Building Self Confidence

Dr. Albert Bandura, is a famous professor at Stanford University. He has identified 4 components that contribute to building one’s self-confidence. If you want to build more self-confidence in yourself or others, then make sure to utilize at least one of these 4 components.

Dr. Bandura is a famous psychologist that is most famous for his social learning theory. He also served as president of the American Psychological Association.

These are for life experiences he thinks you need to have in order to build self-confidence:

1. Mastery Experiences. If you have ever done anything well, it can help you perform more confidently in other areas. If you are good at accounting for example you can use that confidence to improve yourself in other areas like relationships.

2. Vicarious Learning. If you see a peer succeed at something then that can help yourself feel more confident about achieving a task. For example, once someone broke the 4 minute mile barrier, lots of people have done it. It took just one person to do it for other runners to believe that they could also do it.

3. Modeling someone who inspires you. This is actually one of the quickest ways to get self-confidence and master an area of your life. Find someone who inspires you, find out how they did it, and do the same thing.

4. Social persuasion. Having words of encouragement from a coach, mentor, or friend can help you perform better at certain tasks. This is why the home field advantage is so powerful.

If you or someone you know is lacking self-confidence, try to have as many of these life experiences as possible. By varying the sources you receive self-confidence from you can build a better foundation for your psyche.