Why Self-Efficacy is the Key Element to Help Athletes Learn from Failure
Psychologist Albert Bandura in his preeminent book Self-Efficacy defines self-efficacy as the exercise of control over things that affect your life. I like to describe self-efficacy as the mindset you use to control your destiny.
Bandura’s research shows that higher levels of self-efficacy equate to higher levels of effort and belief in that effort producing results. Moreover, depending on the context, self-efficacy can either go up or down. For example, an athlete who plays basketball can have high self-efficacy on defense and low self-efficacy on offense. Or a wrestler can have high self-efficacy scoring with takedowns, but low self-efficacy escaping when on bottom.
Because self-efficacy has a direct correlation with effort and belief, it also has a direct correlation with results. Ultimately, this means self-efficacy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Therefore, pushing an athlete to learn from a failure in a low self-efficacy area is like putting a square peg in a round hole. It won’t work. This is why self-efficacy is the key element to help athletes learn from failure.
How Athletes Can Increase Self-Efficacy to Learn from Failure
In sports, seeing is believing. What’s more, belief leads to effort and this combination is what increases self-efficacy. Correspondingly, the first step to learning from failure is using video review to get athletes to believe. Specifically, athletes must use video review to believe two things:
- There are things under their control that they can change to prevent future failures.
- They can turn what they see on video from a mental model into a skill they can master.
Bandura elaborates on these two steps with more technical detail in what he calls the cognitive and transformational phases of skill development. The cognitive phase is where the athlete develops a mental model of what they must learn. The transformational phase is where the athlete converts the mental model into skilled action using the feedback of a coach to eliminate errors.
To summarize, for an athlete to learn from failure they must first increase self-efficacy by starting with mental skills. Then convert those mental skills into physical skills.
Video review sessions are the catalyst for developing the mental memory one needs for mental skills. Physical training sessions are the catalyst for the muscle memory one needs for physical skills. Learning from failure requires connecting these two together repeatedly until the athlete masters the lessons they need to learn.