Bar Exams

Transforming Anxiety Into Achievement

It may take years of practice, but with deliberate practice, you can turn your anxiety into achievement.

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The February bar exam is right around the corner and law students all around the country are pulling their hair out, chewing their nails, and nervously tapping their feet while cramming as much material into their brain as they can. Thinking back to when I took bar exam, there was a certain level of anxiety and apprehension in the months leading up to the test. It’s difficult for there not to be. Three years of your life riding on a single test.  For many people, the pressure of bringing to bear three years of knowledge on a single test can give rise to a high degree of stress. Some people thrive on it, while others crumble under it.

In reaction to a high degree of stress, your body can interpret it as a harmful event or attack, and your sympathetic nervous system kicks in releasing stress hormones. Your body doesn’t go into full adrenal dump, but does pump you full of hormones that stimulate your heart rate, blood flow, and glucose release. Your body becomes full of “nervous energy.”  You can let it overcome you, leading to anxiety, or you can learn to harness it.

While most people only focus on stress, there is also something called eustress — that is, “good stress.” Eustress is distinct because it is not a stressor-type, but rather a selective response to stress. When faced with a high-pressure situation, there is going to be a natural physiological reaction in your body (nervous energy), but there is no correct or natural psychological response. A person can self-define their psychological reaction to stress — if they take the time to develop it.

Generally speaking, our responses to stress are set out at an early age or early in our development of a skill set.

  • When you gave a speech in 4th grade, you tripped on your way to podium, and now you’re scared whenever you speak in public.
  • The first time you asked a boy out in 8th grade you got declined, and now you’re tongue-tied when you approach a man at bar despite that you’re an attractive, successful lawyer.
  • You decide to take up kayaking and break your nose the first time you go out, and now the kayak is collecting dust in your garage.

If we’re not careful, these early responses to stress triggers can develop into permanent habits and routines that determine how we react to the stressor. We have to actively choose to develop new responses to these stressors. It’s just a matter of breaking down stressful situations into their component parts and asking ourselves: what specific instance is triggering the stress (person, place, time, activity, etc.), and why are we responding in such a fashion? Was the response “burned in” at an early age like in the above examples? Was the response assumed through the observation of others responding to similar stress?

Once the stress trigger and response has been identified, it’s a matter of overriding the default response with a new one. No easy task. It’s often best achieved with weeks of diligent practice.

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Back to the bar exam, I took two months off to study and treated it like a job. I went to a designated location, and studied from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. I took BarBri and watched a number of the videos, but mostly I spent my time taking practice tests — placing myself in the exact situation that I was going to find myself in in two months. This was not exactly a fun experience. Locked up in a room, by myself for hours on end every day, memorizing voluminous amounts of law.

But as the bar exam neared, while I did feel a rise in nervous energy, I had been training myself for weeks to harness that energy and channel it into test performance: high speed reading, memory recall, mnemonics, elements, memorization of typical fact patterns, elements, etc. I was constantly practicing turning my nervous energy into something productive instead. By the time the bar exam rolled around, I simply felt ready.

There was some nervous energy to be sure, but I was able to harness it and channel it into taking the test — and then let it go when I was done. Between the 2nd & 3rd night of taking the bar exam, I went out and drank beer for a few hours with a couple of other law school classmates who had adopted the same study pattern as I had — we all passed easily. I was completely relaxed instead and not gnawing my fingernails off.

The same is true for anyone performing at a high degree of a skill. Over at Study Hacks, Cal Newport once posted about The Deliberate Rise of Stephen King. Newport shares King’s method of writing in his early years:

When I got my rejection slip…I pounded a nail into the wall above the Webcor [phonograph]…and poked [the rejection slip] onto to the nail…By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I’d begun to get rejection slips with handwritten notes a little more encouraging.

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Again and again, despite facing rejection (stress! No one likes me!), King continued to plow forwards and funnel that energy into his craft. As Newport goes on to note:

King was careful to always aim above, but just barely above, his current skill level. His first published story was in a fanzine — the 1960′s version of a blog. He moved from fanzines to second-tier mens magazines like Cavalier and Dude. After he cracked that market he moved on to top-tier mens magazines and top-tier fantasy and science fiction publications. Only once he could consistently hit those targets did he succeed in selling his first novel to Doubleday.

Let’s step back and summarize these key points of King’s training: lots of practice, driven by honest feedback and challenges just beyond his current skill level.

When faced with stressful situations that fill you with anxiety, you can either passively accept your mind’s response, or you can choose to harness the situation in your mind and let it become energy to fuel your work. It doesn’t matter if it’s taking the bar, preparing for a hearing, or taking a deposition. It will not happen right away. It will take concerted effort, mis-steps and failures.

It may take years of practice, but with deliberate practice, you can turn your anxiety into achievement.

Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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