Hi, welcome back. In the last video, I talked about agency. Really spent a lot of time on that. I also tease this idea of self-efficacy. We touched on it briefly in the last lesson. Quick review. I don't want to spend too much time on this because if you watched the last lesson, I know you did you know what self-efficacy is by now, but again, it's this functional self-awareness. It's really that idea that I can take this on and I can do this. Albert Bandura is the one that does a lot of the work in the field on self-efficacy, and it's a very powerful trait, skill to develop, and it can be developed. By now you know I like to give you a good why. Why should you be interested? Why should you want to improve your self-efficacy? We go through life and there's always storms in life. We don't get through this life where it's always smooth sailing. You've been through enough life already to know sometimes it's stormy. How do we navigate that? I'm of a firm belief that as a society we have gotten much worse at this. Much of what not only in this week, but in next week we're going to talk about is how can we navigate those storms of life better? One of the starting points is developing a higher level of self-efficacy. People that essentially have a low self-efficacy, they're going to focus on failure lot more than they do success. Again, this is human nature we have a negativity bias. Let's just throw that out there, but that doesn't mean that we have to live in that world. We do have some power over that and some control over that. Switching from that negativity bias to something more positive, self-efficacy, can really help us do that. It's the old story of, let's say I get a review for my manager, and everybody has been through these. Nine things my manager, Sally loves about me, and she lists all these nine things that I'm doing really well. Then she gives me one out of 10. But there is a room for improvement. Now maybe that's a weakness, maybe that's something I need to work on. What do I usually think about? Nothing, nine things that she said I'm doing real well. We just latch on, we velcro on to that one negative thing. With good self-efficacy, we can let go of that a lot easier. We can use it. Certainly it's useful and valuable to say, okay, this scenario I can improve. But that's not where I'm going to spend a lot of my focus. On my podcast forging metal, the signature last question that we have for every guest is saying, what is your greatest failure? What did you learn from it? The reason is it's not so much that I feel good about talking to that what I would call a successful people, and saying, hey I want to expose your failures. What I want to do is normalize this idea that even successful people fail. The sooner we embrace that the better. Again, with high self-efficacy, we take that it doesn't disrupt us nearly as much when we fail. I wouldn't say embrace failure and good high self-efficacy will help you do that in a much more healthy way. In the last video, I prep to you a little teaser question, what's the difference between self-efficacy and confidence? Is there a difference? A lot of people use these synonymously and quite honestly, that's not correct. There are subtle differences between the two. When we look at confidence and this is nondescript. What I want you to take away from this is I can have confidence. Let's say I have a presentation to do. The big presentation that I'm going to deliver presentation to the executive team. I've got some high pressure, whatever is behind that. I can have confidence that I'm going to bomb this. I can have confidence that I'm going to fail. I'm going to be horrible at this. It can be very negative. A lot of times we think confidence is always the positive, but we can be confident in a negative outcome as well, or a confidence that I don't have the skills to pull this off. That's confidence. Again, it can go either way. It can be positive or negative. We start to look at self-efficacy as more that positive. Let's go back to that example, I'm going to go into that presentation, I'm going to nail it, I'm going to do great. Hopefully you have some, let's track record to back up. I always say that self-efficacy it takes work. To get to that level we got to work at this. We don't just wing it in our good or some. I've already talked about this in previous lessons of settling in for working at what you do, hone your craft. That's how self-efficacy is going to come to you. But self-efficacy and confidence are slightly different. Just keep that in mind. As we talk about self-efficacy, it's all about best interests to mention something called an internal versus external locus of control. If you've never heard this term, really an internal locus of control is right back to our idea of agency. If you remember that in the last lesson, it's grabbing the helm out of our sailboat, our metaphor of the sailboat. Internal locus of control is, I got this. It's all coming from inside me. I can grab that helm and I can steer the ship. External locus of control will show up in two different ways. One of them is, we feel like that chance or fate or perhaps luck is a driving force and whatever happens in our life, we give a lot of power to that external force of chance or fate. Again, you hear people say, well, wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any luck at all. I do believe in some sense we create our own luck. If you're having a lot of bad luck, there's probably a reason behind that, but people that have an external locus of control, will look at that and say nothing ever goes my way, and they'll just give up again back to this idea of a victim mentality or being helpless. The other place we see this show up not only in chance or fade but also power of others. Some people will go through life saying, I never catch a break because Sally is above me, are Joe is above me and they didn't like me, but whatever happens in my life is being controlled by others. It's not being controlled by me, I'm just along for the ride. Again, with both versions of external locus of control, we're given up. We're letting go of the home, were not steering our ship anymore because we feel