Episode 17 - How Sport Got Me To A Town

Hello, this is James Davey, The Exam Coach and Welcome to Episode 7 of Davey Discusses a new podcast series I'm putting together in time for the 2016 Exam Season. This short podcast series is designed to tackle everything to do with exams from preparation to performance whether you're at school, college or Uni there something of value to be taken away. It's designed to fill that period of down time you may have when walking to school in the morning, in between lectures at Uni or whenever else you have 5 minutes to spare and put it to good use, so plug in and let's get stuck into something that's going to get you moving forward on that long and winding road to A town.   In this episode I want to talk about something that probably had the single biggest transformational effect on the way I approached exams. So when I was a young lad, the mini Exam Coach if you will, I absolutely loved sports all sort, any kind, I was competitive as well, always wanted to win and loved every minute of it. For a long time that took precedent over anything academic, and then of course when it came to crunch time and I began to sit exams that would actually have a serious bearing on my prospects and the future direction in life I had to rethink this. I was really not taking anything to do with exams or education in general seriously - if you want to see for yourself check the exam coach website and search this url: www.theexamcoach.tv/james-story...But the moment I made the connection between sport and exam preparation and performance the whole game changed for me and I was able to pretty quickly channel my competitive streak into something quite frankly I didn't care about.    I began to understand the whole process of exam preparation and performance in terms of sport, both team sports and individual.   Exams like sports are something you train for the only difference being is that when game day comes along people aren't pumped - they're nervous, and it's often not the good king or nervous, its the crippling I don't want to be here kind of nervous, they don't do their warm up routines in fact sometimes they don't really want to play and they're sometimes even late for the game, people sub themselves off early by leaving the exam early, or they take a voluntary sin bin by going to the loo in the exam and missing out on points on the scoreboard. A lot of the plays I see students making in the exam room, if you were to apply them in a sports context would be considered disastrous and even stupid and would leave the person in question with little to no chance of performing well and winning the game so to speak.    The Exam Coach Way breaks down this idea of the similarities between high performance in sport and exams into the 5 phases of exam performance, Morning of, pre exam, during exam, post exam and the constant ongoing challenge of doing this routine with the same attention to detail and intensity for each and every exam. It's the Nailing it Part of The FUN Exam Plan and is often, as I found with myself, the single biggest factor in shifting someone's general approach to exams and consequently their final grades    It just makes sense. The principles that athletes of any level, but especially professional level deploy in order to perform at their best is so relevant to Exams in order to execute to the level you know you can on a consistent basis yet it hasn't really been thought about or taken seriously because 'hey' exams aren't cool. But it's by making this direct link between any performance sport, or for that matter any performing art or practice you are passionate about and requires you to perform in a pressurised situation that is going to make all the difference for you on results day. On the most basic level, sportspeople including myself and you warm up before a game, we think about what we're eating, drinking and how much we've slept, we talk through a game plan either with our coach if competing individual or with the team if playing a team sport. But a lot of this doesn't even cross most students minds before they're about to sit an exam - most rely on a frantic scan of the notes a couple of minutes before the examiner calls them in then carnage ensues in the exam room and D Town is inevitable.    I've seen people who know the syllabus back to front go into an exam and not be able to get it down on the day because they're thrown off by something, because they didn't get the rub of the green, they slacked off in their final warm up, their exam technique was off the boil or they were still thinking about how they missed out on that 2 marker in the previous paper they sat and those are the margins we're talking about. Yet the person who prepares fully and then delivers on their game day routines and warm ups will be able to transfer everything from their head to the paper in that 2 hour window everyone gets to show what they know. Its that specific morning routine, the thorough warm up and the exam technique routines during the pressurised exam time which enable that person to perform consistently at the highest level, it allows them to connect the dots in the moment, find that word that they scratching their head over, phrase things just right so the examiner awards all the marks instead of 3 out of 5.   Exam success really does go to the people who can put in the training in the off season but then really get their routines up to scratch for game day. Lessons can be taken both from the gritty determination and occasional selfishness that is needed to succeed in individual sporting or performance pursuits and also the team situation. Exams require that competitive individualistic determination that is so prevalent in individual sport, not to say that it isn't in team sport, I'm just saying that in individual sports it is especially strong. Meanwhile as I've always said exams are a team game and its about assembling or putting yourself amongst a group of people who are only going to help, support, assist and add value to you exam performance on game day. these are the kind of people you can bounce a few questions off and do some casual Q and A type stuff where they also have your best interests in mind rather than trying to highlight how little you know or how they are so nervous and therefore you should be too. Its all about mutual benefit and helping each other along the road to A town.    SO if you're a sportsman or woman, if you're into your creative arts, if you do anything that requires you to deliver in a situation where you are competing and there may be some level pressure on you. Have a good think about how you can take some of the basic mindsets and things you do in these situations and transfer them to an exam situation. Building up some kind of performance routine that you do every time you sit an exam is going to really help you churn out top performances consistently - Exam Coach Students use the 5 phases of The Nailing It Plan. That's what were looking for, solid and reliable performance day in day out, it doesn't matter what curve balls are thrown our way we've done the prep and the leg work all the way up to the moment we enter that exam hall, further more we've got the exam technique on deck to deal with anything thrown our way during the exam - The Exam Coach Way. Everyone has the ability to do well in their exams its just finding the right buttons to push to set you in motion to find that why, for me it was making the connection between sports performance and exam performance.