Confidence For Networking:
- johntepe
- Sep 8
- 9 min read
How Self-Efficacy Builds Lasting Success
First Published August 2025 | Updated September 2025
“I never feel good enough, even when others think I’m successful.”
“I freeze when conversations go off-script.”
“I can’t switch off, no matter how much I achieve.”
These are the phrases I hear most often from ambitious professionals. Outwardly, they are high-performing: closing deals, leading teams, delivering results. Inwardly, they feel brittle, caught in cycles of self-doubt, overthinking, and exhaustion. The same dynamic shows up in networking, where confidence feels fragile and comparison takes over, just as elite athletes can falter when performance pressure overshadows inner belief.
Psychologist Albert Bandura called the solution self-efficacy: the belief in your ability to shape outcomes, manage challenges, and create change. True confidence does not come from pushing harder but from trusting that you can act authentically under pressure.
In the first post of this series, we explored how low self-efficacy creates a regress loop, a cycle where bad habits self-perpetuate and drive overwork, people-pleasing, and burnout. This follow-up begins the path out: how to replace regress loops by strengthening self-efficacy through mastery, modelling, and mental rehearsal.
Why Self-Efficacy Matters:
Points for Professionals Under Pressure
Bandura identified four primary sources of self-efficacy: mastery experiences, vicarious learning (modelling), verbal persuasion, and regulating emotional states. Each one is powerful, but this article focuses on the first two, mastery and modelling, because they create the most immediate shifts for professionals whose external success masks an internal erosion of confidence.
These professionals look competent, but inside they are doubting, overthinking, and waiting for someone else’s approval to feel secure. Athletes face a similar risk: chasing medals and times instead of anchoring confidence in the process of training. The result is the same: performance becomes fragile.
Building self-efficacy reverses this spiral. It is about rewriting your internal evidence base, giving your brain proof of what is possible by recalling mastery experiences and by modelling resilient behaviour. With the right tools, including cognitive-behavioural hypnotherapy (CBH), these lessons can be internalised so deeply that confidence becomes automatic, even under pressure.
Building self-efficacy is an active process. Bandura identified four main experiences that strengthen it:
Mastery experiences
Vicarious learning (modelling)
Verbal persuasion
Regulation of emotional and physiological states
In this post, we focus on the first two, mastery and modelling. These are especially powerful for ambitious professionals whose external achievements hide an inner erosion of confidence. On the surface they appear capable, yet inside they feel brittle. Instead of drawing strength from inner conviction, they are pulled into regress loops that demand constant external validation. The question is no longer, “Am I living my goals?” but, “Am I good enough in their eyes?”
Reversing this spiral requires rewriting your brain’s internal evidence of what is possible. Every time you consciously notice, recall, or recreate a mastery experience, you show your nervous system what effective action looks and feels like. The brain begins to encode new templates: this is how to think, this is how to act, this is how to respond under pressure. Each remembered or rehearsed success becomes the raw material for the next. Over time, internal proof of capability grows stronger than the pull of external approval, and imagined goals begin to take shape in lived reality.
Mastery Experiences:
Building Inner Confidence At Work
Bandura identified mastery experiences as the most powerful way to build self-efficacy. When we succeed in meaningful tasks, the brain encodes the message: I can do this. Over time, these small but significant moments shape a stronger sense of personal capability. For professionals, recognising and reflecting on these wins is what transforms fleeting achievement into lasting inner confidence at work.
“Successes build a robust belief in one’s personal efficacy.”
— Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997), p. 80
Yet many professionals do not register their wins. At best, they celebrate briefly before moving on. At worst, they dismiss success entirely, thinking there are bigger problems to solve. Achievements are minimised with phrases such as “I was just doing my job.” In doing so, the personal qualities that made success possible — courage, clarity, composure — are overlooked.
This habit of chasing external benchmarks blinds us to everyday mastery: holding calm in a tense meeting, choosing integrity over people-pleasing, or finding common ground with colleagues under pressure. These are the quiet acts of bravery that accumulate into a resilient sense of capability. Recognising them is what allows professionals, and athletes alike, to build sustainable confidence.
Emotional Mastery Is Self-Mastery
Psychologist Andrew Salter, pioneer of assertiveness training, defined mastery as choosing one’s emotional response and expressing it openly. For Salter, inhibition kills mastery. Similarly, Judson Brewer’s research in Overcoming Anxiety shows that identifying and reshaping emotional habits strengthens internal safety and capability.
Emotional mastery is therefore not about suppression, but expression from a place of security. When we communicate openly, it becomes not only acceptable to agree or disagree, it becomes energising. This creates opportunities to channel enthusiasm into action, collaboration, and growth — in the workplace, in relationships, and in competition.
A Case Example: Reframing Mastery for Confidence in Real Time
Clients often come to me focused on what is going wrong. They want to vent about so-called “failure experiences” that feel like barriers to what they deserve. This is natural. It is often the most immediate entry point into the discomfort of a regress loop.
BB, an executive at Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), booked a one-day intensive to explore how he could approach networking events with senior leaders more effectively. As we worked together, it became clear that his habit of listening for what was “right” in a conversation led him to overthink. He projected too far ahead, stumbled over his words when it was his turn to speak, and became hyper-vigilant about what others might say next. His need for validation through the “perfect line” and his fear of saying the wrong thing formed the axis of his regress loop.
The work began with hypnosis, creating an internal safe space from which he could think, feel, listen, and speak with authenticity. From this grounded state, BB practised imagining himself at networking events, engaging in active listening and expressive communication. We replayed scenes of him discussing AR technology and the luxury car experience, and from there cultivated assertiveness through role play.
