The emotional side of GMAT Prep

Remembering knowledge, learning concepts, and building skills comprise one aspect of the GMAT preparation. The other, often ignored and probably more important, aspect is the emotional aspect – how to manage your emotions as you persevere in this journey. Being a private tutor, I have had a chance to understand, quite closely, what kind of emotions people go through as they struggle their way through. Confusion, stress, sadness, irritation, frustration, self-doubt, and even panic attacks are some emotions I’ve seen my students experience. One of my students used to wake up in the middle of the night and scroll through b-school discussions worrying whether he has a chance or not. Another student went from being an energetic, easy-to-laugh girl to a dead-serious one as she spent a couple of months dedicatedly preparing for GMAT. And I once got a call from a girl who used to have panic attacks since her husband, who had a 740 on GMAT, was waiting for her to get a good score so that they could apply together – she felt very guilty for having stalled her husband’s career.

In this article, I’m going to share a few real-life stories of my students and the perspective I shared with them. Probably, some of you may be able to relate to some of these stories and probably gain a bit from the perspectives shared.

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Starting with the wrong assumption – Everybody takes 2-3 months

“While everybody gets it done in 2-3 months, I’ve spent more than 6 months preparing for the test without any significant improvement. What is wrong with me?”, an aspirant asked me in our first call, feeling frustrated and discouraged.

I replied:

Nothing is wrong with you. Many factors may have worked against you. Probably, the resources you were using are sub-par, or probably the way you were using them was not correct. It is also possible that you actually have a lot of ground to cover and thus need much more time than others. In any case, this is a myth that everybody takes 2-3 months. I hear from several people every week who have been preparing for more than 6 months and sometimes even for two years without much progress. Everybody thinks that everybody else takes 2-3 months to complete GMAT prep because people who get it done within 2-3 months are much more likely to share their stories with others and on forums and even test prep companies market these stories a lot. Who wants to share with the world that he took 2 years to get done with GMAT? So, the data you see in the world is very skewed. Besides, eventually, not everything is going to come easily in life. Somethings are going to challenge you. The point is whether you continue to believe in yourself and give your best every day. Thus, instead of doubting yourself, take a look at what you need to do to improve, and then patiently work towards it.

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Your whole life experience gets driven by the section you’re struggling with

A student came sad to the session. When I inquired about the reason for her sadness, she said that her continuing struggle with the CR section was making her discouraged.

I replied:

If CR is the biggest problem in your life, you don’t have big problems in life.

It’s a reason to be happy. While people out there struggle with big problems, CR is the biggest problem in your life. That’s it!

What I’m trying to do here is put your problem into a perspective. You’re blowing this single aspect of your life out of proportion. Since you’re completely focused on this problem of CR, your whole experience of life is driven by it. This need not be the case. Besides, if you think about it, such problems or, let me say, areas of growth or uncertainties are always going to exist in your life. After GMAT, it’ll be b-school admissions. After admissions, it’ll be getting the desired job. And then on a personal level, finding the right spouse. And then, all the problems of marital life. This is going to continue forever. Will you always be sad, overwhelmed by these problems and uncertainties?

If CR is a problem, just give your best on it every day. It’ll be resolved in a few weeks or months. Give yourself time. Have patience. And enjoy this journey of continuous growth that you’ve chosen to undertake.

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Comparisons are the root of most suffering

A student who was struggling a lot with GMAT asked me, as a lot of students in a similar situation ask, “Am I taking more time than a typical student takes?”.

I responded, “How would this statistic help you? Of course, you’re taking more time than a typical student takes. However, that’s because you are starting from a lower level. But where you are starting from doesn’t determine where you end up. I’ve had students who started at the 60th percentile and could manage to achieve only 80th percentile, and I’ve also had a student who started at the 5th percentile and eventually reached the 90th percentile. Where you are starting from doesn’t define you…unless you allow it to.”

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Using Questions to assess rather than to learn

It’s quite common for me to hear from students that they become stressed out and worried when they get questions wrong. Every time they struggle with the questions, they doubt their capabilities and whether they can ever achieve their target scores. Then, they end up wasting hours and days indulging in self-doubt and negativity.

