Build Self-Efficacy to Write Your First Book

And how I made a honeypot costume in the 11th hour

Let me start by saying that I am not a seamstress. I’m not particularly crafty nowadays - but there was a time in my life (mostly junior high and high school) when I was passionate about creating things with my hands. I crocheted blankets for my dolls and friends, scrapbooked my memories, and enjoyed sewing Halloween costumes and dresses with my mom and nana.

It’s been years since I’ve done anything like that. I have a giant tub of yarn, fabric, and crochet hooks languishing in our attic right now. I haven’t crocheted a granny square in eons.

We decided that for Halloween our family would be a beehive - complete with beekeepers (me and my husband), honeybees (our daughters), and a honeypot (baby boy). The honeybee wings and antennae for the girls were bought on Amazon, but it is basically impossible to find a good honeypot costume for toddlers on sale online. I felt like the little Red Hen: “Then I’ll do it myself!”

The problem was: We had a busy previous weekend, and I was in New York for work the three days before Halloween. Then I had to work Thursday morning. And then take baby boy to a dr. appt Thursday afternoon. How/when on earth would I make a honeypot costume?!

Not to worry. I took baby boy to Joann’s after his doctor appointment and armed myself with brown and yellow felt and yellow fabric paint. When I got home, I cut the round outline of a honeypot in two pieces of felt, cut a neck hole, hand-stitched the shoulders and sides (with a neat backstitch, thankyouverymuch), slapped a yellow felt honey drip on the neckline, and wrote “honey” in big block letters across the front. Et voila: homemade honeypot! The whole thing was done within an hour, and 30 minutes later we were trick-or-treating.

While I was measuring the shoulder length on my squirming toddler, I thought to myself: “Wow, good thing I still remember how to do all this!” And, honestly, I marveled at my own chutzpah in taking this on with literally no time to spare, no room for mistakes, no margin of error. I had to get it right basically the first time, and yet I felt very little anxiety about being able to accomplish this task.

Okay, what’s the point?!

The point of all this is not to brag about my superior crafting skills (believe me, my skills are not impressive). It’s to say that I took on this ridiculous challenge because I had a confidence based on prior experience and I knew how to do each individual component of the task. I knew I could slap together something passable fairly quickly.

I had just enough self-efficacy to try - even though I had never made a honeypot costume before and only had a rough sketch of what it should look like in my head.

When we try something new, like writing a book, we don’t have to wing it from the get-go. Just like any other major goal, we can break the goal of writing a book down into its individual components and practice those discrete tasks. When it comes time to write your book, you’ll find that you’ve already done a lot of the work and finishing it is really not so intimidating!

This is how you build self-efficacy.

See? Not great, but totally passable. :)

So what is self-efficacy?

‍Self-efficacy is the degree to which you believe you can execute actions to achieve certain outcomes. It’s a concept pioneered by the late psychologist Albert Bandura, who passed away a few years ago.

Whether you realize it or not, your self-efficacy guides nearly everything you do. It’s why you feel completely confident as you stroll to the washing machine to do a load of laundry: because you’ve done it before, you know how it works, and you have total faith in your own ability to get the job done well. It’s what causes you to shy away from attempting Olympic gymnasts’ routines in your backyard: because you (most likely!) don’t have the years of experience, the skills, and the proof from past success that you can accomplish them.

In my laundry example above, you likely feel high self-efficacy because someone taught you and you’ve done it successfully many times. You believe in your own ability to successfully perform the actions needed to attain the desired result: a clean load of laundry. And on the other hand, as with the gymnastics, having low self-efficacy stops us from trying something we’re uncomfortable with, or even might expect negative results from (like a broken neck!). Bandura writes, “If people believe they have no power to produce results, they will not attempt to make things happen.” 

‍Self-efficacy has a tremendous impact on our motivation to try something new. Even if you’ve never written a book, you might still have high self-efficacy around doing it if you have the right preparation, and you won’t encounter as much resistance to making it happen.

This is what professional writers do, and what we teach aspiring authors to do in our book Hungry Authors. We break the task of writing a book down into its component parts:

• Pick a genre

• Decide your audience

• Refine your big idea

• Create a book map

• Define your little big idea for each chapter

• Write a great hook

• etc.

We guide you through it so that by the time you get to actually “writing”… it doesn’t seem so scary because you’ve already done SO much of the work!

So how exactly do you increase your self-efficacy?

Four ways to build self-efficacy

‍Bandura’s work is so powerful because he showed that self-efficacy can be taught and developed. He wrote that there are four primary ways to increase your self-efficacy around a skill:

Finding small wins (mastery experiences)

The most powerful way to start building your confidence is to experience small writing wins—or mastery experiences. These small wins might look like meeting your word count goal, posting a blog, getting positive feedback on a writing sample, finishing a chapter or article, or perhaps even writing your manuscript.

The idea here is: “If I did that, I can do this.”

Each small win builds on the last, so that as you gain confidence and momentum, your wins get bigger and bigger.

Seeing others like you succeed (vicarious experiences)

‍If you’ve never written a book before, it doesn’t make sense to compare yourself to John Green or J.K. Rowling or Glennon Doyle. Instead, you should look for models who are in a similar situation as you—they have a similar platform (even if it’s none!), similar writing experience, and a similar drive to write, and they’re having some success. 

Seeing these people who are just like us succeed sends the message that “If they can do it, I can do it, too.”

Receiving authentic encouragement from people you trust (social persuasion)

‍Bandura’s research shows how powerful, honest encouragement (what he called verbal persuasion) from someone credible and trustworthy could be in building up our self-efficacy. But it can’t just be blind praise. This encouragement must be:

• From someone credible whom you respect

• Tailored and specific to you

• Realistic (they can’t promise you the moon!)

• Genuine

• Consistent

Staying calm and reducing stress around the task (affective states)

‍Bandura writes that both our physical state and our mental/emotional state (he calls it our “affective states”) affect our efficacy beliefs. If we’re sore, winded, exhausted, or in pain, we probably won’t have as much confidence in our ability to run 10 miles as we would if we were feeling great and had high energy levels. Likewise, if we’re frightened, angry, grieving, or depressed, we may not “feel like” writing, because we judge our own abilities as less than optimal in that emotional state. 

Research shows several ways we can take care of ourselves physically and emotionally to increase our self-efficacy:

• Sleeping

• Walking

• Hiking

• Working out

• Staying hydrated

• Regulating our sugar

• Journaling

• Meditating

• Setting boundaries

Writing a book is not easy. But we can make it easier and increase our own confidence and courage to take it on by building up our self-efficacy in these four ways.

If you want to learn more about self-efficacy, Liz and I are talking about self-efficacy for the next few weeks on the Hungry Authors podcast. Listen to the first episode here!