Welcome to our 7th MBA Winner Newsletter. We want to take the opportunity and explore a subtle but yet important relationship that has been reappearing in our conversations with our students.
There have been several occasions, over the last quarter, where our MBA students were stressed and frustrated by the idea that university tutors were making demands that seemed unreasonable.
Meeting the expectations of the university tutors has been a challenge for MBA Winner. We have painstakingly tried to understand what tutors want from the students to produce. Some times, disappointment and frustration seem to often get in the way making the whole process too difficult to deal with.
We want to share with you what we regard to be a critical relationship that has direct impact on someone’s ability to perform and meet expectations. Despite the fact that disappointment gets in the way finding the courage and motivation to move forward can make a big difference to your performance.
Assisting students with the writing of the assignment is faced with many drawbacks and responsibilities. However, one of the goals we set for ourselves to achieve is to try and vision the outcome of what is it that we want to achieve and allow this to motivate and inspire our work.
MBA Winner has grown in its network of its students over the last year because of the quality of the work that it offers. We are committed to understanding and developing that personal relationship with our clients that allows us to really engage and tailor our work to their specific requirements.
This is not done by accident but the outcome of hard work. However the way we inspire ourselves takes place by visioning the outcome we want to produce.
The importance of visioning
When you are struggling with your MBA coursework or any other part of your MBA programme there is a process by which you engage with the challenge that remains unrealised and unreflected. The challenge might seem all that there is. Feeling a sense of panic or frustration because you did not manage to understand your tutor or because you have received a negative remark is likely to put you off unless you control it.
Visioning is the process by which you seek to engage with your experience by moving beyond it. It is trying to make sense of what you want to achieve. The negative experience remains important but is not all that there is for you. By visioning the effort is made to identify the outcome despite the fact that is not clear and evident.
By visioning what it takes to overcome a challenge you set in motion possible outcomes that result from specific inputs and actions. The perceived sense of control over the situation remains critical for feeling that you are in charge. The battle is in the mind more than anything else.
In having to deal with several assignments a day and a myriad of requirements by our students, MBA Winner consultants face different and many challenges. Some of the challenges we only tackle between ourselves and other challenges we have to work with our clients in close partnership.
One of our clients had the interesting experience just a few weeks ago of being given two contradictory sets of feedback by her tutor. Despite the effort to produce a strong piece of work the tutor seemed to have changed his mind with the result of expecting ‘something else’ in it. This created anxiety and frustration about what was really expected. The student was becoming confused and loosing control about herself but also our competency as an organisation to produce a piece of work that was of satisfaction.
The way we managed to tackle this challenge was by restoring the sense of control to the students but also to the MBA Winner consultants who were in charge of developing the coursework.
We started off with visioning what was the outcome we wanted to achieve and restoring confidence in our ability to produce it. We clearly endeavoured to set out clear pathways for what we needed to do. We spent time understanding the different sets of feedback given by the tutor. In the process we started to realise that the tutor’s contradictory set of feedback was less important from developing a clear argument.
Our visioning process developed to creating different propositions that could be supported with different sets of argumentation. Achieving an excellent grade became our only goal and this strategy guided our work throughout.
We started to become less dependent on what the tutor said and more dependent on demonstrating a good answer to the question. This slight shift of perception changed the dynamic and reduced the felt frustration and anxiety.
By providing complementary notes that explained the reasoning of the argument the student was able to feel confidence because she understood the sequence and reasoning behind the argument.
Following her tutorial the student was able to argue with confidence the paper’s argument to the tutor with the result of receiving good praise that eventually lead to a very good grade.
You can perform better when you know what you need to do differently.
