How Higher Self-Efficacy Helps In Better Mental Health? #Mental Health #CauseAChatter #CampusToCorporate

According to Albert Bandura, a social cognitive psychologist, self-efficacy is defined as:

The belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.

Self-efficacy is about your belief in your abilities in dealing with different situations. It is very important to understand how self-efficacy impacts the mental health of a student, in specific. It plays a vital role in your life, as it not just affects the way you feel about yourself but also how successful you will be in your personal and professional life. It has a huge impact on your psychological state, behavior as well as on motivational level.

When a person believes in his or her own abilities to face any challenges, he or she not only become confident but will also increases their self-esteem and that will have a positive impact on their mental health. Therefore, in today’s competitive world one need to work on their self-efficacy so that they not only manages but succussed in whatever endeavours they take up.

Self-efficacy contributes to a large extent the way you set your goals, approach your tasks and deal with various challenges. A person having high self-efficacy look at things in a positive way.

• Participate in activities with deeper interest
• View problems as any other task
• Feel highly committed while indulging in any activity
• Accept disappointments and setbacks positively and recover fast
• Never blame any one for anything and believes in taking ownership
• Accept change as a part of life
• Accept failure and take it as a learning

A person with low self-efficacy looks at things in a negative way.

• Doubt their own capabilities
• Avoid challenging situations
• Lose confidence quickly
• Take failure as a personal defeat
• Get into depression and feel anxious
• Do not except change
• Stay in their comfort zone

Self-awareness is the key to success. To have a smooth transition from school to college, or campus to corporate, a students should know their strengths and weaknesses. In order to measure self-efficacy a student should undergo a self assessment test. Their are several self assessment tools available in the market but one of the most used one is “General Self-Efficacy Scale by Chen, Gully, and Eden”, It is an eight-item measure scale that assesses one’s belief that they can achieve their goals, despite whatever difficulties they may encounter or have. So how to use this Self-Efficacy Scale? The SES is designed to evaluate ten functional areas of life, and each functional area can have different survey questions.

10 Functional Areas

• Intellectual: High intellectual means, person is satisfied with his/her intellectual performance and degree of difficulty.
• Family: High family means, a person believes his family trusts him and offers him the social and emotional support he needed.
• Educational: High educational means, person is satisfied with the education he/she is receiving.
• Professional: High professional means, person is satisfied with his/her professional position and the capabilities.
• Social: High social means, person is satisfied with his/her social status and recognition.
• Religious: High religious means, person is at peace with its sanctity and belief.
• Erotic: High erotic means, person is happy with his/her intimate life.
• Moral: High moral means, person is happy with his decision on being right or wrong.
• Life: High life standard means, person is happy and satisfied with his/her personal wellbeing.
• Health: High health means, person feels good physically, mentally and emotionally.

Now the question is, how one can achieve higher self-efficacy? According to Albert Bandura, there are five sources that helps in achieving higher self efficacy.

1. Mastery through experience: One can achieve higher self efficacy if the success rate of performing the task is high.
2. Social Modelling: Seeing other’s motivates the person to perform well. Seeing people similar to yourself successfully completing the task causes you to believe in your own abilities.
3. Social encouragement: Someone persuading you or motivating you to perform well and over come self-doubt.
4. Psychological responses: Ability to succussed also depends upon our mood, emotions, physiological reactions and the amount of stress one can take.

As I said earlier self-efficacy can be done in different area and these areas can also be broken down into sub areas. For example for students there could be

Academic self-efficacy , where student’s opinion about what they can or cannot do as opposed to individual resources. Students with high self-efficacy tend to choose complex and challenging tasks while students with lower self-efficacy tend to avoid them.

The Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale, is designed to gauge someone’s self-belief that he or she can successfully navigate and make good career decisions.

The survey questions for success career self-efficacy could be

1. I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I have set for myself.
2. When facing difficult tasks, I am certain that I will accomplish them.
3. In general, I think that I can obtain outcomes that are important to me.
4. I believe I can succeed at almost any endeavor to which I set my mind.
5. I will be able to successfully overcome many challenges.
6. I am confident that I can perform effectively on many different tasks.
7. Compared to other people, I can do most tasks very well.
8. Even when things are tough, I can perform quite well.

This survey question is proposed by (New General Self-Efficacy Scale by Chen, Gully, and Eden (2001).

To calculate a score, one would take the average of all of the responses. A higher score indicates a greater self-efficacy.

Remember there is not one all-purpose measure for perceived self-efficacy. People will always differ in the areas in which they develop self-efficacy. For example, someone may have a high level of self-efficacy in their career, but a low one in something like parenting.

This post is part of the Blogchatter’s #CauseAChatter