Do you welcome and rise to challenges? Or do you avoid them at all costs? How you approach challenges is an indicator of your degree of self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their ability to succeed in a particular situation or their belief in their ability to achieve certain goals for themselves, such as losing weight. In order to be successful at weight loss, you have to have confidence and a belief in your ability to reach your goal.
Too little or too much confidence gets in the way of success. Research shows that self-efficacy is one of the primary indicators of whether people achieve their weight loss goals. If we don’t have enough confidence and self-efficacy, we will quit as soon as we encounter an obstacle, or we won’t exert the necessary effort because we don’t believe we will be successful anyway.
Overconfidence leads to failure with weight loss, and other life goals. As soon as we think we’ve got something handled, we tend to become less vigilant and diligent, and this leads to a slip up or even failure.
Therefore, it’s important to have the right amount of confidence and humility so that we can continue to learn throughout the weight loss process and make the necessary adjustments that will lead to our eventual success.
Psychologist Albert Bandura states that self-efficacy impacts our moods, behavior, and our level of motivation.
People who have high levels of self-efficacy are:
- Confident in their abilities
- Feel they can reach their goals
- Easily recover from setback and disappointments
- Have high levels of focus and commitment towards their goals
People with low levels of self-efficacy:
- Get frustrated easily
- Lose motivation and focus quickly
- Focus on their failings and perceived flaws
- Quickly lose confidence in their ability to reach their goals
