When I was in high school, I worked at a sub shop.
One day, there was a little kid at the counter who was covering and uncovering his ears.
If you’ve ever done that in a noisy environment, you know it changes your perception of the sound around you.
A few people were looking at him sort of quizzically as he did that, and he looked back and said,” I’m doing it!”
It’s an example of the magical thinking of kid logic – he thought that what he was doing was changing the sound in the entire restaurant, that it was changing it for everyone.
It’s a great example also of one of the most enduring concepts in psychology called Self Efficacy Theory.
That’s the idea that your confidence that you can accomplish something may be more important than even skill at helping you succeed.
And if you think about this, it makes sense because someone with high skill, but low confidence, might not believe that they can use those skills to achieve.
Whereas someone with high confidence and lower skill? They’ve won half the battle before they even started because they believe they can.
You might argue that the little kid really didn’t succeed at changing the sound in the environment, but he sure had us thinking about it and all these years later.
And maybe – just maybe – he has you thinking about it, too.