Finding Partners to Unload My Stress of the Journey
Three candidates boost their study prep with a combination of mindset coaching and private tutoring for the curriculum.
Background of the approach: Getting to PASSED
Christy is a team leader with 10 people serving the M&Aand business unit analysis needs of a large private company. Her work scheduleis grueling and places an intense cognitive load during work hours. She is abusy wife and mother and in process of planning her second child.
This is her first attempt at Level II but she’s anxious because she had failed on her first attempt at Level I. She wants to assure passing this time and moving on to Level III in June 2020.
As with all coaching programs, we began with an assessment of her motivation and strengths. Christy’s assessment revealed a high impact of stress; indicating that she would require additional hours of study over the averages because high anxiety means learning comes slowly. Additionally, she is a concrete thinker, a style that can find the demand to integrate topics in Level II and Level III more challenging.
Christy had a disciplined study schedule in place by the time we started in early February. She is out of bed at 4:30 AM and studies for a minimum of 2 hours before leaving for work. Her evenings and weekends are dedicated to family.
We set up a 13-hour coaching program for her. Since we had more than 13 weeks until the exam, at beginning and end we met weekly; we met bi-weekly for the middle stretch. The goal was to break Christy’s anxiety cycle with knowledge of triggers and for her to learn skills to head off the crippling impact.
By mid-May Christy had identified specific concepts and formulas from the curriculum that she realized she just didn’t get and wanted tutoring to master them. She created a list to review with the tutor ranging from questions she had been missing consistently on the mocks to end-of-chapter quizzes. This turned out to be a longer list than she could realistically address. Christy would panic and miss study sessions when she spent too long on a single concept; this would make her feel that there was not enough time to complete her full plan. The added stress of spending so much time trying to figure things out herself warranted the need for tutoring.
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She reached out to a CS tutor in mid April. Christy made it clear she wanted to pass but was losing confidence. There were concepts in the CFA Level II program she felt she mastered but when answering practice questions would get them wrong. It became clear that Christy was falling into a rookie Level II candidate trap by using a Level I approach to pass her Level II exam. She was studying concepts in isolation rather using a more holistic approach. She had little appreciation for the additional analysis and application item sets demanded over Level I multiple choice questions. After a phone conversation with the tutor she started the VIP Tutoring program She found the real value- add to be the ongoing assessments of her progress as well as the integration and application of concepts to item set questions. This helped her to distinguish between answer choices and select the best one. She also appreciated receiving prompt responses to her text messages or phone calls when she needed clarification, a service she did not receive with her Level I prep provider.
Cost was a factor in adding resources which drove her purchase of the program. This was an economical approach as she had personal attention each week and worked her way to mastery of CFA curriculum using just that process.
Read Beating Fear of 3rd Attempt
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