I read alot.

I have to so I can keep up with these things:

1.   What is going on in my industry

2.   Developments in my area of professional interest

3.   Ways to make my business even more successful and profitable

4.   Ways to develop myself

5.   Things I am generally interested in outside of my professional field.

I also listen to audio programs on a regular basis too.

I travel on a regular basis and regularly find myself in situations where reading a book just is not possible (or legal) and so the convenience of having my ipod loaded up with some great stuff means I can listen to the worlds experts at the press of a play button.

Whislt I do enjoy my reading, I especially enjoy listening to audio programmes.

You get to hear incredible authors and speakers delivering some great content and I believe that when you listen to an inspiring and inspired expert share their knowledge, espcially if they are in a live situation in front of an audience, some of the magic of their performance passes through the headphones.

I have listened to probably thousands of hours of audio over the last 15 years, many of the same programmes over and over again and I am constantly adding to my already large library.

Just recently I purchased a fabuolus audio programme from Nightingale Conant called "Success is Your Own Damn Fault" by Larry Winget.

Larry is a…mmm how do I describe him…..Larry is a colourful character to say the least. 

He is known by his trade marked title as the World's Only Irritational speaker and the Pitbull of personal development.

He is a tough, take no prisoners kind of guy who says what he thinks, is funny with it but essentially tells it as it is.

You won't find any suggestions for bonding, hugging or any other sort of touchy feelie stuff - Larry just is not that kind of speaker.

He is hard hitting and will tell you the truth about what it takes to be successful.

I like what he has to say and having seen him live at the National Speakers' Association convention in Phoenix a couple of years ago, I have always enjoyed (and benefitted) what he has to say and how he has to say it.

So when the regular mailing piece from Nightingale Conant dropped through the letterbox a couple of weeks ago promoting his latest programme, I sent off for it immediately.

It is good….very good.

And for Larry to get that good he has not only been there, done it and got the t-shirt in rising from poverty to riches, losing it and then getting it back again, but he also has researched the topic of success extensively.

He claims to have read over 4000 books (and I have no reason to doubt him and if I did I would not be stupid enough to challenge him on it!) and listened to approximately 5000 hours of audio programmes.

Now I am sharing this with you not because I necessarily want you to go out and buy this programme (although that is not a bad idea if you feel you are ready to be successful in whatever you do), but because of something Larry says on disc 2, track 2 at about 3:30.

He shares his experience of reading so much and after going through all those books, he probably knows a thing or two about being an effective reader and he offers a GREAT piece of advice that alone was worth the investment in the programme.

He says that you should read for INTENT and not CONTENT.

I will write that again because I think it is so powerful:

Read for INTENT not CONTENT.

So what does he mean?

Well if I give you a book and recommend you read it without telling you why, you would have to work your way through the whole book to see what you could get out of it.

But when you read for INTENT, you have a pretty good idea of what you need right now (assuming you have clarity on what you are trying to achieve and the focus to concentrate on that and that alone) and so you can scan through the book to find the stuff that is relevant to you, discarding or ignoring what is not useful to you right now.

Larry suggests that you can focus your INTENT by asking yourself:

What is the one thing I can get from this book (tape programme, speaker, DVD etc) that will help me in what I am trying to achieve and that I can USE RIGHT NOW!

By giving you mind that sort of clarity you can get through material very quickly until you find that one thing, that one idea or that one suggestion that will move you forward.

Now if you can get through a book a week (and if you can't you are going to be left behind in your industry or field) that is 52 books in a year, 52 great ideas.

What would your life, business, relationships, performance, income etc etc look like if you just took one great idea a week and applied it (and made it work)?

So as Larry says, read for INTENT and not CONTENT and focus on finding that one thing.

When you do this you will get through far more books and much quicker too - so just by changing your approach to books, you have accelerated your reading speed and you can do it instantly.

Let me know how you get on.

Do you get e mails?

I bet you do, we all do?

Are they a problem for you?

Well I bet like the millions and millions of people on the internet these days you probably get "too much" e mail.

Lots of that might be SPAM and we can do something about that with SPAM filters and filtering devices (Google Mail is excellent for only letting you receive genuine e mails).

So even if you have dealt with the dross that bothers everyone, you still have to deal with those real pieces of correspondence that require your attention.

In the work I do helping professional people become more effective so they can release more time for the more important things in their life dealing with e mail is one of the biggest challenges they face.

