Vantage Point at Aspiro - Helping Our Students Build Self Efficacy & Life Success

Vantage Point by Aspiro is built on the foundational idea that facing and overcoming challenges creates positive changes in self-efficacy. Self-efficacy refers to the belief that one can overcome challenges and create desired outcomes.

Where does self-efficacy come from? This process can be described in terms of “coping” versus “avoidance”.

“Coping” means facing daily challenges. Doing our best to overcome and carry on to the best of our ability.

“Avoidance” is the opposite… running away from or avoiding challenges.

The concept is very simple yet infinitely powerful. When we cope with life, our confidence and self-efficacy grows. When we avoid facing challenges, our confidence and self-efficacy decreases. Some have even gone so far as to say that most, if not all of life’s problems are due to our tendency to avoid rather than cope with our difficulties… our tendency to choose safety and comfort over risk and discomfort.

When we give in to negatives like fear, insecurity or anger, we tend to withdraw from life’s daily challenges.

Avoidance takes many forms… anger, using drugs or alcohol, blaming others for our problems, isolating ourselves on the computer or acting out in other ways that have negative consequences for our life.

It is a common misconception that confidence and self-efficacy can be improved by praise, encouragement and external recognition of accomplishments. This is rarely true. We can tell a child he or she is “great” but it will have little impact on confidence or self-efficacy. Many people experience great success by worldly standards and receive extraordinary amounts of praise and recognition, but their internal lives are filled with insecurity and poor self-efficacy. The reason for this is simple. If we are “avoiding” more than we are “coping” we know internally that external praise and recognition is based on our false presentation of ourselves.

We have subconscious thoughts like “sure you think I’m great, but I’m just faking it. If you really knew what was going on inside me, you’d know the truth.” It is therefore easy to discount external praise, especially when we feel insecure inside.

So if external reinforcement and praise doesn’t increase self efficacy, what does?

Our students are immersed in new adventures. They have lots of fun and are challenged in many ways.

Both are crucial to adolescent development. Our students engage in activities that challenge them and take them out of their comfort zone. As they try new things and struggle to learn new physical and outdoor skills, confidence and self-efficacy result.

The crucial mechanism of change at Aspiro is the creation of “overwhelming mastery” experiences.

“Overwhelming” refers to the idea that the student experiences success and positive feedback in ways that are dramatic and that they cannot subconsciously discount. For example, if we simply say “Good job!” a student can easily discount that feedback and think “Right. You are just saying that because that’s what you are paid to say.” However, if, while learning a specific outdoor activity, we give specific, positive feedback about something they are doing right, this feedback is less easily dismissed.

As the student faces challenging tasks, finds success and experiences a feeling of mastery, our guides become a trusted source of wisdom and growth. Our guides then begin to tie current experiences to past difficulties with an emphasis on solutions. We begin to turn our students back to family, parents, support systems and other positive sources of wisdom.