You go tutors!

Every day I receive Google alerts about stories and statistics regarding test anxiety, test scores and test preparation. I like to keep current with what’s going on in the field.

Here’s one that came across my desk today:  It’s from “Janice R.” who runs a tutoring service in Palm Coast, Florida. Janice offers a good roadmap for students: familiarize yourself with the test, do some solid preparation and get ready for test day.

How often we overlook the essentials!

I applaud Janice R for getting the word out and offering what she can to students who may not be getting the guidance they need and deserve. Keep up the good work!

Janice R is a tutor at WyzAnt.com. Check out their website. While I am not personally familiar their services and therefore can’t yet recommend them, I definitely am intrigued to find out more, and suggest you look them over too.

Sure enough, she wouldn’t talk to me.

OK, I thought, now what? I saw Amy eyeing a set of colored markers

I have on the floor in my home-office and I asked her if she liked to draw. She nodded. Rather than get into a tug-of-war over her not talking (of course, she would win), I said, “We don’t have to talk. You can draw if you’d like.” She started drawing and got very absorbed in an intricate picture of a group of lizards. When she was done I asked her if she would tell me something about it. All she said was, “It’s a family.”

In the second session she started drawing again, almost immediately. Again, lizards. The identical family as last time. They were in varying sizes and from the expressions on their faces (anger, fear, blankness) was obviously some story behind the picture. I asked Amy if she would tell me the story and she said, “In this family there is a father, a mother, a brother and a sister.”

Of course this corresponded directly to her own family configuration, and the story, as it wound out over several sessions, came clearer: the parent lizards didn’t think the little daughter lizard was as smart as the older brother lizard One day, as Amy was drawing I casually asked her, “So what’s the problem with math?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t understand it.” I asked her if she told anyone that and she shook her head, “No.”

Immediately a light shone for me on her whole situation: here was a child who didn’t understand the teacher but was afraid to say so for fear of that she’d be seen as not being smart. I asked her if this were so. Again, she nodded.

With Amy’s knowledge I spoke with her parents and teacher. I explained to them that it had to be safe for Amy to say, “I don’t understand this,” and that they needed to check in with her about it during or after class and when she was doing homework. I also trained Amy to say these simple words right away, “I don’t understand this.” When she saw it was safe to say it, she did.

Our work together ended several weeks before the math qualifying test and the interview. Her mother called one day and said, “Amy passed the math test and couldn’t’ stop talking at the interview.” She was accepted into the school.

What can we take away from Amy’s story? First, it’s all right not to know, and second it’s necessary to speak up, to confide it to someone who will be accepting. There’s an ancient expression, “He who thinks he knows not, knows; he who thinks he knows, knows not.” While this has deep spiritual implication, the bottom line is that not knowing is a natural, expected and an excellent place to start, provided you have a safe environment to express it.

When you are studying or preparing for a test and you don’t know something, recognize that. Rather than beat yourself up about it, say it—to yourself, and to someone who can help you. This is the first step on a path to building your confidence: it’s OK to not know.

Follow your coach's direction

I’m in NY for a conference organized by the NY Times on “Schools for Tomorrow.” I met yesterday with Alexandra Zabriskie, a top-notch NY tutor for the SAT and ACT (and school subjects too).  Alex talked about coaching her students to take practice tests under the practice conditions, in other words, when it’s possible, to take at least one practice test at the place you’ll take the actual exam.  ”I tell them how important this is, they say they’ll do it,” Alexandra says, sighing, “But they don’t follow through.”

If you are working with a coach it’s important for two reasons that you follow through. The first is that your coach is not your mother, not your father, not your teacher, but your coach. Your coach knows what you need to do to succeed on the test, just like the coach of an athletic team knows how you should practice to succeed.  Imagine what would happen if you were on a team and you didn’t follow your coach’s direction.

