You are not your result. You are you.
Hi. Firstly, sorry for the badly-timed joke post about the tax question and the alpacas. In my head it was hilarious but clearly tone-deaf to the April/May sitters so my bad.
Second, results tomorrow. I am getting them too. I am a career convert - used to be a shrink and mental health stuff. I worked a lot on something called self-efficacy (not to be confused with self-esteem, different TED talk).
Self-efficacy is the difference between:
>"Oh, I made a mistake, I failed, I am terrible and do not deserve anything"
and
>"Oh, I made a mistake, there is something I can do different next time and try again."
It is an intrinsic sense of worth that recognises the difference between who you are, and what you do.
They are not the same. Even in our everyday language we may say something like "I am proud of you" after having done something, and we mistake the praise and worth with the recognition and validation of the achievement. I think that is very unfortunate, and becomes a real cross by the time we come to sit pivotal exams.
To the ~80% of people who pass tomorrow, congratulations,!, but what will hold you in a higher place for much longer is not thinking "oh, I passed, I am great" but "oh, I passed, I executed that job well, and what I did well I will try to take forward into X, Y, Z, etc." especially if you have a job role or TC lined up. It will grant you far more resilience when you find out that a 9-7, five to six days a week is actually not about writing a letter to a client having only known them for half an hour and hoping it is the right advice for the invisible markers.
It is the ability to dust yourself down when you eventually fall. Because you will fall. There is much more "you" in the getting up than there is in the falling, and it will happen eventually in work life and in general.
So, well done, but keep going, and do not mistake even a good result for your worth. You are more than that.
For anyone who is unsuccessful tomorrow. This post may not mean a terrible amount tomorrow afternoon, or the day afterwards, or ever. But the same rings true, and even more so:
You are not your result. You are you.
Life is bigger than an exam, law, a career. You have people around you who do not like you for how well you smashed those mocks or "hung on in there" during the exams, but for the entire you. For a while you will look at the black speck on the whiteboard and forget the entire canvas, but when you are able to look at this post again (or much more ideally, yourself), dust yourself down and remember it was a result of something you didn't do in a small area of your life, and not a deficit in the whole of who you are.
Just thought that might be a nice thing to hear on either side of results tomorrow. Good luck to everyone and hopefully we will not have to try and bleed a stone dry again in an interviewing station.