How a Person’s Belief Can Change Your Life
The Psychology of Self-Efficacy
Chapter 1: Cold Open
As I’m applying color to her roots, section by section, I notice her watching me in the mirror. My client has a particular look when she is about to say something, whether I’m ready to hear it or not.
“Evet,” she says. “You’re such a smart, dynamic, capable woman.”
I laugh the way I always do, and try to turn the conversation back toward her.
She doesn’t let me.
“I mean it,” she says. “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
I keep applying color so I don’t have to answer.
Chapter 2: Introduction:
Hi, it’s Evet
Today I want to talk about how other people’s belief in us can help us build self-efficacy at any age or any time in our lives.
Although I begin with one particular exchange, this episode is really about a pattern I have witnessed across several long relationships behind the chair.
Accepting a compliment has never been one of my more developed skills. I can explain it away, make a joke, or quickly find something nice to say about the other person.
Anything that keeps the attention from resting on me for too long.
But some part of me hears them.
Some part of me has always heard them.
Over the years, clients have watched me open salons, return to college later in life, and even start this podcast.
I didn’t feel confident through it all. I questioned almost every new step, sometimes repeatedly and with great creativity.
Their belief didn’t remove the doubt.
It sat beside it.
And sometimes, that was enough to keep me moving.
Chapter 3: The Voice That Stayed:
I’m lucky. Many people in my life have said kind things to me. Clients have told me I’m talented. Friends have encouraged me and have even suggested that I write a book.
I don’t know about that one.
The point is, it’s always nice to hear, but much of it disappears.
But certain voices stay with me.
I’ve wondered why some words become the ones we hear when we’re standing at the edge of something new, trying to decide whether we’re capable of doing it.
Maybe it’s because, for me, the people saying them have never offered one of those inspirational wall plaques you find at Home Goods for your beach house.
“Life’s A Beach”
“Be Shore to Smile”
Those slogans were actually hanging on the walls of a beach house my family and I rented and, of course, we had fun mocking them all weekend.
But back to what I was saying.
The clients whose words stayed with me had been paying attention. They knew the version of me who had not yet returned to school and the version who eventually graduated. They had asked questions and listened while I talked myself out of things, then watched me eventually do some of them anyway.
They had seen the confident decisions and the decisions I made while feeling anything but.
Their belief came from years of paying attention to who I was becoming.
And that makes a difference.
There’s a psychological concept called mattering. At its simplest, mattering is the feeling that we occupy a meaningful place in someone’s life— that they notice us, that our experience actually registers with them.
We trust that we are not interchangeable or invisible.
I didn’t have a name for it at the time– I just knew that when they said something, I believed it more than when other people did.
Their encouragement carried the weight of all those years they had spent paying attention.
When I first returned to school and had to take statistics, I was convinced I would fail. I have always believed I am horrible at math.
And I mean, it’s not only a belief. There is actual evidence demonstrating how little I understand it.
So, with that well-established story about myself, I knew I would fail the class.
One longtime client told me about taking statistics in college. She joked that her professor finally passed her to get her out of his class. Because she struggled so much with the material, she was always the first person waiting outside his office, ready with more questions.
She kept telling me that if she could pass, then I could pass too.
She encouraged me to ask as many questions as possible and to believe that I could make it through the class.
I watched countless hours of YouTube tutorials, called my brother more times than he cared to count, and tried getting my tech clients to explain problems to me. It didn’t help much.
I wrote so many emails to my professor that she probably had to go home and have a drink to relax.
But I passed.
My client’s belief didn’t pour confidence into me simply because she said nice things.
It made failure feel less inevitable.
It gave me enough room to believe that success was still possible.
Chapter 4: Self-Efficacy: Belief That Leads to Action
Psychologist Albert Bandura used the term self-efficacy to describe a person’s belief that they can organize themselves and take the actions a situation requires.
Self-efficacy is not the belief that you will succeed at everything. It’s also not positive thinking or pretending fear has disappeared.
It’s the belief that you can engage with what’s in front of you. You can try, adjust, and keep going.
Bandura argued that self-efficacy influences whether we begin, how much effort we invest, and how long we persist when something becomes difficult.
When our self-efficacy is stronger in a particular area, we are more likely to treat setbacks as information. When it’s weaker, we may treat those same setbacks as proof that we shouldn’t even try.
Bandura identified four main sources of self-efficacy.
The first is a mastery experience. This is the evidence we gather by doing something.
For me, finishing statistics without perishing was a mastery experience.
Not because I suddenly understood the material. I still don’t, not really.
But a year later, in a research methods class, my professor asked a statistics question.
I rattled off the answer like I actually knew what I was talking about— with the same unearned confidence as that scene in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where Lisa Kudrow’s character Michele explains how she supposedly invented Post-it note glue, throwing out real chemistry terms she clearly didn’t understand but remembered.
I was completely shocked that I remembered the answer, and I must have looked shocked, because the professor laughed and said, “Good job, Evet.”
It was a mastery experience because I did the thing I was certain I couldn’t do, and I came out the other side with proof instead of theory.