The second reason that this particular coaching — take a practice test at the test site — is important is that you need to simulate the conditions of the exam itself.  Taking the practice test at the site is vastly different than sitting on your bed at home and practicing there. Why? Because at home there are a zillion distractions: texts from your friends, snacks in the fridge, comfy pillow where you’ll just take a rest for “a minute.”   Zzzzzzzzzzzz.  Try doing any of these in the exam room (well, don’t try, actually).

Follow your coach’s direction. Chinese say, left ear in, right ear out. Don’t do that. Hearing what your coach says and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, doesn’t raise test scores. Doing the right things and practicing in the right way does. After all, if you don’t listen to the coach, why do you go to him/her in the first place? doesn’t make sense.

A special shout out to Alexandra Zabriskie in NY. She was an early follower of my work and she does a terrific job of understanding her students’ needs and tailoring her tutoring to them. Check out her website:  http://atoztutor.com. (That’s Alex, on the left, in the picture above.)

You need some energy to perform well

Today’s question is:  How do I get rid of my anxiety before an exam?

Answer: You don’t get “rid” of anxiety. A little bit of anxiety has been shown (in over a hundred years of research) to be a good thing. Remember the “Yerkes-Dodson curve” (see illustration).  Yerkes and Dodson were two psychologists who showed, at the beginning of the 20th century, that there’s a direct relationship between stress and performance. Too much or too little stress and performance suffers. You need just the right amount of stress to perform well. The trouble is students think that their “anxiety” before an exam is a bad thing. Yes, it is, when it incapacitates you. In other words, when it’s too high.But if you think about it as “energy” you need some to give you the boost to get you launched. Think about those big spacecraft — the rockets are fired and the energy propels the rocket into space. The big hulking parts of the spacecraft fall away eventually and the small capsule does its thing once it is out of the earth’s gravitational pull. You are just like that before an exam. Your jets are fired, you are ready to launch. Don’t confuse anxiety with energy.  If you are truly anxious and you are not remembering things, you are doubting yourself, you are distracted and you are physically tense, then you’re going to slide quickly to the right side of the graph. You are unable to perform the way you ought to be.  Too much stress = poor performance. Use the tools in the book. Get yourself back on track. Learn to become calm, confident and focused.

Tell us your stories and send in your questions.

Afraid? Again?

I’ve recently started coaching three very different people who have exactly the same issue with tests: they’re all afraid of failing.  To be accurate, they’re all afraid of failing again.

Each of them (a high school, college and graduate student) had a bad experience in the past with a test—one didn’t finish in time, one didn’t get the score she wanted and one actually failed.  I’m using the word “bad experience” instead of “failure.”  While every one of us has had a bad experience with a test none of us is a failure because of it.

Following what I wrote in my last post: when you have a bad experience you have two choices with how you are going to hold that experience.  Choice #1: You say to yourself, “Oh, no,  it happened before and it’s going to happen again. For sure. No way I’m going to succeed.”; Choice #2: You say to yourself, “Yes, I did have a bad experience, but  I learned from that experience and what I learned is actually going to help me do better this time.”

So why do so many people – certainly the ones I see in my practice—so readily adopt choice #1?  I think it’s a combination of  things. The “bad” past experience was painful. No one wants to score low, not be able to finish or actually not passing the test, but sometimes these things do happen and the bottom line—and please read this carefully – is that we are meant to learn from all our experiences.  ‘Learn’ means: what did that experience teach me that will help me the next time around?  As soon as we start to uncover the answer to that question, the more quickly and determinedly we can move ahead.

So here’s my challenge to you: think of of a time when you did not do well on a test. What did you learn from that that you can apply to the next time you take that test, or any other test?

I’m going to provide you with some common responses to that question, but first I’d like you to do the work and answer that question for yourself.

In part 3 of this series of posts I’ll not only answer the question, but show you how we can get through previously traumatic experiences in a new, better, and much more fulfilling way.

What happens is one word: practice.  He has to practice, practice, practice.  He has to practice becoming more aware of when he tenses his body and when he feeds himself negative thoughts about himself. And he has to practice tools to reduce the stress and turns those unhelpful habits around.

