Self-Efficacy and Other “Best Kept Secrets” to Success

How often do you steel a quick glance around of your peers to pass a judgment on their progress in relation to yours? While there is no way that we can know what other folks have going on, inevitably we measure ourselves to our perception of their accomplishments. To imply otherwise is, in my opinion, a lie. The intention can be there, right? “Don’t look at what others are doing”. “Just focus on your path”. The energy sent out to “read the room” could have been used to keep progressing your journey. Yes, comparison is the thief of joy. It also happens to be a very normal, human thing to do nonetheless.

When we pop our head up during an exam to note the temperature of the room at large (is everyone else sweating profusely, too?) it either affirms or upset our current progress. In the real world, though, we’re surrounded by a bunch of folks masking their real experience as a way of maintaining social norms. It’s all cool and great, but somewhere along the way we might feel further behind because the masks that we see mute the internal screams of panic that everyone else is also screaming.

Through these same masks, coaches tout their methods- affirming the value of buying into their particular program. Let them tell you how to live and you’ll certainly end up looking just like them*.

With great power comes great responsibility. Unfortunately, the coaching industry’s exponential growth moment has not come with regulation. As a result, we’ve ended up with harm done and poorly researched information disseminated. The coaching industry can be highly toxic at it’s worst. Because we don’t make money when you don’t spend money on us, coaches are likely to retain you through disempowering practices that keep y’all feeling incapable of “going at it on your own”.

Below, you’ll find a quick list of real, results driving practices that are free to explore and readily a part of your self-preservation toolbox already :)

Self Efficacy

Self efficacy is a belief that you can persevere. We are able to adapt through the constant process of learning, failing, recounting, and realigning to attempt better outcomes. When we are inundated with imagery that reflects the oxymoron that everyone else is okay and succeeding alongside the impossibility of making ends meet in this current capitalist culture, the essence of self efficacy is harder to adopt.

Us believing that we can persist, regardless of past failures, is a manifestation of “the american dream”. As an institution, America was founded on the backs of othering, subversion, and abuse. The American dream was established for the folks who reaped the rewards of the systematic subjugation and abuse of anyone else who didn’t fit that mold. Due to the deep seated fractures in our current state of things, self efficacy became a privilege only affirmed for the few that were given the advantage of believing that they could.

The brain constructs its reality based on continually confirmed behaviors by the folks who rear you and the community that you’re brought up in. These realities create a unique system of optimization for resources that the command center needs to survive each day. At this point in late-stage capitalism, we are all targeted by strategic marketing boosted by research that has proven the mechanisms for human behavior. Us believing that we can persevere is something that disrupts the system enough- not all can, otherwise the system will collapse. It wasn’t built for one-for-all.

When your systems optimization methods don’t quite mesh well with practices that will yield positive results, it takes an extra effort to unlearn and relearn in a new way. Humans who are categorically kept from equal access are immediately at a disadvantage from believing that they can. It’s exhausting. Now that megacorporations have the research and the tools to keep us looking away from the “man behind the curtain”, our global sense of self-efficacy feels at-risk.

To recenter yourself and your outcomes, consider all of the trials you’ve overcome so far. When you find yourself in a rut, return to examples of times that you’ve felt the same and ended up with a positive outcome. Persistence doesn’t have to be grandiose, it can be simply getting up and completing the intentions for the day when you were particularly dark, ya know? Wins are wins, you’ve made it this far, and you can keep making it onward as a result.

Agency

A sense of agency, I believe, is our easy act of revolution. Agency is our sense of self-determination. When we feel “agency”, we see ourselves in the driver’s seat. We are the director, the performer, and the audience determining the success of the performance. Our agency is taken from us when we’re constantly inundated with messaging that leaves us feeling helpless. Whether it’s content that we directly engage with or the sounds, sites, and sensations that surround us regularly, it’s easy to have taken when we’re most vulnerable.

Us reclaiming our sense of agency is us returning to our roots, serving our needs, and standing in our power. We aren’t ideal consumers when we are in our skin, on our feet, and thriving. We are sold on dreams that we’re told to have, and encouraged to match and outdo our peers in the rat race for attention. Not only do we need to carry the burden of the daily stress of showing up right, we also end up exhausted in our pursuit of some ideal that we believe we need to experience.

We can begin to reclaim our sense of agency from within. Our thoughts become our words which are spoken into action which persist as habits and we leave this earthly form by way of the legacy that those actions have left. When I’m feeling particularly disempowered, I’ll imagine my perfect day. “Your Perfect Day” exercise is meant to inspire the steps necessary to get you from the moment you’re in and to motivate you towards just where you can go. Imagine your perfect day, take note of the sounds, the locations, the feelings, and (most importantly) the actions that you take to make that day most perfect. How do you get there? What can you do this month, this week, this day to realize that dream? That’s action, that’s agency. Uncontrollables aside, knowing just how much you can influence your outcomes is addictive.

