This powerful belief can help you accomplish more

our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Decades of research show that self-efficacy can be strengthened with a few surprisingly simple strategies. Mind and BehaviorCognitive PsychologyMotivationSocial Psychology Excerpted from Agency: A Psychological History of Human Progress. Copyright © 2026, Martin Seligman.

Reproduced by permission of Simon Acumen, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. In the 1970s, academic psychology escaped from studying just behavior to start studying mental life. Albert Bandura, the father of this cognitive revolution within social psychology, led the way in 1977 with “self-efficacy.” An “efficacy expectation” is the belief — the conscious thought — that you, yourself, can bring about the goal you desire, and this is distinguished from an “outcome expectation,” which is the belief that your goal will happen, even if you are not the agent who brings it about.

Self-efficacy implies the existence of much more than the bare fact that depriving people of control results in passivity or the bare fact that control is rewarding. Those effects may or may not be caused by thoughts. Self-efficacy claims that there are conscious expectations of the future that cause trying in the future.

Indeed, this turns out to be true and is the strongest sense of efficacy. Richard Lazarus, across the bay from Bandura (at Stanford) in Berkeley, proposed _appraisal_ theory. When an event occurs, the person first assesses the consequences of the event (“primary appraisal”).

Then the person asks if he has the ability to cope with the event and its consequences. This is “secondary appraisal.” Importantly, Bandura and Lazarus were both explicit about agency: It requires conscious expectations. Bandura’s idea caught fire, and today he, after Sigmund Freud, is the most cited 20th-century psychologist.

It led to a cascade of international research on conscious efficacy as causal. There are now hundreds of studies showing that more — much more — achievement occurs, over many domains, when conscious efficacy beliefs are present. When, moreover, they are enhanced, achievement goes up.