Happy Easter / Xristos Anesti for everyone who celebrated!! Hope the break was restful and rejuvenating for everyone. 
Over the break, I had more time than usual to do some reflecting, and wanted to share one thought in particular with you all this evening. “How can I make the tutoring experience as rewarding as possible for my students?”
I heard Alex Hormozi say on a podcast once that successful people don’t have more “grit” or “willpower” than regular folks, they’ve just found more ways to get rewarded for doing the same task. As we become more and more competent at things, we become less and less outcome oriented and can become more immersed in and rewarded from the actual process itself. At that point, the process itself is what becomes most rewarding, and the destination (or in academia, the test results) – just a nice byproduct.
I thought “how can I keep my students in a perpetual state of process-oriented focus, instead of outcome-oriented focus?” Or, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined it, a constant state of flow? The answer, to me was obvious – progressive overload. A concept not unfamiliar to regular gym goers – instead of shooting for the stars or unreasonably large leaps in progress every single session, simply starting at a point that our student finds challenging (though not anxiety inducing) and making incremental increases in question challenge (or in the gym analogy – load, over time).
As our students get more and more confident in their ability to answer questions at the level they’re at, they become increasingly eager to continue attacking harder and harder problems, because the process of answering questions (and over time, getting more and more of them correct) is what has become rewarding in and of itself. Ideally, we’re creating little question answering machines who have learned to become so rewarded and fulfilled by the process (answering challenging questions) that gets them the favourable results (good test marks) that when the A’s come back, they’re just icing on the cake.
Thomas Koutavas