How to stay motivated throughout the academic year
As autumn fades into a rainy, dark winter, shorter days and all-round fatigue, November and December can feel like challenging months for any student. Keeping your motivation high despite gloomy weather and the stresses of the school year ahead is a challenge along the path of becoming the student you want to be. With the academic year having just started and the end of it being 9 months away, these months can often feel impossible to get through, with only the excitement of the next school holiday pushing you through the endless 5am, 6am, or 7am school alarms. The results you desire in your studies rarely come overnight. This can make the school year feel like long periods of hard work with little immediate payoff. We have all been there as students, nobody thinks it is easy, but in order to make it to the end of the year, it is crucial re-charge your mindset. Your mindset all depends on what motivates you, and in this blog post, what I am suggesting is that motivation can be found in cultivating a long-term mindset – understanding that all the work you do now will pay you back endlessly not only at the end of the school year, but in your future as an adult.
Ultimately, there is a way to find joy and meaning, even in the darkest slumps of a rainy November day. It is so important to envision the destination that the road that we are travelling leads to - paper by paper, class by class, day by day. We have to see the bigger picture. Each dreary piece of homework and each class exists as part of a longer story with a much bigger payoff than we can sometimes realise. The payoff of a school year filled with hard work, creativity, and good habits is immensely rewarding. Strong grades, acquiring new skills, and experiencing personal growth all open doors for us. The promise of this is an exciting thing. All the work you are doing now as a student means something. It means that you have the opportunity to pursue your dream career, move to your favourite country, or fulfil a lifetime goal you currently have. The pressure of this can often be crippling and in many ways fills students with anxiety, which is understandable, but once you start seeing your work now as a positive opportunity for a better future life, it can give you a new perspective which drives you to the end of the year, and eventually to the end of your time as a student.
This proposal, of course, is a lot harder than it initially looks. Everyone has their own way of conjuring up methods of how to toil through the academic year. Many students succeed in this, but at the same, many other students feel like they cannot crack this code, especially when the results they crave evade them in weekly essays or after an end of term assessment. Personally, I remember hitting mid-year slumps throughout my academic year, struggling as a student who wasn’t excelling in every subject at all points of the year made me feel useless or not as smart as my peers. When I made the choice to set my goals for the academic year and start outlining where I wanted my hard work, determination and patience to lead me in the future, the every-day routine at school became easier for me to get my head around. I realised that every morning I woke up for school, I had a brand-new opportunity to prove to myself that my goals for the future were not so out of reach as they initially seemed. Every day, month and even year as a student was now an opportunity to draw me closer to a brighter future that I knew I deserved. It took me steeping out of the automatic mindset that is easy to cling to as a student, one which only sees motivations at school in the short-term and not the long-term. What began to motivate me was the comfort I found in the knowledge I was curating now for the future, not how the knowledge I was curating now become futile once classes had ended for the day.
Once you begin to see how motivation can come from seeing how hard work in the now directly connects to our successes in the future, I hope that the next 9 months for you as a student will be filled with optimism, hope, and ambition. If each test, study session, and quiz makes you question what you are doing this all for, think of your own personal goals, where you see yourself in the future, and how your position as a student now can help you get there.
As Muhammad Ali once said, "Don't count the days: make the days count." What truly makes the days count? Understanding the personal and academic growth that results from the hard day-by-day routine. Motivation doesn't come from making each step of the journey easier, it comes from understanding that the journey as a whole makes each step worthwhile.
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Written by E. Ticehurst