Develop Self Discipline and Deal with Challenges

During your pursuit of a worthwhile learning goal, you continually face challenges. Overcoming challenges is one reason achieving a goal is so rewarding. Sometimes though, challenges can seem overwhelming. This chapter deals with some of the common challenges you may face. It also shows you how to use various techniques to help overcome those challenges.

In this chapter, you will find ways to overcome many of the common challenges you may face during your learning journey. Developing a better understanding of these challenges, as well as techniques to address them, helps you move forward faster when these challenges arise. The challenges we tackle in this chapter include:

• Motivation. Lack of motivation is often the largest issue that arises when times get tough. However, lack of motivation can also come from other sources as well, such as misaligned goals or internal or external conflicts.
• Fear. Fear and nervousness, in many guises, degrade learning performance in several ways. I describe fear's dual nature, and how to combat fear with knowledge, understanding and other techniques.
• Mistakes. Rather than seeing mistakes negatively, learn to see them as steps towards your goals. You can learn from your own mistakes, as well as the mistakes of others.
• Pressure. I outline some tips on how to deal with the impact of pressure on various techniques, both during learning and at other times.
• Wrong assumptions. You can use the ACT model to overcome wrong assumptions.

A tip before we begin. Medical students often develop the symptoms of a disease they are studying. If you read this chapter and suddenly believe that your lack of motivation comes from a deep internal conflict about possible success and the impact a mistake, due to making a wrong assumption under pressure, would have on that success, stop for a moment! Are you suffering the Medical Student Syndrome? I cover this in more detail at the end of this chapter.