Going back to school after a break can be daunting! These tips will help you ease back into student life as a Mature Student.

With the start of a new academic year approaching, many of us will be returning to school and college. For some it will be their first time back in the classroom since they were a teenager or young adult.

Continuing your education is an amazing thing to do. It not only helps with your future career prospects, but it also helps to keep those brain cells in top working order!

The thought of going back to school, however, can be daunting, to say the least.

You are filled with a mixture of emotions from excitement about learning new knowledge and skills, to fear or failure, to dreading being the oldest one in a room of young adults!

Find out how fear stops you everyday and what you can do to help keep the fear-monster at bay.

When you think of fear, you tend to think of the feeling that you would get if you were in a really scary situation.

Perhaps you associate the feeling of fear with a pounding heart, dry mouth and sweaty palms. Perhaps you think of the feeling of fear that results after a nightmare, where you try to scream and you can’t, then wake up to find yourself all out of sorts, and the monsters in your dream have vanished.

We can plainly see that this is a fear response. Your mind has alerted your body of the danger around, and it’s triggered the survival response to keep you safe.

This is what we think of when we think of fear.

We don’t tend to think of fear as something that holds us back in everyday life. But it does.

Let's consider the power of self-belief when it comes to achieving your dreams in life, and how you can increase this power.

No doubt you will have heard many stories from people telling you of how they created a vision board and soon after all their dreams came true. They will encourage you to do the same; to create a board filled with pictures of the life you want to start living.

I have a vision board, and I encourage others to create one too. It’s a great tool to help relight your imagination and passion for bigger and brighter things in life.

However, it’s one thing creating a great vision for your future but believing that you can achieve it is another thing altogether.

You can spend ages looking through magazines and pinning pictures of your dreams on your board, but if you really don’t believe that you will achieve those dreams, the chances are you won’t.

By creating your vision board, you haven’t created a path towards achieving your dreams, you’ve just created a pretty looking board that you can look at wishfully now and again.

You have a created a reminder of the things you don’t have and attached a feeling of inadequacy to it. That’s not good! That’s not the purpose that it is supposed to have!

So why do Vision Boards work for some people, and not for others?

Not Enough Hours in the Day? Find the extra time you need to put your plans into action

How many times have you wished that there were more hours in the day?

You have so many jobs to get done in your waking hours and little, if any, time left in the day to do the things you really want to do. 

It’s so frustrating. By the time you get the chance to work on your own projects or goals, you are either too tired or can’t be bothered. So you eventually give up on the idea.

No matter what you seem to do, there are days that just feel doomed from the start. Real-life ‘Friday 13th’s’.

You can’t say anything, do anything, or even think without attracting day-devastation. The day is on a downward spiral and you are just focusing on getting through it until you can go home and hide under the duvet until it’s all over. No amount of finger-crossing or good luck charms are going to help. You just need the day to be over so that you can start afresh the next day, and deal with fall-out of today.

You know what? We all feel like this from time-to-time. Sometimes, we even feel like this more times than we care to! It’s completely normal. Although it may be hard to believe, there is a way to salvage days like these. There is hope for them. You can turn a ‘bad’ day into a ‘better’ day.

Keep reading to find out how to climb out of that ‘Bad Day Rut’