It is my pleasure to welcome Elena DuCharme back to continue our dialogue on mindset and the bar exam. Elena is a lawyer turned performance coach who works with bar studiers to help them conquer fear and anxiety and find bar exam success. 

You and I both agree that mindset is a very important part of your bar preparation. Excessive stress and anxiety can prevent a bar studier, even one who has prepared adequately from a substantive law perspective, from passing the exam. If I am reading this post and worried that I might be struggling with excessive stress and anxiety, what would be your recommendations to start moving past this? 

The first thing I’d recommend is that you wholeheartedly embrace the fact that you’re normal. After all, this isn’t Farmville, it’s the freaking bar exam! It’s the culmination of years of investment—of your energy, your time, your commitment, your money. Not only do you really want to accomplish your goal and become a lawyer, you may have a lot of other people in your life that are expecting or even depending on you to pass. This loads the bar exam with a huge amount of importance, and that puts the protective, subconscious parts of your brain on high alert, and that in turn generates mental worries and stress. So, it’s quite natural to feel anxious about bar exam—and in fact, it would be a little weird if you didn’t.

Another assumption you’d want to bust sooner than later is the mistaken one that everyone else is feeling confident and on top of things, getting great feedback on their practice essays or PT’s, and happy about their MBE scores. This is simply not the case. 

It takes pretty much all of the bar review period to start feeling competent and on top of the material. You need to give yourself the room to learn and practice and improve—which means that for a while you may get crappy scores and write really lousy essays. It is just part of the learning process. 

So the first step is to cut yourself some slack. If you’re scared, frustrated, worried or overwhelmed, just know that you’re human, and a pretty typical bar-taker.

I also strongly recommend that you make sure to do things you enjoy during the bar review period, including staying connected with other people—don’t isolate yourself too much. One of the hardest things for many bar-takers is the pervasive sense that they’re doing it all alone. 

And if you have to take the bar more than once, it can feel painfully isolating. In part we do this to ourselves, because we may feel ashamed, so we avoid friends in an attempt to prevent the revelation that we’ve failed. Some repeat takers never even tell their friends or work colleagues how freaked or bummed out they are. I always urge them to share the failure and the challenge they’re going through, and when they finally do, they find out they aren’t rejected—they’re not painted with a scarlet letter. And that’s a relief. It can be helpful to know that most of the rejection we experience in life happens entirely in our own minds…

You also need some tools to calm your nervous system. These could include anything doing a regular “body scan”—simply noticing how your body is feeling, to practicing a simple breathing process, to finding more supportive things to say to yourself rather than beating yourself up about not being good enough, smart enough, capable enough, etc., ad nauseam.

For example, you might simply take a few moments to breathe and allow yourself to notice and feel whatever you’re feeling—comfortable or uncomfortable. And then simply accept that this is how you’re feeling. You could take it further—repeat a simple positive word or phrase to yourself on the outbreath, such as “Right now I feel this way.” It’s not a complete solution, necessarily, but in a few breaths your mind and body will start to calm down.

Noticing, allowing and then accepting your current feelings may seem ridiculously simple, and even counterintuitive. Most of us think we have to push down uncomfortable feelings or they’ll get out of control and we’ll fall apart and not be able to function. But mostly the opposite happens. Once you get curious about exactly what you’re feeling, then let it just be there and not resist it, it will change. It’s the fastest and easiest way to start feeling better.

And there’s more research now that the simple awareness training you get in meditation classes, including mindfulness meditation, can make a big difference in your stress level and positively reframe how you see this phenomenon of anxiety.

These are just a few simple options. The key is to have something you can turn to when you feel a wave of anxiety. Start early—choose and start using a calming technique now, and over time you’ll train your nervous system to respond faster and more easily.

And finally, know that it’s okay to reach out for help. If you are really stressed and anxious and think you’re at risk of failing the bar exam, get some help sooner than later. 

You don’t want to take it over and over again. It’s painful, it’s expensive, and you have a huge pause button pressed on your life. And the negative effect can snowball, because you start to take on an identity as someone who can’t pass the bar. And you don’t need that.

So I’d urge you to talk with someone who specializes in helping people with anxiety right away. Of course, I’m biased in favor of the kind of techniques and approaches that I use in my work and online course, which repattern your mind at the subconscious level. But mindfulness training and some types of counseling can make a big difference too. Just make sure you don’t spend months in a therapist’s office talking about your worries and your past —some of that is helpful, but too much can reinforce a negative mindset. Make sure you’re doing things that actually change your mental patterns.

Thank you, Elena. If you are interested in more of Elena’s perspective on the bar exam, check out her guest posts over at the Bar Exam Toolbox: Two Simple, Non-Woo-Hoo Ways to Calm Your Nerves and Boos Your Score on the Bar Exam and Why Your Mindset Matters When It Comes to the Bar Exam.