How to Build Self-Efficacy Through Mastery, Modelling, and Mental Rehearsal
- johntepe
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
True confidence doesn’t come from pushing harder. It comes from remembering who you are—especially under pressure. We need to remember our goals, the values and beliefs anchoring our goals, and behaving authentically in ways that allow us to take action on our goals.
In the first post of this series, we explored how low self-efficacy can create a regress loop. A loop in which bad habits self-perpetuate and lock professionals into vicious cycles of overwork, self-doubt, and burnout. This follow-up begins the path out: how to actively replace regress loops by capitalising on Albert Bandura’s findings.
Building self-efficacy is an active process built upon four main experiences:
Mastery experiences
Vicarious learning (modelling)
Verbal persuasion
Regulation of emotional and physiological states
In this blog, we focus on the first two: mastery experience and vicarious learning (modelling). These are especially powerful for professionals whose external success masks an internal erosion of confidence. These professionals may be building an external perception of success and yet they are falling about inside. They are trapped in a regress loop that drives them towards external validation of being ‘good enough’ rather than the internal confirmation of meeting one’s personal goals, drivers, and spiritual anchors.
As you’ll see, building self-efficacy is about rewriting your internal proof of what’s possible by showing your brain what you want. Consciously noting, remembering, and returning to mastery experiences shows how brain what taking action looks and feels like. Mastery experiences how the brain to ‘do it like this’ and to ‘think about it like this. Mastery experiences show the brain how to take specific action in how we think, feel, and act. Capitalising on and learning from mastery experiences allows us to build even more mastery experiences. And so, through mastery experiences, we can bring internal and imagined goals into real life.
Mastery Experiences:
Not Just Big Wins, But Inner Ones, Too
Bandura calls mastery experiences the most effective way to build self-efficacy. When we experience success in meaningful tasks, our brain encodes the message: I can do this. Over time, through consistent and intentional review, this sense of personal capability and mastery becomes learned behaviour. We internalise mastery experiences into the brain’s salience network and begin to change the brain’s default method for interpreting our external reality. Through mindful analysis of what made a success experience so successful we can identify and then reflect upon what our best work really looks like and feels like. Mastery experiences make how we think, feel, and behave about success transferable from one situation into the next. Mastery experiences build our belief that success in continual and not a one-off:
“Successes build a robust belief in one’s personal efficacy.”
—Albert Bandura
And here’s the problem: many professionals don’t register the majority of their wins. At best we celebrate the win and then let it pass by. At worst, we don’t even acknowledge it, feeling there are ‘bigger fish to fry’ and more significant problems worth our attention.
So many of us minimise achievements (“I was just doing my job”), dismiss the courage needed to be expressive and open in building working alliances. Working with leadership in boardrooms, so-called ‘difficult people’ in corridors, and business partners across the negotiating table takes bravery. All too often the external outcome outshines the personal qualities needed one needs to actually make it happen. This bad habit, choosing the external benchmark over the personal one, blinds us to the ongoing mastery that happens in everyday choices and everyday act of courage: keeping calm under stress, choosing integrity over people-pleasing, and finding common ground with others.
These are the moments to look out for, to identify and to review. These are the personal wins, the mastery experiences from which we can learn to build sustainable personal and professional success.
Emotional Mastery Is Self-Mastery
Psychologist Andrew Salter, known for founding assertiveness training, defined mastery as choosing one’s emotional response—and acting on it with open and honest expression. Inhibition, for Salter, kills mastery. Similarly, Judson Brewer’s work in Overcoming Anxiety shows how identifying, regulating, and rebuilding emotional habits reinforces internal safety and capability. So, Salter encourages us to be emotionally honest and free – to be expressive and open when communicating. When done from an internal space of safety, this makes it not only okay to agree and okay to disagree, it makes it exciting to do so. Open and uninhibited expression gives us a language for our enthusiasm at work and at home, and the opportunities to build expression into action, collaboration, and growth.
Clients often come to me wanting to explore and accentuate the things going wrong. They want to vent about so-called ‘failure experiences’ holding them back from everything they feel they deserve. And this is okay – it’s the most natural place to start, from right where you are in the discomfort of a limiting regress loop.
BB, an executive at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), set up a one day intensive with me so we could review how he could better approach networking events for senior leaders. So, we talked about it and discoved that B’s habit of listening for what was ‘right’ in a conversation lead him to over think, to think to far ahead and then stumble over his words when it was his turn to speak. B. hyper vigilance for what someone might say next, or even say two exchanges in the future, had been inhibiting himself in conversations. B wanted the validation of saying the perfect line, and was terrified of saying the wrong thing – and this was the axis of his regression loop. B’s fear of to simply listening to another’s story and then freely sharing his own, was the touchpoint for our work.
So, we used hypnosis in a way that supported B in creating an internal safe space. From this safe space he could think, feel, listen and speak from a place of authenticity. B. learned that being safe could be a state of mind he could carry with him anywhere. So we built a safe space, and from this space B imagined himself networking with senior executives openly with active listening and expressive communication. We replayed sessions of him confabulating over AR technology and the luxury care experience andd from there – cultivating assertiveness through role play.
By the end of the intensive, BB had role played several mastery experiences and knew the key ingredients for thinking, feeling, and communicating at his best. Together, we had mapped out what had been a regress loop and reframed it into what an experience of self-mastery. These moments of bringing a shared space to mind, acting from it, and then listening openly and organically sharing common touchpoints with colleagues and peers became BB’s ingredients for networking success and models for many future conversations.
