• Posted in January 2015


When you are totally in love what you’re learning your brain opens up and embraces the material with ease. Reading is the same, love what you read and the book will love you and will be forever in your memory. It all sound so easy, doesn’t it?

The problem for many is they are required to learn stuff they don’t even like, let alone love. As part of business life we are given reading lists that make our heart sink. One client even told me he felt a stabbing pain in his heart when he just thought about what he ‘had’ to read. As he spoke his voice quivered, and hands trembled. This man was suffering from ‘reading heart break’ where it is heartbreaking to sit down and focus on the reading material, yet the consequences of not reading what you are supposed are dire. It’s a lose-lose situation, otherwise known in NLP as a double bind!

Relax - there is a way out of this dilemma.

What if all reading could be easy and fun?  What if reading heartbreak transformed to a love affair with reading, studying and absorbing information through the written word?

What if and even the horrid reads were no longer a chore? You may be asking, how can I have a love affair with reading, and it’s a good question. If you love knowledge, reading is your vehicle to access masses of knowledge, and like all vehicles, there are ways to supercharge your performance

Way back in the early 90s, I fell in love with NLP. (I know there is a lot of love in this article and I am serious). I wanted everything NLP could offer and more, so I started my own NLP company, challenge was I fell out of love with the financial services business I was in, so I decided to sell up and make NLP my primary business. Selling a Financial Services business is not as straightforward as selling a car, there is a process that takes time. Meanwhile the Financial Services Regulator insisted in order to keep my licence I ‘had’ to sit some pretty complex exams.

And there was my dilemma, studying or exams in a subject I had no interest in, studying material that would not be part of my future. The only motivation was short term “I must pass this exam, so I keep my financial licence and thus find a buyer for my company.” I made a study plan, I worked it all out. Then I kept finding more important things to do than study, like work on my NLP business. As the exam drew closer, I revised the study plan, increasing the time to account for lost time. The truth was, I was running away from study, because I had fallen out of love with the subject. Each week, with nothing being done, the pressure was increasing and the required study sessions lengthening in time

It was 12.00 noon, the day before the exam, I was totally stuck, my nervous internal voice was shouting ‘what the hell will you do now?’

I was sitting in my study, pondering the situation, when out of the corner of my eye, I saw my ‘ PhotoReading’ materials. “PhotoReading” I shouted out loud,  “why did I not think of you earlier” I jumped out of my chair grabbed the PhotoReading materials and was ready to PhotoRead all the exam notes.  I had learned PhotoReading a few years previously and had been successful with the skill, and like many skills I had let it fade.

Next step, I drew all the content in image format similar to mind mapping and stuck these colourful images all over my study wall. In an altered state, I made sure all the relevant detail was easy to remember.  This partnership between the conscious and uncobscious mind is crucial for recall, in 4 hours I had done more study than my colleagues had done in 4 months.

I went to bed that night, and my learnings were brought to life in my dreams. Complex financial services regulations and laws were presented in my mind in the most vivid and peculiar ways. This was my unconscious mind working, giving me another way to connect with the content.

When I woke, the dreams were in my mind, the mind maps from my study were present and I was feeling good.  What’s more I knew I had passed before the exam even took place. How did I know this? My conscious and unconscious had formed an alliance and I knew all the content was there. Even the tricky topics were covered.

Learning, study and recall are state dependent activities. There is a special state, that makes it all so easy. I walked into the exam room that day, with a smile on my face and right in that state. I took my chair and when it was time to start, I read all the questions first, feeling a nice familiarity with it all. I knew I had passed the exam earlier in the day, and now I was totally certain. So I wrote for 3 hours, it all came to me, it was almost like I was on auto pilot. I left the exam feeling very satisfied.

PhotoReading is a system that combines conscious and unconscious mind processes to enable you to more than treble your reading speed.  Some people increase their speed of reading by ten times and remember more than traditional reading.  I just knew PhotoReading would be my saviour.

So I went through the 5 PhotoReading steps will all the exam books. This was technical content, yet I was whizzing through it at lightning fast speeds. My unconscious was on overdrive feeding the relevant content, giving me images that were useful for recall.

I looked at my watch, it was 12.00 noon, and then it hit me, only 24 hours earlier I was totally stuck and thinking of postponing the exam and now here I was really excited and pleased with a knowing feeling, I had passed. It was an unbelievable transformation.

So the obvious conclusion this story is building up to is Yes! I did pass the exam with distinction. It’s amazing what the brain can do when it has a strategy. 80 people in the network I was involved with at that time took the exam across the country, and only 4 people passed. Many spent weeks and months studying. I did it all in four hours. I am not more clever than the others, I just had very efficient way of using my brain to read and recall.

The good news is, anyone can learn to PhotoRead and anyone can significantly improve their reading speed and recall. I have taught PhotoReading in many different countries, in businesses, schools, colleges and universities. All the people benefit from this amazing technology.

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