A short, personal response to a very brief discussion last week

In class last week we briefly brought up the topic of how disorders such as anxiety and depression affect self-efficacy; specifically, Michael brought up the idea that people with such disorders tend to be more efficacious. This surprised me as someone who has dealt with both anxiety and depression, and I originally reasoned its validity with the idea that, in my personal experience, I know the limits of my ability and when it’s healthy to push myself to try something new. Therefore, when I am confident in my abilities with the proof in the past work I’ve done, I feel highly efficacious.

However, as I was further reflecting on it, I realize the opposite is often true. Even with a demonstrable backlog of past success, I rarely feel confident in my abilities even though I know I can do the required tasks. From my perspective, negative self-talk lowers my self-efficacy beliefs, but I have learned over time and through therapy to use it as a motivation tool to consistently attempt to improve my abilities. I don’t always succeed, but working to rebel against the discouraging voice in my head and prove it wrong produces results that others may perceive as high efficacy; however, the voice never truly goes away and I continue to perceive low-self efficacy. I am confused by this dichotomy, especially because I know it’s definitely clouded by personal judgement and subjective experience, but I wonder how this may be addressed by self-efficacy theory.

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To address the commotion of this past week, I worry that we didn’t start this class in a way that set a proper foundation. I think we’re all coming at the core understanding of “self-efficacy” from very different perspectives, and it’s hurting our ability to come to a common ground. Without strengthening the theoretical base understanding of self-efficacy, it is easy to take the definition/concept personally. With all our vastly different backgrounds in experience with the concept of self-efficacy, I feel it’s necessary to create a shared meaning of the core ideologies and assumptions that self-efficacy entails as a topic. This goes equally for any other terms we bring up in class, like last week when the topic of self-regulation came up and was subsequently put on the back burner to delve into at a later date.