Mental Preparation
Relevant sections in Living Confidently with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLDs)
Finding Your Voice with Dyslexia and other SpLDs, 2nd Ed.
1) How you think: Chap 1 Living Confidently and Chapter 4 Thinking Preferences
2) Know what your goals are: pp 78-79
Gaining Knowledge and Skills with Dyslexia and other SpLDs
1) Know the goal of any task: p 118-200.
2) Keywords: pp 176-177.
3) Surveying: pp 533-534
Text equivalent of video
Mental warm-up extension
Mental preparation is an extension of mental warm-up: you are doing more than getting your mind switched on to an immediate task; you are giving your mind more to get engaged with in advance of doing a project.
You use the same methods as described in the Mental Warm-up video, and any others you have developed for yourself. There are two other skills to include, surveying and knowing the goal, and the timing is different.
For dyslexic/ SpLD people, it is important to know how you think best and to use these ways. You will be linking more information together and so increasing the capacity of working memory. Your very best way may not suit the task in hand, so do check amongst the ways that work for you to find the best fit to the task.
Any project can benefit, including ones that are mainly practical. Mental preparation is particularly useful for big projects.
Surveying
Surveying is a powerful way to find the key issues. Choose suitable sources: books, articles, instructions, the web. To survey:
- look for the major themes
- decide which themes are secondary
- identify key words and key issues
- record the structure and key words that you find.
In practical work, you are looking at the steps involved.
You are building an understanding of how parts of the project fit together.
Knowing the Goal
Can you identify the goal of the project? Has it been set by someone else, or have you set it? If it’s been set by someone else, is your goal the same or different?
Knowing the goal gives you a direction and can be a very useful tool for gathering information and putting it together.
If there isn’t a definite one, see if defining a temporary one helps you. There can be some strong contrasts here:
- Some people find it easy to convert their work from a temporary goal to the real one when it emerges: it is easier to go from one structure to another than to let the work develop in a random way.
- In contrast, others find the temporary structure and goal unhelpful at all: what they have done becomes set into that pattern and it is very hard to adapt it to anything else. For them it is better to let the work develop in a random way until the real goal and structure emerges.
If you find the project has become stuck in some way, just check that your goal hasn’t changed while you have been working. A shifting goal can be important for dyslexic/ SpLD people as it can affect their command of language.
Time
Mental preparation is a longer process than mental warm-up, but the time given to it should produce good results. You probably need about an hour. Be deliberate about doing mental preparation; make sure you stay in preparation mode and don’t drift into working on the project.
Do mental preparation several hours before starting the project. Doing it the day before and having a night’s sleep is worth trying.
Doing mental preparation several hours in advance gives the mind more time to sift the information and come to a better understanding of how it all fits together; the mind does this without you paying attention. This is similar to ‘sleeping on a problem’ when a certain amount of attempted problem-solving has been done but produced no results, you stop working on it and then later, often after sleep, the solution arrives in the mind.
The processing while not paying attention is called subliminal processing. For many dyslexic/ SpLD people, subliminal processing cannot be assumed to happen: no matter how much we read, we don’t learn correct spelling the way others do.
However, in mental preparation, when a dyslexic/ SpLD person has used their best ways of thinking and has been chunking information in a way that increases the capacity of their working memory, subliminal processing has a chance to work.
A brief mental warm-up just before starting the project is still worth doing.
Conclusion
Mental preparation, done the right way for you, can result in projects that flow better, take less time and give you more satisfaction and that have a more satisfactory outcome.