Accelerate Your Personal Growth by Reading Books Differently

I have noticed that one frequent question on podcasts these days is about which books people are reading and how many books they read a year. I think these are great questions and I love hearing about the books people are reading. I also love reading books.

This focus on the number of books people read has got me thinking lately about the fact that in rushing to read as many books as we can, we can lose sight of the value of taking our time with ideas presented in a book. So although reading 50 books a year is an impressive thing, it might be more valuable to read four books a year and really take the time to implement and test out the ideas in the book to see how they work in real life.

For the last several months, I have been focusing on improving my parenting skills.  I’m reading one very important, influential book about collaborative problem solving to support our children to develop the skills they need to address their unsolved problems. The book is called The Explosive Child by Dr. Ross Greene.

In the book, Dr. Greene sets out the different steps and scripts that help parents develop the skills they need to effectively communicate and collaboratively solve problems with their children. (I promise to do a future post where I talk about how this has worked for my husband Robby and I with our two very different children.)

The thing is…

These steps and scripts are challenging to learn and apply. I have been reading and rereading sections of this book for months because I’m testing, implementing, and developing the new skills and mindset needed to develop this collaborative parenting approach. And so far, as I move along this learning curve experiencing both setbacks and milestone moments, this is what I have learned:

• Sometimes I approach the conversations all wrong and close off the possibility that my kids will talk at all. I have learned that even a slight change in the words or tone can have a significant impact on the depth and quality of the conversations with our children.
• Sometimes I’m able to complete some steps in the conversations effectively and gather information that is both valuable and new to me (and many times it surprises me).
• Sometimes I have to restart the same conversations over and over again to try to get to the collaborative problem-solving step.
• Often we come up with a collaborative solution that we think will work but it doesn’t and we have to try out several more before we find a solution that actually helps our children builds the skill and solves the problem.

But most importantly, I have learned that struggling to build the skills to engage in collaborative conversations with my children has already changed the dynamics of our parent-child relationships for the better and has enabled me to learn totally new things about each of my children.

All this is to illustrate that if we read books that contain valuable information but never take action on the ideas contained within them, we may be losing out on the most valuable parts of reading a book: to learn, test and experience growth by engaging with the ideas and lessons that the book presents to us.

By adopting a growth mindset in how we engage with new ideas that present themselves to us, we give ourselves permission to test them out as we learn and grow to become better versions of ourselves. We can also discard the ideas that don’t work for us and in this way we can constantly, continously improve.

So by all means, keep reading those books…and if you want… aim to read 50 books this year! But as you read each page, take some time to ponder the ideas, to reflect on whether and how these ideas could be implemented in your own life, and test them out to see if they are valuable to you.

Rather than racing through one book and onto the next, let’s deliberately engage with the life-changing ideas in each book we read and, undoubtedly, we’ll find ourselves growing in new and amazing ways!

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