by Cathy Fyock @CathyFyock
“I think I can! I think I can!” said The Little Engine That
Could. The Little Engine believed that she could do it—that she had the smarts
to figure it out and the persistence to keep at it. She had a quality that
social cognitive theorists call self-efficacy,
and it’s the same trait that enables us to achieve our big goals—like writing
our books.
Self-efficacy is an
individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to
produce specific performance attainments wrote Albert Bandura
in his 1977, 1986, and 1997 research findings. It’s the confidence we need in
our abilities to be able to exert control over our motivations, behaviors, and
social environments.