He no longer saw himself as disempowered, but as already leading in the conversation because he was listening openly and from there, freely expressing.
Modelling: How Comparison Can Heal or Harm
The second source of self-efficacy is vicarious experience: seeing others succeed and internalising the belief that you can too.
“Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers’ beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities.” —Albert Bandura
But in high-achieving environments, modelling can become a razor-sharp double-edged sword. Identifying the ingredients for success in another and quickly become a template for comparison and self-judgement: “She speaks more eloquently.” “He handles pressure better.” “They’ve already published, presented, been promoted.”
These comparisons don’t inspire. They highlight flaws. And without the right support, the opportunities that model how we can improve and grow t become fuel for damaging self-criticism and negative self-talk.
In sessions, I help clients shift their minds from noting opportunities for unconscious comparison to seeking out and acting upon conscious modelling. The question becomes:
What do they do so well?
And do you know how they can make that happen?
Could you talk to them about what they do so well?
Do you think you could ask for help?
Do you think you can ask them to help you grow?
For example, a client recently described a colleague, M, who he both admired and resented for their big personality. As we unpacked the dynamic, it became clear: WH’s colleague modelled disinhibited communication. They said what they felt in an organisation where high expectations and tight deadlines fuelled stress and consternation, and only M showed it.
M knew their role backwards and forwards, they had been there for decades, and her outspokenness also made her hard to get along with. So, instead of comparing himself against M, WH and I shifted towards asking M for help. We replaced ideas around ‘M must listen to me in meetings and consider what I say’ to ‘M can help me if I ask. And I can also be open about how I need their help and how I’d prefer to receive it.’
Though M was excellent, they did have a reputation for being hard to get along with. So learning from M was about engaging directly with their expertise—by calling it out as important and worthwhile—rather than demanding easy interactions.
This therapeutic shift—replacing rigid interpersonal demands with flexible preferences—is also a core principle in rational-emotive behaviour therapy (REBT), developed by psychologist Albert Ellis. His work emphasised that much of our distress arises not from others’ behaviour, but from the internal demands we place on how others should behave.
Rather than trying to force M to ‘be like this’, WH and I identified and broke down imperatives that limited WH and M to interacting in black and white roles. Instead, we aimed for collaboration and shared perspective. We used role play to identify WH’s most empowering language and then mental rehearsal to integrate it into interactions that felt empowering and authentic—while also honouring M’s role as mentor. We didn’t control M; we learned to reconnect with them.
Mental Rehearsal: Rewriting Possibility Before It Happens
Modelling can happen externally. We did it all the time during my teaching career – observing colleagues, providing feedback from the observation, and sharing good practice. But external modelling is just talk and notes on paper unless it’s acted upon and internalised. And internalising is where mental rehearsal becomes crucial.
Bandura calls this “symbolic modelling.” Neuroscience shows the brain responds to vivid imagery and internal simulation as if the event were actually happening. Our neurons don’t differentiate between imagination and action. This is the basis for performance psychology for elite athletes, and it’s just as effective for professionals rehearsing a presentation, a boundary-setting conversation, or a new way of managing emotion and inoculating themselves against stress.
In our work together, clients learn to:
Use self-hypnosis to visualise future situations with deep attentional focus and vivid emotional clarity
Anchor behaviours to specific thoughts and actions so they become intentional and automatic
Interrupt old patterns and replace them with helpful alternatives
Feel the embodied confidence of succeeding before the event arrives and then acting from that mental space of safety and surety.
This isn’t visualisation for its own sake. It’s rewiring the expectation of self-efficacy through hypnotic behavioural —rehearsal so that when the moment comes, it feels less like a threat and more like a remembering.
What Building Self-Efficacy Really Looks Like
It’s a narrative shift.
It’s your internal history changing shape—reclassifying events not as failures, but as initiations into strength. It’s setting down the belief that confidence is something you either have or don’t. And instead, practising it like a craft.
This is why at John Tepe Psychotherapy and Coaching we say, ‘Take Control of Your Narrative’.
And here’s what it can look like:
Recalling times you held your ground under pressure—not perfectly, but with growth
Noticing when someone else models behaviour you admire, and choosing to work towards it with collaboration, not comparison.
Imagining a future situation with composure, presence, and clarity—and feeling it in your body before it ever happens
If This Work Speaks to You, Here’s Where We Begin
My clients are often professionals who look capable on the outside but carry invisible exhaustion on the inside. They’ve spent years proving themselves—and somewhere along the way, their belief in their own competence has become brittle.
Together, we begin by identifying the moments that shaped their belief systems. Not just childhood patterns, communication struggles in relationships, or workplace traumas, but the storylines they’ve inherited about leadership, success, and self-worth. We work out the patterns so you can start controlling your narrative.
We map where self-efficacy collapsed—and begin gently building it back through:
Anchored mental safety
Expressive Journalling and Language Analysis
Assertiveness Training
Stress Inoculation
Cognitive and Behavioural Hypnotherapy
More importantly, we reframe what counts as success. Because confidence doesn’t look like bravado. Sometimes it looks like clarity and purpose driven action. It’s a quiet refusal to abandon yourself under pressure.
If you’re ready to build a more grounded, authentic form of confidence—based not on performance, but on presence—this is the work.
