One day I had an anxious person on the ‘phone telling me their ITIL exam was next Tuesday and they hadn’t even taken their course manual out of its cellophane wrapping yet. Was there anything I could do to help them?

He and I both knew that there was a limit to what he could achieve in just one week, because he wasn’t going to be giving himself enough time with the information for his brain to make a pattern of it and send it to his long-term memory.

Instead, I encouraged him to look at the situation as a game. Given that he had booked and paid for the exam, he might just as well take it next Tuesday. However, since he had set himself up in such a way that it was unlikely that he was going to do well, I suggested that instead of worrying about what he hadn’t done and what he wouldn’t be able to achieve in the time, that he turned it around. I asked him to treat it like a game, by telling himself, “Since I’m probably not going to do well anyway, I’ve got nothing to lose. So instead I’m going to get curious about what I can achieve, how many points I could gain in the ITIL exam, what I could actually learn in the time that I’ve got.”

That way he wasn’t going to waste time worrying about the situation, because, the probability was that he was going to fail, but there was always the smallest chance that he might just make enough progress to get through the exam after all, now that he was freeing his mind and focusing on discovering what was possible in the time he had.

If you want to find out more about how you can cut hours off your revision and pass your ITIL exams easily, take a look at Genius Material, the complete revision system for exam success.

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