Stop Reading Your Personal Growth

Are you a big fan of self help books? Because many people that I know are forever reading, constantly learning, forever searching, deepening their understanding not reading that changes your life, doing changes your life.

Continually reading self help books is much like gathering a whole library of holiday brochures and travel guides about some beautiful place that you would love to visit. You’ve seen the lovely pictures, read the experts’ recommendations, imagined yourself sipping a cocktail looking out over that breath-taking sunset, immersed yourself in the idea of being there. However, you never actually make the reservation or purchase the ticket. What’s my point? Reading about how to achieve the life that you really want and doing something about it are two completely different things. Reading all those feel-good stories about how others have taken the required action and, as a consequence, changed their lives, will give you that longing feeling inside. But tomorrow morning, when you drag yourself out of bed for another day of going through the motions, what has changed? Precious little! When you’re confronted with another day of worry, anxiety, financial shortage or battered self-esteem, what good will all the books have done you? If anything, it will have made you even more restless and more dissatisfied than you were in the first place.

Reading, intellectualizing and understanding what it takes to change your life will make no difference to your life until you put your learning into everyday practice. And that’s just too big a hassle for so-called normal people – they’re fearful of taking what they think of as some risk-laden leap of faith.

If you’ve been blessed to come across a self help book that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to change your life (and they’re few and far between – most of them are ‘feel-good books’) then surely you’ve realized by now that a leap of faith is not necessary. All you’ve got to do is take easy steps each day that shake you out of the stupor in which most normal people are merely existing.

To change your life, you have to change the way you’re living the life that you have at present. Change can start small – by doing something as simple as changing your morning routine – because small changes get your subconscious mind out of its comfort zone. Once out you will start to realize that every single thing in your life can be done differently. When this realization dawns upon you, you’ll find yourself in a completely different place – where things that were otherwise unthinkable suddenly become obvious – and easily doable.

In other words, it’s up to you to start doing the things that will change your life, to stop reading and start doing.