Where have your beliefs in your abilities come from? 3 Perspectives on the Sources of Efficacy – Sarah Cordiner

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Sarah Cordiner | 27 September 2014 |

Sarah Cordiner, founder of ‘The Efficacy Effect’ believes there are 5 stages to the creation of an ‘Efficacious Effect’; aka the development of an event, experience or circumstance that causes desired results, (or undesired ones).

THE EFFECTOR – this is something causes a change in belief in one’s ability to create desired results
THE MIND-SET – This is the attitude, thought and decoding process that occurs on experiencing the effector
THE RESPONSE – This is our reaction (behaviour, words and emotions) to the effector
FEEDBACK – This is the response and reaction we get back as a result of our own response
EFFECT – This is the ultimate the ultimate state and result of the effector being experienced

These will be broken down in other posts, along with methods for controlling each of these stages for the best outcome.

Over time, we experience endless ‘Effectors’ in our lives, some of which don’t mean anything, and others that dramatically change our lives by effecting our level of efficacy (belief in our ability) to create desired results in our world.

But what causes certain kinds of responses and what is the source of efficacy?

Sarah Cordiner believes there are 3 perspectives to the sources of efficacy:

1. The Dependant Perspective

There are
three different perspectives on the degree to which people can control the
outcomes and experiences in their lives.
The first perspective is what I call the ‘dependant perspective’ which
asserts that people are reactive creatures and are a result of their collective
environmental, social and circumstantial experiences. This assumes that life
just ‘happens’ to us, that we have no control or influence over the direction
of our lives; that we are shaped, guided and contrived by other people and our
environment.

2. The Power Perspective

The second
perspective is the ‘power perspective’.

This
perspective suggests that people are entirely responsible for the experiences
they have and the life paths they take. People
have a unique set of characteristics unlike any other creature on earth. Our
brains function differently to other animals, giving us greater ability to be
calculating, manipulative and decisive.
We have characteristics such as free will and imagination, which gives
us the unlimited ability to control and shape our lives; and that we have
endless power to engineer and regulate the experiences and outcomes that we
encounter.

3. The Enterprise Perspective

However, I
have a different perspective. I believe
that reality is a combination of both of these perspectives. Our circumstances and environments can
certainly influence our emotions, change our affective states and encourage or
discourage us from taking certain actions.

However, they
do not determine the end result or outcome we will experience, as they do not
force us to make certain decisions or take certain actions. We have the free will to choose what action
to take, and the ability to imagine or preconceive pros and cons in executing a
certain action or inaction. Therefore,
we not only have the power to influence our future, our circumstances and our
experiences; we also have the ability to create it.

Albert Bandura states “People are producers as well as products of social environments. They have a hand in shaping and selecting
their environmental contexts” , so I call this the Enterprise Perspective.

Like a succesful enterprise, the environments around us change and the inner organisation can temporarily face chaos when it experiences change; it also has emotion as a fundamental part of its human functioning which cannot be omitted or ignored. Yet successful enterprises use strategies, plans, methods and rules for ensuring a degree of control is maintained for the benefit of creating desired results.

Which one are you?

Sarah xxx