What is the role of confidence in helping people to build their resilience and achieve their potential? Our true potential is not determined by confidence, but confidence is a key to unlocking it. Confidence opens the door for potential. Likewise doubt keeps our potential as a prisoner.
A new paper on confidence summarises the way in which confidence impacts on our motivation (1). Stajkovic describes the link between confidence and motivation. The role of confidence in motivation is to psychologically enable our potential. Confidence underlies four dimensions;
- hope
- self-efficay
- optimism
- resilience
Wanting to do something to achieve success (hope), helps develop a belief that we can do it (self-efficacy), helps form a positive outlook on the entire undertaking (optimism), and works on the belief that we can bounce back if things go awry (resilience).
The author describes the difference between activity-specific confidence, confidence that comes with success at a given activity, and core-confidence which is a fundamental belief in our ability to succeed under almost any circumstances.
Activity-Specific confidence
Can be described as state confidence since it depends on the state of circumstances surrounding the activity. It may not generalise to other situations thus a confident person succeeding in one activity may not posses confidence in succeeding in an unrelated activity
Core-confidence
Can be described as trait confidence since it is more like a stable and generalisable trait that the individual possesses. It is enduring and transfers across different and unrelated challenges.
The author suggests that trait-confidence will play a role in opening up opportunities to test state confidence and that trait confidence will set a range within which state specific confidence will vary.
Positive Previous Experience
The longer positive experiences of success continue the more stable becomes the core confidence. But this is only one half of the story. The other half of the story is how we attribute these successes. Do we attribute these successes to internal causes (our ability or effort) or external causes (luck or easy task). Failure attributed to internal causes may diminish core confidence where as external attributions may deflect blame and take the sting out of failure.
Making attribution errors
But the authors also tackle the thorny issue of erroneous attribution - seeing failure as the result of an external cause when it is blatantly due to internal factors. The same is true of arrogance, seeing success as the result of an internal cause when it was blatantly due to external factors.
They describe an abundance of well directed confidence as beneficial for resilience but caution against arrogance in which someone may try something that is way beyond their range of capability and will result in almost certain failure, or at best, will result in highly fortuitous success.
(1). Stajkovic, A. (2006) Development of a core confidence - higher order construct. Journal of Applied Psychology. Vol. 91 (6). pp1208-1224
|
|
|