So with all the trouble with lack of motivation we talked about before, then how do we succeed in our studies? Lets take a look at the 4 main factors of ADHD-motivation and how to actively use them:

• A sense of urgency or external motivation
• Novelty and play 
• Challenge – but the exact right amount! 
• Interest

All these factors can be used to give your brain some much deserved dopamine and get you through your studies. Ideally they will all come into play at the same time, but more likely you will switch between them as you go. Lets look into how you can use them. 

A sense of urgency or external motivation

For the smaller exams with a shorter study, the exam date luring in the horizon will often be enough to give you some adrenalin and dopamin and get you to your desk. But for the big exams it won’t be enough to pass if you only sit down and study when the adrenalin kicks in a few weeks before the exam. At least not if you want to pass the exam. So how do you activate this sense of urgency although you have 5 months left to study? 

If you are lucky enough to have a local study group you can meet up with, giving each other tasks every week that the others actually rely on can be very helpfull. If the others rely on you to present a topic or to have made maps or flashcards to the group, this will create an external motivation for you to get the studying done. If the deal is only that you all read the chapters and then meet up and discuss, this might not be enough for you to activate dopamine. So try adding assignments that the others expect you to do! 

For many winestudents, a local study group is not an option. Try to find an online on and it might work for you. For me it can become to overwhelming with an online study group, with organizing meet-ups cross timezones and schedules and talking with people with very different goals, possibilities and forces. If you are struggling to remember just the grapes in Chianti it can be stressfull to study with people panicking they can’t remember the exact soiltypes or grafting materials… remember, we are all on different journeys and have different forces and challenges. But, if it works for you, awesome!! 

While an online study group doesn’t work for me, discovering online body doubling and accountability was really what got me through the D3 exam! There are many different programs and sites, I use the one called Flow Club that I have written about in other blogpost too. Having an external timeframe of 30/60/90 minutes, someone working along side me although not in the same room, and checking up on me when the time has gone, really activates my brain and gives me a good dose of dopamine both while working and when finishing the work-session. Bonus: it works for all kinds of tasks not just studying, I’ve used it to help me finally tackle that pile of laundry that had to be folded! 

If you are doing an online-course, you’ll probably have some deadlines of turning in mock-exams and practice essays. But the rest of the time, no one really holds you accountable for your studies until the exam. Having some one checking up on you, seeing if you did the studying you planned to do, can really help you get the studying done even when its hard to get started. Maybe a friend can help you, a study partner or an accountability-program like the one we offer. There are many ways to Rome, what is important is to break the grand deadline of the exam into smaller deadlines but still feel the same urgency towards all those mini-deadlines as if it was the real exam. 

Novelty and play 

While moving through the chapters of the books might give a sligt hint of novelty, using different methods of learning is much more effective in sense of adding motivation. Reading the books, writing your notes is great for learning, but it also becomes somewhat monotone and repetitive. Good news is that its really easy to add some fun and play into learning! 

You might already be using flashcards to repeat grapes and regions and this can be a great way of studying while waiting for the bus or just repeating a chapter you just read. Down the same road, how about a wine trivia night with a study group or just some wine-nerdy friends? Or make a Jeopardy-game with your self an evening (may we suggest wine as a reward for correct answers?) In apps such as Brainscape you can find really good flashcards for most wine certifications, so no need to make those your self. If you want to make some, then try focusing on factors and not facts, e.g. how does the fog in California affect the wine styles. 

While it probably isn’t financially recommendable to do all the time, going to a nice coffee shop and study can also bring some novelty to your study sessions. Order a big coffee and have one but just one big task you want to do while sitting there. Maybe reading 10 pages or writing a practice essay. This gives a sense of timelimit, novelty from the new work station and dopamine-treat from ordering something nice. 

Drawing maps is perfect way to help you visualize the wine regions and the important factors. Try replicating the maps from the books onto paper and add the information you are focusing on – the grapes, the styles, the climate and so. Not only do you activate your visual senses but also your tactile senses, which is very effective when learning new things. And the best part is you can have fun with it! Use the good color pensils, treat your self to some new ones, makes different maps for the same region, try making one that looks pretty and one that is full of info, use watercolors if you want, make small ones in your notebook and maybe a few large ones you can hang on your wall. This is even something you can do while spending time with your kids. 

The point of these things is to add layers in your knowledge of the subject you studies. Some mental hooks to hang more information on. If you just read the book and then read it again and again, you will not only be immensely bored, you will also have a harder time learning it all, than if you add in the information in different ways; for instance remembering that you painted Sta. Ynez in green on your map because of the cooling influences. Then next time you read about that region, you already remember that it’s green in your map, so it must be cool, and why it is this and how is the cooling created and what it means for the wine styles is now a lot easier to understand and remember.

So add some fun and play, not only to stay motivated throughout your studies, but to learn better! 

Challenge – but the exact right amount! 

