Give me 14 minutes, And I'll Turn You Into An Academic Weapon

this video I'm going to help you to become an academic weapon and I Define an academic weapon as someone who's not just getting by but absolutely obliterating the standards required to succeed and I'm going to do this by teaching you a technique called visible process mapping which you can learn and apply in less than 24 hours visible process mapping is something I've developed and used in my coaching practice for years and it's something that I do in almost every private consultation and the reason visible process mapping works is because it helps us overcome something that

I call learning baggage which is one of the most common reasons that stops students from achieving their academic goals in the first place now the easiest way to understand what learning baggage is and how it sabotages us is to understand the trajectory of an academic weapon see a lot of quick tips and studying hacks can be a total waste of time because it doesn't change our academic trajectory in other words if your trajectory looks like this where you're barely meeting your next academic Challenge and it's getting harder and harder to keep up until eventually you

just fall behind then just one or two little changes from a 30-second Tik Tok is probably not going to be enough if you want to be on the academic weapon trajectory where it's actually getting easier and easier to overcome your academic challenges over time then we have to clearly understand where our current current weaknesses and limitations are in other words what are the things that are holding us back from being on this academic weapon trajectory and the answer is learning baggage learning baggage refers to the invisible habits that work against us and we all have

these habits now habit might be something like cracking your knuckles or playing with your hair but it can also be a much more extend Ive process like your entire morning routine of how you get out of bed and brush your teeth and get ready to leave for the day or it might be the way that you warm up before a workout they are processes that you have done lots of times and have become autopilot but learning baggage is invisible because they are cognitive habits meaning that they happen in our brain these are ways of thinking

that we run on autopilot and when it comes to learning our cognitive habits directly dictate our academic success or failure and most people have never thought about their learning baggage so it continues to sabotage them again and again so here is how learning baggage prevents us from becoming an academic weapon learning is a series of cognitive processes and some of these processes like higher R learning are beneficial for our long-term memory as well as our ability to perform but our brain doesn't just automatically do the these processes otherwise learning would be easy instead we have

to use techniques to try and Trigger these processes to happen in our brain and now here's where learning baggage comes in most of these techniques are things that we kind of just picked up here and there over the years we might have seen something that our friends use we've read something seen something online it's sort of this haphazard combination and some of these techniques are good and work for us but then some of them aren't very effective but over time these techniques and the processes that they activate become habits which means that some of these

techniques and processes which we're now running on autopilot because they've become habits are actually detrimental to our learning we've basically automated something that makes us worse and in doing so we have created learning baggage these harmful and our habitual processes will continue to reduce our memory and performance again and again every time we go to learn something in fact even if you learn a great technique those habitual cognitive processes will actually make you perform it incorrectly that's why you can use the same exact technique as a top achiever but not get the same result this

is how our learning baggage can ruin our our academic trajectory so then how do we get rid of this baggage and improve our trajectory unfortunately many of these cognitive habits are invisible which means that most people are not aware of the habits and processes that they use and even if they are aware they don't know which part specifically is helpful versus harmful they just think that overall my studying is working for me or it's not and it's actually this fact that learning baggage is invisible that can potentially keep someone on a downhill trajectory for the

rest of their life just imagine someone comes up to you and says that they're struggling with their studying they're getting bad results and they don't know why they can't really explain their learning process uh they're just doing a bunch of things that their friends told them to do a while ago they don't know what's working they don't know what's not and frankly they haven't really spent a lot of time or effort thinking about this would you expect that that person would actually improve no it's obvious that this person is not on a great trajectory yes

partially because they probably don't have great techniques but mostly because they don't even know what they're doing right or wrong which is why the first step of becoming an academic weapon before learning any technique is just to make this invisible learning baggage visible the way we do that is with visible process mapping now before before I go into the actual mapping process and demonstration the first thing that you can do to get a huge head start on this is to get your major learning habits assessed if I were in front of you right now then

I would just ask you a bunch of questions and evaluate you on the spot unfortunately I can't do that for every single one of you so I've created a free quiz which is the next best thing takes about 2 minutes to answer a bunch of questions and then at the end it will give you a report that tells you which major areas of your learning might be your learning baggage the quiz is completely free to do and although it doesn't replace the visible process mapping it will make it a lot easier and probably much more

accurate I'll leave a link to the quiz for you in the description so here's how we do the visible process map it's basically a record of your entire learning flow and I'm using this table here I'll leave a link as well in the description where you can go and access this to do it yourself we're going to start off by putting in some baseline performance metrics of how we're finding things so far so let's say my results right now tend to be good my confidence is okay my confidence to recall facts is let's say high

