Self-Efficacy
Self-efficacy is Albert Bandura's term for the belief that you can produce a specific outcome through your own action. It is not general optimism, not self-esteem, and not confidence in the abstract. It is a judgment about what you can do in a particular domain — and it turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of whether you actually do it.
How It Works
High self-efficacy changes behavior in four concrete ways. People with it choose harder tasks, because challenge feels manageable rather than threatening. They persist longer when things get difficult, because struggle is read as solvable rather than as evidence of incapacity. They recover faster from failure, because setback doesn't collapse the underlying belief. And they experience less anxiety in performance situations, because the threat model is weaker.
These behavioral differences compound. A person who attempts harder tasks, persists, and recovers faster acquires more real competence over time — which in turn reinforces the self-efficacy belief. The belief and the competence build each other. This is why Bandura is careful to distinguish self-efficacy from wishful thinking: it is not "believe you can and you will." It is that accurate self-efficacy — matched to your actual developing ability — produces the behavioral pattern that grows ability.
The Transfer Effect
One of Bandura's most important findings is that self-efficacy built in one domain tends to transfer to others. In his phobia research, patients who worked through his guided mastery protocol didn't just stop being afraid of snakes — they became less anxious about other unrelated things in their lives. The underlying belief that changed wasn't "snakes are safe." It was something closer to: "I can handle difficult situations."
Kelley draws on this directly. The goal of his d.school work is not to make people better at any specific creative skill. It is to build sufficient creative self-efficacy that the belief transfers — that someone who completes a design sprint starts to think of themselves as a person who can generate creative solutions, across contexts.
Distinction from Growth Mindset
Self-efficacy and growth mindset are related but not the same. Growth mindset is a belief about the nature of ability — that it is developable rather than fixed. Self-efficacy is a belief about your own current capacity to produce a specific outcome. You can have a growth mindset about a skill you currently rate your self-efficacy in as low: "I know I could get better at this, but I'm not there yet." The two beliefs tend to reinforce each other — believing ability is developable makes it easier to build self-efficacy through small successes — but they are doing different work.