Certainly in large organisations where the tendency to copy EVERYONE on e mails creates this unnecessary flow of electrons that clogs up in boxes throughout the company, e mail volume is a problem.

Even if you could reduce the CC problem, a big challenge is the way e mails are written.

Long meandering paragraphs, too much information, not getting to the point and a myriad of other poor communication habit mean not only do we have to read this stuff, we also have to decipher it.

Perhaps there should be an "Email writing course".

One of the things on that course would be the layout of the text.

I subscribe to quite a few e mail lists for a variety of different reasons - personal and professional.

Some are better than others for their content but one that stands out not only for its content (subject is irrelevant here) but for te way it is laid out so that it is much easier to read.

Here are just a few lines from a recent e mail I got from a marketing expert called Tellman Knudson:

I was at this party…

Fantastic spread of food,
good music, awesome company…

but one thing stood out-

and since then I've checked
in with my friends who
threw the party-

It's the most refreshing
thing I've ever tasted.

The thing I like about how this is written is that the text is just a few words wide allowing us to simply run our eyes down the page to take in the writing.

I also like the gaps between the ideas so it makes it very easy to read.

This is chunking in its purest form and means the reader can scan through this very quickly and get the meaning from it.

I am convinced if more people write their e mails like this, they would be far easier (and therefore far quicker) to read.

So the next time you write an e mail why not try doing it like this…

Let me know how you get on.

I was running a Speed Reading training course just recently and I was challenged by one of the participants who said to me:

"Michael, what if I don't want to read everything quickly?"

My answer was quite simple:

"Well don't then!"

For a moment or two this person was lost for words and that gave me time to explain the challenge faced by people who have not developed their reading abilities above and beyond that taught in schools.

There is a huge problem with the standard of reading, not only in this country but across the world.

I am not talking about levels of illiteracy.

I am talking about the millions and millions (if not billions) of people who have completed their education (whether that be school, college or university) and who are ignorant of the fact they have a massive reading problem.

So what is that problem?

Well if I told you of a school that is turning out pupils with only 25% of the qualifications they are easily capable of achieving, I am sure you would be shocked.

If you had kids you certainly would not want them to go to THAT school.

If you were a radical social activist, you might campaign for the school principal to be reprimanded by the local education authorities, possibly suspended and maybe even replaced.

The story would certainly hit the local press and depending on that day's world events, it might even appear on the national six o'clock news.

Now whilst there are fewer and fewer schools with that sort of record across the range of qualifications expected of those leaving school, every school that has reading on the curriculum is churning out pupils with a reading ability 25% or less (and more likely to be less) than what they are capable of.

Why is that so?

Why is this not reported on the News?

Has there been a cover up?

No, there has been no cover up because hardly anyone knows about it.

Only the few of us who have sought to increase our own reading speed and then have gone on to teach others how to do the same really know and understand the problem.

I run Speed Reading courses.

I prefer to call them "Effective Reading" courses because that is a better description, but essentially I show people how to get through written material faster.

How do I do that?

Well first of all I take away the bad habits instilled by our good old education system.

Habits that occur as a by-product of the archaic reading development typical across the world.

Now that might sound a little harsh but here is what I experience on a regular basis.

Professional people attend one of my courses and they generally have a reading speed of somewhere between 250 - 350 words per minute.

There is a bit of Speed Reading Training folklore that a few years ago the United Nations identified the average reading speed necessary to be "functionally literate" in today's information driven world.

They came up with a figure of 400 words per minute.

Now whether this is true or not, I have never been able to verify because I can't find an official UN reference to that figure or the study, but if it is true, all the people who attend a speed reading course are, by definition, functionally ILLITERATE!

With a little bit of new information, a short amount of practice, I can on average double someone's reading speed in a day, with NO loss of comprehension (see my recent post "Speed Reading Techniques - Do They Work").

So the average speed then becomes 500-700 words per minute whilst they are with me and then they walk away with a plan to even double that.

No I am no magician, I don't impart Effective Reading wisdom, I just remove some barriers that hold back the reader and give a few additional strategies to help people get through their reading faster.

And it is when this objective comes up that I usually get the "What if I don't want to read everything quickly" type comment.

You see because of the way most of us have been taught to read, our frame of reference is a "one gear only" reading engine.

So as soon as there is a suggestion of doubling the output, some people balk at the idea.

What they don't realise is that for the variety of different reading material they encounter they need more than the one gear given to us at school.

You wouldn't savour the nuances of the vocabulary of a great poem in the same way as you would read the instruction manual for your new cell phone.

