If we asked ourselves the question, "Which is most important: what we do or who we are. Most people would answer, "Well of course, its who we are!" It could reasonably be argued that the two are inter-related as what is the point of being a person of 'worth' if our actions aren't also 'worthy'?
The concepts and relationship of self-esteem and self-efficacy are equally intriguing and play an important role in the coaching process.
Self-esteem (belief in who we are) and self-efficacy (belief in what we are able to do under given circumstances) reflect our perceptions of ourselves and the latter is often where we start when helping someone with behaviour change. It is important to understand the relationship of the two to be able to coach effectively. There may well be a big difference in our belief in ourselves as a person and our confidence level in an area of our life, such as sport or work, weight loss or stress management where we may have great talent and success or struggle with achieving what we want.
So lets take a look at self-esteem. A person who has low self-esteem believes that they have little worth as a person no matter how successful they appear to the outside world. This may be a belief that was formed in childhood due to ineffective parenting or negative experiences. There are times that despite our apparent achievements we suffer self doubt or a sense that we don't deserve what we have been blessed with but this is often a temporary feeling. For some people it is more permanent - take documented cases of lottery winners who have lost their new fortune within a short period of time. In many cases low self-esteem led them to believe that they didn't deserved their winnings! Low self-esteem will get in the way of a person living a fulfilled life and therapy is often recommended.
A person with high self-esteem, however, will have an overall good feeling about who they are. However, this person may still have low self-efficacy around certain areas of their life. Low self-efficacy is what we see the most often in wellness coaching. Let's take the successful executive who is good at, and loves his work. Yet he is 30 kilos overweight. Now this person's self-esteem may be healthy and his self-efficacy around work is excellent. But when it comes to changing lifestyle habits that will lead to him losing weight, he has little or no confidence, which means he is unlikely to succeed. One of the biggest reasons why people fail in changing health behaviours is their belief that they can't do it.
Coaches are in the business of building self-efficacy in our clients. A good coach can help increase self-efficacy by working with someone over a period of time and slowly, step by step, increasing the belief that they have what it takes to make the change in their habits. If a person happens to have good self-esteem, this will help towards building self-efficacy as the research has shown that people with high self tend to be more resilient and show more initiative!
So if we focus simply on building self-efficacy will this help increase self-esteem? The good news is that it can. As people experience success, they will often feel better about themselves in a general sense. So although coaches do not set out to increase self esteem, the work they do in helping increasing a clients self-efficacy may well have an impact on how they think of themselves as human beings. So the relationship is complex and not directly causal but one definitely impacts the other. We begin where we can gain the most ground and this is often by helping our clients increase their confidence. We will take a look in the next issue at how we can do this.
