Staying the Course Near the End

/in /by

These next couple of weeks bring the challenge of not-quite-done, so-much-to-do! before exams.

I say to my stressed students: You have made it this far! You can carry on!

And they do!

I’ll share the three key tools we work with in our coaching sessions leading up to the exam period. They are

  • Self-care
  • Time management, and
  • Self-management.

There is nothing new about these tools. It’s just more challenging to maintain them with the real and perceived stresses of end of term. So a quick review:

Self-care

  • Maintain exercise, even if at a reduced schedule.
  • Maintain sleep. Even if unexpected delays require one short night of sleep, schedule a make-up nap. Find what other places you can to cut time from–shorter Face Times; reduced work hours, for example.
  • Eat. Keep your regular meal routine. Maybe you shorten your mealtimes, but don’t skip them. Use them as breaks whenever possible. Stock up on healthy snacks that you enjoy.
  • Hydrate. Drink smart. 
  • Groom. Get dressed. Shower. Brush your teeth. You’ll feel better and work smarter.

Time management

  • List what remains to be done, with real or targeted deadlines. Include social, family, job, academic, self-care.
  • Prioritize. 
  • Chunk projects into tasks and schedule them on your time planner. Allow for contingencies.
  • Prepare to adapt priorities and adjust scheduling as life happens.

At this point, many people don’t have enough time left to get everything done. The strategies to retrieve the situation differ from student to student, and are much of the work we focus on in our sessions at this time of the year. Getting creative about prioritizing, connecting with professors, considering withdrawal of a course, setting less than perfectionist goals, rescheduling job shifts—each student’s situation and therefore each student’s solution is different. 

You now have a plan. Staying the course is down to working that plan. And guess who gets to do that.

Self-management

The key element of implementing your plan, making changes while maintaining motivation to carry through, is a belief that you can carry on with some degree of assurance that you will achieve an acceptable result.

Some tips on how to maintain motivation:

  • Self-talk: Now is the time to pat yourself on the back every time you spot that you are dissing yourself, and repeat (aloud, if possible) I can do the next step!
  • Control your social ambience, but don’t let is control you: Schedule conversations with other human beings. If your social group is an echo chamber of anxiety and fear, switch topics, keep the session short, and find other people to talk with. Even walking a friendly dog is better for motivation than participating in reinforcing Debbie Downer, Fearful Frankie, and Resentful Robert sessions.
  • Control your physical ambience, but don’t let it control you: Nice organized desk, and organized mind, et cetera, but this is not the time to house-clean or reorganize your filing system. Do what has worked for you in the past. Have something to glance at that makes you feel good, but doesn’t distract you—a trophy, a picture of a relative or pet, a favourite piece of porcelain, for example.
  • Keep intense work sessions down to a focusable length: When you lose focus or run into a snag in memorizing, or drafting an essay, or solving an equation, take a break. Get up, stretch, tackle some short, easy task,  then see what the challenge task looks like. Sometimes an overnight break or nap helps, if your schedule can accommodate that.
  • Plan rewards: Reward yourself for studying, or for working a certain length of time, or for completing a task. Rewards don’t have to break the bank, and they don’t have to take a chunk of time. They just have to be, well, rewarding. Maybe opening a box of tea you’ve been meaning to try. Maybe reading a short story. Every student is different; I take time in coaching sessions to have my students pin down ahead of time what their rewards will be.
  • Control your breaks: Take breaks, take rewards. To keep them from expanding into time-sucking plan saboteurs, schedule them, or if they are spontaneous, mind-mark exactly what you will do right after the break. Visualize yourself back at your desk, working on the first part of the task.
  • Stay grounded: If you do yoga or mindfulness meditation, keep those times scheduled. Get in the habit of finding that core sense of self, even for a minute, when anxiety or stress thoughts are in your mind. If running grounds you, visualize yourself running, in the zone, for when those stress-thought moments happen.

The strongest point in maintaining motivation came from a student who said he didn’t need to believe he could do it [the whole course], he just needed to believe he could do that next step. It was pretty rewarding to me that our work sessions kept him focussing on those next steps.

What are your challenges about end of term? Let me know, maybe I can help [email protected]