The Power of the Positive Inner Voice (Re-blog)
Every year, many of my students start a new semester with the aim of changing anything that will make them more successful with their upcoming coursework. If there is one thing that you can change in the very next instant that will make the greatest difference in your performance, it can be that “inner voice” that tells you, “you are not good enough” or “this is a hard subject that I can’t do well in” or “I am not going be able to get all of this work done”.
It seems to be much easier to have an inner voice that is negative rather than positive. Many people are quick to employ the negative rather than the positive because the negative seems to be more believable. Most people are taught that a positive inner voice is the same as “patting your back” for non-achievement but the truth is that a positive inner voice is more about self-confidence than false self-aggrandizement. It is the confidence that one has to master in order to keep moving in a positive direction with any long-term goal. One has to believe that you will reach your goal in a series of small steps toward it on a daily basis.
Since you have total control over your “inner voice”, you can change anything that is negative such as “you are not good enough” to the positive such as “you are as good as anyone else” or make the change from “this is a hard subject that I can’t do well in” to “this may be a challenge but I will have small victories every day and get help the moment I need it”. In short, you can decide in the very next second that you will not listen to the voice that tells you what you “can’t accomplish” and replace that voice with one that tells you “what you have accomplished” and how you will keep accomplishing to meet any challenges head on.
Yes, students will fail exams and quizzes but learning from those failures will help make failing the complete course more remote. If you have never failed at anything in your life, you haven’t actually been tested. People who are untested do not develop the skills to learn from their failures and put them behind so that they can keep moving forward. If you keep spending precious time telling yourself what you “can’t accomplish” because of one set back, then you are likely to fulfill that negative inner voice that seems to be so tempting.
You can control how you react to a grade on a test or quiz. You can look at what you missed and make a careful assessment of what you need to work on so that you don’t keep making the same errors and master the material in a different manner. If you are only focused on the numerical score and not on mastery, you are likely to have difficulty integrating concepts and keeping concepts in your long-term memory (your goal for professional practice).
As I have stated many times on this blog, there has never been a course of study developed by one human being that another human being cannot master. Mastery of your studies does not take any super-human mental feats or membership in high-IQ societies but does take diligent and disciplined study for efficiency. If you use large amounts of time worrying about the rigor or the amount of material that you must master, you lose a great amount of efficiency. In the long run, your learning time for tasks and concepts becomes longer rather than shorter.
For example, as a junior surgical resident, I had to master many surgical procedures. If I had made a list of all of the procedures and cases that needed to be mastered, I would have been overwhelmed at the first case. Instead, I took each case as it came and worked on the fine points after I had mastered the major points. In short, by “divide and conquer”, I was able to master my procedures. I didn’t have the luxury to “think” about non-mastery as I ticked off things as they came under my review.
In residency, there is no person or class that pushes one to undertake daily reading and study. As the hours grow longer, it becomes easy to get behind unless one is vigilant. I set a goal of a minimum of 30 minutes of journal reading and 30 minutes of textbook reading per night with 2 hours on each Saturday/Sunday. I told myself, that I could get my goal accomplished and would get my reading goal accomplished. Like brushing my teeth, I quickly embraced my reading “habit” which meant that I was never behind when review for our yearly in-training exams came around. On same days, I did more because the habit made the task easier and more efficient.
During my residency research years, my reading schedule time tripled during the weekdays and was cut in half on the weekends because my time schedules changed drastically. When I went back to clinical work, it was difficult to stop reading and study because the habit had become so ingrained. I was amazed at the exponential learning that my solid reading schedule had afforded me during those research years. My reading and study efficiency had increased exponentially during this time which was the same exponential reading and study efficiency increase that I had experienced when I started medical school. In short, anything that becomes a habit becomes more ingrained/grooved and more efficient.
One can work on increasing confidence and from that one step, increase efficiency in almost any area of life that needs improvement. This improvement is invariably the result of one good habit leading to improvement in other aspects of one’s life. Just as when one starts a daily work-out program (can start with as little as 10 minutes per day), as the habit grows and becomes honed, other aspects of one’s life such as eating healthy and sleeping better start to improve.
What works for physical fitness can also work for mental fitness too. It always follows that people who are generally physically fit will experience less stress and more efficiency in their mental tasks. There have been plenty of scientific studies that show overall improvement in mood and health with increased physical conditioning. If you add mental conditioning in the form of adherence to a daily positive mantra, you are likely to see improvement in all aspects of your life too.You can start with one small change and keep reinforcing that small positive change on a regular basis. It only takes a change in the very next instant to embrace the positive and confidence that you can keep going which will keep you on the right track.
Y.O.L.O
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