What is the Difference Between Self-Worth, Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence, and Self-Efficacy
A person with black hair standing wearing black clothes and a red jacket.
The concepts of self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-efficacy tend to get thrown around a lot and often interchangeably. And yet, they mean different things. Furthermore, how one works to address these different concepts is also different. Thus, it is worth taking the time to break these down. Let’s begin!
Let’s start with the base, self-worth. Self-worth is your belief or beliefs in your value as a person in the world. Put another way, it is our internal sense of being good enough and worthy of being loved and feeling a sense of belonging from other people. Generally, the development of self-worth begins when people are little through early experiences. Here are few questions that you can ask yourself related to self-worth:
What words, phrases, or pictures would you use to describe yourself?
What value do you place on yourself or aspects of yourself?
Evaluate your descriptions. Were your descriptions generally positive, balanced, or negative?
Where did your messages around your worth come from? Family? Friends?
How long ago do you remember these messages starting?
Next is self-esteem. Self-esteem is the emotional judgements that you make about yourself based on your own experiences in life. Another way to say this is your relationship and understanding of how you interpret external factors like your successes and failures as they relate to you (aka. The opinion you have about yourself.) When you have healthy self-esteem you generally feel positive about yourself and about your life in general, which helps with our ability to work with the ups and downs of life. In contrast, when your self-esteem is low you can see your life and self as in a more negative light influencing your ability to take on the ups and downs of life. Here a few thoughts about how you may help build your self-esteem if you need a little boost:
Recognise what you are naturally good at and acknowledge that!
Build positive relationships with people who build you up.
Be kind, compassionate, and empathetic to yourself rather than harsh and judgmental.
Develop boundaries so that you can engage from a place of grounding.
Remember that it is okay to say “no” so that you engage in things that you want to rather than being pushed into.
Challenge yourself to step out of your comfort zone.
So then what is self-confidence? Self-confidence is the judgements you make about your general abilities. There are a few different ways to talk about confidence. First, there is task-specific which is your confidence in your ability to execute a particular task. Second, is general, which is your confidence in yourself and your abilities. Finally, there is situational, which addresses your confidence that varies depending on the situation that you find yourself in.
Finally, we arrive at self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is the belief that you can perform a specific task at a certain level. This definition comes from the work of Bandura (1977, 1986, 1997). Self-efficacy impacts the effort that you put into changing behaviors and your work toward developing new skills in addition to how persistent you are in the process especially when faced with challenges or setbacks. It can also impact the type of goals you set and the energy you put into reaching them. So how do we influence or build self-efficacy? Here are a few ways:
Experiences that leave you feeling successful.
Seeing others do well, which falls into the category of vicarious experiences.
Being encouraged by people in your life or what is called verbal persuasion.
Both your physiological and affective states so think about the mind body connection.
These descriptions just scratch the surface of these big topics. Hopefully, though you have found something that you can take and apply to life and/or sports.
take action today moment:
Try one of the many suggestions written in the post!
Learn More About Self-Worth, Self-Esteem, Self-Confidence, and Self-Efficacy:
What is Self-Worth & How Do We Build it?
Teaching Tip Sheet: Self-Efficacy
References
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.
Bandura, A. (1986). Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The exercise of control. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.