Albert Bandura proposed self-efficacy is a personal judgement of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations”. He explains that a strong belief in your inner abilities determines how you think, act, and feel about your place in the world.

Bandura is one of the most influential people in modern psychology, and according to a survey in 2002, is one of the most quoted psychologists, along with Zigmund Freid and Jean Piaget. One of his most famous quotes is “In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.”

The core is his concept is that life is not fair, we will face a lot of challenges in life and the key to success is a strong inner belief in our ability to overcome challenges, which plays a major role in how we approach goals, tasks, and everyday life challenges. Self-efficacy is a core concept in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which highlights the strong role of observational learning and social experience in the development of personality.

Social cognitive theory says our personal actions and reactions are influenced by our social surroundings, and that we subconsciously act or react on things that we observe in the people around us. Based on Bandura’s theory, people with high self-efficacy see challenging tasks as something exciting that they are ready to master. However, people with low self-efficacy feel helpless in the face of challenges and so try to avoid them.

And like a self-fulfilling prophecy, your level of self-efficacy ends up largely dictating your level of success. If you don’t believe you can succeed, then you will usually fail. So how can we increase our self-efficacy and our level of success?