The power of positive thinking
25th April, 2017
Why we cannot underestimate the impact positive thinking has on our children’s education
Words: Kate Shand
Source: School Report Magazine, April 2017
A new year saw renewed energy and focus at the Enjoy Education offices. As a team, we sat down to look at our services to ensure our students continue to feel supported along the full course of their educational journey. Enjoy prides itself on delivering specialist support and expertise to our families, and we take the time to reflect on our long term vision and be inspired by the goals we are looking to achieve.
A large part of achieving any goal lies in careful planning, preparation and positive thinking. These are essential skills to share with our students as they head towards end of year tests and those all-important exams in the summer.
Positive thought and visualisation have been used by elite athletes and actors for decades to support their training and enable them to perform at their highest level when competing. The same process can be applied to learning and exams. The focus can be visual such as conjuring up images of successfully sitting the exam itself; sensory, the excitement you feel as you tell your friends and family your results or auditory; the sound of opening up the letter to let you know whether you have made it into your chosen school or university.
We all have our peak cognition time, that moment when our brain is firing on all cylinders, as well as those downtimes and it’s important to recognise when we are at our most effective.
Members of Enjoy recently attended an excellent talk on ‘How To Have a Good Day’, which contained plenty of nuggets that, I know, would help our students achieve their academic goals. Whether it’s focusing on a single task, understanding how to snap yourself out of a bad mood or how to restructure a problem positively, all these skills are central to self-esteem and long term success.
When revising, students are often tempted to put together complicated and potentially unrealistic revision schedules, jumping between subjects to provide variety, mapping in lots of hours and miraculously hoping that we can somehow fit bonus hours into our 24 hour day. However, the brain just doesn’t work that way.
We all have our peak cognition time, that moment when our brain is firing on all cylinders, as well as those downtimes and it’s important to recognise when we are at our most effective. If you find yourself falling asleep at 4pm, that’s not the time to tackle your hardest subject. Go for a swim, read a book, chat to your friends and put the time in to ‘switch off’. We provide many resources to help students develop good habits when it comes to revision and exam preparation so they can feel upbeat about their progress.
In all cases, preparation sits at the heart of every successfully achieved goal. As George Eliot remarks: ‘To have more roses, we must plant more roses.’ Ensuring you have an effective revision plan, the right support network in place and the positive belief that your goals are achievable are all important steps to allowing that goal to become your reality.