Low Self-Efficacy and Action

I wish I had been there for the discussion of Wendy's post about success last week, as this week I have been thinking about definitions of success, and how they impact our self-efficacy, motivation, and behavior. I tend to identify and believe myself to be very performance oriented. In my eyes, success is about doing well in a way that others see, it is about recognition, whether through a grade, a positive comment, or praise from peers. Perhaps that is why I liked teaching so much, as it consistently gave me feedback, through student behavior/grades, etc. that allowed me to know how I was doing. When I was in school, I did just enough work not to get a bad grade, but never enough to get an excellent one. I wanted to look just good enough. Moreover, without dates and deadlines, I struggle to motivate myself to do anything, though at some point I do get things done. While, I want to want to learn, and master material, I have always needed some external performance evaluation to keep myself motivated and engaged in tasks. Thus, my definition of success is generally tied to external outcomes.

Which brings me to this class and this week, I did not want to write a post, and I seriously considered just skipping it altogether, I mean what would happen. However, I wrote it, and have written them every single week. But when I think of how I define success, in external terms, I have gotten no feedback that I am going well on these blog posts, and my self-efficacy I feel has dropped. My posts have not gotten read in class, are not graded, are not getting positive comments from others, and are seemingly drawing little attention. Thus, I do not feel like I know what I am supposed to be doing, what constitutes a good blog post, or what I should do differently to be better. Thus, my self-efficacy is dropping by the week, and I am less and less motivated to write a post or engage in class altogether. While I know I can write a blog post, I certainly do not want to nor feel good about it.  

However, when I think about self-efficacy and behavior I struggle to figure out what is happening, my low self-efficacy seemingly is contributing to my low motivation, and may likely be why I do not want to write a post, and why I put it off. Alternatively, is it something else that is leading to reduced motivation, and somehow my low self-efficacy still caused me to write the post? To me it feels like there is something else going on here, there are other factors at play that are impacting my procrastination and struggles that I cannot fully explain with self-efficacy. How does self-efficacy explain procrastination, delay versus actually engaging in a behavior? We have been talking a lot about self-efficacy and behavior, people doing or not doing something. However, quite often when it comes to people's motivation for behavior, they will put something off but eventually do it. I get the whole self-efficacy high à you do something, self-efficacy low à you do not do something. However, what about the rest of it? Self-efficacy low à but you do something anyway? High self-efficacy with not doing anything. From a self-efficacy point of view how is my lack of efficacy, yet still writing a post get explained?