Challenging your self is a great motivational factor. But if it becomes too big a challenge, you might stop studying and come to a standstill. One way to adapt to this, that might seem a bit controversial, is to postpone your exam. Not forever and for it to work you have to decide exactly when you’ll do instead so you don’t just postpone it for infinity. I did it with one my modules in my WSET Diploma. I was supposed to take the exams for both D4 anf D5 (sparkling wines and fortified wines) but I was struggling with balancing starting a new job, taking care of my family, looking after myself and studying for two exams at the same time. I was miserable and procrastinated a lot as the studying felt overwhelming. One month before the exams I decided to postpone D5 and focus only on sparkling wines for now. Suddenly the challenge was possible to do and it gave me a ton of energi and motivation knowing the study burden had just been cut in half for the moment. For some of the big wine exams, like the Light wines of the World in WSET Diploma, the time from the module starting to the exam is quite short for the amount of material you have to learn. If you have another exam finishing just before starting the big module, beginning to study earlier might not be possible. But postponing the exam 6 months right away will give you more time to study, to actually learn the material and to take care of work, family and your self while doing it. 

If overall time isn’t the issue, there are other great ways to use challenge as a motivational factor. Using external accountability like handing in essays to your teacher or a feedback service like ours, can help you keep the motivation going. Not only do you get to tic off what you have accomplished, you’ll have someone keeping you accountable for it! 

A great way to give yourself the right amount of challenge is to shift focus on improvement instead of results. This is especially good if the exam in itself is starting to feel like too big a mouthful to deal with. But even though passing the exam seems impossible where you are at, it doesn’t mean you haven’t learned anything or improved in knowledge and exam practices. So to focus on your improvement there are different things you can do. For instance you can challenge yourself to write a practice essay of a topic with the book closed and wait 2-3 months until you have repeated the topic again. Try write the exact same essay again in the same way. Compare the two essays, how much more did you remember the second time? And what do you still need to work on? If you don’t want to wait that long, you can also go back and find a practice essay you did earlier. It doesn’t matter it was 3 weeks or 3 months ago you wrote it. Read through your own essay and improve it! I bet you know even just a little bit more now about how to structure the essay, how to answer the question, how to distribute the different sections. Then look at the old essay and the revised one – hopefully its clear that you are better now than you were before. So keep focusing on how much you have improved, how much you have learned, even if it still isn’t enough for the exam. 

When challenging yourself to take a high level of wine certification, it can also help you a lot to set the bar the right place. What is your goal with the exam? And what surcumstances helps you or prevents this? If your goal is to be the winner of the WSET Vintners Cup (the person with the overall highest grade), it might be beneficial to have done other high level certifications like Wine Scholar Guild or similar, to have abundant time, to not have small children at home, to be very structured and good at keeping up motivation. If it doesn’t sound like you, then well first of all you are not alone! Second, maybe revise your goal? Maybe just passing the Diploma is a great accomplish, especially considering how low the pass rate is? Maybe even taking a year more to do the certification is still challenging enough? 

It is not about quitting or being lazy, it is about setting the challenge the exact right place where you feel the dopamine-rush of the challenge without drowning under an impossible task. 

Interest

When all the grapes of Italy starts sounding the same and you wish you only had to focus on nebbiolo (because I mean, Barolo you guys!!), its time to add some interest-dopamine to your study sessions. There are a number of ways you can make the exam material more interesting. 

First of all it can simply help to shift your focus from facts to factors. The many grapes of Italy are essentially not important for your exam if you don’t understand the factors that drive viticultural and vinification practices. So forget about the grapes for a while, what is way more interesting is WHY they are grown where they are? WHY do they need irrigation or why not and it is allowed? WHY are the vinification practices different? Not only is this a lot more interesting to focus on (you can learn the names of the grapes another day) it will also help you write better essays in the exam where you are tested on how well you understand how the work in field and cellar results in wines of different price, quality and style. 

Another way to add some interest is to combine your studies with something else that interests you. Just reading the book over and over again will not only bore you to death but will also limit your understanding. So if you love painting or drawing, why not try to paint the factors influencing a specific area? Or listen to a podcast about a region while walking, watch a movie taking place in a wine region, hang out with a friend and tell them all about a grape (my neighbor got a long lecture on Argentinian wines just before my final exam, I got to hang out with a friend and revise my knowledge!) And of course, drink some wine from the area you are studying at the moment! Not just tasting practice with a SAT formular, but try to just find some really nice wine from the region and enjoy it while you are studying. This can help you find some interest in the local grapes and winemaking techniques or if nothing else, give you a little buzz and make the reading more fun. 

One of the advices you get a lot as a student that has never worked for me, is to make a plan and follow it, to be consistent in your studies and make the same kind of notes to all the chapters… I always get exited at first and follow it, then get bored and either do nothing or something completely else. So my new practice is that the plan is to shift plans! Yes! So from the beginning I will say that not only is it okay to change notesystem or study method, changing it is the plan! So some chapters I will write detailed notes about, others I will read the book and then just do a million flashcards, others I will draw ugly maps of, others I will try a lot of wines from and mainly just research how they where made. This keeps my motivation going and helping me to maintain interest, without a bad conscience or feeling guilty about not being able to follow a strict plan. 

And of course – use the other motivational factors to keep you going! If you can’t find any interest in the subject, maybe you can find it in the challenge of knowing all the italian grapes mentioned in the book? Or in the novelty of a new chapter and then go back later to the one you are struggling with? There is no right journey to follow, do what works for you even if others are doing something else. And remember, you don’t have to it all on your own! Use your study group, your teachers or mentors or get some extra essay feedback or accountability from us. We are here to help you thrive in your studies!

So have some fun and crush the exam!