By the end of the intensive, BB had role played several mastery experiences and identified the key ingredients for thinking, feeling, and communicating at his best. Together, we mapped what had been a regress loop and reframed it as a self-mastery loop. He learned to carry his safe space with him, to act from it, and to listen openly. Conversations became shared spaces rather than tests of performance.
He no longer saw himself as disempowered. Instead, he recognised he was already leading by listening attentively and expressing himself with ease.
Modelling:
Building Confidence for Networking
The second source of self-efficacy is vicarious experience: observing others succeed and internalising the belief that you can too. For many ambitious professionals, the challenge is not capability but confidence for networking. Instead of feeling inspired by colleagues who lead with ease, comparisons can trigger self-doubt and negative self-talk.
“Seeing people similar to oneself succeed by sustained effort raises observers’ beliefs that they too possess the capabilities to master comparable activities.”
— Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control (1997), p. 87
In high-achieving environments, however, modelling can become a double-edged sword. Identifying the ingredients of another person’s success can quickly turn into a template for comparison and self-judgement: “She speaks more eloquently.” “He handles pressure better.” “They have already been promoted.”
Instead of inspiring growth, these comparisons highlight flaws. Without the right support, opportunities to model improvement become fuel for damaging self-criticism and negative self-talk.
In sessions, I help clients shift from unconscious comparison to conscious modelling. The questions become:
What does this person do so well?
How do they make that happen?
Could you ask them about their strategies?
Could you request their help in applying them?
How could you let them know what kind of support you need?
For example, one client, WH, described a colleague, M, whose big personality he both admired and resented. As we explored further, it became clear that M modelled disinhibited communication. She expressed what she felt in an organisation defined by stress and deadlines, and she was often the only one to do so.
M had deep knowledge of her role, built over decades, and her outspokenness was both a strength and a challenge. Instead of comparing himself against her, WH learned to engage her expertise directly. We reframed his thoughts from “M must listen to me in meetings” to “M can help me if I ask, and I can express how I need her support.”
Although M was not always easy to work with, recognising her as a model of expressive communication helped WH build collaboration rather than competition.
This therapeutic shift — replacing rigid demands with flexible preferences — is also a core principle in Rational-Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT), developed by psychologist Albert Ellis. His work showed that much of our distress arises not from the behaviour of others, but from the internal demands we place on how they should behave. For more detail, see the American Psychological Association’s guide to REBT.
Rather than trying to force M to “be like this,” WH and I worked on identifying and breaking down the rigid imperatives that locked their interactions into black-and-white roles. Instead, we aimed for collaboration and shared perspective. Through role play, WH discovered language that felt empowering and authentic. With mental rehearsal, he practised using this language in ways that honoured M’s role as a mentor while also strengthening his own voice. The goal was never to control M, but to reconnect with her in a more constructive and confident way.
Mental Rehearsal:
Creating Confidence Before It Happens
Confidence for networking, presentations, and high-pressure conversations does not appear in the moment. It is built beforehand. Mental rehearsal creates that inner proof, allowing professionals to step into challenging situations with the clarity and composure of someone who has already succeeded.
Bandura referred to this as symbolic modelling. Neuroscience shows that the brain responds to vivid imagery and internal simulation as if the event were actually happening. Neural pathways do not distinguish clearly between imagination and action. This principle underpins performance psychology for elite athletes and is just as effective for professionals preparing for a presentation, rehearsing a boundary-setting conversation, or managing emotional responses under stress.
In therapy and coaching sessions, 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 constructive alternatives
Experience embodied confidence before an event and act from that mental space of safety and clarity
This is not visualisation for its own sake. It is the process of building self-efficacy through hypnotic behavioural rehearsal, so that when the moment arrives, it feels less like a threat and more like a remembering.
For a related perspective on breaking cycles of overthinking and burnout, see my blog on Therapy for Perfectionism.
Building Self-Efficacy:
It's not about becoming flawless.
It is a narrative shift.
It is the process of reclassifying events not as failures but as initiations into strength. It means setting down the belief that confidence is something you either have or lack, and instead practising it as a craft. This is the essence of therapy for perfectionism and of cultivating a high-performance mindset.
At John Tepe Psychotherapy and Coaching we call this taking control of your narrative.
Here is what it can look like in practice:
Recalling times you held your ground under pressure — not perfectly, but with growth and resilience.
Noticing when someone else models behaviour you admire — and choosing to work towards it with collaboration rather than comparison.
Imagining a future situation with composure, presence, and clarity — and feeling it in your body before it happens.
Self-efficacy is built in these moments. Each one is evidence that you can meet challenges with clarity and act from a place of inner mastery.
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 have 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 those belief systems. Not only childhood patterns or workplace traumas, but also the inherited storylines about leadership, success, and self-worth. By mapping these narratives, you can start taking control of your narrative and rebuilding the foundations of self-efficacy.
We explore where confidence collapsed and begin gently reconstructing it through:
Anchored mental safety
Expressive journalling and language analysis
Assertiveness training
Stress inoculation
Cognitive-behavioural hypnotherapy (CBH)
Most importantly, we reframe what counts as success. Confidence does not look like bravado. Often it looks like clarity and purpose-driven action. It is a quiet refusal to abandon yourself under pressure.
If you are ready to build a more grounded, authentic form of confidence — one based not on performance but on presence — this is the work.
Ready to begin?
Explore my free Toolkit for downloadable resources, or book your free strategy call to take the first step in rebuilding your self-efficacy.
