Defeat exam anxiety

After a long series of exams in which my client’s 13-year-old son had struggled with blackouts and failed to answer the exam material that he was capable of, she contacted me.

I made an initial appointment with the mother, at which her son’s subconscious revealed a lot about fear of failure and beliefs that could be resolved directly.

As a result, the exam performance improved, but the blackouts were not yet completely defeated. Two weeks later we made a follow-up appointment, and we decided that I would make a phone call directly with the boy after I had previously only made energetic contact. The phone call turned out to be very valuable, because after resolving further triggers for the occurrence of the blackouts, we both received a message: “Always watch out, for signalss that might make you wish for a bad exam performance.”

We weren’t sure what this message would do because we couldn’t imagine what would make him want to under-perform.

A few days later I get a call from him and he told me how he saw his friend totally exhausted that morning, with heavy rings under his eyes on his way into school. He thought “That can’t possibly be good for the maths exam – I’m sorry, his parents’ argument is preventing him from sleeping and now he will not be able to put in a good performance …”. He told me that before he could even think through to the end he realized “Stop – I won’t spoil my exam in order to console him!” He advised his friend to report sick to the teacher and go back home and re-write the exam . Then he was able to write his exam without any nervousness and without a blackout.