There is a direct correlation between skill and confidence. It is a feedback loop: reaching competence in a domain informs the general confidence levels and vice versa. For this reason, it is extremely important to measure steps in the training process to be certain of your abilities when it is time to implement them.
Psychologist Albert Bandura coined the term Self-Efficacy. It refers to the belief of a person to succeed in any particular situation. He claimed that individuals develop their self-efficacy beliefs by interpreting information from four main sources of influence:
1. Mastery experiences (Performance outcomes): regularly achieving easy success with little outcome dooms people to expect rapid results, and the product of this is being easily discouraged by failure. To contrast this behavior, Bandura suggests engaging in constant achieving of hard skills through vigorous practice. By regularly chasing new abilities and successfully getting them, an individual becomes someone capable of finishing a task and acquiring any new skill, so he starts seeing himself as such.
2. Vicarious experiences (social role models): “another way that a person can build self-efficacy is by witnessing demonstrations of competence by people who are similar to them” (Bandura, 2008). By witnessing the author’s success through dedicated efforts, the observer comes to believe that they too can achieve their goals. Seeing positive models in their lives, people come to absorb those positive beliefs in relation to themselves.
3. Social persuasion: receiving positive verbal feedback. A social group, and/or a teacher, should help recognize opportunities for development and offer encouragement in the process.
4. Emotional and physiological states: our emotions, moods, and physical states affect how we perceive our self-efficacy. “People with chronically low mood are likely to give up on goals sooner and demonstrate a reluctance to even take up goals in the first place” (Bandura, 2008). Introspection and constant monitoring of the physical state will help an individual to not interpret negatively these states and navigate within the naturally occurring oscillations without losing the capacity to be efficient.
The structure by which we organize the learning process in The Bamboo Body is supporting all four elements of Bandura’s theory. The more you are getting exposed to different tasks and succeed at them (no matter the complexity or time frame), the more you start thinking of yourself as a person who is capable of efficiently learning new skills and finishing what you started. It elevates the levels of motivation to pursue any other endeavor in life. It is important, however, to make sure that the skills that are being developed are measured in a coherent way so when there is a moment to actually perform them (a wet test, so to speak), you are absolutely confident of your abilities and not being paralyzed by fear or anxiety. Failure to do so can undermine self-confidence and hijack future learning.
We implement different strategies to measure skill efficiency during the process of its development. First of all, it is important to start learning a new skill in a safe environment where errors do not have a high cost and then progress into more and more complex situations. For example, if you learn a precision jump, it makes much more sense to start learning it using something like a line on the floor instead of going directly to a stair or a rail where serious damage can be done if you do not execute it correctly. It also eliminates the element of fear at the beginner stages. If you have been cheating yourself and accessing incorrectly the capacity to perform a jump in order to feel better about doing it – when you go to an environment where the stakes of improper execution are higher, a few things might occur:
- The fear that is correlated with not being sure of your skills will occur and hinder performance. This can result in long-lasting anxiety patterns that will be associated with a specific skill or even a set of skills.
- You hurt yourself – and it will have a long-lasting impact on future learning both physically and emotionally.
- You can be lucky and execute the skill right, but relying on luck is not sustainable. This is not a resource you can trust, nor use by volition. It inflates the ego and doesn’t build true self-confidence in the long run.
Fear and anxiety often come together and are hardly distinguishable. Fear was a critical theme in Greek philosophy. Aristotle stated that the complexities of the cosmos consist of pairs of opposites (e.g. hot and cold, night and day), and he conceptualized the opposite of fear as confidence. The continuous failure in executing a skill successfully results in a lack of confidence in oneself, which feeds back into fear and anxiety and creates a vicious circle that is not easy to break. Anxiety is a primary emotion that requires cognitive processing before being experienced (Woodman & Hardy, 2001). As compared to fear, which has a direct link to identifiable objects or circumstances, the source of anxiety is comparatively vague. Freud suggested that anxiety is “the evolution of fear” (Freud, 1920, p. 345). When experiencing anxiety, one perceives sensations similar to those experienced when fearful, but the anxiety experience appears more complex and less precise. Specifically, whereas people will fairly rapidly know how to avoid fear, they will less readily understand how to avoid anxiety.
To measure the state of anxiety in sports, Martens, Burton, Rivkin, and Simon (1980) constructed a test called Competitive State Anxiety Inventory, which looks at three relatively independent pre-competition subcomponents including cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety, and self-confidence. The explanation of how anxiety affects performance is closely linked to different stages of skill learning. According to the skill-focused account of anxiety-induced performance breakdown, a skilled performer has reached automaticity and is thus able to perform skills subconsciously and smoothly (Anderson, 1982; Masters, 1992). But when skilled performers are anxious, they reinvest attention on their skill by using step-by-step “rules”, which regresses skilled performance to a novel level and leads to performance impairments. If in the training process the steps we took to measure the development of the skill on every step of it, it is much more probable that the confidence of the performer will not be impaired by the raise of anxiety. Having in mind the notion of self-efficacy when approaching teaching will foster students’ capacity to perform under stress and in new situations. The actionable ways to assure the efficacy of a skill while learning it can be done following subsequent steps:
1. The process should be progressive and consist of small steps developed for each particular case. You cannot learn to walk before you learn how to stand, so it is important to understand the hierarchy of skills. The breaking down will be different for every individual, but the general step-by-step approach will ensure much better results over the long run.
2. Always delimitate specific parameters of success for every small step on the way. Tracking of the progress shouldn’t be random. A good teacher will have quality standards in place that will determine whether a pupil should move further or not. Create a system that will allow tracking the quality of success rate for each skill in the curriculum, whether it is a physical or cognitive task, and go to the next stage only when it hits this quality standard. This can be a slower process for some people, in case you see that the student struggles with something, break it down into smaller chunks so they can achieve short-term goals within the time frame that will not get them frustrated.
3. Develop a system to track the quality of every single repetition. Coming back to the example of the precision jump, you can put in place such parameters as a specific time of stabilization after landing, denominate margin for missing the target, specific coordination queues, etc. If you encourage students to measure the success of every single repetition that they do, when the time comes to test the skill outside of the training environment, they will have much more confidence in their success. There is no reason to not make it if in safer conditions you hit a 10 out of 10 success rate, and they will know it and will be able to apply themselves better in a new circumstance.
4. As we have discussed above, the social aspect of learning is incredibly important in enhancing self-efficacy. Create a support system where the students can motivate each other and give each other feedback in the process. A group setting where each of the members is encouraged to learn and develop will have a huge positive impact on the growth of the individual. Tell your students/peers about the importance of measuring the quality of the skills and their correlation to self-confidence, so they can keep one another in check while working towards the same goals.
Thinking in self-enhancing (optimistic) or self-debilitating (pessimistic) ways can influence one’s functioning. If someone believes that their actions impact their experience and the environment, they are more prone to a self-sustaining optimistic view. In other words, no matter what the circumstance is, they know that ‘something’ can be done to affect the ultimate outcome (Bandura, 1994; 2008). Enhanced self-efficiency in its turn affects our cognitive and emotional states, making us see ourselves as someone capable of learning anything new and solving any kind of problem. It will positively improve the decision-making and the general well-being of day-to-day living and will allow anyone to approach new heights of self-development. As a teacher, I find myself obliged to build a process where a person is not only exposed to new tasks and situations, but where they can build solid, measurable skills progressively, which will enhance self-efficacy and increase the positive states associated with it like a person's confidence in themselves to control their behavior, exert an influence over their environment, and stay motivated in the pursuit of their goals.