How to Build Self-Efficacy Through Mastery, Modelling, and Mental Rehearsal
- Brainz Magazine
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
John Tepe, founder of John Tepe High-Performance Mindset Coaching and Therapy, helps professionals master their beliefs and behaviours. With advanced degrees in English Literature and Applied Neuroscience and expertise as a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming, John helps clients take control of their narrative.
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 those goals, and behave authentically in ways that allow us to take action on them.
In the first article 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, on 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 apart 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 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 the brain what taking action looks and feels like. Mastery experiences show the brain how to “do it like this” and to “think about it like this.” Capitalising on and learning from mastery experiences allows us to build even more of them. 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 successful experience so successful, we can identify and then reflect upon what our best work really looks and feels like. Mastery experiences make how we think, feel, and behave about success transferable from one situation to the next. They build our belief that success is 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 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 acts 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 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.
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, but it also 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. As we talked, we discovered that B’s habit of listening for what was “right” in a conversation led him to overthink, to think too far ahead, and then stumble over his words when it was his turn to speak. B’s hyper-vigilance for what someone might say next, or even two exchanges into the future, had been inhibiting him 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. His fear of 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. We imagined him networking with senior executives, openly engaging in active listening and expressive communication. We replayed sessions of him confabulating over AR technology and the luxury car experience, and 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 an experience of self-mastery. These moments of bringing a shared space to mind, acting from it, and then openly 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 can quickly become a template for comparison and self-judgement: She speaks more eloquently. He handles pressure better. They’ve already published, presented, and 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 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?
Do you know how they 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, whom he both admired and resented for her big personality. As we unpacked the dynamic, it became clear: M modelled disinhibited communication. She said what she felt in an organisation where high expectations and tight deadlines fuelled stress and consternation, and only she showed it.
M knew her role backwards and forwards; she 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 me, I shifted towards asking M for help. We replaced ideas around “M must listen to me in meetings and consider what I say” with “M can help me if I ask. And I can also be open about how I need her help and how I’d prefer to receive it.”
Though M was excellent, she did have a reputation for being hard to get along with. So learning from M was about engaging directly with her 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 her.
Mental rehearsal: Rewriting possibilities before they happen
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 of 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, then act from that mental space of safety and surety
We might begin by mapping a situation, say, an upcoming meeting with a difficult client. Then we imagine entering with a strong posture, calm breath, and clear inner dialogue. We rehearse their tone, their exit strategy if needed, and their first sentence. We then anchor these sensations in hypnosis, allowing the nervous system to rehearse and embody not just what to say, but how to feel and think about it. The nervous system gets complete self-efficacy training, from thought to feeling to decision to action. The hypnotic self-mastery experience is complete, from start to finish, in the client’s mind, emotions, and actions.
This isn’t visualisation for its own sake. It’s rewiring the expectation of self-efficacy, so that when the moment comes, it feels less like a threat and more like 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.
Read more from John Tepe
John Tepe, High Performance Coach and Psychotherapist
John Tepe is the founder of John Tepe High-Performance Mindset Coaching and Therapy, where he helps ambitious professionals gain clarity, master their behaviors, and capitalize on career opportunities like promotions, business deals, and personal milestones. With advanced degrees in English Literature and Applied Neuroscience, as well as expertise as a Master Practitioner of Neurolinguistic Programming, John blends creativity and science to empower his clients. His mission is to help professionals take control of their life narratives and achieve meaningful, lasting success.
