watch tHe skies

So I’m particularly looking forward to this weekend, and attending a Self-Hypnosis training run by Adam Eason.

Adam is a foremost authority on Self-Hypnosis, and as such, it looks like we are going to be doing some interesting stuff, such as pain relief, personal reprogramming and lots more.

I usually try to set an outcome for myself before I do something. After all we are goal-seeking organisms, and as such we are much more likely to achieve our goal if we set one in the first place. And my goal for this weekend is fairly simple, to improve my communication with my unconscious mind, to be able to increase the dialogue in both directions so I can make personal changes to my habits, beliefs and values without needing tapes and CDs. After all, surely your unconscious will listen more readily to your own voice than someone else’s.

This should also help me to get in to state for photoreading quicker and more efficiently, as the initial moments of the photoreading process are effectively getting in to an accelerated learning trance with affirmations (self-spoken hypnotic commands)

And it should also help me with my own trancework with others. The easiest way to get someone in to trance is to go in to trance yourself, and this is of course self-hypnosis in one way or the other.

And so who knows next week I might be able to bend steel bars, turn invisible and fly (or at least hover), any of which are surely worth the course fee…!

Learning stuff is great fun for many people, and a complete pain for others, and most would agree that there is never enough time to learn all the stuff that you want for that new job, or promotion, career change or just to be so damn good at something that everyone is prepared to pay you a tonne of cash just to get your thoughts on something.

And the reason for this is a good old thing called the competency model. No-one for sure knows where it comes from and it suggests that there are four stages of competency that we all go through”

1. Unconscious incompetence
You don’t know that a skill exists and therefore you don’t have it!
2. Conscious incompetence
You are aware of the existence of a skill but its something that you fail at or have to be very careful at doing successfully.
3. Conscious competence
You can successfully deploy the skill, although it takes conscious attention and concentration to do so.
4. Unconscious competence
You can do it in your sleep, the skill is “in the muscle” and requires no conscious processing power, it’s an automatic skill.

The idea is that to adopt a new skill you need to consciously work it out to the point that it becomes repetitive, at which point your unconscious says “hey I get it, it works like that, right?” and takes over. Learning to drive a car is a great example of these steps, if you are a driver, if not then consider walking. Our little man Ben has only recently moved to unconscious competence with walking, as he now happily eats, drinks and talks whilst walking, whereas a few weeks ago he would fall over if someone called his name whilst he was concentrating on putting one foot in front of another without losing balance.

So it works, as a model of learning it is very useful. It does, however, underestimate the power and intelligence of the unconscious mind. After all, does everything have to go through the conscious mind to be learnt? Can you think of examples of learning directly by the unconscious? How about music… do you consciously analyse the notes of a tune and go through the 4 stages to be able to hum something? The unconscious mind is very, very smart, and it can learn stuff all by itself and put you straight to step 4, if you let it. And if you would like to know how, read on. (more…)

Man alive I do get frustrated over on the photoreading forum with the number of people who just don’t get that photoreading requires a different level of investment from the reader. It’s frustratingly full of people desperate to get through textbooks in minutes without investing effort in the learning process. Consequently they complain about how it doesn’t work, that it’s a shortcut rather than a skill that needs an entirely different way of reading to the traditional paradigm.

Perhaps the book needs to place more emphasis on this. After all if there are that many people that aren’t “getting it”, then the message is getting lost in translation.

Anyhow for those of you visitors who photoread or want to, here’s my standard answer to the “what is a purpose” question.

Traditional reading is a fairly passive activity.

That is, most people read from cover to cover and expect the information to wash over them. They then remember the stuff that was most relevant and the rest is ignored. You still read it all though.

ABANDON ALL PRECONCEPTIONS OF READING NOW!!!

Done that? Good. Right let’s get to work.

From now on you are ACTIVELY ENGAGED in the learning process.

That’s right, success is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Forget that this is a book of paper. The author worked his ass off to impart in these pages all of the knowledge he took years to acquire.

Now if you were sitting with the author would you ask him to just tell you everything in a convenient order, and let the information wash over you?

If your answer isn’t NO!!! then go back to the start of the post and try again.

Hopefully you would engage with him (or her), ask him questions, get to the bottom of the bits that you don’t understand. You wouldn’t keep asking him the same generic question and hope to come away thoroughly understanding the book, would you? I hope not.

So here’s the thing.

EACH OF YOUR QUESTIONS COULD BE A PURPOSE!

That’s right, activate in short bursts, get your answer and then consider how that answer changes your next question. GET INVOLVED in the learning process and rather than have information wash over you, you will be diving for pearls with a 90% or better success rate.

From now on, don’t think of reading as a lecture, think of it as a 2 way conversation with the author GET INVOLVED and you will see results.

It’s been a while since I posted about photoreading. And perhaps that is because it’s not a novelty any more.

I use it all of the time - textbooks for my studies, newspapers, reports, and I get great results with it, sometimes suprising results that I could harp on about for days, and you would either believe me or not.

