The motivational paper was a piece of cake for anyone who is at all interested in all of this.
The whole process is most likely designed to test your initiative. It's very obvious almost immediately that the paper is very out of date. What would someone with initiative do? They would go and look up the up to date information. What would someone with a true interest and passion the aviation industry do? They would go and learn more about it. Not just what was in the paper. I for example, made trump cards for each of the aircraft with the exact seating arrangements, speeds, cruising altitudes and examples of airlines and routes. It turned out to be not very useful but I literally learned exactly how many seats every aircraft had because I'm interested and I wanted to learn the information as comprehensively as I could. I also figured that as an ATCO, we would need to have an understanding of the relationship between speed, distance and time, a rough sense of geographically where and how far away everything is, how some of the technology actually works and how aircraft use it to navigate etc etc.
I prepared very extensively and I'm confident that I got 100% of the first test right. If I can do it, so can anyone else. So stop moaning and try again next year!!
In terms of the phychometric stuff... a lot harder than I thought!! I only completed 37 from the diagramming paper and 28 from the cube nets paper. I think I totally under prepared for these tests. I put too much time into learning about the role and the information in the paper and not enough into practicing the psychometric stuff. I'm quite sure that I won't get through to stage 2 because of these tests unfortunately. But now that I know what's involved, I will definitely try again next year!! And this time I'll practice loads and loads of times!!!
Good luck to everyone else and thank you all for sharing your experiences!
Mike