Self-efficacy
Your belief in your own capability to carry out what a task requires.
What it means
Self-efficacy is a person's belief in their capacity to execute the behaviors needed to produce a given outcome, a construct central to Bandura's social cognitive theory. It is distinct from self-esteem (overall self-worth) and from actual skill: it is the situation-specific conviction that one can do what a particular challenge demands, and that conviction shapes which goals people set, how much effort they invest, how long they persist, and how resilient they are to setbacks. The mechanism is both cognitive and emotional — high self-efficacy reframes difficulties as surmountable challenges and dampens the anxiety that can sabotage performance, creating a self-fulfilling cycle. Bandura identified four main sources through which it is built: mastery experiences (the most potent), vicarious experience or modeling, verbal persuasion, and the interpretation of one's physiological and emotional arousal. Self-efficacy predicts outcomes across health, education, work, and behavior change, and is a target in many interventions. It matters because believing you can succeed measurably raises the odds that you will, by changing the effort and persistence you bring to bear.
Examples
A patient who believes they can stick to their physiotherapy regimen is far more likely to actually complete it and recover.
Two developers of equal skill meet the same bug; the one who has untangled worse before treats it as a puzzle rather than a verdict, and simply keeps going longer.
A pupil who has never yet cracked a hard maths problem gives up within a minute; after solving three, she will sit with the fourth for twenty — mastery built the belief.
First described in Albert Bandura (1977).