As we spoke I remembered something I learned in one of the first meditation courses I took some 30 years ago. The teacher said, “The Dr. can give you a prescription, but if you just place the prescription on your altar and pray to it every day, and yet never take the medicine how can you ever get better?”  So it’s the case with this medicine — the ongoing, daily practice of becoming more aware of old habits and replacing them with new ones.

The day after our session the client emailed me about how much he got out of it. Then I remembered something my old analyst, a real Viennese psychiatrist, said to me on many occasions, “Ze proof is in ze pudding.”  Let’s see if he practices. One thing I am 100% certain of:  if he does, he will improve and his test scores will be just what he wants them to be: excellent.

The first student — I’ll call her Aly — is determined to score well in her college level courses and is doing what’s necessary  to make that happen. The second — I’ll call her Erika — wants to score well but she’s often distracted and her grades are sub-par.

What’s going on?  Aly is focused, Erika is not. Focus means having a goal and taking actions that get you to it. That’s what

Aly is doing. She sets herself a task and she accomplishes it.  Each task that she accomplishes lead her closer to her goal of getting good grades.  She stays on the path and if she veers off it she gets back on and keeps going. Erika– who’s got the same amount of brain power as Aly– winds up checking email, or talking on the phone, or watching TV when she knows she should be studying.

In the next posts I’m going to go into more depth about these two scenarios.  But to start: which one do you identify with– Aly or Erika?

Here’s some hope: even if you are way off the path, you can always get back on it. You can succeed. How?  Stay tuned!

First, just listening to her language, I could tell that she was not grounding herself in the present. “I’m going to fail,” “I won’t get into a good graduate program.”  A lot of  “future forecasting,” no?  As we spoke I noticed some other things.  Though she was sitting in a chair and her feet were able to rest comfortably on the floor, they weren’t. She was on her toes. I was also struck with how often she was holding her breath.

As I pointed all of these things out to her she became more aware of what she was doing as a matter of habit. All this showed her that she was not being in the present but kept launching herself into a very uncertain future.

Stress is a function of disconnection. In body, mind and spirit.  She was disconnecting in all three: her body was tense (no breath, perched toes), she held her breath, she was obsessing about the future. She forecast a negative performance, and she was distracted by all of this– in other words it became harder and harder for her to stay in the present and just study.

As we spoke she became aware of how often she disconnected from the present, and she began to see that each time she disconnected — in all the ways mentioned or described above– she became anxious.

We believe that we are anxious because we’re thinking we’re going to fail.  Well, yes and no. A thought in and of itself is not anxiety provoking. It’s just a thought and thoughts come and go What happens though is we keep following the thought and lose touch with the present, the here and now. This is the time and place for her to study.  Instead she disconnects by imagining the future.

If this happen to you, do what I coached her to do: come back to the present.  Use your breath. Feel your feet on the floor. Look around and open your sense to what is there right here and right now.

Then you’ll be training yourself for the test: when the only place to be if you want to score well is in the present answering the questions

Let me know the ways you find yourself launching out of the present, and which tools you use to bring yourself back.  If you’re not sure which tools you can use, please ask! I’m happy to coach you.

Facing life's tests

I have good news and, well, not-so-good news for you test takers.

Let’s get the not-so-good news over with. Here’s the deal: we cannot choose most of the tests we face in life.

Now, here’s the good one. Drum roll, please…

We can choose how we’re going to face all those tests.

Are we going to have a miserable experience, crumble under the pressure, run away, or avoid challenges altogether?

Or are we going to find the strength and inner resources to rise to the challenges and fully actualize our potential?

That’s the term psychologists use for becoming the person you are meant to be. Facing tests in the right way will give you this opportunity.

When you face the tests of life, learn from them and grow with them, you become that person.

The tests of life require you to call on the inner resources residing deep inside you.