I told one such student,

“You are solving questions not to learn and grow but to continually assess yourself. Of course, you are not at a level where you want to be. That’s why you are practicing. Now, having understood that you need to improve considerably, be patient with yourself. If you want to assess yourself, do so after 3 months. However, for the next 3 months, whenever you get a question wrong, don’t consider it yet another judgment on your capability but look at it as an avenue to learn and grow. Make growth your only objective for the next 3 months. If this happens, whenever you get confused or make a mistake, you’ll be eager to learn since every such question will help you in meeting your objective. And then you’ll see, after 3 months, that such continual assessment had been not only unnecessary but counterproductive.”

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Making sweeping statements about self-worth

“What is the reason you think why you got this question wrong?”, I asked a student in our first session yesterday.

“Because I am stupid.”

A couple of mistakes later, the student said, “you must be thinking I’m really dumb.”

I was surprised by his thoughts although this was not the first time I had heard such thoughts. This is what I said:

Making such a sweeping statement – that I’m stupid – about yourself based on a single mistake and that too in a narrow subject field is clearly not justified. Is it? If I take that as a definition of “stupid”, I’d also be stupid in almost all domains of life. Stick to the facts. The fact is just that you didn’t understand something correctly ‘today’. That’s it. Try to refrain from making such sweeping permanent statements about yourself.

Regarding what I’m thinking, why would I judge you so soon? Rather, why would I judge you at all? If you didn’t have any problems in understanding or reasoning, why would you have come to me? What sense does it make for a teacher to judge his students? What I want from you is not excellent skills but a solid commitment to learn and grow? If you have the commitment, I’ll enjoy teaching you.

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Interpreting struggle as failure

“You are not defined by your circumstances but by your interpretations of those circumstances.

When Thomas Edison, known as America’s greatest inventor, couldn’t succeed a whopping 10,000 times, he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Even though he hadn’t succeeded after 10,000 attempts, he didn’t interpret the circumstance as a judgment on his ability; he didn’t say, “I just can’t do it. I probably don’t have the capability to do it.”

He persisted. And so can we.

We need not succumb in the face of failures but rather can take them as instances to learn from. There is no one correct interpretation of the situation you are facing. You can choose an interpretation that serves you. And if an interpretation indeed serves you, doesn’t that automatically make it the correct interpretation and the other interpretations not so?

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Panic Attacks

Once, a girl called me, all tense. She had a 680 on GMAT but wanted to get 730+ since she and her husband were planning to apply to the top US b-schools. Her husband already had a 740. She had been studying for a few months but hadn’t gotten near her target score. And she was at a stage that she used to have panic attacks out of guilt that because of her, her husband couldn’t move ahead in his career.

After hearing her out, I replied:

Are you sure that doing an MBA is the right thing for you and your husband? Right now, you are having panic attacks since your husband is not going for his MBA because of you. What if you get a 740 and you both go to a top b-school and get your MBAs? Is it a guarantee that you both will get jobs? Don’t you know of people who go to top b-schools but still have to return back to their country for various reasons? With an education loan of more than Rs 2 cr and no job, would that situation be better for you than this current one?

The point is that you don’t know what’s best for you but you are so fixated on achieving a particular outcome as if you knew. And you’re killing yourself for not achieving this outcome. Accept your ignorance that you don’t know what’s best for you! Give your best and then let it rest!

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A stage of prep in which you start getting easy questions wrong

Many of my students have gone through this stage in which they start getting many easy and medium questions wrong that they stopped getting wrong a long time back. This doesn’t happen to everyone but has happened to many. And this stage lasts for a few days to a couple of weeks. Many students panic, worrying that their preparation lasting months has been undone somehow.

Now that I have seen several such cases, I just ask students to calm down and just tide over this period. Preparation cannot be undone automatically, and the students are usually back to their normal accuracy levels in a couple of weeks.

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I asked one of my students, whose GMAT journey has been quite long, “What do you have to say about the emotional aspect of this journey?”

She replied, “Society needs to teach us resilience rather than winning. All my life I have been praised for my achievements. Nobody taught me the value of resilience. It’s only when I came to GMAT did I realize its importance.”

I hope this article helps! (Originally posted here)

- CJ

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