Unusual or unexpected study tips?

One of the most powerful things I did when preparing for the GMAT was finding and resolving unconscious conflicts I had with success. Doing so made hitting my GMAT score goal almost effortless.

Here's an example of how that process works and the type of results one can get from it.

At a certain point during my preparation, I realized that so called careless mistakes were holding back my quant performance, not only because they would result in my missing questions but more insidiously because, even if I caught them and redid questions and ended up getting the questions correct, redoing the questions would take time and make finishing the quant section on time almost impossible.

So, my move was to figure out why I was making "careless mistakes" on purpose. In other words, I figured that I was conflicted on the surface I didn't seem to want to make careless mistakes, but unconsciously, I wanted to, and often my unconscious desire was winning out.

I went into a meditative state to find my desire or intention to make careless errors, and sure enough, there it was. I found multiple things going on, but perhaps the most important factor was that I had a very strong aversion to doing things right the first time. Unconsciously, I had the idea that it was way better to, guess what, do something wrong the first time, and then fix it. So, of course, I was doing just that when I was answering GMAT questions.

So, I addressed that aversion by meditating on it, and convinced myself, at least partly, that doing something right the first time might be OK.

Sure enough, when I went to do quant questions after going through that process, I quickly figured out how to make fewer careless errors, and when I went to take the actual GMAT, I had no trouble finishing the quant section on time. In fact, having done that work on careless errors and other inner work on quant performance, I found the quant section of the GMAT so easy that I was a little disoriented and literally checked the screen that the test was presented on to make sure that I was taking the GMAT and not some other test.

I worked on many other aspects of my GMAT performance in that way. Any time I was having trouble with something or wanted to achieve something, I would go into a meditative state, find unconscious conflicts, and resolve them to smooth the path to success.

One funny thing I discovered on GMAT Club is that there is a fake debrief by someone who said that he scored 800 on the GMAT with, an impossible, 52 in quant. He said of using meditation, "It helps you focus and retains everything in your memory, so that even if a needle is placed in a haystack, you should be able to find it with one pull." It cracks me up that, in creating that fake debrief, that person fairly accurately described the results I had experienced. The result of resolving inner conflict is effortlessness.

So, that method was super effective, and some of my students have used it as well with similar results. In multiple cases, they, like me, have been something along the lines of disoriented by the ease with which they scored high on the test.