In a period before the exams, proper organization of your preparation is extremely important. To prepare yourself for the future tests well, it will be useful to understand your internal self.
All the motives & goals human has can be divided into two groups: internal and external ones. To say simply, to make yourself get up to work you need to find something external to stimulate yourself (award, compliment, etc.), or to figure out and to understand why and how important this particular work is for you, to find your personal interest in the certain kind of activity.
If you usually go for studying because of your parents control you (external motivation), it is time to think about this situation seriously and to develop some internal motives for yourself.
Set Goals
Motives are tightly connected to goals. Once a motive for an action is determined, it is important to set yourself a clear goal. This goal is to be formed positively. For instance, say: “I will come to the exam totally prepared, with all the knowledge I need”, and fixate this internal status in your mind.
Motivation is connected to your “feeling of reasons”, too. If you find any activity as the useless one, which doesn’t make any sense, it is extremely hard to make yourself do something.
How To Prepare For Exams: Small But Important Tips
All the human motives are placed hierarchically in your mind. In practice, this means you shouldn’t go for studying before your basic needs are satisfied. It is better to devote some time for eating, sleeping, organizing yourself a comfortable environment for studying, and then start real studying. This will give a lot more effect. If to go another way, your motives will conflict with each other, and all your energy will be wasted for this struggle, not for studying.
If you go in for sports, dance, swim: don’t refuse these activities while your exam preparations, just devote them a bit less of your time. Load your psychics less, too: don’t watch TV or play videogames for too long. What’s the most important: make a clear schedule for all your activities and keep up to it during your day. Once you sit and star studying, nothing should distract your attention.
You walk around and can’t make yourself work, can you? This is how your motives conflict with each other, possibly. It is worth to stop, and to think what you actually want right now. Maybe this is not a space flight, but something totally real, huh? If so, spend some time for this wish so you could study good a bit later.
Divide Information into Parts
There is one more “motivational law”: as soon as your mind finds an amount of work to be too big, the wish to deal with it disappears. But nothing to do, there is a lot of serious material to read before the exams!
Try to cheat on your mind: divide all the volume of work onto small parts. While studying the first one, don’t even think about other parts. Don’t put all the mountain of books and notes onto your desk, don’t turn the pages to find out how many of them left till the end.
Exam Is Not a Disaster
Similar psychological mechanism could engage once you turn yourself on with a thought of the future exam to be the main test of your life, making everything else to depend on it. This hyper responsibility makes serious fears to appear, and you want to lower your hands without even trying.
If that’s how you feel at the moment, try doing next. Ask yourself: “What is the worst thing could happen if I won’t pass the exam?”.
You’ll see that even the worst result is not that critical to worry about it that much. Think on the alternatives in the case if you fail, and you’ll find out the world isn’t all connected to the exam. You’ve got the ways to continue living and studying even if you fail. It’s ok.
Good luck at your exams!