Ever wondered why you excel at what you love doing? Be it watching your favourite sport or your favourite TV series, painting, playing instruments or playing video games.
How your hands know what to do exactly with the video game controller or how you know at which step the player went wrong in the match. Ever wondered why you know the next line of your favourite TV show episode.
We all tend to know the answer. We enjoy doing it so much that our brain develops a pattern. We are so relaxed while doing the things we love that we learn them to an expert level.
“Practice makes a man perfect” - is an age-old saying and never it goes wrong. The modern-day explanation of this quote is the concept of “Neuroplasticity”.
The very informal definition of “Neuroplasticity” is that for every activity that we do our brain forms a pattern or a circuit of neurons. Our life is basically functioning on millions of circuits that our brain forms. If we continue that activity that circuit keeps on repeating and becomes strong, which explains our reflexive actions of the things we have been doing since our childhood. This is how we learn things. It also explains why we are expert in doing what we love. It can be anything.
Now that we have shed some light on this concept let us relate it to the fact as to how we can implement it in our CAT preparation.
How To Implement Concepts Of Neuroplasticity For CAT Preparation
- Habits: The first and foremost activity we should do for our CAT preparation is to force ourselves to form certain habits. This includes setting our schedule for certain fixed things that we have to do no matter what. For example: learning 20 new words a day, practising 3 DI sets and 3 reading comprehensions a day.
- It will be a little uncomfortable at first but as you proceed you will be surprised to know how uncomfortable you feel when you don’t do it after you form a habit. This is how we train our brain or form a permanent circuit of the pattern. This Starting struggle may last from one week to 10 days. After 10 days of doing a particular activity, you start to hold a grasp over your brain and your activities.
- Enjoying what you do: It is a common experience that if we learn something new, practice it for some days, we tend to develop some grasp on it. Moreover, as we gain more and more control over something we tend to enjoy it. Preparing for CAT is a process of loving the preparation time. You don’t even know how much you can do if you start loving what you are doing. Trust the process and trust yourself.
- Repeat and Revise: If we learn something and leave it like that we will never retain it. Our brain does form a circuit and if we don’t repeat it again it will not get permanent and strong. So the key to learn something and retain it is to revise.
Revising something takes a very little time. So why not invest little slots of time every day instead of earning something new, leaving it for a long time and then relearning it again.
- Create a comfort zone: According to an age-old saying, we cannot achieve something if we tend to remain in our comfort zone. According to me if we practice something and gain our mastery over it, we create a new comfort zone.
- Here's where mocks come into the picture. Mocks are an excellent way for creating a pool of variety of questions. Another thing mocks do is to condition us to sit for 3 hours without feeling tired.
- So our goal here is to give and analyse as many mocks as possible. Take a “blow to the head” approach where you practice so many mocks that on the day of test it feels like just any other day in your life.
- Create small patches and sew them later on: This just means learn new topics every day and keep on revising and perfecting them. After you develop some confidence start practising mixed bag of questions. Train your brain to be as comfortable as possible. After you excel at this start taking mocks and take them in a good number.
This concept is very simple and explains a great deal of things when applied in real life.
With six months remaining for CAT, it is very important to understand that if we do something daily and consistently even for one month it becomes our comfort zone. Our main aim is to make CAT preparation our comfort zone so that we tend to ease up on things as the exam approaches.
So make a schedule and follow it. CAT is a stressful exam, but in order to counter it, we train our brain to actually believe that it is just a daily activity we are performing.
You will be surprised to know your potential once you ease into the preparation.
All The Best.