Proof is different from encouragement. Encouragement is someone else’s word. Proof is mine.
So is surviving a mistake and discovering that we can recover from that mistake.
Difficulty doesn’t prove that we are incapable. When we adapt, keep going, and complete something we weren’t sure we could do, we create evidence that we can handle more than we believed.
The second source is a vicarious experience. This happens when we watch someone we identify with do something and begin to imagine that it may also be possible for us.
This is why I became a life coach. One of my clients was also a life coach, and I would hear about the classes and seminars she led. Watching her do it is the reason I became one.
Watching someone we relate to succeed can strengthen our belief in what may be possible for us. We don’t even have to know them personally. It might be a public figure, someone we encounter in a biography, or an athlete we admire.
How many kids watch Steph Curry make his trick shots, then go outside and practice because seeing him do it makes them believe it might be possible for them too?
Who we admire can show us a possibility we hadn’t previously imagined for ourselves.
The third source is social persuasion. This happens when someone credible tells us that they see ability in us. Their words don’t prove that we can do the task, but they may keep us from quitting before we’ve collected our own evidence.
The person encouraging us has to be believable. Generic cheerleading from someone who barely knows us usually doesn’t carry much weight. Specific, repeated belief from someone who has watched us over time works differently.
My thesis professor knew exactly how many nervous breakdowns “working toward a deadline” could produce, because he watched most of them happen. Every so often he’d remind me how far I’d come and that if I stayed the course, I’d succeed. It worked because he’d earned the right to say it.
The fourth and final source is our physiological and emotional state. A racing heart can mean “I can’t handle this,” or it can mean, “This matters, and my body is getting ready to respond.”
The sensation may be the same. What changes is the meaning we give it, which changes what we do next.
I once turned an Arctic white blonde client’s roots orange. I mean like the kind you pluck off a tree in Florida. I began to panic, my heart started racing, my mouth went dry, and all logic left my brain.
I applied a treatment to her hair, walked away, and let my pulse slow down. A couple of hours later, her hair was back to the white she loved, and all was well.
When I consider my own self-efficacy today, I realize the belief my clients expressed was a form of social persuasion. Their words couldn’t substitute for my effort, but they helped me stay engaged long enough to build mastery of my own.
Returning to school, graduating, and earning my credential gave me evidence.
Producing the first podcast episode, then the fifth, and eventually the twenty-seventh gave me evidence.
Chapter 5: Reclaiming a Sense of Agency
Their belief also helped me in situations where the challenge wasn’t learning how to do something. It was recognizing that I still had the power to take action.
Psychologists use the term problem-focused coping to describe directing our attention toward the parts of a stressful situation we can influence. Instead of remaining overwhelmed by the entire problem, we gather information, identify our options, and choose a practical next step.
When I was opening my own salon, I ran into problems getting the necessary building permit because the building wasn’t up to code, but my lease stated that it was. The landlord denied responsibility and tried to frighten me into paying for the improvements required to continue the build-out.
The landlord owned what seemed like half the commercial buildings downtown. They had an endless stream of money and the attitude to match.
The landlord’s son-in-law was my contractor. He continued asking for payments without moving the project forward. He told me the city wouldn’t approve my building plans because there was something wrong with them. He neglected to mention that the real problem was their building.
I confided in my client about what was happening. I told her I didn’t think it was too late to back out of the contract, although I would lose much of the money I had already invested.
I didn’t believe I had the money, experience, or the power to go up against this family, and quitting felt easier.
My client reminded me that I knew how to speak to people, ask questions, and get answers. She convinced me I could walk into the city’s planning department and find out what was actually happening.
In my memory, the planning department was open from approximately 8 AM to 8:01 AM on the fourth Tuesday of a leap year.
It was a very narrow window of service for the many businesses waiting for building permits.
My client’s confidence in my ability pushed me to go there despite how intimidated I felt.
That’s where I discovered that my plans were perfectly fine. In fact, the permits weren’t issued solely because the building was non-compliant with accessibility codes, even though the landlord had stated in the lease that it was up to code.
Once I had documented proof in my hand, my brother and I summoned our Italian ancestral roots and went to the mattresses.
I’m kidding,
We confronted the landlord and made them bring the building up to code.
My client didn’t solve the problem for me. She helped me recognize that I still had agency within it. Once I gathered the facts, I could respond from evidence instead of intimidation.
But the deeper lesson wasn’t only about what their belief gave me. As my own evidence grew, my attention shifted toward the clients who offered that belief so freely.
Many of them had spent much of their lives being the people everyone else relied on.
Their stories showed me another side of what it means to be capable.
Chapter 6: When the Strong Ones Need Support
Over the years, I have known several women who learned to become capable very early in life.
Some were the oldest children in large families. Some grew up moving from place to place or adjusting to instability. Many became skilled at noticing what everyone else needed before asking what they needed themselves.
Those qualities served them well. They became dependable friends, attentive mothers, dedicated teachers, and the people their families called when something went wrong.
But I have also watched what happens when the strong one becomes overwhelmed.
