I walked into my CISSP exam with confidence.
Not overconfidence, but the confidence that comes after putting in serious preparation.
I had worked through nearly 6,000 practice questions.
Those questions helped me understand the concepts, identify where I was weak, improve my approach and, over time, build confidence that I was ready for the exam.
So, when I entered the exam center, I genuinely believed I had prepared well.
Then the exam started.
And the first 30 questions almost destroyed that confidence.
The questions didn’t feel familiar.
The practice questions I had spent so much time working through didn’t seem particularly relevant to what I was seeing on the screen.
I remember thinking:
“Am I actually prepared for this?”
The first 30 questions tormented me.
It took me around 50 minutes to get through those 30 questions.
That’s a lot of time for the first 30.
And while I was going through them, my mind was doing what it naturally does when things don’t go as expected.
I started questioning my preparation.
Had I studied enough?
Did I misunderstand the way the exam was going to test the concepts?
Was all that practice actually helping?
For a moment, the confidence I had walked into the exam with was gone.
And I think this is something people don’t talk about enough when discussing the CISSP journey.
You can prepare extensively.
You can solve thousands of questions.
You can know the domains.
You can have years of experience in cybersecurity.
And the actual exam can still make you feel completely unprepared.
That’s exactly what happened to me.
But somewhere along the way, I realised I was making a mistake.
I was comparing the real exam with the practice questions.
I was expecting the questions on the screen to look familiar because I had spent so much time practising.
They didn’t.
And they weren’t supposed to.
Practice questions helped me build the knowledge and reasoning required to approach problems.
They weren’t supposed to predict what the actual exam would look like.
Once I stopped worrying about that, something changed.
I started concentrating on the question in front of me.
Read it.
Understand what it was actually asking.
Look at the scenario.
Think through the options.
Make the best decision I could.
Move on.
And my pace changed completely.
The next 70 questions took me around 60 minutes.
That’s a completely different rhythm from the first 30.
The anxiety had settled.
I wasn’t trying to calculate whether I was passing.
I wasn’t thinking about how many questions I had got right or wrong.
I wasn’t trying to predict what the next question would look like.
I was simply working through the exam.
Then the exam stopped at 100 questions.
And honestly, I had mixed emotions.
Those first 30 questions were still somewhere in the back of my mind.
I wasn’t walking out thinking, “That was easy.”
Far from it.
But somewhere inside, I had a feeling.
I think I’m going to pass.
It wasn’t the same confidence I had when I walked into the exam.
That confidence had been tested pretty hard during those first 30 questions.
This was a different kind of confidence.
It came from knowing that, despite the uncertainty, I had managed to stay with the exam and keep making decisions.
And fortunately, that feeling turned out to be right.
I passed.
Looking back, I think one of the biggest lessons from my CISSP experience wasn’t about any particular domain.
It was about how you respond when the exam doesn’t go the way you expected.
Because there will be a point where you encounter questions you don’t feel prepared for.
You may find yourself between two answers.
You may choose an answer and immediately start wondering whether you should have picked the other one.
You may look at a question and think, “Where did this come from?”
That’s when you have to be careful.
One difficult question can become:
“I’m not prepared.”
Then the next difficult question reinforces it.
And before you realise it, you’re no longer answering the question in front of you.
You’re worrying about the result.
That is where things can start going downhill.
Don’t let one question become the story of your entire exam.
You don’t know how you’re performing while you’re sitting there.
You don’t know how the other candidates are performing either.
The person sitting next to you may look completely calm while internally questioning every answer.
Someone with 20 years of security experience may walk out convinced they failed.
Someone else may feel terrible throughout the exam and still pass.
You simply don’t have enough information to judge your result while you’re taking the test.
So don’t try.
Focus on the question in front of you.
That’s it.
There is also a bigger lesson here that goes beyond CISSP.
In cybersecurity, we rarely work with perfect information.
We deal with incomplete evidence.
Competing priorities.
Limited resources.
Business pressure.
Uncertain threats.
And decisions that sometimes have to be made before we have all the answers.
The expectation isn’t that you will always know everything.
The expectation is that you can assess the situation, understand the risk, make a reasoned decision and move forward.
In many ways, that’s what the CISSP experience reinforced for me.
Feeling uncertain doesn’t necessarily mean you’re unprepared.
Sometimes it simply means you’re dealing with something unfamiliar.
And there is a big difference between the two.
So, if you’re preparing for CISSP and you’ve already worked through hundreds or thousands of questions, don’t expect the real exam to feel like another practice test.
It may not.
You may walk in confident and have that confidence shaken within the first few questions.
You may spend more time than you expected on the early questions.
You may question everything you’ve studied.
If that happens, don’t panic.
Take a breath.
Reset.
Read the question again.
Think about what is actually being asked.
Trust the preparation that got you into that chair.
Make your decision.
And keep moving.
For me, the first 30 questions broke the confidence I walked into the exam with.
The next 70 questions helped me rebuild it.
When the exam stopped at 100 questions, I walked away with mixed emotions—but somewhere inside, I still believed I was going to pass.
And I did.
That’s probably the part of my CISSP journey I remember most.
Not the 6,000 practice questions.
Not the hours of preparation.
But those first 30 questions that made me think I wasn’t ready—and the decision to keep going anyway.
You don’t necessarily need to feel like you’re passing to actually pass.
Sometimes, you just need to stay composed long enough to let your preparation work for you.
