Welcome to my Accelerated Learning and Life Skills blog. I am very excited to share with you a wide variety of tips, techniques, and strategies to help you succeed in school and in life. I have been gearing up for the coming semester so accelerated learning techniques have been on my mind a lot lately. Therefore it seems like a perfect topic for my very first post. Let’s start our adventure together at the beginning, with the first and perhaps most important step of accelerated learning.

The first step of accelerated learning, one which is almost always overlooked, is getting into the right state of mind. From my experience, most students do not consider their mental state before studying. They just sit down and study, even if they worried, anxious, or stressed. From my experience, most students also only achieve a very small fraction of what they are capable of achieving.

As all top athletes know, getting into the right state of mind before an athletic event is extremely important. The same is true for learning. In fact, spending just 5 – 10 minutes preparing your mind before studying is so powerful that this alone can double your learning, even if you implement none of the other steps of accelerated learning.

So what is the right state of mind? Simply stated, the best state of mind to be in when learning is one in which you feel positive, confident, resourceful and relaxed. Any negative feelings such as stress, self-doubt or anxiety will severely limit not only your ability to learn, but also your ability to recall the information at a later time. It is much better to spend 5 – 10 minutes changing your mental and emotional states than trying to study or take a test while in a non-optimal state.

As a college instructor, I spend a minute or two before every quiz or exam leading my students through a quick visualization process designed to help them get into an optimal state of mind called alpha state. I will write about this process as well as other techniques that you can use to prepare you mind for learning in future posts. Stay tuned …