but my confidence to answer challenging questions or curveball questions might be kind of low uh overall I feel like I spend more time than others studying and the time that I spend relearning material that I forgot is let's say moderate 20 to 40% of my studying time is just relearning stuff that I forgot this helps us to calibrate how effective our learning flow is now you'll notice that in the middle of this I've got this thing that's highlighted called the main learning event the main learning event is really the first time where you're going to

sit down and properly be exposed to the topic in most situations this is a lecture covering it in class if you're self-studying it's the first time you sit down with a dedicated study session to say hey I'm going to cover this topic now and then what we do is we say well what are we doing during that main learning event so let's say for example we're talking about this being a lecture then what am I doing inside this lecture we want to write down this process reasonably specifically so let's say that I'm uh listening to

the lecturer uh I'm writing some notes and again be specific what do the notes look like they're linear they use uh bullet points I'm copy pasting some diagrams into it and in the next column we're saying why what's the rationale for using that as a technique we're trying to make that invisible connection between the technique we use and the process that it's meant to activate I'm trying to make that more visible so well I'm doing it because it's meant to help me Focus it's meant to help me concentrate uh I think if I do it

it's going to help me to remember the information more accurately it's going to help me to understand it a little bit more deeply and then the next column you see certainty it's how sure are you how sure am I that doing all of this what is actually achieving the why in this case maybe it's uh I'm actually not too sure and we're going to work through this going before and after the main learning event so let's say before uh 30 minutes before we're doing some kind of uh pre-study type of Step we're going to fill

that in and let's say uh 3 hours afterwards I'm going to go and review my notes and then again we fill that in in a little bit more detail and let's say uh one week later we're doing some kind of review and let's say you know 3 weeks after that or a week before our exam we're basically taking a single piece of information and we're tracing what we do with that information from the first moment we make contact with it all the way through to when you need to use it like an exam or an

assessment solving some kind of case and this is a very very useful activity for a number of reasons first of all if you don't even know what you're doing you found some definite learning baggage the chances that you're doing all the right things without even really knowing what you're doing is very slim let's say you know what you're doing but you're not really sure why you think you're just doing it because that's what I'm used to doing it's a habit now that could be learning baggage maybe it's a habit that you developed years ago that

served you back when you were 8 years old but now maybe should be optimized and in this final column with certainty that's another opportunity to find learning baggage you know that you're doing something that's meant to achieve some kind of goal or effect but it might not actually be doing that so that's another possible habit or belief that you've had that you never really critically challenged now remember not every habit that you find is going to be learning baggage remember it's a combination of some things that are useful and working for you and some things

that are not the point of the exercise is to make the invisible visible at the bottom of the template I've also left a number of questions that you can ask yourself that can help you reflect on your learning process a little bit more deeply these are types of questions that people don't generally tend to ask themselves but they're also questions that I always ask when I do a learning consultation because it makes the learning baggage very obvious just to show you what it looks like when it's completed here's an example of one that I did

for one of my students during an initial consultation and here's what I want you to notice is that a lot of the things that they were doing they were not very sure about it was a lot of like notur as maybe or definitely not so what this means is that they had a method of learning where they were doing a lot of things just based on previous habits a lot of baggage and so for this student her name's anelie for Anie uh one of the light bulb moments for her when she did this was she

found that she was spending like 3 hours writing these notes because it was to help her understand it and help her to remember it but then she was also spending like 3 hours a day doing flash cards on the same stuff that she wrote the notes on because her notes didn't help her to actually remember it anyway so she was able to see that there was directly a technique that she was doing purely because her first attempt was not successful and that's something that I call a Band-Aid technique a Band-Aid is something that you do

because you didn't do it right the first time now here's a comparison of her process map three mon months after working through this and I want you to look at the difference the certainty of the technique was much much stronger so for aneli by looking at her initial map and then finding these possible areas where there could be all this learning baggage and then working on techniques and optimizing that she was able to get to this higher level of certainty which translates into not only getting better results but having more confidence to achieve those results

more consistently and predictably now I have mapped the learning processes face Toof face and consultations for hundreds of my students and I can tell you that the students that actually bother to do a visible process Map and find their possible learning baggage and then optimize and iterate to overcome them they are the ones that are on the trajectory to being an academic weapon it doesn't mean that after 24 hours they have become an academic weapon but they are on the trajectory and I know that even if this video is viewed thousands of times that most

of you will not actually make a process map or change your trajectory and that's because your learning baggage may tell you no this isn't right that's not how you're going to achieve your academic goals no what you need is a better technique that is what your baggage will tell you and if that's what you're thinking then well I think you should reflect on that but anyway thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time