For This Alumna, Success Starts with Belief

For Deborah Feltz, BS ’74, success has always stemmed from one key idea: self-efficacy. It’s also the concept she’s spent years studying, shaping decades of research that has influenced athletes, coaches and exercise scientists.

What seems like a given when discussing their drive and passion for being the best, the psychological concept of self-efficacy was new in the sport niche when Feltz got to studying the impacts of the athlete’s mind on their performance improvements.

It’s all part of her passion for sport—she is a master’s level runner—and for understanding a specific piece of human psychology: motivation. Yet, psychology was never really the avenue she sought. It just happened, she said, while studying in Colorado and Buffalo, both.

“I didn’t want to be a psychologist, but I combined psychology with motor learning, anatomy, exercise physiology, and kinesiology [biomechanics]. That blend gave me the tools to help guide junior skiers I was coaching with muscle relaxation training, mental skills and technique,” she says. “The physical education teacher training that I received at UB helped me with the pedagogical aspects of my coaching. Very soon after I graduated from the then Health, Physical Education and Recreation program, the major morphed into what it is now—exercise science.”

In her quest to understand what motivated people, and specifically athletes and coaches, the concept of self-efficacy fell into her lap as a new pathway to understanding the mental aspect of sport.

The journey began in graduate school, where a mentor suggested she read a research paper on self-efficacy. It made her question herself and led her down a path familiar to many scientific researchers.

Feltz uses “mesearch,” the colloquial term for when a researcher investigates a situation, be it a problem or a lack of understanding related to their own life, to describe her work then. For her, the mesearch led her directly to the question, “Am I good enough to do this?”

That question turned into a research career exploring how confidence and motivation affect performance, not only in sport, but in physical and occupational therapy, exercise, and even scientific research itself.

Over time, Feltz’s work expanded from individual self-efficacy to teams and coaches. If a team has low motivation due to poor results, highlighting successes can change perceptions and lead to better future results. She has shown how small successes, carefully highlighted, can lift an entire team’s outlook. She has also offered insights into how athletes can avoid overconfidence by respecting their opponents and avoid overlooking an opponent’s strengths.

One of Feltz’s most innovative contributions came from exploring the power of partnered exercise, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and NASA. Her research revealed that working out alongside a partner—even a virtual partner—can significantly boost motivation and performance. When paired with someone of equal or slightly higher ability, individuals push themselves harder and persist longer. The effect is so powerful that her findings have influenced the design of fitness apps, online training platforms and group-based wellness programs.

“It’s about accountability and encouragement,” she explains. “We’re social creatures. When you exercise with someone else, you’re more motivated to keep going—not just for yourself, but because you don’t want to let your partner down.”

Feltz takes considerable pride in her career not only as a groundbreaking researcher, but also as a professor and mentor to those who have risen through the ranks in exercise science since she began teaching.

Under her mentorship while working at Michigan State University, she guided 47 PhD students and 60 master’s students through their degrees. But she never saw mentorship as producing copies of herself.

“As I went further on in my career, I realized it wasn’t about cloning me,” she says. “Students had ideas of what they wanted to pursue. You need to let young people try to reach their own dreams.”

For Feltz, the legacy is clear: she has not only helped athletes, teams and coaches believe in themselves but has also empowered the next generation of scholars to do the same.