"I am" is a powerful phrase. Just as powerful is the word that follows it.

What follows the "I am" is a belief that you have about yourself.

"I am smart."  /  "I am stupid."

"I am capable."  /  "I am lost."

"I am confident."  /   "I am worried."

"I am strong."  /  "I am anxious."

​With the new school year comes an opportunity to play around with organization systems.

Personally, that was always something I looked forward to when I was a student. One year I would have one big binder. Another year I would give each class its own binder. Another year I would give each class a composition notebook and a folder.

Coming up with a system of organizing my materials felt like breathing fresh air into the new school year. It was sort of like how it feels when you rearrange the furniture in a room. The room still serves the same basic function, but it feels different.

With this short video in celebration of Labor Day, I hope to help make your other days feel less laborious. Having a day off is great, but experiencing more ease every day is better!

​I hope you are feeling good as we launch into another school year!

​Feel free to reach out with questions or feedback!

​--Erika

In my book, Acing It! A Mindful Guide to Maximum Results on Your College Admissions Test, I say that I want you to "trust your gut and do the work to have a gut worth trusting."

Acing It! gives you a step-by-step framework for developing a gut worth trusting, but in today's video I decided to put a twist on the idea of what it means to trust your gut because the idea of trusting your gut works on a few different levels. 

In the video, I also teach you a quick (1 minute!) technique to settle nerves and release stress.

​When I first began my formal meditation practice, my teacher informed us that, in time, we would clear our bodies of all the stress we had stored over the course of our lives. Not a bad proposition, eh? I mean, what anxiety-ridden person wouldn’t be enchanted by the idea of a stress-free life?

I began to see positive changes immediately. But I still felt anxious. 

And a voice in my head would taunt me, "If only you'd started sooner, you'd be further along right now. You'd feel so much less anxious."

Having goals is an important part of any process. Goals tell you where you want to go and give you the fuel to get there. 

But sometimes, the goal-setting and goal-getting processes feel like struggles. We feel overwhelmed, we find ourselves coming up short, or we aren't sure where to focus our time and attention.

Part of the reason why this happens is that we think of goals in a really general sense so that they encompass everything that we want to experience and have happen. ​

We all have excuses for why we aren't making more progress on our goals. It's easy to accept those excuses as valid. But often, rather than being based in facts, excuses are based in stories we've told ourselves about why something can't or won't work.

Today's video is all about how to change your thinking about excuses so that you can keep moving forward in spite of whatever circumstances have been holding you back.

On the back cover of Acing It!, it says, "If earning a perfect score were as simple as knowing what to study, it wouldn't be such a rare achievement."

I'm a big believer that successful test prep is as much about how you prepare as what you prepare.

So I got to thinking about the qualities that my most successful students demonstrate during their SAT and ACT prep. Here are my top five.

For some students, these qualities came naturally. For others, test prep coaching helped them tap into the mindsets and habits. Either way, these five qualities are important to foster, because it's rare that a student has a successful test prep experience without them. 
​

It's easy to build up the SAT and ACT and everything that they represent: testing, college admissions, success, the future...

All of this creates a high-stakes story that can lead test-takers to freak out during their prep, in the test room, or both. And since it's hard to think clearly when you're freaking out on test day and hard to face a project that's causing you anxiety leading up to test day, it's important to learn ways to address your anxiety as a part of your test prep process if you want to perform your best.

Today’s video is all about taking your first SAT and ACT. 

You should take both tests at the beginning of your test prep process in order to help you decide whether you want to move forward with prepping for the SAT or the ACT. (I explain why you should only prep for one or the other in the video.)

In the video, I give you your main options for those first tests:

• Taking an officially administered SAT and ACT through The College Board and ACT, Inc., respectively
• Taking a mock SAT and ACT through a test prep company
• Taking an official SAT and ACT on your own​