This One Perspective Shift Will Make Your Studying Easier

In this week's episode, I reveal a powerful perspective shift that can make your studying easier and transform your academic journey.

Whether you're juggling work, family, or both, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the pressure of achieving good grades. You might even find yourself confused by inconsistent results—feeling confident about an essay only to receive a disappointing mark, or the opposite.

But what if I told you that the secret to success lies in focusing less on the results and more on the process? Join me as I break down how you can take control of your learning by improving your study habits, strategies, and mindset.

We'll explore practical steps to boost your motivation, maintain focus, and develop efficient study routines.

By the end of this episode, you'll feel empowered to tackle your studies with renewed confidence and clarity, knowing that the right process will lead to the results you desire.

This post originated as a podcast episode which you can listen to below or search for episode 163 of the Chloe Made Me Study podcast. Or, if you’re more of a learn-by-reading student, carry on for the rough-and-ready blog version based on the podcast script.

In this week’s episode I want to share with you a powerful perspective shift that I wish I’d known earlier in my studying journey!

Students in my membership, the Kickbutt Students Club, will be familiar with this idea as I share it often at the beginning of our virtual study sessions, as a reminder for what to focus on.

Here’s the one perspective shift that’s going to make your studying easier…

You cannot control your results, you can only control your process

Now, there are a few facets to this idea so let’s go.

1. Your results are the outcome of your process over time

I often hear from students who are pretty confused and feel pretty powerless about improving their grades. Sometimes they finish an exam and feel like it went terribly – but then they get a great grade. Other times they submit an essay feeling pretty confident but then their grade comes back much lower than they expected. These shocks and surprises can lead some students to become a bit ambivalent about results – “there’s no point thinking about it too much because what will be will be.”

Doing well in an essay requires you to tick lots of the right boxes.

Doing well in an exam requires you to remember and be able to apply lots of the right knowledge in the right way to get the right answers.

And sometimes these right boxes, this right criteria, feels a bit unknowable. While some universities share the marking criteria for each essay grade, for example, others share the question and some guidance and that’s it – the grading criteria the tutors use to mark your work is kept a secret.

So I can completely understand the perspective that you might want to remove your focus from your grades and just try your best and hope.

Now, trying your best is obviously an admirable thing to do as a student, but it’s a pretty bloody vague strategy, which can open you up to riding the rollercoaster of motivation and procrastination – relying on your feelings and energy to study when in fact these factors fluctuate A LOT. There will be plenty of times when you’re not gonna want to study so a focus on trying your best might open you up to a lot of self-judgement and procrastination – because what does ‘try your best’ really even mean?

Instead, I invite you to see that your university grades are the output of a machine. With the input being your habits, mindset and study strategies. If the things that go into the machine are not very efficient, or they’ve not been well thought out, then your grades that pop out the machine are likely to be lower than they could be.

So instead of worrying about what’s coming out of your academic machine, focus a bit more on what’s going in. Especially if you’re currently freaking out a bit about your grades. At the time of this episode coming out, lots of you are receiving your latest academic results. Some of you will be ecstatically happy, others definitely not, and a likely large majority are not doing atrociously but would like to improve.

So here are the things to focus on putting INTO your academic machine to make your studying easier and so better outputs come out:

• Your commitment to studying – putting aside a certain number of hours each week to get it done and switching things up when life happens. Studying cannot be a top priority all of the time but a certain amount of dedication is needed.

• Your study routines – the ways that you plan your time and tasks.

• Your study habits – how you make studying happen and study with more focus, motivation and positivity.

• Your study strategies – how you read and take notes in the smartest way for your course, how you plan, write and edit your assignments, how you prepare for exams methodically throughout your classes.

• Your studying mindset – how you bounce back from doubts, overwhelm and disappointment. Setbacks WILL happen in your studies, they’re unavoidable, so you want to focus on reducing the downtime they cause.

As you can see there are lots of things that you can control here. You don’t have to change or improve all of them at once but when you’re feeling a bit dejected and stuck by your studying progress, pick one area and tweak it for your next study session – and the results will follow.

2. Your study session output is variable

It’s possible to make a pretty good plan for a study session, in terms of mapping out what you want to work on and in what order. However, there are lots of variables that could impact how much you actually manage to get done:

• You’re tired and struggle to stay focused

• Your household is noisy or you’re being bugged by friends or family on your phone

• You don’t feel well

• You’ve had a stressful day or you’ve got a lot going on at the moment so your attention is split

• You weren’t that great at estimating how long a task would take. For instance, you’re a time positive person.

• Unexpected issues cropped up as you were studying – the task was harder than you thought, you hadn’t anticipated an issue or an extra task, a more pressing priority arose.

So this means that, even with the best of intentions, it’s possible that you won’t achieve everything on your task list. And if you rack up a few study sessions in a row where you don’t finish everything you’d hoped then how do you think you’re gonna feel?

A little bit dejected. A little bit peeved. You might then lose motivation to study at all the next day.

So, because your studying output is variable, it makes way more sense to focus your energy on controlling your studying process.

What can you do to get and stay motivated?

What can you do to maintain focus and discipline?

What can you do to increase your productivity?

What can you do to overcome obstacles that might crop up? For example, boredom, overwhelm, the urge to procrastinate, self-doubt. And tangible issues such as interruptions from family and friends or noisy neighbours.

Focus on studying in an effective way, and problem solving issues – which will make your studying easier and the results will take care of themselves.

3. What would a smart student do?

When you’re feeling stressed, focus on action taking, and try to think of the smartest actions you can take. Not smart as in related to cleverness or intelligence – smart as in strategic, productive, effective, efficient.

You’ve likely heard the idea of ‘fake it till you make it.’ Well this is a key part of becoming the person who achieves the university grades you really want. If you’re feeling like an overwhelmed, unproductive, unfocused, procrastinate-y student, focus your energy on becoming the opposite, a better version.

Ask yourself, ‘what would a DISCIPLINED student do right now?’

‘What would a MOTIVATED student do?’

‘What would a PRODUCTIVE student do?’

Then do that. Because if you change the way you do things, if you study in a more efficient and effective way, then the results will take care of themselves. You’ll make your studying easier, you’ll have to study LESS each week as your process is more efficient, and your results will improve so you can graduate with your dream grades.