3 Reasons Why Your Skills Don’t Matter As Much You Think
Hint: Self-efficacy is far more important
From a very young age, we are all sent on a quest. This quest is to acquire new skills in life so that one day we can become competent adults.
We start by learning skills like walking and talking. Next thing you know, you are having to learn how to read, write and count.
As we continue to acquire more skills we also start to attribute levels of self-confidence in those tasks. Naturally, we feel more confident in certain tasks and less confident in others.
This is where the concept of self-efficacy comes in. The term was initially coined by psychology professor Albert Bandura, and it is defined as:
“One’s belief in one’s ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task” — Prof. Albert Bandura
Self-efficacy isn’t just about how many skills you think you have. It is about how well you think you can utilise those skills to be competent at a task.
This is precisely why your skills matter less. It is more important to nurture our self-efficacy which focuses on the utilisation of these skills. Let me explain why.
1) Self-Efficacy & Ability
One of the fascinating things about self-efficacy is that it influences how well you do in a task, more so than your actual ability in the task. This was demonstrated by a study done by Colins (1982) with children trying to solve math problems.
Children were found across 3 levels of math capability. High, medium and low.
Each child was also asked to rank their own perceived ability in maths, from high, medium and low. This was their perceived self-efficacy.
The findings showed that at each level of ability, children who had higher self-efficacy performed better than their lower self-efficacy counterparts.
Put simply, it didn’t matter how good you actually were at maths. What mattered was how good you thought you would be at the task.
The reason for this was because the children who had higher self-efficacy were not deterred when they encountered a difficult problem. They showed more perseverance and were able to maintain their analytical thinking to be able to solve it in the end.
On the other hand, children with lower self-efficacy were more erratic in their approach to difficult problems and gave up sooner.
What all of this shows is that self-doubt can over-rule your abilities, so that even highly talented individuals make poor use of them. However, individuals with higher self-efficacy make more productive use of their skills and can overcome difficult situations.
2) Conception of Ability
Besides being able to affect your ability in completing a task, your self-efficacy also influences how new skills are learnt.
Professor Albert Bandura and others did a brilliant study explaining this concept by showing how people can look at skills/abilities in 2 ways.
- Abilities/Skills are inherent traits of individuals.
- Abilities/Skills are acquired traits that require continued practice to achieve.
People who fall under the first category view skills and traits as an inherent capacity for certain individuals. Therefore, when they first attempt a task and do not find immediate success, they start to believe that they will never be good at it. Generally, people with this perspective also have lower levels of self-efficacy.
Since the consequence of trying a new task can be quite threatening to their self-image, these same individuals also take fewer risks and set lower goals to avoid disappointment.
On the other hand, people from the second category see skills as acquirable traits that can be increased by gaining knowledge and competencies. When these individuals make errors in their attempts at a task, they view them as a natural part of the learning process. Generally, these individuals have higher levels of self-efficacy.
They show more perseverance in the face of hurdles, set higher goals for themselves, and think more efficiently in their approach.
Bandura demonstrated what these 2 different approaches to learning new skills have on performance by using groups of people where a leader was assigned to do managerial tasks.
Some of these individuals before the task were told that proficient managerial skills reflected their inherent capabilities.
Meanwhile, others were told that these same tasks reflected acquirable intellectual skills.
The first bunch who were told in layman’s terms that you “either had the skills or didn’t”, found their self-efficacy plummeting as they encountered problems. They were more erratic in their analytical thinking and also set lower goals for their group.
The second bunch who were told that these skills could be acquired maintained higher levels of self-efficacy in the face of challenges, set challenging goals for themselves, and were efficient in their analytical thinking.
This study ultimately shows how we view skills and abilities that can make more of a difference than the skills themselves.
Instead of worrying about whether we have the skill to do something competently or not, we need to focus more on how we approach learning a new skill because that can determine our success in it.
3) Framing of Feedback
One of the things that can affect our competency in a task is how the feedback is given to us.
Professor Bandura and others also showed this in a study by giving 2 different forms of feedback to the group leaders during their managerial tasks.
When they were 75% through completing the tasks they were given feedback. Half of them were told that they had “completed 75% of their tasks”. The other half were told they “still had 25% to complete”.
Both versions of the feedback are equally true.
However, the first was framed positively since it highlighted how much they had achieved thus far. This allowed for these individuals to maintain a higher level of self-efficacy and therefore go on to complete the remaining 25% of tasks to a high standard.
On the other hand, the second bunch were provided with negatively framed feedback since this highlighted the amount of work that was not done yet. Consequently, these individuals found their self-efficacy diminishing, and the remaining work was done to a lower standard.
All this goes to show that regardless of the actual skills that these individuals had, the way their feedback was framed influenced their self-efficacy, which in turn affected their competency.
Conclusion
What all these studies point at is that self-efficacy has more of a say on how well we complete a task than actual skill does.
In the real world, results matter the most. Your employer doesn’t care if you're top in class. They care more about how well you do your job.
When those are the incentives we are working with, isn’t it more important to focus on what allows us to utilise our skills to their maximum potential rather than just having the skills themselves?
- We should be more focused on ways of increasing our perceived self-efficacy.
- We should also be paying more attention to how we approach the learning of new skills since that directly affects our self-efficacy and therefore our competency.
- We should find ways to frame our feedback positively so that we maintain our self-efficacy going forward.
I hope you all learned something new and useful about self-efficacy today. It touches almost every aspect of our life, and it is very well worth investing more of your time to building it.
