[seeker5]

After five years of being out of school, I went back in January. I had been a 3.0 Student when I went to school the first time, but that involved a lot of last minute stressed out studying. I had a lot of bad memories from school, and I was scared of repeating it. Worst, I was scared of just getting tired of school..and then getting behind and not being able to catch up and thus quitting. I wanted this time around to get straight A’s – something I’ve never done before. So here is the advice I took from this site that helped me a lot:

1) I took the Millionaire’s intention and modified it. Almost every morning during the weekdays, I’d go exercise and I’d read for one minute “In an easy and in a relaxed way, in a healthy and positive manner, I intend to get straight A’s in my classes this Spring Semester”. This helped tremendous – especially for the first exams, when I started feeling stressed, I remember this intention and distressed.

2) After reading this intention for a minute (and reading other intentions for a minute each), I’d close my eyes while running on the elliptical machine visualizing getting A’s in each of my classes – all the while feeling very proud of it. I’d visualize the end of the semester feeling very proud of having all A’s – of going into the Final Exams with no worries because I had such high grades.

3) I also started aerobic exercising. Steve wrote an article about how the physical is important when one starts to improve oneself, so I restarted exercising in the belief it would help me a lot for school. It really did.

4) I was inspired by his articles about how he took so many coursework and graduated in 3 semesters. While I only took 4 classes, and worked during the weekend, I did get inspired and aimed to study in as less time possible. I also set time blocks modified from his schedule. From Monday to Thursday was school and study time. Friday and Saturday, I set for work. Sunday was my day off. Previously when I had gone to school, I’d just study/do homework anytime. This here helped keep things straight, and stay motivated. I also aimed to study in as short time as possible so the next semester I could take a lot more classes and still do well.

5) I read a book called How to get top Grades right before I started school. I was inspired to do this by the articles on Steve’s site about how he sought information on how to get good grades himself.

6) Steve wrote on that you have to be clear on why you want to do well and why you're going to school. So I took his advice and wrote down why I was going to school, what it would mean to me. I also wrote down a list of what I would do to succeed and get my A's. I kept this list in my master folder that kept track of my performance, and I'd refer to it occasionally to help myself stay on track.

7) Steve said to get up early to get an early start. I started doing that too - getting up at 6am even though my classes started at 9am. That allowed me to study early, and do other things to get a head start on the day, and then exersize. That allowed me to go into my first class fully awake and already feeling good.

I also implemented something I learned from Tony Robbins – which is the art of state management – of getting myself into a state of top confidence, and relaxation and energetic state right before the exam so I’d walk in with full use of my facilities.

Another thing, I’m not sure where I got it from (probably Tony Robbins), but it was new for me in terms of school work was to visualize knowing all the answers in my tests. That is I’d visualize seeing my test and just visualizing the answers coming from deep within me. I knew I had read everything, I knew I had gone over everything, had attended all classes, so I told myself the answers should come from deep within me. This is something I had practiced through Toastmasters actually – as a way to give speeches without notes and without much preparation. It worked quite well for tests - I ended getting the highest grade on my exams for at least half of my exams, and one of the highest grade for most of the rest.

The results:
My newfound friends in classes just assumed I’m a great student and from then just assumed I’d have the highest grade. It was quite an identity shift. On one of my harder classes, I’d have a 100 on exams when most people would have C’s or below. I knew I studied less for it then two friends of mine who got a C and a D. I credit my scoring higher for less actual studying to all of the psychological factors I implemented that they hadn’t.

By the end of the semester, I went into the Final Exams with no stress at all. I went in with 98% or higher in each of my classes. In fact, for two of my classes, through discussion with my professor, they revealed I was the highest ranked student. That was another “wow” moment for me. I was going originally going to go for another Bachelor, but all of my professors told me I should just go for a Masters.

So, I wanted to write back about my first major success using tools from this website and say Thank You! I’ll definitely keep checking and trying out different tools from this site that Steve is building. (Starting with the discipline series!)