Think about where you have succeeded, your role models, and how they would go to war and win. PHOTO | FILE
By SCOTT BELLOWS
In Summary
- Doubts are normal. Even Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Michael Joseph, and Jomo Kenyatta entertained self doubts.
Continuing with the case of Kimbio pitching his
business concept to NaiLab that we discussed in last week’s Business
Talk, he lacked the confidence to stand before the investors and
financiers to pitch his business idea.
In high stakes scenarios, positive self-talk can boost the
brain’s confidence. More confidence leads to self-efficacy. Famed
Stanford University researcher Bandura developed the concept of
self-efficacy that refers to an individual’s belief in his or her
capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance
achievements.
Self-efficacy reflects someone’s confidence in
their ability to exert control over his or her own motivation,
behaviour, and social environment. Someone’s self-perceptions influence
all manner of our human experience, including our goals, amount of
energy used toward goal attainment, and likelihood of reaching
particular heights of behavioural performance.
Syracuse University psychologists Carey and Forsyth
even state that self-efficacy can be effectively used to improve even
considerably more complicated life problems than presentations such as
self-management of chronic disease, smoking cessation, alcohol intake
reduction or elimination, controlled eating, pain mitigation, and
exercise motivation for obese individuals.
So how can Kimbio harness the power of enhanced
self-efficacy in order to perform during his presentation at NaiLab?
First, he must remember intentionality. He must actually work towards
it, but not in simplistic terms.
He should not just practise and practise it over
and over again haphazardly. Ideally, Kimbio would benefit from specific
steps towards self-efficacy.
Angie LeVan of the University of Pennsylvania
delineated a seven-step towards increased self-efficacy that leads to
higher performance. First, imagine your past successes throughout your
life. Actively ruminate on times when you succeeded at completing when
you had initially not thought you could do so. Ponder those times
intentionally.
Spend 20 minutes regularly thinking about those
moments. What was it that you accomplished? How could you glean aspects
from those successes into your future aspirations? Do those
achievements point to a reality whereby you can achieve, succeed, and
thrive?
Second, build your repertoire of successes. If you
desire to achieve a large success, like Kimbio pitching in front of many
investors, then you must build smaller successes.
First pick a small element, like good eye contact, a
verbal tone of confidence, hand movements, not reading your slides,
among others.
Then practice them intentionally in different
settings with feedback from others. Build the successes through the
practice or actual business use of the changes. Small successes build
self-efficacy to make bigger changes. Achieve changes step by step over
time.
Third, think of someone you admire. You may know
them personally or know a lot about them through the media. It should be
someone with whom you identify. If you do, then you are more keen to
believe that you, too, can achieve what they have achieved.
You can vicariously, as Angie LeVan states, bolster
your sense of self-efficacy by imagining your success as possible like
your role models.
The fourth step sounds slightly insane. Solid
sturdy business professionals may initially balk at the idea. However,
remember that a disconnect exists between what science knows and what
businesses actually do. So, fourth, practice mental imagery.
Mentally practice executing a particular task. Visualise successfully completing that task.
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