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Lesson 5: Self Efficacy

Lesson Aims

  • Focus on the good days and small successes
  • Know you are not alone, and self-efficacy takes time to build 
  • Learn to be resilient after experiencing a set back
  • Keep up the good work!

The Big Picture

There are three main phases of behavior change. The first phase involves identifying aspects in your lifestyle that need improvement. The second phase concerns creating specific action plans to strengthen the areas that need improvement. The third, much longer phase, consists of maintaining healthy habits despite obstacles. Building self-efficacy is an important skill to foster because it is helpful in making and maintaining healthy lifestyle changes throughout these three phases! 

Self-efficacy describes the confidence you have in yourself to achieve your goals. Building your self-efficacy is one of our top priorities for this program because it will influence how you approach behavior change. Positive framing and motivation will make it much more likely that you’ll reach your goals and maintain a healthy lifestyle.  Reaching your goals will, in turn, build your self-efficacy, creating a “virtuous circle” that helps you continue to reach your goals and overcome challenges in doing so! 

How to Become More Confident in Your Abilities

Believing you can make changes in your diet, physical activity or smoking behaviors is one of the most necessary aspects of changing your behaviors. Believing in yourself makes you more likely to be successful! However, self-efficacy takes time to build. Remember, this is a learning process! Multiple strategies can be used to build self-efficacy while you make healthy behavior changes. Signing up for the STELLAR program was a major step toward building confidence that you can make healthy changes. You deserve congratulations for taking that first step! You already have experience with resiliency. As a cancer survivor, you have gone through many challenges and persevered. Now, it’s time to continue to build that resilience that you already have.

 

  • Reinforce Your Belief in Your Ability to Accomplish Your Goal
    • When you feel overwhelmed or start to generate negative thoughts, break down your goal into a series of smaller, manageable steps. Allowing yourself to focus on one step at a time will reduce stress by making the task less daunting. 
    • As time goes on, you will feel more confident in setting more challenging goals. By gradually increasing the difficulty of your goals, you will be able to adjust slowly.  
    • Succeeding in small steps will help you gain self-efficacy. You will feel a sense of accomplishment and gain more confidence each time you reach a goal or master a behavior. 
    • There are so many ways to change behavior, so you should be doing whatever makes you feel your best!  
    • Celebrate all your achievements and use them as inspiration and proof that success is attainable for you.
  • Know You are Not Alone
    • Remember there are many other participants and cancer survivors out there who share similar experiences.  
    • Find a person like you or find support groups online. Being able to access positive role models who’ve gotten through similar struggles can motivate you to continue striving for improvement and help you learn new techniques.  
    • Speak to your health promotionist. They are here to support you! They want to know and understand what you are going through. Do not be scared to share what you are thinking and feeling.  They care about you and want to see you succeed. Take their empathy and encouragement to heart!  
    • If you are ever confused about any aspect of the program, ask for help. The study team, a trainer, family, or friends are all great resources for support. Once you are confident that you are performing an activity correctly, you will feel much better moving forward with it.
  • Strengthening Your Resilience
    • Resilience is the capacity to withstand difficulties or to recover quickly from them.  Strengthening your resilience will be especially helpful when you experience a setback. 
    • To start building resilience, consider your past accomplishments, which don’t necessarily have to be program-related. Reflect on a time when you overcame a particular challenge. Ask yourself: “What did I do to help myself succeed with my goal?” Try applying the strategies that worked well for you in the past to your current plan.  
    • If you are unsure of how to approach your goals or how to start building your resilience, try finding inspiration from observing others. If you have a family member or close friend who has gone through challenging experiences, ask them for their perspective and what worked well for them. You can also gain new insights by joining different types of online support groups.  
    • Train yourself to engage in positive self-talk. Positive-self talk encourages you to continue with your goals, while also giving yourself grace when things don’t go according to plan. Steering away from negative thinking patterns will give you the confidence to maintain healthy behavioral changes.  
    • Tune in to your body and be mindful of physiological cues. Knowing your limits and when you need to push yourself is an essential skill that you’ll build throughout your time in the STELLAR program.

 

Keep up the good work!

In the beginning of STELLAR, you may have started off doing very well. You may have felt very motivated to change your behaviors. However, there may have also been a few days where it has been really challenging to reach your goals.

Despite your best efforts, it is likely that your motivation may waver at some point in the STELLAR program. This is a very common frustration in any healthy lifestyle program, but it is completely normal and should be expected.

You may need to adjust some of your healthy behaviors due to your success so far in the program or start trying something new to keep yourself engaged and motivated. Here are some questions you can ask yourself when assessing your progress and current state.

  • Are you maintaining your behaviors?  
  • Has your routine changed since you started?  
  • Is your motivation still high?

 

How to Maintain Your Behaviors and Motivation

1. Review the reasons you joined this program.
    1. What did you hope to gain?
    2. Why is this important to you?
2. Visualize yourself as healthy as can be!
    1. Sometimes just envisioning being successful creates that exact thing. Think about the person you want to be – healthy and strong. Know your hard work will pay off and you’ll reach your goals soon.
3. Track EVERYTHING.
4. Try new forms of exercise.
    1. Is there something new you’ve been wanting to try?
5. Limit unhealthy behaviors.
    1. Maybe you’ve been holding on to one of your favorite unhealthy behaviors. Now is the time to try moving past that?
6. Increase your intensity.
    1. Try adding intensity by exercising quicker or longer.
7. Stay positive.
    1. The fact that you’ve come this far means you’ve already had a lot of success! Remind yourself of all the good things you’ve accomplished so far.

