Study Prof

From the series Better Test Performance the Navy SEALs Way.

U.S. Navy SEALs wannabees are taught goal setting.  Why?  It helps more of them survive the grueling training and actually become SEALs.

If you’re like me, goal setting brings to mind thick-as-your-thigh Covey planners and pretentious self-help gurus.  But if the SEALs are using it, you can bet there’s no namby-pamby lets-all-get-in-touch-with-our-inner-child two-day retreats going on.  Pragmatic techniques that can be used when the world is on fire are what they’re looking for.

Goal setting on-the-fly functions like this; set your sights on an immediate, easily-reachable goal and then take one step after another until you get there.  Then set a new goal.  For a SEAL trainee, their internal dialogue might go something like this…

“Just gotta make it until lunch, then I can rest.” And after lunch, “Just gotta make it over the next hundred yards of beach.” and then, “Just gotta swim this last 200 yards.”

The entire day is broken up into a series of individually manageable steps.

You can do the same during finals to get through the mountains of work that can pile up.  “Just gotta get through this next chapter.”  “Just gotta finish the next page of this rough draft.” Or you can use it when test anxiety rears it’s ugly head.  “Just gotta finish this next problem.”

This technique is deceptively simple, but it’s powerful and proven!  It helps concentrate your efforts not on what you can’t do, but on what you can.

How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!

From the Series “Better Test Performance The Navy SEALs Way”
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The elite SEALs teams–the U.S. Navy’s Special Ops forces–have discovered how to make their trainees more successful at completing the mythically tough training and actually become Navy SEALs.  In fact, they now teach trainees stress control techniques that may be responsible for helping to boost the number of successful passing candidates from one fourth of each class to one third of each class.

Amazingly, these techniques are very similar to what I’ve been teaching my students for years.  No magic here.  What I teach comes directly out of good psychological research, and the SEALs have been doing their homework!

According to a recent History Channel documentary on brain science, SEAL trainees are now taught four key stress control techniques that allow them to perform better even during the grinding SEAL Hell Week.

The four keys?  Goal Setting, Mental Rehearsal, Self Talk, and Arousal Control.  I normally teach these techniques in my GRE prep course to help students cope with test anxiety and in my College Capable seminar as a way to conquer daunting study schedules.

Check back tomorrow as we look at how the SEALs use goal setting to overcome stress and how you can use it to excel during finals!

From the Series “Better Test Performance The Navy SEALs Way”
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

Do you have enough mental muscle to get the grades you want or to score as high as you would like on the SAT or GRE?  I’ve pointed out several times that peak mental performance depends more on technique than on sheer power, however, there is no doubt that having a beefy brain does make things easier.

Good news!  Neurological research has demonstrated that the brain responds to mental exercise much like a muscle.  The more you work it, the stronger it gets.  I’m not just referring to IQ; the brain itself actually grows physically in response to training.

Vincenzo Malacarne, an 18th Century Italian scientist first discovered this when he trained birds to do a series of complex tricks.  Later he dissected the birds’s brains and found increased folding in the brains of the trained birds.  The modern technological breakthroughs in brain scans have shown similar variations in human brains in response to learning.

This is great news.  It means that, just as our bodies respond to exercise by becoming stronger and healthier, so do our noggins.  So break out those books and start pumping info!  You can get smarter!

This resource from gre.org includes “a description of the Analytical Writing section, strategies for each task, directions, scoring information, scoring guides, score level descriptions, a sample test, and scored essay responses with reader commentary.”  Download this pdf.

Can you imagine how much time you could save if you could spend one hour studying and remember nine times as much as you normally would?  How much trouble could you get into with all that extra time?

Research has shown how to do just that by ditching the old read-the-notes-repeatedly study method.

Here’s how!

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Looking into the possibility of getting a degree online?  Check out this site.

West Texas A&M University has put together a brief online GRE Math tutorial with practice tests.  Take a look!

You gotta like that!  Fastweb (owned by Monster, as in Monster.com job search) has been featured in many national and international magazines and is an excellent site for finding college scholarships, grants, and internships for students at any age. It also has great resources on finding colleges, getting loans, writing resumes, and much more.

Initially, you must enter a lot of information (for example; age, address, preferred colleges, GPA, extracurricular activities, etc.) so the site can determine which scholarships are a likely match.  I took about ten minutes to do so and the site returned 55 matching scholarships, essays, and internships. Most were around $1000, but many were much higher!  What a fantastic resource.  Take a look!

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