By doing that, you come to know yourself and to develop your innate capacities. That is what we mean by actualizing your potential, and being tested presents you with the opportunities to do it.

Tests are like a challenging teacher or friend. If you maintain a good relationship with them, many of your best qualities will emerge.

Fortunately, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. There are fabulous role models who have preceded us and can show us how to face the vicissitudes of life in a meaningful way.

These are the teachers and masters, saints and sages, the divinely inspired women and men who dedicated their lives to finding meaning and purpose through their struggles.  Jesus on the cross, Buddha under the bodhi tree, Moses in the desert for forty years, Mohammed in the cave. Each faced the tests that life handed them, and they mastered the ability to learn and grow and become fully realized beings.

My wife says, “We are all saints-in-training.” All kidding aside, we may not all be sages and saints, but we all face tests on a regular basis, and some of them are severe and daunting.

Do we have the strength to overcome, the fortitude to persevere, the humor to see things in a lighter way?

With these capacities, it is possible to do more than just get by. We can do something inspiring with our lives.

Great beings create a memorable path through life’s tests. Because ultimately, that’s what life is—a path with tests at every bend in the road. Every test is there to help us grow and to fully become the people we are meant to be.

Let’s take a moment to honor our those who have challenged and mentored and inspired us along the way.

Close your eyes, and breathe out. Now see a circle of light and into that circle see the people who have taught you, believed in you and stood by you in your life. Enter the circle with them, and see yourself surrounded by them. Look into their shining faces and thank them, each and every one.  Open your eyes. Go through your day knowing you are supported.

Send in your stories about the tests you are facing and how you are dealing with them. Your story will inspire others.

Karen Bryant, who mentors students even after graduation, said she credits the success of the program to a relationship built on trust and respect with her students. Many of the students have remained friends of Bryant over the years.

In the ‘confidence’ leg of my 3-legged stool performance model I explore into the relationship between ‘trust’ and ‘confidence.’

The word confidence is made up of two Latin roots: con, meaning ‘with,’ and fidelis, which means ‘faith’ or ‘trust.’ A confident person has faith in herself and trusts that she can accomplish the task.

Fidelis has an additional meaning, and that is loyalty. We can interpret this to mean that a confident person is also loyal to herself. When she’s taking a test and the questions are hard she doesn’t jump ship. She believes she can work it out and stays with the process right to the end.

If you struggle with self-confidence, you probably have the opposite feeling when you take tests. When the going gets rough you feel like you want to bolt. I can’t do this, I’m out of here.

Wanting to bolt creates a problem because it means your attention isn’t fully present. It’s on its way out the door, you might say. Your mind, like your body and your spirit, is a key player on your “Team of Three.” You mind has to play its part so that you can win. You need your mind to stand by you, to support and encourage you through thick and thin, not turn against you and undermine the process. When your mind is yelling, “Let me out of here!” it is a way of abandoning you which we can certainly call a form of disloyalty. You have to train it to be loyal, to have faith in your ability and to trust that you can do the job well.

In other words, you have to know you can count on your mind.

Here’s a helpful tip to train your mind.

Your self-evaluating, talk-radio mind has two sides, positive and negative. On the positive side you are broadcasting approving and encouraging messages about yourself: I can do it. I’ve got what it takes. I am smart enough. The negative side sends out disapproving, discouraging, self-defeating noises: I can’t possibly succeed. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not going to make it.

Now, how do you tune into this positive side?  Start with this: what are your initials? Mine are BBB. I live in California. If I put K in front of BBB, I get KBBB. If I lived east of the Mississippi I would put a W in front of my initials and get WBBB.  Now you do it.  What do you get?  What does that sound like?  You got it: a radio station.  Your radio station.

Your mind has a 24/7 personal talk radio that is sending positive messages to you. You can count on it. Just don’t flip the dial. And if you hear noises, chatter and static, fine tune the receiving frequency. The voice of your spirit is always there to guide you.  Always.

Let me know how your personal talk-radio is working.