a chance or others are directing our ship when truly an internal locus of control is grabbing that wheel and steering our ship. Back to the Stoic philosophy, which I really like. Again, these circles of control of chart that you see comes from positive psychology.com. I do some business with them in my coaching, and so I like this chart and they don't mention this, but really what they're showing here is something that the Stoics called the dichotomy of control. One of the main premises of Stoic philosophy is understanding what you control and what you don't. May seem like a simple question, but I see people get this wrong a lot. I think part of it is because they just don't reflect and think about, what do I truly control? When I say control, what do you 100 percent control? In the center, we have what is completely under control, and then as we move outward, they have what they're going to call a circle of influence, and then the third ring is going to be things out of our control. The idea behind this concept is understand what you control, what you don't and then let go especially that outer ring, that outer ring that is really out of our control. Let that go, don't spend your energy and time on losing sleep over that, but how many times do we do that? They mentioned your social media presence or how many likes you get on social media. Really, if we look at that objectively, why would that ever cause us any eggs? We don't control that at all, and we can also say how important is that really. But again, I understand that, and so what is it that we control attitude, effort, or tooth that I like to use? The choices that we make are our opinions. How we show up in the world, those are the things that we have 100 percent control over focus on those. That doesn't mean that we ignore the circle of influence, we want to influence that as much as we can, but again, we want to give that the do that it deserves, and it's not under our complete control. A lot of people worry about their reputation. We don't control that, we have influence over that, but we don't control our reputation, so don't let that cause you to lose too much sleep. At the end of the day, I understand what you control and you don't, and this is really going to help with your self-efficacy. Just like in the last video, I'm going to give you eight ways that I see as good ways to improve your self-efficacy because really what's the point of all this if we can't get better? One of the taglines on my, at my company and my podcast forging metal is, do hard things. I feel like again, much more on this in the next week, but we've become a society that is really shied away from doing hard things. If you want to improve your self-efficacy, you need to test yourself. You need to test your mental, your fortitude, you need to go out there into what I call the frontier and do some exploring, looking for those limitations, that's how you're going to develop some self-efficacy. Really related to that as stretch goals. I tried to do a stretch goal at least once a year, and the first one I did was roughly five years ago, and it changed my life when I did that. That's when I learned what I'm truly capable of, and so now I'm addicted to doing, and I'm going to say personal stretch goals. Stretch goals in the workplace are a little bit different and I'm not completely a fan of those, but personal stretch goals, pushing yourself to do something that you should quite honestly scary a little bit, that is where you're going to find out what you're truly capable of, and that's how you're going to develop some incredible self-efficacy. The next one. We've already got to touch on this but reframe failure. You're going to fall down and you're going to skin your knee, that's part of the game, that's how we get better, embrace that idea that we're going to fail. Hone your craft. You've heard this already, so I don't know that I need to say too much more, but again, don't be shallow, go deep, sell in for the long haul, have some patients, and the fact that we don't become good at what we're doing overnight. There's no such thing as an overnight success in my humble opinion, we really need to settle in for this idea of maybe 10,000 hours, or what I like to say is expect to spend about 10 years at about 1,000 hours a year to get really good at what you want to do. If that, just say, turns you off, I would say embrace the idea that you're in it for the journey, not the destination. There'll be afraid to look foolish, I think we may have covered this in pretty good detail when we talk about agency. You do see some overlap here, but don't be afraid to look foolish, try those things then there's a good chance you're going to fail, that's okay. Don't be afraid and don't shy away from those. Believe you are stronger than you realize. I cannot emphasize this enough, we have genes passed down from survivors. Me and you, we have those genes. The only reason we're here is because our ancestors found a way to survive, so you already have more strength within you than you really truly give yourself credit for. I'm going to say that very confidently, and so the idea is to tap into that. This is where we're going to develop a lot of good self-efficacy by understanding, I got this. I got this, my ancestors had this, and I'm going to carry on that lineage, and I'm tough enough to do this. The next one. Dichotomy of control. We already talked about it, nothing more to say here, you got the idea what the dichotomy of control. Then lastly. Be assertive. You can usually look at this as a spectrum being passive, assertive, aggressive, so in between being aggressive and being passive is this idea of being assertive. It's different for everybody, but we should embrace this idea of being more assertive in our life. Again, grabbing them and steering our ship. There's nothing wrong with that, even if you're an introvert and maybe a little bit reserved, a little bit more quiet, that's okay, I know how that feels, but you also can be assertive and I would say it's going to be a great benefit to you if you are. Grab the wheel, and don't be afraid to take control of your ship. Have fun, I'll see you out there.