I have sat with clients whose spouses or loved ones became seriously ill. They managed appointments, absorbed frightening information, supported the rest of the family, and continued functioning while carrying fear that few people ever saw.
Their stories were different, but I noticed a shared belief beneath many of them:
I’m the one who handles things.
I’m the one who helps.
I’m not the one who needs.
Psychologically, self-reliance can begin as an adaptive response. It helps us function when other people depend on us. But a strength becomes restrictive when we no longer feel permitted to respond any other way.
Research on help-seeking has found that a strong preference for self-reliance can prevent people from seeking psychological support. Sometimes it isn’t that they believe asking for help is wrong. They simply have difficulty believing that the same permission they give everyone else also applies to them.
But for some whose identity was organized around being capable, receiving help can feel almost like breaking a contract.
Who am I if I can’t manage this alone?
What happens if I become the person asking instead of the one answering?
Will people still see me as strong?
Perhaps strength also includes knowing when to stop performing invulnerability.
I have watched some of these women make a different choice.
They accepted help from family and friends. Some did seek professional support. They let another person listen without immediately turning the conversation back to everyone else.
Accepting support didn’t make these women less capable, less generous, or less dependable.
It did, however, allow them to include themselves among the people worthy of care.
Chapter 7: Self-Compassion:
Psychologist Kristin Neff describes self-compassion through three connected elements: self-kindness, mindfulness, and common humanity.
Self-kindness means responding to ourselves with care rather than harsh judgment when we struggle.
Mindfulness means acknowledging what we are experiencing without suppressing it or allowing it to become a whole story.
Common humanity means recognizing that struggle and needing support are a part of being human.
I think common humanity is especially important for people who are accustomed to being the strong one.
They readily recognize when others need care. The harder part is allowing themselves to need it too.
For some of my clients, self-compassion has meant accepting the meal someone offered, letting a family member take over an appointment, seeking support from a therapist, working with a life coach, or admitting, sometimes for the first time, “I can’t carry all of this alone.”
I have watched clients reach a point where what they were carrying finally became too heavy to conceal.
They would sit in my chair and begin talking, not about their hair or the ordinary events of their week, but about everything that had been accumulating. Their voices were even and controlled until suddenly, they weren't.
Instead of cleaning my area, I’d sit down in the chair beside them.
Often, they apologized, as people do when they have learned to treat their pain as an inconvenience. I made sure they knew that I never saw them that way.
Speaking honestly about what they were carrying was an act of self-kindness. Allowing themselves to experience the exhaustion without turning it into proof that they had failed was mindfulness.
And recognizing that needing help didn’t separate them from everyone else was common humanity.
People who cared about them had often been waiting for the opportunity to help. Receiving that care required them to trust that their needs would not make them less capable or less worthy of respect.
That kind of shift doesn’t happen once and stay finished. It’s a practice we choose again whenever the weight becomes heavy.
I know that because it’s been true for me too, not only when asking for help, but when trusting someone else’s belief in me before I had it myself.
Chapter 8: What I’m Taking with Me
I think we sometimes misunderstand how people influence us. We assume the people who change our lives are the ones who give us exactly the right advice at exactly the right time.
Often, they are the ones who give us a more accurate reflection of ourselves.
Because those relationships were grounded in honesty, my clients’ belief in me helped me develop my own. Their encouragement supported me without making me dependent on their approval.
Through their lives, my clients taught me something else: the generosity we offer other people eventually has to include us too.
Neither lesson requires anyone to fix us, and neither asks us to feel completely confident before we act.
So, here’s what I’m taking with me:
Self-efficacy grows through action, not through waiting until we feel ready.
Problem-focused coping turns a sense of helplessness into a practical question:
What part of this situation can I influence?
Credible belief from another person helps us remain in the experience long enough to gather our own proof.
And self-compassion expands our understanding of strength to include receiving support.
So, when that ugly little voice of doubt starts talking in my head, instead of asking it to shut up, maybe the question is,
“Why am I treating doubt as the only credible voice in the room?”
Chapter 9: Something To Try:
This week, offer one person a specific reflection based on something you have genuinely observed.
“I’ve watched how you keep going when this is difficult.”
“You ask thoughtful questions.”
“I see how much courage this is taking.”
Then try this: The next time someone offers support, practice receiving it fully. Pause long enough to let the help land before deciding what you owe them.
Pay attention to which feels more natural: offering support or receiving it.
That answer may tell you something about the role you’ve learned to play.
Chapter 10: Closing:
Clients have reflected strengths in me that I wasn’t yet ready to recognize. I’ve also watched capable people discover that accepting support doesn’t diminish who they are.
I still deflect compliments. I still laugh, change the subject, or question whether I’ve earned the words.
But I’m slowly learning to let those words land and trust that they might be true…slowly.
The best part is that self-efficacy doesn’t require doubt to disappear. It just means doubt no longer gets to make every decision.
Sometimes another person sees enough possibility in us to help us take the next step.
Sometimes our role is to offer that belief. And sometimes our work is to receive it.
I’m Evet DeCota. If this story resonates with you and you would like to contact me, all of my information is in this episode’s notes.
Thank you for listening, and have a wonderful week.
