Well done on following along with this simple 3 step process to successful police selection. If you’re allocating the time to read these emails and also take action along each step, then you’re already on your way to standing out amongst the hundreds of other hopeful applicants. You’re not someone just standing by – you’re actually will to DO something to effect your police selection.
If you’ve taken the time to complete steps one and two of this process, you will now have a thorough list of reasons why becoming a police officer is so important to you as well as a concise summary on what skills you need to work on.
This final step is to sit down and work out what actions you will take in the coming weeks or months to make sure that you perform beyond you current standards on testing day. So for this you need your own training plan.
In order to develop your training plan, take your priority areas for improvement and consider them in order of the tests you will face ahead. For example, if you want to improve in both cognitive testing and on the Beep Test, but the cognitive testing is the first test, then you may want to prioritise the cognitive training as your first action.
The reality is that you can train for everything each week, however, you need a start point. Using the first test you face as a marker will help you take action on your preparation. Once you take action on this, you will start to build some momentum which you can then apply to the remaining areas, including your physical training.
If, like most, you have a number of areas to work on each day, there’s an old trick I learnt years ago to help me improve on every aspect equally, even if I favoured one area over another. In my case, I found it easier to prepare for physical training that the cognitive training – and the technique I applied was this:
Take the activities you need to do and put them in REVERSE order of what you would LIKE to do. So in this case I LIKED to do the physical training. So I put that at the bottom of the list and said to myself “Ok John, you MUST complete the other aspects of preparation today before you can go and train for the beep test.” The most insane thing about this was that I was doing my physical training in the morning before work. So I made myself fit in my cognitive training even earlier in the morning!
You don’t have to be so extreme, but I can tell you that by doing this, I ensured that I prepared for what I found most challenging (cognitive) just as well as what I enjoyed (the physical training). You can make this more thorough of course to include your writing, spelling, judgement, interview skills and more…
You can also break it down into the week (instead of the day). So you might schedule your least preferred activities at the start of the week and progress to the more preferable as the week progresses.
I wish you well in your preparations and I encourage you to remember that of all the steps we’ve discussed, the most important overall is knowing with absolute clarity WHY you are doing this.
Then you will naturally DO whatever it takes to succeed.
Keep an eye out for a few more emails over the coming weeks to access some extra tips and considerations to optimise your preparation for your coming police tests.
You can also CLICK HERE to view the range of training resources available at Police Preparation Australia to maximise your exam performance.
Kind Regards,
John Ashburton
Police Preparation Australia