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This thread is also on the MT Board, but Coding students may benefit from it as well, so I'm posting it here.  I hope you'll enjoy learning from it as much as I have.

Originally posted by Instructor Redpen.
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This is a post that is generally about "stress" and it begins with my comments on how much stuff there is to remember in MT--a prime cause of the stress.

Why bother trying to remember? There IS a lot to remember here. It's a confusing mess, as a matter of fact. Everybody feels overwhelmed. The more you attempt to remember, the worse it's going to get. The easiest thing to do is simply to follow what I've asked you to do--just look everything up. This is going to take a little longer, but it's worth the time. You don't have to struggle to "remember" what you can't possibly remember, and every time you look something up you'll imprint it a little more into your brain.

Simply look up every word every time it occurs. Don't try to REMEMBER all of them--that's how you're going to make mistakes. Students never believe this. Then, when they send in their GI assessment, it will have a load of term errors on it--misspellings, miscapitalizations, made up stuff--because they didn't bother looking those words up thinking they "remembered" it. Or, they think it's plain old English and think they don't need to look THAT up. Only it's not plain English or they couldn't spell it in English. They always try to tell me that they did look up all the terms. When I send them a list of all they got wrong, they then say, well, they didn't look up THOSE because they "remembered" them.

Just look up the words. All of them, every report.

Also go through the BOS page by page. Do not attempt to remember the rules or to guess about what they are. Just go page by page, checking to see if each rule applies to your report. If it does, make sure you did it correctly.

If your problem is that you have "formatting" trouble, i.e., the format you are using for headings, etc., doesn't match the scripts, that's likely to be a non-problem. There are a variety of formats you can use and the scripts are going to show you a large variety of them.

If you are focusing on punctuation issues, I'd advise that you stop. That's not the focus of Module II. You have better things to worry about now, like getting all the terms correct (no guesses), getting the rules right, getting all the text transcribed correctly, etc. By now, you should have grammar and punctuation well in hand. You should be able to just let that part happen.

We all have distracting issues--kids, pets, marriage, mothers-in-law, the plumbing, the car, the school tuition, the sudden discovery of our pastor's criminal and perverse past, and all sorts of other things.

Distracting issues are a problem, but the nice thing about medical transcription is that it really doesn't take any deep intellectual activity, so that you can still do it--and often enjoy doing it and find it relaxing--even if you have a lot of issues going on.

MT is not like playing chess. You don't have to plan your moves way ahead and you don't have to anticipate something that will occur way down the line. A choice HERE does not really affect a choice that will occur THERE.
All you really have to do is listen and transcribe one sentence or so at a time. You can stop and start at any point. If you become distracted, just calmly go back and redo whatever you got distracted doing.

If you are trying to make good time getting through the tapes, you'll be frustrated. Students always put too much of a burden on themselves. YOU'LL GET THROUGH IT WHEN YOU GET THROUGH IT, so chill out and try to enjoy it. Rushing won't help--it'll make things worse.

You'll find that the more pressure you put on yourself, the less you can hear. This is not a joke--MTs have known this since the 1960s. If someone pressures you to hurry or not to make a mistake, your ears will snap shut. If you begin to let anxiety affect you, your ears will snap shut.

In the middle of the night, a doctor once hung over me and said "Can't you go faster than that?" I replied "No. This is as fast as I go. This apparent slowness is the reason I do not make mistakes in your reports." I then added, in a more menacing tone, "I do have a slower speed which will kick in when I feel stressed . . .." He said, "Oh . . . cool." And became my prime supporter.

You have to do this work like Pooh Bear. Remember the story where he wants the honey and has to sneak past the bees to get it? He floats along on a balloon pretending to be a little cloud? Looking innocent? That's what you need to do when you are transcribing, and IT IS THE KEY TO BEING ABLE TO DO THIS WORK. (It's the key to achieving great speed, too!)

Sometimes, you see advice that tells you to take time for yourself when you're feeling stressed. The advice always recommends a nice bath with music, candlelight, and a glass of something or the other. Well, if you're having a lot of family issues, that kind of "destresser" can make ME feel even worse! On top of everything else, I begin to feel GUILTY, too! The advice is right, though, in that you need time to clear your mind. If you begin to see the transcription as "time for yourself AND your family," then you may be able to use it as a destresser you won't feel guilty about.

Now, you will actually have to work at becoming like Pooh so that you can do a little transcription--even half a page is enough--in a de-stressing manner. When you sit down, stop and think about letting thoughts go so that you can enjoy listening and typing. Try sitting down and imagining that you're sitting in the Hundred Acre Wood. Lovely breeze blowing by. Everything nice. Tigger and Roo might drop by for a little snack of something later. Notice that those thoughts about whatever the problem is keep popping into your head? Hmmm, well, they do and here's another one right now. This is why you can't focus--because the thoughts keep popping up and interfering. Not much you can to do stop the thoughts. They just keep coming. One after the other. If you take one up and work on it, it'll start unraveling and you'll soon have a big pile of more thoughts as a result. (Eeyore does this all the time.)

Pooh is a bear of very little brain, as you will recall. Having little brain doesn't serve to keep those thoughts from coming up, though, so he's in the same boat we are. Those thoughts just keep popping up. But, since he's a bear of very little brain, he knows that it's futile to worry about them. There's probably not much you can do about whatever is causing them, anyway. It's a lot like getting stuck in Rabbit's front door because you ate all the honey. Nothing to do but stay there until things take their course. Thinking about all the details just makes you miserable, and there's no point in THAT.

So, essentially you're in Pooh's place--stuck in the door. And those thoughts just keep popping into your head. Because Pooh is such a simpleton, he can easily use a little trick to deal with those pesky thoughts. Remember that nice breeze blowing by? Well, Pooh would just let that breeze blow right through his head, taking the thoughts with it.

That's what you do, too. Sitting there at your desk, picture yourself in the shade of the Hundred Acre Wood with a nice breeze blowing by. Kind of look around in your head and become aware of what you are thinking about. Whatever it is, let the thought float up and be gently blown away by the breeze. Watch it float off. When you notice another thought has appeared, let it float off in the breeze, too. Just keep doing that for a few minutes. When you feel calm and quiet, let yourself transcribe in that state of calmness and quietness. When you notice that a stressful thought about transcription or something else has popped into your head, let it float off and then go back to what you were doing.

This work *can* be stressful, but it does not *have* to be. Air traffic controlling is stressful. MT should not be stressful. Work at keeping it unstressed. Emulate Pooh.