Different material requires different approaches depending upon the type of material you are reading,  what you want to get out of it and the time you have to achieve that.

Using the reading skills we have been given at school is like a single (poorly tuned) violin trying to play all the parts of a full orchestral piece.

mmm….first time out for that analogy….not sure it it works but I will leave it in because it is close to what I mean and besides I am in mid rant so a little leeway won't go amiss.

But as I have seen over and over again, people are easily capable of 1000 words a minute plus, and with full comprehension too.

So for the average reader with their 250 wpm levels that have changed little since their school days, they really are only operating at 25% of their capabilities.

What could they have achieved if they were operating closer to their full potential?

Although more important in this day and age is the ever increasing problem of information overwhelm and whilst reading faster may not be the whole answer, it would really help.

And so with this information readily and freely available it is criminal that our school systems do not embrace this knowledge and develop their teaching to equip pupils with reading skills closer to their true capability.

The trouble is, most teachers read slowly too and so it is a bit like the blind leading the blind…that too in my mind is criminal.

Is Speed Reading the answer to information overwhelm?

Well many people believe that to be the case and here is why:

Part of the problem with information overwhelm is not necessarily the volume because although that is a big factor what might be manageable for you might be far too much for me.

No the key factor is how we respond to that volume and only once it gets past the "too much" stage does overwhelm start to take hold.

A few years ago, before the explosion of information on the internet (how on earth did we manage before the WWW I will never know!), one of the "treatments" for a case of information overwhelm was attending a speed reading course.

The theory goes something like this:

Too much to read and not enough time - well if you read faster then you can get through far more and much quicker thus saving you time.

Now that was true back in the good old days when even having a mobile phone was considered the height of sophistication.

Of course the theory of Speed Reading is essentially about taking away bad reading habits that slow you down (habits by the way that you were taught to have in school!), giving you a set of better habits to have you reading more in tune with the way your eyes and brain naturally work and then showing you how to incorporate those habits in your reading practice.

It works. 

Check out my post "Speed Reading Techniques - Do They Work" for the proof.

But just being able to read faster is no longer all that is needed for information overwhelm.

Recently I made a statement on my site that said:

 "the efficiencies, effectiveness and increased productivity required by today's knowledge worker are simply not possible by just working harder or reading faster."

In a soon to be published interview with Mind Mapping Software Expert Chuck Frey, he challenged me on this and asked me to explain myself.

Here is what I told Chuck:

"Well the simple answer is that to be effective you need to work smarter. 

It doesn’t matter how fast I learn to read, and already I am a pretty impressive reader with high reading speeds, I will still never get through all of the information available to me even in my own small niche.

Even applying all of the tools, tricks, skills, cheats and short cuts of speed reading, there will still be more left to read at the end of the day.

So the skill today is about knowing “what is enough?” and “where to find it” and being savvy enough that when you do dip into the raging torrent to go fetch the stick you need, you resurface and come back to the bank again before you are swept too far downstream.

This is where the clarity, the discipline, the decisiveness and the persistence come into their own.

Reading faster just means it takes just a few more pages to reach that feeling of overwhelm and being out of control – but probably in the same amount of time as before.

Now I am not saying don’t learn to speed read because having that skill, when you define what the finite amount of reading is that you have to do, will save you an amazing amount of time. 

But being an effective reader where you also have a range of filtering strategies before you even get to the conventional “reading” part is far more powerful and a good Effective Reading course will give you those.

However those strategies really only work at their best if you have clarity, discipline, decisiveness and persistence."

Let me know what you think.

I mentioned towards the end of last week that I had been given a sneak preview of a new Speed Reading Software that was about to be launched.

Unfortunately last week I was sworn to secrecy and could only hint at what the launch was all about.

Well the iphone application was formally launched yesterday and I can now tell you more about it.

The product is called Spreed:News and it is an application that allows you to customise your news and blog feeds so that you can read articles through its speed reading software.

There is some technical stuff about where to download it from and how to specifically use it and you can find these details at Spreed:News Software Launch Blog

Here is a video they have put together that tells you a little more about it.

 It is very simple to use and what it does is take the news or blog article you want to read and then presents the words to you at a rate of your choosing in convenient "chunks".

The range of speeds available to you is anywhere between 300 words per minute and 1200 words per minute.

This chunking or grouping of words is one of the fundamental principles of becoming a more effective reader (or speed reader) and this software does that automatically for you.

Now when you try this out for yourself you may find it feels a little strange.