Simplicity

Finally, and one of my hardest pills to swallow: Simplicity. The quality of being easy to understand or to do except as it pertains to personal growth. Everyone has an opinion and, if you open yourself up to those opinions, you may be at risk of having your own opinions elbowed out. For those of us who can’t quite accept things at face value and who worry that the simplest solution might, in fact, be the most negligent, accepting simplicity is scary.

For a broader system that gives all voices something like a platform, elevating the most clickable and provocative voices, simplicity isn’t sexy so it’s unworthy of amplification. Other than the clickbait-devoid-ness of simplicity, the hyper-productivity driven information economy relegates simplicity to the margins, unworthy of a second glace. That’s it, that’s the post. Simplicity doesn’t play into the narratives that want confusion in order to facilitate buy-in for the solution.

When we’re just setting out on a fresh day, there may be a million things we want to do, there may be a handful of things we need to do, and there may be the grey area tasks that we neither want to nor need to do (but that we might be more than happy to use to procrastinate). It’s useful to map out this brain clutter into a handful of buckets: high priority, low priority, exciting, distracting. Categorizing the mish-mash in our brains is a helpful way to simplify, to clarify the intentions of our actions, and make the choices that will most efficiently get us where we need to go so that we can exist how we want.

All in all, and if you’ve gotten this far, remember that you are the driver of your life. You have all of the tools, they just may take a bit more practice than you expect. Believe in you, advocate for your best interests, and watch your energies shift :)

Learning Behavior Change

Being healthy and cultivating a long, full life can feel like a Sisyphean feat in the world that we’re living in. The world in which we’ve readily become “Human Resources” for a productivity driven, output hungry, insatiable machine. Not only is our work-life harmony more like a cacophony- what little free time we do have is consumed with advertisements and low-hanging, low-quality gratification. Everyone is trying to sell you something and, even if they don’t make the sale, they’re profited off of monopolizing your limited attention resources.

Each year, we’re provided a small handful of “change moments”- holidays or key moments to get excited about “beginning again”. The New Year, a birthday, a new semester, Mondays- all examples of the “start” that we crave when we’ve decided that we’re ready to make a change (just not ready enough to do it right then). Inevitably, if we do step up to the “start”, we do so ready to capitalize on the collective enthusiasm to carry us through the perceived “finish line”.

So often, though, the wave fizzles out and we’re left to paddle onward. Without some form of planning and preparation, our compass malfunctions. If we haven’t charted the course, we’re left to paddle aimlessly, hoping to catch the next wave going in the “right direction”. The energy lost in the confusion could have been a valuable resource on the path to achievement. All of that to say this: behavior change is a series of skills practices until they become automated.

We perform best at tasks that we don’t have to think so hard about. We love a “path of least resistance”, especially in our society. That’s why we’re so easily sold on quick-fixes which, in turn, leave us jaded about the whole journey anyway. So let’s, for a moment, reframe the behavior change process as a skills practice.

How Memories are Made

When experience events, our senses perceive a handful of tidbits about the environment. From that initial encounter, we retain a smaller handful of tidbits that we then either synthesize or toss away. From short-term memory, the elite few get to stick around in the long-term memory, ready for recall at a moment’s notice.

Our brains can store so much information the way that it does because it categorizes elements of experience and connects them through relationships. The more we feed any given category, the better established it’s complexities become in our understanding. We build new skills that are considered procedural memory- we get better at them the more we do them. Though it might feel defeating to practice the habit at it’s outset, the demonstrated process of “learning until expertise” is undeniable. As a result, changing behaviors requires the simplest and most specific approach possible so as to leave no margin for error.

Getting SMART

This is why SMART goals are such a pervasive part of organizational development. Goals need to have specificity, there needs to be some sort of measure of success. They need to be achievable, relevant to the big picture, and set to be timely with deadline. The whole of my twenties was saturated with nonspecific goals that left me adrift over and over again. Setting goals without SMART-support is a resource-drain- it’s the well-intentioned friend offering to help without really intending to help, ya know? It’s that well-intentioned friend that’ll reach out while your floundering to offer support- “just let me know what I can do”.

We can set ourselves up for better success by taking big goals and making them small and by taking the small goals and making them smaller. When we get granular on our goals and values-in-action, we provide ourselves an exponentially larger toolbox of small steps to pull from. Getting miniscule means that, within the grains, you’ll be better prepared for challenges before they’ve come up, as well.

The practice of getting SMART, though, takes focus, patience, and resilience. The noise of commercials and gurus, along with the typical drags of the workday, distract and numb us from turning in. So getting SMART also involves finding and filtering out the noise that keeps you from accomplishing what you set out to do.

