Last Updated on 2025/06/30
Dear Friends,
When I was in my final semester at university, I worked at the NuSkin call center in Provo, Utah, USA. It was there that I had a conversation with a colleague that changed my life.
We sat in the same section of the massive facility and often took breaks together. I admired his blunt honesty. One day I told him I was moving to Phoenix, Arizona after graduation, where I would begin study at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. He asked me if I was going to work while in graduate school. I told him yes, and I might need to work full time to make ends meet. He asked me what type of work I was going to apply for. I said, “I guess I’ll get another call center job.” He thought for a moment and said “Why would you sell yourself short like that?” I replied that I didn’t know what else I was qualified for.
My colleague suggested I apply for a position as a test preparation instructor for a company like Kaplan Educational Centers, then proceeded to list all of the reasons why I was qualified to work there: I did well on standardized tests like the GMAT, the GRE, the LSAT, and the SAT. I had taught Mandarin Chinese to Taiwan-bound LDS missionaries for a few years. I had the communication skills and the presence to be a good teacher. As I listened to him, I started to believe that I actually might be qualified to be a test preparation teacher.
What this friend did for me that day was convince me that I had a number of strengths that qualified me for a higher paying, meaningful teaching job. I applied for a job at Kaplan Educational Centers the week after I moved to Phoenix and was hired. My pay was three times the hourly pay I’d made at the call center.
I thrived in that job, taught a broad range of courses, and loved the work. It allowed me to support myself through graduate school. As graduation approached, I parlayed my reputation and network at Kaplan into a full-time regional management role with Kaplan in Las Vegas. In that role I found my confidence as a businessperson and a leader, thanks in no small part to mentors who believed in me and convinced me to believe in myself (Thank you Deborah, JD, Dahn, Matt, and Andy).
I do the work I do now in large part because I had a blunt-spoken friend who convinced me 33 years ago that I was good enough to be a professional teacher. He gave me the gift of self-belief, which is also known as self-efficacy.
What is Self-Efficacy?
In a nutshell, self-efficacy is the belief that we can do something. It’s critical when we face challenges, such as learning something difficult, mastering a new role at work, or as in
my case, successfully securing a job.
My daughter Savannah is a semi-professional dancer. She has experienced her greatest success in the hip hop form, competing in domestic and international competitions, appearing on television, and performing at corporate events. Over the last few years, she has also invested a great deal of effort in learning other forms of dance—contemporary, jazz, and now ballet—whilst continuing to develop her hip hop skills
.
Savannah has done well in all of these pursuits because she is dedicated to her craft—some of her practice sessions would exhaust a fit adult! She is passionate and ambitious. She seeks out the best teachers and challenges herself to get better. I have no doubt that her success as a dancer would not be possible without a strong sense of self-efficacy, and that self-efficacy is largely fueled by teachers, trainers, and other dancers who tell her where she is good. People who take the time to point out where she is naturally talented and where she is making progress, instead of only pointing out her mistakes and weaknesses. It’s important to know where to improve; it’s even more important to believe we can learn
something challenging or achieve something hard.
Giving the Gift of Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is critical to our ability to do difficult things. It is also a gift we can give to others, as leaders, parents, friends, colleagues, trainers, coaches. It is not complicated.
Step 1 Observe someone with the intent to identify their talents and strengths. Character strengths also count.
Step 2 Tell that person the good things you observe in them, particularly when they express self-doubt. Convince them that they can do it, based on the evidence you see in them (their strengths).
Doing this for people is an act of generosity. An act of generosity that costs little and has the potential to make a lasting, positive influence on someone’s life.
If you are a leader, you have a chance to build people’s self-efficacy every day. If you are a parent, you can do this for your children. If you are an experienced colleague, you can do it for a less experienced colleague.
Take a moment to think of someone in your life who could use a confidence boost and then, go tell them where they are great. You might just change their life, like my friend did mine years ago.
Yours in Supporting Self-Efficacy,
True
To hear how True changed himself thanks to the support and belief of others, check out True Talk #7.