That is because you are not used to taking in words in this fashion, however with a little perserverence you will get used to it and you will start to reap the benefits immediately.

I like this application alot and unfortunately I do not have an iphone (yet) but if I did then I would definitely benefit from this tool.

David Coleman and his team are working on versions of the application for Blackberry's and Windows moblie devices but I am more excited about the desktop application they have planned for a later release.

When this comes out, you should definitely get hold of that because it will help you RIP through your reading matter.

If you want to see a video of it in action without the gorgeous model then click on the iphone below and I take you through just how simple it is to use.

By the way, I forgot to mention the price of this application….its FREE!

Wouldn't it be great to have speed reading software?

Imagine an application where you could upload the text from any document and have it presented to you in a way where you could ONLY read it fast, but do so in a way that you understood every single word.

Now what do I mean by fast?

Well the average reading speed for people who have not undergone any formal training is around 250-350 words minute.

Assuming you fall into that range (and it is highly likely you do based on my experience of teaching people to speed read) how would it impact your life if you could double or even treble the rate at which you process the written word?

Of course if like the majority of people these days you are overwhelmed with the massive amount of information you have to process then doubling your reading speed would halve the time it takes you to read.

Now you would either free up some time to use for more profitable purposes or you could make greater headway into what it is you need to get through.

Certainly the feelings of control you would have would increase and that horrible sensation of overwhelm would begin to ebb away. Now last night in a secret late night transatlantic conference call, I was shown a brand new application that can and will double, treble or even quadruple your reading speed.

I was contacted by a company that is not from Europe (you can work out for yourself which region it might be from) who wanted to get my thoughts on their product because of my experience of sharing speed reading advice to thousands of people.

I am sworn to secrecy and so am unable to tell you any more about it other than that it exists and within the week that it will be launched.

The only thing that Mr X has allowed me to share with you (I have to refer to him like that because ANY mention of who he is and what this thing does before it is formally launched will have me up before the Supreme Court before you know it!) is that this application will first of all be available on on a popular mobile device.

There are plans to launch a web based version of it soon too but the impending launch is for a certain handheld device.

What I am allowed to tell you though are my initial thoughts on this application. Well let's just say, I am extremely excited by this launch and expect tens of thousands of people to benefit from this application.

I believe the application is launched on Friday and formally announced on Monday.

So if you want to find out about this amazing Speed Reading Software then watch out for my post on Monday when I will be giving it a full review and telling you where you can get it from.

One last thing….you just will not believe the price of this thing when you see it

Whenever I run an Effective Reading course I am always asked this question:

Q - "How do I remember what I read?"

I also get asked this by subscribers and visitors to the site too so I thought I would spend a little time explaining this rather short and succint answer:

A - "Buy a Memory Course"

Now I am not being awkward, I am not trying to be funny, I am being absolutely serious.

If you want to remember what you read, you need to take a memory course so you can learn how to remember.

You see most people's expectations of the reading process is this:

1. I see the characters on the page 
2. I recognise them as letters
3. I formulate the letters into words
4. I read the words and make sense of what is written
5. I understand what is written
6. I remember what is written
7. At a later date I recall what was written
8. I use the recall of that information for my own needs or for communicating to others

Unfortunately our reading development in school only takes us up to step 4 (reading the words and making sense of them).

Hopefully the rest of our education takes us through to step 5 but unless you have any formal training in memory development, that is where your reading skills stop.

So the reading skills the majority of people have don't match their expectations of what they feel they should get from reading a page.

Because in order for you to be able to remember something from a page of text, you actually have to memorise it.

Now some stuff will naturally stay in your memory for a variety of reasons (outstanding, unusual, association, something of interest etc) but if you want to recall the specifics you have to memorise the specifics.

Just reading them once is usually not enough.

Reading them through over and over again (the repetition approach) will help a little but is not recommended as a memorisation strategy.

The trouble is, most of us were not taught HOW to memorise when we were at school.

So what techniques do you use if you want to remember what it is you are reading?

Well the first thing you need to get very clear on is what is it specifically do you want from the material you are reading.

When you know that it becomes much easier to choose the right technique to use.

I am a big fan of Mind Mapping and so would always recommend using that as a note taking device when reading any content you want to commit to memory.

If you want to remember a sequence of facts then I would use the Journey Technique (using locations on a journey you know well as a form of mental filing system).

If you need to recall numerical data then you could choose either the Major System or the Dominic System.  Both of these are great ways to turn numbers into more memorable images.

