Motivation in the Mind of a Champion

Introduction

Hello all, welcome to the Motivation blog, where we talk all about motivation and its role in achieving success and fulfilling our goals. For this blog, I will discuss how I was able to implement different motivation and concentration strategies to get a good grade in Organic Chemistry.

My Goals

As stated above, this semester I am taking the dreaded Organic Chemistry, one of Ohio State’s more challenging classes. My goal throughout the semester was to get at least a B in the class which I knew would be tough.

Motivation

One problem I seemed to have early on in the semester was a lack of motivation and the inability to fully concentrate while studying. As a former athlete, I decided to pick up the book A Champion’s Mind by Jim Afremow.

My Plan

Going into this semester, I knew Organic Chemistry would be my most difficult class, it is INFAMOUS for being TOUGH.

I knew my old strategies of doing sets of practice problems may not work this semester around, so I decided to implement new study and concentration strategies.

In order to see how motivated I was, I would track my overall performance in the class, write a journal of everything I did for a few weeks span, and use a tracker app on my phone to make sure I was still staying motivated.

Look in the Mirror Everyday and Tell Yourself You Can Achieve Anything

This was one of my favorite strategies to use and really helped me to stay motivated throughout the semester. I chose this strategy in part because not only does it help with motivation, but confidence as well, which sometimes I can lack.

For a class like OChem, confidence when taking tests is vital to doing well. That is why this strategy helped me out a lot, everyday when I woke up I would utilize this strategy and look at myself in the mirror to tell myself that I can do anything.

I knew I would need motivation to stick to my new study strategies, so that is why I chose to do this strategy. Without it, I doubt that I would have been able to see the amount of progress that I did.

The pictures below were kept over two three week spans leading up to my two Organic Chemistry Midterms. The picture represents my habit of looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself I can accomplish anything.

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Visualize your Goals

When setting out for a goal, it is important to visualize what you want to achieve without doing so, how can you expect to know what it is that you want to achieve. This is a great strategy for gaining confidence and knowing what you want to achieve, it helped me tremendously by allowing me to see my goal and believe that it was possible.

For my major, I have to maintain a certain GPA (3.0) and in order to visualize my success in organic chemistry I began to look at what being successful in it would do for me long term.

By achieving my goal of a B in one of the hardest classes at Ohio State, I will be well on my way to maintaining a 3.0 GPA. So to help myself visualize what my goals were and what they mean going forward, would write down after every weekly quiz (post midterm 1) what I needed to do on Midterm 2 in order to get a B. I realized that as the class went on, the grade I would need on each assignment would drop, indicating that I was indeed making significant progress.

I finally realized that my goal was right within my grasp.

Don’t Be a Cry Baby

What I took this strategy to mean is to get over the fact that hard work was going to have to be done. This one is especially important for me, because I know at times I can complain about having to do work and complete an assignment.

I knew in order to do well in this class, I needed to spend more time working and less time complaining about having to work, so I decided to track this using a planner/schedule. By doing this I was able to track how much work I was actually putting into the class, as well as how lazy I had been acting.

As you can see over a three week span, I did not study on the weekends, and I studied every other day. This somewhat shows that I was acting slightly like a cry baby, after my test was over on March 25^th, I seemed to get complacent which Afremow says, “You can hate to lose, but don’t be afraid to lose. Confidence without complacency keeps you on target when you are playing well and winning.”

Takeaways

Here is what I was able to take away:

1. Life is going to be difficult and require adaptation and trying new things to get through it.
2. Motivation is the key to success in any facet, without motivation, it will be hard to succeed.
3. Confidence is key to success as well, you have to be able to believe in yourself and know that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.

Going in I felt as though I was a pretty confident guy, for the most part I am a pretty good student, I get good grades and do well for the most part. What I did not know is that I can be an even better student just by implementing a few easy methods of motivation. With the help of all of these motivation tactics, I was able to increase my test scores by 15 points, which puts me on track to achieve my goal of getting a B. If I was able to accomplish this goal with just these strategies, imagine what we can all do with even more.