the choices you make today.”
- Author Unknown

Positive thinking is closely related to self-confidence as a factor in self-motivation. It’s important to look at things positively, especially when things aren’t going as planned and you’re ready to give up.

If you think that things are going to go wrong, or that you won’t succeed, this may influence your behavior in such a way that your predictions will come true. This is particularly the case if you need to work hard to achieve success, or if you need to persuade others to support you in order to succeed. Your thoughts can have a major influence on whether you succeed or fail, so make sure those thoughts are “on your side.”

Positive thinking also helps you think about an attractive future that you want to realize. When you expect positive results, your choices will be more positive, and you’ll be less likely to leave outcomes to fate or chance. Having a vivid picture of success, combined with positive thinking, helps you bridge the gap between wanting something and being willing to invest the action necessary to go out to get it.

To apply “the power of positive thinking”, do the following:

• Become aware of your thoughts. Write down these down throughout the day.
• Self-Confidence and Self-Efficacy Challenge your negative thoughts, and replace them with positive ones.
• Create a strong and vivid picture of what it will be like to achieve your goals.
• Develop affirmations or statements that you can repeat to yourself throughout the day. These statements should remind you of what you want to achieve, and why you will achieve it.
• Practice positive thinking until you automatically think about yourself and the world in a positive way, every day.

Strong Goals and Focus

As I said above, a key part of building self-confidenceis to start setting strong goals. Self-confidence doesn’t come in a vacuum, and needs to be based on real accomplishments, and everyone has them. But we frequently tend to overlook our achievements, and focus on our failures. Focusing on your achievements gives you focus, a clear sense of direction, and the self-confidence that comes from recognizing your own achievement.

First, determine your direction through effective goal setting.

To set comprehensive goals in all areas of your life, use our Life Plan Workbook.

When you set a goal, you make a promise to yourself. Part of the strength of this is that it gives you a clear direction. Part is that you’ve made this promise to yourself, and you’ll want to keep this promise. And part is that it’s a challenge, and it’s fun to try to meet that challenge!

But don’t set just any goal. According to Locke’s goal-setting theory, your goal should have the following characteristics:

When you have a variety of goals, be sure to schedule your time and resources effectively. You can achieve the “focus” part of self-motivation by prioritizing, and by establishing a schedule that will help you succeed. It doesn’t make sense to work until you’re exhausted or give up one goal to achieve another.

Using tools like the Urgent/Important Matrix and the Action Priority Matrix, you can quickly and easily see how each goal activity fits into the bigger picture of your overall objectives. If you fully understand your priorities, you probably won’t feel as pressured to do everything at once. This can reduce stress and help you to concentrate on the most important strategies.

See our article on Prioritization for a summary, and for links to our top time management and prioritization tools.

4. Motivating Environment

The final thing to focus on is surrounding yourself with people and resources that will remind you of your goals, and help you with your internal motivation. These are external factors – they’ll help you get motivated from the outside, which is different from the internal motivation we’ve discussed so far. However, the more factors you have working for you, the better.

You can’t rely on these “environmental” or outside elements alone to motivate you, but you can use them for extra support. Try the following:

Look for team work opportunities. Working in a team makes you accountable to others.
Ask your boss for specific targets and objectives to help you measure your success.
Ask for interesting assignments. See our article on Maximizing Job Satisfaction for tips on getting the most from your job.
Set up some goals that you can easily achieve. Quick wins are great for getting you motivated.
Buddy up with people who you trust to be supportive, and ask them to help keep you accountable.
Try not to work by yourself too much. Balance the amount of time you work from home with time spent working with others.
When you start your self-motivation program, you may tend to rely heavily on these external factors. As you get more comfortable and confident with your self-motivation, you’ll probably use them only as needed, and for a little extra help.

Key points:

• Depending on your early programming, self-confidence may not come naturally to you. Even those who are highly self-confident need some extra help every now and then.
• Build your self-confidence by (a) practicing goal-setting skills, (b) combining those intentionally running positive thoughts about your competence, achievements and potential through your mind, (c) creating powerful visions of success, and (c) building of high levels of self-efficacy and self-confidence.
• Your attitude and beliefs about your likelihood of success can predict whether or not you actually succeed. Set goals, and work hard to achieve them. Examine ways to improve your self-motivation, and regularly reassess your motivation levels. If you actively keep your internal motivation high, you can significantly increase the likelihood of achieving your hopes, dreams, and visions of the future.

For [read more]]]> One of the best ways for any of us to get motivated is to see something work. Seeing is believing, and there’s no shortage of occasions throughout history where a once seemingly impossible achievement is conquered, it became almost common for people to achieve it.

For example, Roger Bannister (who is still alive, by the way) breaking the 4 minute mile in 1954 seemingly opened the flood gates for the feat. While athletes have certainly benefited from improvements in training and nutrition, it’s still surprising to me at least that although no one had accomplished the feat prior to that time, since then 955 runners have achieved the impossible dream accomplishing the feat an incredible 4700+ times. Belief makes many more things possible.

My point is that having success, however small or insignifant it may seem, breeds success. How should that affect our actions today? Achieving some smaller goal or milestone, however minor or insignificant, to build on makes reaching the larger, more difficult goal much easier.

Want to start a workout program? Successfully take a 2 block walk for 5 days in a row to get started. Want to get out and meet more people? Take one evening to attend one event of your choosing (church, singles related, some club, etc) to get the ball rolling. Build on small successes.