Learning to Love Learning

Most coaching certifying bodies that I’ve seen leverage the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (TTM) framework. TTM is a model of behavior change that follows stages of change from “pre-contemplation” (no awareness or intention to change) all the way through “action” and involves both “maintenance” and “relapse” phases of making change.

We don’t know what we don’t know until we do. Once we’re irrevocably aware of the circumstances that need a shift, our inertia (precontemplation) is enlivened with potential energy (contemplation). The vigor of what comes next is big and daunting. Preparation is fun! But when you’re unsure where to start, seeking resources to inform and educate your path is your strength. While the internet may be bad for many things, it’s certainly a great way to access any bit of known knowledge at super speed. This is where coaches come in- they assist with the planning process if your process isn’t cutting it for you. Once you’ve got your prepped list, you’re ready to take action.

Practice makes permanence and those actions need to happen regularly and with fluidity to adjust as necessary in order for a behavior to really stick. If not, we lose steam quickly and revert to our former pathways. This consistency is a learned skill all the same. As such, it’s important to plan for relapse with grace and purpose instead of letting it snag you. Reframing “loss of direction” or “falling off the wagon” as “discovering doesn’t work” is one way to begin to break the cycle.

Learning can reliably be disappointing- that’s what makes the successes so sweet. Taking steps to facilitate growth and change in your life is the highest form of self-regard. You’ve got to look out for your future self, even just a little bit, in order to realize the vision of who that future self is to you, ya know?

Mindfulness for Beginners

What is MBSR

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a practice in being aware as moments unfold. MBSR offers an opportunity to leverage the tools we have on-hand (our consciousness) to be unhindered by both the anxieties of what has been and the concerns for what will be. In an over-stimulated society, practicing mindfulness through the easiest framework possible can feel like a breath of fresh air.

How the Body Handles Stress

When the body absorbs stimuli, our sense systems identify the threat’s potential and proceeds accordingly. When talking about stress response, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is our central driver. The hypothalamus is the systems central operation controlling temperature, hunger, and heart rate. The pituitary gland recieves signals to start production and circulation of hormones to the body and the adrenals via secretion of the stress hormones necessary to prime our bodies to react.

Our two most common stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, serve the purpose to get you up and going as well as keeping the system on alert after initial response. When that initial adrenaline pump fades away, the cortisol of the body continues to pump through the system supporting circulation, respiration, and musculoskeletal alertness.

Because we are constantly on-guard and assessing the stimulus around us, high or recurring systemic cortisol is not an uncommon experience. We are, essentially, trapped in our fight or flight response by the design of the society in which we live. So how can we return to grounding in a way that is not daunting and that is accessible?

4-Fast Tips to Ground

Take Inventory of the Present Moment

We are one set of eyes in a vast universal experience. All at once, this moment unfolds for and impacts an un-quantifiable number of other humans. Sometimes simply taking a second to take inventory moment over moment can be enough to return to the now and peel away from the concerns of what was or what will.

Observe Judgments, Emotions, & Resistance

As the seer, it is our ego’s contribution to keep us narrating, identifying, and affiliating with the concepts that come to mind. Pattern recognition is an important part of operating efficiently in the world that we exist in. While wonderful and with purpose, pattern recognition at all times is exhausting. The practice of noticing patterns can be enough to cut off intrusive thoughts and repetitive inner discourse.

Engage With Their Implications

While we dialogue internally between our observer and our narrator, having taken inventory and observed the narrator’s contributions to the present response to the present moment, we can begin to realize what is us and what is not us. More often than not, so much of what we assign to us is, in fact, not us. We are the sum of those that we interact with the most- the people, places, and things that operate around us have such a significant influence on our concept of self. Just taking the step back to see the historical pattern play out can also be enough to cut off overthinking or unproductive internal rumination.

Explore Opportunity to Step Into New Patterns

I often refer to this yogic concept of Samskaras- these wheels of suffering that we persistently ride on. Suffering (Dukkha) is inevitable, we are a logical narrator tacked on to an irrational animal form- both the horse and the rider- a match made in hell if I do say so myself.

Choices are made for us (both external and internal) when we lack the practice of awareness to find which choices we can in fact choose for ourselves, we become stuck to this treadmill of the same stimulus leading to the same outcome further ingraining our patterns and our suffering.

By this point, perhaps headway has been made, perhaps how you began is how you remain. What is worth noting is this- if you’ve taken the time to observe, to dis-associate, and to explore new oprtions- you’ve done the practice. It is a practice not a perfect because it may not be the first nor fiftieth time that yields a breakthough, but it may be that fifty-first, ya know?

Simply trying is the first step- failure, missteps, disappointments are inevitable- but sitting put and accepting the outcomes without agency will certainly yield no progress.