You have many, many recipes that you are using every day.
Sure, you may have a recipe for baking a cake, your favorite Thai dish, or the best Margarita in the world. These are the recipes that you can think of when I talk about a recipe.
But there are other recipes that you use. Let’s have a quick conversation about them.
Simplify Your Life With Recipes
You do your work best when you get into a certain flow. When you know what you do next and what the outcome will be. We use recipes at work. For instance, when you enter your workplace, what do you do?
Do you first get a drink? Or do you switch on your computer? Do you want around and have a chat with a few people?
Let’s bring things even closer home. When you wake up, are the first 10 minutes pretty much the same every (working) day?
Recipes help you to make things easier. When you have a recipe, your life gets simpler. Instead of thinking about what you have to do next, you know exactly what you will do.
An important benefit of recipes is that they kind of guarantee a certain outcome.
When I bake a cake, I follow the recipe. The cake goes into the oven for exactly 55 minutes for instance. Longer makes the cake too dry. Less time and the cake is… well… you need a spoon instead of a fork 🙁
Think about the recipes that you use at work and at home. I am sure you can identify many. From the way you spend your evenings, to how you handle email, to helping your kids to bed, to driving to the store. Humans are creatures of habit.
Now… here’s the million-dollar question.
What is your study recipe?
How do you start your study session? And what happens during that session?
It is important that you know what happens and why you do what you do. It will help you to become better at studying. Your life will be less stressful. Studying can be fun again!
Think about this for a couple of minutes. Write down your study recipe.
I will be right here, so do it now. After that, we continue…
(enter dramatic pause for you to write down your study recipe)
Updating Your Study Recipe
Right, now that you have your recipe on paper we continue.
Is this the best way to study? Is it brain-friendly? Do you read and take notes at the same time (why?)? Do you need a lot of time for reading or for memorizing information?
From all the other things you’ve read on this website, could you enhance your recipe?
Remember, a recipe is giving you a consistent outcome (most of the time). When you want a better result, you have to change the recipe. Would you like to learn faster, or have less stress, or memorize better? Change the recipe and your outcome will change!
A personal mentor can help you with that. I do this in the Studying Made Easy training. I help people change their study routines/recipes. The result is a better study session outcome.
You can start that same process by knowing your recipe and updating it.
If you have any questions about this, let me know.