It’s so common to look at a goal, particularly a legitimately large goal, and feel like it’s overwhelming which then stops us in our tracks. But if we can get that first small success under our belt to get some momentum going, and to help us begin to believe the goal is really possible, the chances of reaching it improve greatly.

Start small, and get some success toward your goal each day.

Restated in a slightly different way, [read more]]]> Setting goals, making plans, keeping focus, visualizing the outcome, all the things that we know about the value and benefits of setting Goals comes down to one simple principle. It is:

• Where we want to go tomorrow, drives what we need to be doing today

Restated in a slightly different way, where we want to be TOMORROW will be determined by what we do TODAY.

It’s like a rule of human behavior: future intent determines present action. Where we want to be is the key factor in driving what we need to be doing today. That’s why if you want to know how someone really feels about something, pay attention to what they do, not what they say. If their actions don’t reflect a geniune intent to make something happen, we can be certain that it won’t.

The reason reading blogs and websites like this one is important is that this kind of idea, this line of thinking or belief, is critical to making the right choices. Once we understand what the rules are, once we believe in the right principles, taking the correct action becomes easy.

Remember though, we do still have to take the right action! I think the missing ingredient from The Secret was the fact that, as Einstein once said, “Nothing happens until something moves”. I’m not aware of any repeatable scientific evidence which shows that sitting and wishing for something is sufficient to make it happen. But when we marry the right thoughts to simple regular action, the results become virtually inevitable.

Thinking makes it so. That’s why successful people are able to remain successful. They think better than others do. How they think about money, service, work, planning and setting goals leads them to make better decisions and get better results.

1. We have an idea, epiphany or “ah ha!” moment when you are certain that your life would be [read more]]]> It seems there’s a natural progression or trend to virtually any aspiration, desire, target or dare I say it …. personal goal. I think it goes something like this:

1. We have an idea, epiphany or “ah ha!” moment when you are certain that your life would be better with (or without) something (less weight, more money, better relationship, better job, etc).

2. The energy produced by the idea in #1 is channeled and we create a plan to achieve our goal, either in our head or on paper.

3. We set about implementing the steps in our plan, with the determination and enthusiasm of Rudy (click here if you’re not familiar with this notorious sports reference).

4. Now somewhere around week 2, we realize we’ve been working at this hard, with true passion and zeal, and nothing (or not much) is happening (how can this be?).

5. Despite a voice in your head saying “these things take time”, you begin to reevaluate your priorities, rethink your epiphany and weigh just how important this goal really is.

6. A few more days go by, your effort lessens a little, still no results or rewards, and it’s becoming even more likely that this wasn’t such a great idea.

7. Finally somewhere around week 2 – 4 resignation sets in, we made a minor miscalculation in the assessment phase of this goal, and we decide that we really didn’t want it that bad after all.

Maybe this isn’t exactly you, but it’s a fairly typical model for how alot of people approach goal setting and making changes in their lives. You don’t have to look any farther than New Year’s Resolutions to see that this is true. Research tells us that at least 80% of all such resolutions are broken by Jan 31, and in fact 90% are abandoned by Jan 15 if they are related to health and fitness activities.

Sounds grim, I know. However the truth, as they say, will set your free. Realizing this pattern, this tendency, can allow us to go into the goal plan with the proper mindset and attitude to greatly increase our chances for success. Following these 3 simple steps will provide you with ammunition to deal with disappointment, disillusionment and frustration.

1. Take the long term view.

It’s not news that we’ve all to some degree joined the immediate gratification, “get ______ quick” (fill in the blank as you choose) society, and that leads to unrealistic expectations and the wrong attitude. Before you decide to pursue this goal, consider whether it’s worth turning into a life habit, or at least whether you’re willing to do whatever it takes to achieve it.

2. Decide if you’re willing to invest effort over an extended period of time without getting results.

Similar to the immediate gratification idea in #1 above, this relates to the principle of deferred gratification – being willing to put off reward today in return for greater rewards later. It’s a rock solid principle (think college education, retirement savings plan or regular exercise), but it does fly in the face of immediate download movies on cable tv or “pizza in 30 minutes or it’s free” (or whatever the ad says). The easy stuff comes quickly, but many times the good stuff isn’t easy.

3. Recognize and prepare for “The Dip”.

One of my favorite authors, Seth Godin, coined this phrase (I think) in his book of the same title. The point of the book is that it can be smart to know when to quit, which I agree with. But the greater message in my opinion was that most people quit when things get tough, frustrating, don’t show progress, etc, and that’s exactly where the opportunity lies. Following through on worthwhile goals that most people give up on is one of the things that makes the achievement so valuable. We do, however, have to be willing to stick it out through “the dip”, that phase where the progress is hard, the rewards are not obvious and it’s easier to rationalize the goal and give up.

I like the analogy of the artist who loves sculpture. He meticiously strikes the rock in just the right place over and over, until it finally cracks in perfect form. The last strike was the one that seemed to produce the results, but in fact it was no more important than every one that preceded it. But he had to hang in there as long as it took.

Other tips include picking things that are attainable, create a system that encourages you to include these things in your day, utilize some form of accountability partner and track or measure your progress. But start by taking the long term view and plan to invest your effort as long as it takes, even without measurable reward, through the hard times. This is a good test to determine if you’re really committed to the goal, and if you decide to proceed then you’ll find your success rate at achieving your personal goals is quite good!