Another very useful strategy is to create mnemonics like the "Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain" method of remembering the colours of the rainbow.

The key to successfully remembering the stuff you read is the clarity of what is important.  Then the rest is easy.

Of course we then start getting into long term and short term memory issues…

Maybe another time…

Here is an interesting question for you….

Which does the reading - the eye or the brain?

I am not sure whether this is another one of those chicken or egg questions but it is something worth exploring if you are interested in learning how to read faster and absorb more.

You see the answer of course is that they are both involved in the process. 

You can't read something without seeing it (unless of course you are reading braille) and certainly there is no point in running your eyes across a page of words if your brain is going to be doing something else.

But have you ever experienced reading a page of text, maybe in a newspaper or perhaps a novel, and you get to the bottom of the page and you can't remember a thing about what you have just read?

I expect you have because I have yet to meet anyone who has not encountered that phenomenom.

So what has happened?

Well your eyes have been involved in the process (mechanically looking at each word - that's how we we taught to read of course) but for some reason the brain has not kicked in.

There are a variety of reasons that could be the cause…distractions, other things on our mind, what we are reading is boring etc but if we just isolate it to the reading process, you will find it is because you are reading too slowly.

Your amazing brain is capable of taking in massive amounts of information, processing it, analysing it, organising it, making decisions and acting on it in fractions of a second, often without us even realising it.

So when you read in the conventional manner just like we were taught to do in class, probably at a rate of about 250-350 words per minute (this range is based on tests I have done with hundreds of people attending my speed reading workshop), you are providing data to your supercomputer brain at a very slow rate indeed.

So in the eons between each word you read, the brain has time to go off and do something else before the next word comes along.

Often though, this is far more interesting that what you are reading and so explains why mechanically you have "read" with your eyes but because the brain has been elsewhere, you can't remember a thing about it.

So if you want to read faster and absorb more, you must learn to engage more of your brain in the process.

How do we do that?

Well by learning to read effectively…that's how.

Speed reading techniques are very straight forward and simple to apply and the effects can be quite staggering. 

We all have to read and every day it seems like there is more and more that we have to read. 

The rapid expansion of the internet in our lives has not only increased our access to more knowledge, but it has created new forms of information that 5 years ago never even existed.

So there is a tremendous amount of pressure on today's reader with the ever increasing amount  of written stuff that we have to process.

Of course logic says that if I have too much to read then being able to read faster and improve my reading speed should help me deal with this problem. 

That is an interesting perspective on the challenge but the reality of it is quite different (more of that at the end of this post).

I teach people to read faster because that is what I am asked to do by my clients for their staff. 

I like to think I do that quite well and in a way that the readers on my course really enjoy.  That last part can be quite subjective but I do have results to back up the first part.

Here are the results from a recent speed reading course I ran for a client.

What you see in the table below are two sets of results.  The first set, the "before" is a baseline test of the reading speed of the group at the start of the session.  T

hey were briefed to read for "normal comprehension" which means I wanted them to read so they understood what it was they were reading.

Now the issue of comprehension is an interesting one because the majority of people confuse it with being able to remember what they have read.  Anyway that is another topic and I am not going to go into that one now - maybe another time. 

The key thing to understand is that the "before" test was done at a speed they felt comfortable at where they understood every word.

The second set of results show the reading speed of the group "after" they had been through the training.  Again the brief for the group was that they should read so that they comfortably understood everything they have read. 

I will stress it again because it is important - comprehension does not mean remembering.  If you want to remember something you have read, you have to commit it to memory and not expect the reading process we have been given by our schooling to do it for you.

So here are the results from this particular speed reading course:

More on Speed Reading Techniques - Do They Work?

Through my work, I have a deep interest in speed reading and being able to read faster and have now been a speed reading course provider for many years now.

When you start letting people know you have an interest in a topic and then maybe some experience in it, you start to have people ask you for their help (which is great for business). Sometimes it comes up in conversation at a meeting or social function.  Often I am approached through recommendation from my other satisfied clients and occasionally I am approached through my website.

Recently I had this request via my website:

"Can u send me techniques of readind 1000 plus words/minute?"

That was it.  No "How do you do", no introduction, no explanation just "GIMME THE ANSWER NOW!!"

It was "Tell me how to read faster, tell me right now and make sure it is easy".

Of course I am in the business of helping people and so here is my response to this person (who by the way did not even sign off with a name!)

Hi

Thanks for your question and my apologies for the delay in replying.