Recently I photoread my first novel. A fascinating experience indeed. Not only did I read through the book quicker than I would normally read a novel, but I also had a much more vivid experience of the book than I normally would. Many times in the book I noticed that details of the scene I had imagined included details that weren’t described until later on, so my imagination was far more stimulated and multi-sensory, immersing me in the story as a witness rather than observer. That’s the best way I can describe the experience, you really need to have your own experience to get more information on this.

And there have been countless little moments where photoreading has surprised me. The most recent being when I had 5 minutes to read a 40 page report before a meeting to review it. I read it through, superread it to highlight my comments on the errors and headed off to the meeting. As part of the discussions it became clear to the attendees that I actually knew the content of the report better than the author, who had copied and pasted much of the content. I was also able to comment on the inconsistency of the themes in the document. And the interesting thing is I didn’t have time before the meeting to consciously process these things. As the meeting progressed and the report was actively discussed, the answers came and I just let them come out. Brilliant.

So there you go, some of my experiences. If you are intrigued, head over to this blog, a guy is documenting his experience with photoreading and I wish him the best of luck with getting out what I do.

http://withthebeginninginmind.blogspot.com/2007/06/photoreading-journey-so-far.html

Since my last photoreading post I’ve been very busy photoreading as much as I possibly can. Unfortunately getting in to state is still something that takes me a few minutes so I can’t switch it on and photoread everything in sight. However I am getting some photoreading in every day - not the 3 books a day but not at all bad. I did manage to photoread and process a John Adair book “Not Bosses but Leaders” on the train in a couple of hours last week, which was very impressive. You can check out my mind map here to see what you think of the content I extracted in a very short period indeed.

The most profound experience I had during that exercise was wondering what page was the most important for my purpose for reading the book (which was to understand what the key characteristics of a good leader are in Adair’s opinion), I immediately got a number in my head, and when I turned to that page, there it was, a summary of the key characteristics, on a page that I hadn’t even read consciously. (more…)

When I wrote this post the other day about photoreading, prompted by an email, I realised that in the chaos of the last few months I hadn’t done any photoreading for many months, since before Christmas.

So long in fact that I’d forgotten the technique. I’d never got to unconscious competence with it, so I’m fairly annoyed at myself and determined to get back on the horse. I hadn’t experienced spontaneous activation but I had some good results with being able to recall specific facts when asked, and being able to mind map a book’s salient points in about a third of the time it would usually take me (I like to borrow books, mind map them then give them back, you see - it saves on storage space!)

Anyhoo so I’m not back to square one but I’m back on the squares in some way. How am I going to do it? Well I am setting myself the challenge of photoreading 3 books a day.  Actually photoreading 3 books a day is pretty easy - 10-20 minutes in the office before everyone comes in… finding the time to postview and activate them is the challenge, so I think I’ll have to go and have a look at my “to read” book pile and decide how I’m going to achieve this. My aim is, by the summer, to be able to get in to PR state in an instant and to have a handful of spurious activation examples documented on this site. Once you can get in to state spontaneously, then no-one can actually tell that you are doing anything different, other than the fact that you are turning the pages really quickly… but lots of people do that as they browse a book anyway.

All this and a little baby? Challenge I know but my books are piling up again and I need to crack on!

With the fourth edition of the Photoreading Whole Mind System book coming out soon, Paul Scheele is offering free teleseminars on activation for those of you who photoread this blog. If you sign up at http://www.LearningStrategies.com/Free.asp you will also receive a PDF of the considerably expanded activation section absolutely free, and it’s not often that Learning Strategies give free stuff away now is it?

Fourth edition of the book is due out next month.

Ok so I’ve sold out, so sue me! Actually I noticed that Learning Strategies (the inventors of photoreading) offer a free CD if you recommend the system on your website, so here is my page to recommend said system. Actually it just explains it and recommends it at the end. Go on have a read, you know you want to…

I recently watched a DVD from Paul Scheele entitled “Genius Mind”. The DVD is a film of a talk he gave, presumably to his photoreading students. It covers similar ground to some of his “Natural Brilliance” book, and is centred around explaining the amazing capacity of the human mind to do, well, some really clever stuff.

It turns out that the mind is a complicated thing. No brainer for some, but to paraphrase the great Douglas Adams, the mind is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to the mind. And for all but the thickest of the thick, it’s a mechanism so complicated that it makes setting the video recorder seem like, well, blinking.

And the funny thing is, we all, have the same brain, the same mechanism for clever thought as Enstein, Newton, Bergkamp, name a genius and your brain is roughly the same as theirs. In essence we all have the same Porsche brain. It’s just that some of us don’t realise that this sexy sportscar of a processor has more than one gear. (more…)

Continuing my interest in all things that increase productivity, and particularly with the concept of speed reading, I have been doing some research around the subject. As you, my loyal reader, already know, I have been learning Photoreading for some time. However I am a great believer in reading around a subject to get balanced knowledge and skillsets from different viewpoints in much the same way as Bruce Lee did for martial arts, but hopefully without the mysterious death and legendary conspiracy theory.

So I also had a look at QSR and a new twist on traditional speed reading, in addition to giving an update on my quest to photoread. (more…)