Читать книгу A Guide to the Scientific Career - Группа авторов - Страница 56

Research has shown four major sources of confidence (Bandura 1986, 1997, 2004; Bandura and Locke 2003). These sources can promote or undermine your confidence and its influence on your life and career. The first source of confidence is a history of prior success. This confidence refers to the degree in which you have experienced success in a given domain or task. As students are shaped by changes and challenges, they go through a self‐appraisal process that includes comparing themselves to others and to standards that have become more demanding. The second source of confidence is observing others. Role models and peers can affect your confidence. In your personal life, observing parents, siblings, other family members, and friends with their struggles or coping mechanisms, successes and achievements, can affect your confidence. In the medical field, observing fellow medical students, residents, and physicians can have the same influence. This is mirrored in an academic setting through observing fellow students, professors, and researchers. Your peers and mentors can promote thinking skills, provide constructive feedback, and share struggles as well as coping mechanisms to change your sense of self‐efficacy and confidence.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

– Eleanor Roosevelt (1939)

The third source of confidence is persuasion, which entails the efforts to ensure that you can be successful. Verbal encouragement and constructive feedback are most often received from your role model or mentor in your personal life or profession. Unrealistic expectations from peers or role models can affect the level of confidence that you achieve. At this time, it becomes important for you to utilize self‐confidence techniques or to seek feedback from others whom you trust, while not allowing unrealistic expectations to jeopardize your ability or level of confidence. The final source of confidence reviewed by Bandura (1997) consists of emotional experiences and physiological responses. Feelings of stress, anxiety, and pressure can undermine your confidence while feelings of enjoyment, interest, and engagement can promote self‐confidence.

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.

– Bernard M. Baruch (cited by Cerf 1948)