Is This Really Necessary? (Whatchathink Wednesdays)

A former participant who prefers to remain anonymous asked for advice regarding her current predicament in school.

She said that she finds her tests this semester much more difficult compared to the previous ones. She attributes the difficulty to her professor’s outrageous test types, her lack of a definite place and time to study and her bout with the expectations of her peers.

What should she do? Here’s a more cohesive version of my advice.

She needs to be smarter with her study habits by focusing on sample questions most similar to the test instead of poring through everything. Since she doesn’t have all the time and reference in the world, she just needs to understand the basic concepts and subsequently move on to the difficult practice questions.

Aside from this, she should do whatever it takes to maintain her focus while studying. Since she gets easily distracted, I advised her to listen to music to regain her focus whenever the environment becomes too noisy.

She also needs to deal with pressure better. After dissecting the pressure she attributes to her family, scholarship and peers, we actually came to a rather divergent conclusion. The worst kind of pressure she deals with comes from within. Her skewed perception of pressure has created heat that has become too much to handle. Even to a point that it negatively affects her performance.

Thus, she needs to extinguish the unnecessary self-generated pressure and focus her efforts on her studies and her goals alone. She need not worry about the others. At the end of the day, she should be most mindful of how she performs and how she perceives her performance. If she believes that she did her best, no matter how appalling the outcome, then there’s nothing she could do about it.

Aside from better study/work habits, what should we get from her experience?

The most necessary measure to take is to take out the unnecessary. We have to be wary though that sometimes the unnecessary lies within. Though it will entail measures to take that may seem unnecessary to begin with, I assure you that such measure will eventually reveal itself as necessary when only the necessary have remained.

Now, ask yourself, is this really necessary?