Notice Small Changes and Gain Success

After their initial success with learning PhotoReading many students fall back into their old reading habits. There are a number of reasons for this. One the reason I’m going to cover right now is learning to accept the results you get.

New PhotoReaders often excited to apply what they learned and then it doesn’t happen. It’s a problems for any newly learned skill or attempt to change not just PhotoReading. Many have left a self-improvement seminar excited to use these brilliant ideas, only to realise two or three weeks later nothing has changed. What is going wrong?

The unrealistic expectation

“Now that I know it I will automatically apply what I know.” Sorry it doesn’t work that way.

Sadly no matter how much time we can save or how much easier the new approach may be, old habits die hard. The old habits are like well worn, familiar tracks, through the jungle of out neural networks. They are the first one we take when we are on automatic pilot.

Change takes a conscious approach and it takes 21 to 30 days to develop a new habit. We need to make a conscious effort and when we notice we missed an opportunity to use our newly acquired skill to acknowledge it. To first become aware that we have choices.

The other thing we can do is schedule specific activities for the next 30-days in our planner that make use of the new skill. The time need only be 15 to 20 minutes. It’s important to remember it takes 30 consecutive days. If you are not one to use a planner Get a calendar and aim to put a cross through each day that you have successfully applied the new skill.

If you want to succeed with PhotoReading look for opportunities to use your skill. Select one book for the week to work with over 6 days at 15 to 20 minutes each day. Play with the steps of the system and see what happens.

Be aware

It’s important to remember when we learn something new we often fall short of our expectation. This means the result we got might have been less than what we hoped for. You may have done really well in the PhotoReading seminar and now on your own you fall short of your expectation. If you followed what you learned as best you can you did get a result. And any result that takes you in the direction you want to go is a good result.

New PhotoReaders they are often uber critical of their minor successes and throw the baby out with the bath water.

Why do we do that?

The problem probably stems from our education system where there is a top grade wins awards and accolades and a passing grade which is considered just barely acceptable and in many cases not quite good enough or even poo pooed. Just passing or not passing left us feeling inferior and to avoid that feeling we procrastinate in doing what we know we need to work on.

We develop an ’All or Nothing’ approach and result to developing new skills. It becomes a stop sign, anything to avoid feeling inferior. It leaves us stuck with the old habit even when we know the new skill we learned would serve us better. If we could just develop it some more.

The biggest problem is we never learned to celebrate small improvements. We ignored poor results instead of using them as a guide post to push ahead. We scratch it and start over instead of keeping going until we’ve given it all we have.

That too is the biggest problem for those who are learning PhotoReading on their own. They do one activation and say it doesn’t work instead of using that activation layer and building on it with another and then another. For the beginner to finish a book in 1/3rd the time it takes them to read it in the traditional way you need to do a few activation layers.

Be kind to yourself and learn to celebrate minor successes. If you only managed 10 minutes of your new exercise routine although you planned to do 30. Give yourself credit. Celebrate. It’s 10 minutes more than nothing. And it makes it easier to add more minutes next time.

Ignoring it or berating yourself about it isn’t going to motivate you. Your mind will think what if I only manage 9 minutes next time that’s worse I better not start because I feel bad about myself then. Only because you threw out the results you got as not good enough. Don’t make yourself start over. Build on it and see if you can do a bit more than that next time.

If you find yourself disappointed after applying yourself to do something, Stop! Reconsider. You did something and you got a result. Can you champion yourself to use that as something to build on? Something to get better than rather than starting over?

Celebrate your successes. No matter how small.

© Alex K Viefhaus May 2008