Ideas to Apply These Strategies to Specific Behaviors

Physical Activity

  • One way to enhance your self-efficacy is to focus on activities that you enjoy. If you enjoy music and dancing, you can try an aerobic dance class online in the comfort of your home. Whether you decide to walk outdoors, go to the gym, or take an online gym class, do what makes you feel great!
  • Think about how you feel when you reach your physical activity goals. Reaching your goals can feel really good! Focus on times that you successfully engaged in activity or met your weekly goal. Remind yourself that if you could do it then, you can do it now!
  • Gradually increase the time and intensity of activities. This can be done by trying to add 5 minutes to your walk each week. Instead of starting out by walking for a full hour, start by walking for 15 minutes, then the next week walk for 20 minutes, and so on. This gradual increase will allow your body to adjust to increased physical exertion, and help you build confidence in your ability to complete physical activities.
  • Pay attention to the small successes as you progress. Think about big and small goals that you reached over the past few weeks. Each time you complete a goal, you should feel more confident in yourself and know you can do it again next time!

Achieving and Maintaining a Healthy Weight

  • The first step to self-efficacy about your diet and your weight is to fully understand your eating habits. This is where self-monitoring what you eat comes into play! Use the STELLAR app to record as much of what you eat and drink as possible. Be honest with yourself. This means looking at food labels to find accurate portion sizes and seeing if you can pronounce most of the ingredients in your food. If not, look for a less highly processed alternative! Research has consistently shown that dieters who self-monitor their food intake more often lose the most weight.
  • Make sure your weight loss goal is realistic, healthy, and achievable. Speak with your health promotionist about how much weight you’d like to lose and the pace at which you plan to reach your goal.  For example, losing 20 pounds in 2 weeks isn’t healthy or feasible. Losing between ½ pound and 2 pounds per week is safe, achievable, and will help you build self-efficacy about reaching your goal.
  •  Tracking what you eat is the best way to understand how you accumulate calories throughout the day. What time of day do you typically eat meals or snacks? What foods and drinks contribute to the largest number of calories that you intake per day? Do you tend to skip meals and then overeat later? Do you eat late at night?
  • Being able to see a tangible report of your food intake over time in the app will help you to gain insight into what your eating triggers are. Were there some very stressed or sleep-deprived days when your consumption of sweet treats skyrocketed? Once you understand your personal eating habits, you’ll be able to create SMART goals to change specific patterns that cause overeating, building self-efficacy along the way. Start out by celebrating when you self-monitor your eating for a 3-day streak; then increase that to 5 days. Shift next to celebrate when you achieve your calorie goal for 3 days in a week, and so forth.  Reflect on what worked well on the days you met your self-monitoring or your calorie goal and what got in the way on the days you didn’t. Note exactly how you dealt with the challenge successfully, so you can use the tactic again when needed.
  • For some variety, try a shift from setting goals for self-monitoring and meeting calorie goals to setting a goal for healthy food purchasing. For example, one week you can set a goal to make 3 changes to your shopping list (ex. swapping out cheddar cheese for a low-fat mozzarella, adding an extra type of fruit, deciding to avoid soda, etc.) because you know anything more than 3 changes would be difficult to achieve.  Therefore, start by making 3 changes and maintain those changes until you feel confident about continuing. Then, when you are ready, try making 4 different changes to your shopping list.

Quitting Smoking

  • Think about when you were able to reduce the number of cigarettes you smoked or when you were able to avoid smoking altogether for a few days in a row. As for physical activity and weight management, reflecting on what strategies worked well for you in the past and what you have overcome will give you assurance that you can complete that goal again.
  • Self-awareness is a key to building self-efficacy! Learning how to control yourself and understanding your own limitations can help you curb some of your cigarette cravings. For example, if you know that leaving work through a door where people smoke outside makes you want to smoke, exit by a different door that bypasses the cues to smoking.
  • If you slip or relapse, don’t go down a negative thinking path and believe that it will be permanent. Slips and even relapse is common and part of the process of learning how to quit smoking and stay quit for good. So, if you relapse, use that opportunity to learn more about the triggers that made you want to smoke. Use that new insight to refine your goals and refine your strategy.
  • Try out many different strategies and see which is the most effective for you. From deep breathing exercises, calling a trusted friend, going for a walk, or picking up an enjoyable book, there are lots of activities you can use as a distraction. When you try out a new strategy, celebrate your efforts! You should feel proud knowing that you are working towards a healthier lifestyle!

Final Thoughts

It is important for you to continue building self-efficacy, so you can succeed throughout the STELLAR program, even when encountering obstacles. Your confidence in your ability to reach your goals will take you a long way!

Assignment

Your assignment for the next week is to keep up the positivity and believe in yourself! If you ever feel unmotivated about achieving your goals for the week, think about your previous achievements, and tell yourself that you can continue to make progress.

Set manageable goals, achieve them, and use some of the strategies we discussed today to increase your self-efficacy.

1. Think about your time spent in STELLAR. What are you most proud of so far?

Physical Activity Achieving and Maintaining a Healthy Weight Quitting Smoking
1. 1. 1.
2. 2. 2.
3. 3. 3.
4. 4. 4.
 

2. What changes related to your behavior/s have you been able to make that seemed unimaginable at the start of the program?

Physical Activity Achieving and Maintaining a Healthy Weight Quitting Smoking
1. 1. 1.
2. 2. 2.
3. 3. 3.
4. 4. 4.

Learn More

Self Efficacy Blog

Ted Talk on Self Efficacy

The “Can Do” Beliefs that Help People Change their Lifestyles