The third secret to academic success involves time. Quite simply, successful students are people who devote lots of time to their learning. Learning and the creativity it demands are time consuming endeavors. God may have created the universe in 6 days, but it will take you a lot longer than that to earn a degree. If you do not have time to devote to your goals, you will not reach them.
Few people know that the average amount of homework a college student should expect each week is 3 hours for every academic unit enrolled. In other words, if you are taking a 3-unit course, you should expect to devote an average of 9 hours each week to studying and preparing for just this one course. If you take five 3-unit courses, or 15 units, you should plan to have about 45 hours devote to your homework, every week!
In contemporary society, we have countless potentially time-saving devices that might help us to complete that homework much faster. In reality, these devices are often the downfall of many college students. The computer is just one example. Certainly word processing programs are lifesavers for college students who once had to spend countless hours typing their papers on manual typewriters. But how many people use computers only to type their papers? Most of us are familiar with the Internet and at times find its allure difficult to resist. We are information junkies, and the Internet is our favorite dealer. Even if we aren’t surfing the web for information, a tone indicating a newly arrived message to our email inbox can be enough to pull us away from the task at hand.
Television, smart phones, iPads…all these fabulous devices can actually serve as unwelcome deterrents to our learning. This is partly due to the fact that people who have negative emotions associated with learning and creating find electronic devices to be powerful narcotics. If you are a person who watches a lot of TV, sends numerous text messages, has an obsession with all the latest applications for your iPhone, or spends hours surfing the Internet you probably do not have time for your own learning and creating. This is very convenient if you are trying to avoid the uncomfortable sensations that arise when you are trying to learn.
Sadly, we do not need to have a traumatic early childhood experience to suffer from an addiction to any of these devices. Today’s advertisers are very savvy. They know how to access the subconscious layers of the individual psyche to convince us that we need their products in order to be happy. And if we are in an environment where everyone else has access to these devices, we cannot help but feel we need them ourselves. Lacking the self-discipline to turn off these devices when we need to devote our time to learning can create real problems for people who are trying to achieve academic success.
But even people who are not addicted to technology may have difficulty finding the time they need to succeed in school. Some people have developed deep-seated subconscious beliefs about how they should be spending their time, beliefs that do not include devoting time to study, or that place study time at the bottom of a long list of other priorities. Until these subconscious beliefs are eliminated, finding adequate time to devote to studying will be a challenge that will impede their academic success.
To summarize, the three secrets about learning that are critical to academic success are 1) academic success requires active engagement with the material being learned, 2) academic success requires using one’s creativity, and 3) academic success requires time. These first two secrets relate to qualities that exist in every human being from the time they are born. Unfortunately, while everyone is born with the capacity to learn and create, some people have early life experiences that cause them to have unpleasant reactions to learning and creating. These people may actually go out of their way to avoid the negative feelings they subconsciously associate with learning and creativity, thereby sabotaging their efforts to succeed in school.
The third requirement for academic success is time. How people make use of their time depends on a number of factors, including subconscious beliefs that interfere with their ability to make sufficient time for academic success.
The tests provided in Chapter Two of this book will help you to determine whether self-limiting beliefs are impeding your academic success. They will also help you to determine whether you have an addiction to technology that is interfering with that success. And they will help you to understand whether unpleasant emotions and memories are subconsciously interfering with your efforts to succeed academically.
EFT can be used to clear blocks to success that are created by any one of these factors, be they subconscious beliefs, unpleasant memories, or self-limiting thoughts and addictions to technology or other time-draining devices. Clearing these blocks is like clearing debris from a hiking trail after a storm. Think of the trail you are clearing as the one that leads to your success.
In order to reap the greatest benefits from EFT, you will find it helpful to identify the precise barriers that stand between you and your academic success. That is because EFT works best when it is applied to very specific conditions. The three tests for assessing your readiness to succeed academically that are provided in Chapter Two will help you to identify the specific unpleasant emotions, troubling memories, and self-limiting beliefs that may be acting as barriers to your success. In Chapter Three you will learn exactly how to clear these barriers in order to achieve the success that can be yours.