Today, we are discussing whether we should be reading more or not.  Many of the mentors that I subscribe to believe completely opposite ends of the spectrum.  You have some people that are telling us that we should read and devour every single book that has ever been written, then at the other end of scale you have people saying, particularly during creation time, that they don’t want to be reading anything because they want to make sure that all of their ideas are coming from their heart, rather than being influenced by what the latest trends are and what other people are doing.

You then have some people in the middle of that saying that we should just be reading one book at a time until we have mastered and implemented all of its lessons.

Where do I sit on that scale?  Learn from the below vlog.

Actually, it’s a little bit of everything.

I am an avid reader, although I don’t have a huge amount of time to read, so what I find is I mainly listen to books on Audible whilst I’m doing other things.  I listen to a lot.  Probably not one a week, but maybe one every couple of weeks, so that’s one end of my personal reading spectrum.

Then I have times where I feel the need to switch off, and this is mainly when I’m feeling either overwhelmed or I have information overload.  I’ve taken in so much that I can no longer hear my own inner guidance system, and for most of us at least 90% of the time we already know what we should be doing, but we’re just not implementing.  That’s where coaches and mentors and accountability partners can be really, really useful for us.

When I can no longer hear what I’m supposed to be doing and I’m perhaps even looking in books or listening to podcasts to find out the answer, I know that it’s time to switch it off and press the reset button.  Then, what I do is quite often at the end of a new book, I will scroll through my audible lists and I will pick a book to not listen to in its entirety, but to go back through a few chapters before I move on to the next one, and just that simple act of reminding and refreshing myself of what has been said can be really helpful.  Not only from a practical day-to-day, ‘oh, I forgot I need to be implementing this’ or ‘I’ve forgotten that I haven’t written my goals out for a day’ standpoint.  I mean, actually, that never happens, but it’s an example.  This can be really super-useful, and then from a content creation perspective, often it’s the stuff that I’m reading in the night or listening to in the morning on my walk or my run, that sparks an idea that I’m like, ‘okay, I’ve got to write about that.’  That’s how I come up with my content quite a lot of the time; my content which some people are like, ‘you’re always writing or you’re always creating.  How do you do it?’  Well, it’s because I get inspiration from other people’s content.

My recommendation for you is to just do whatever feels right.

If you are ever short on ideas, and you’re not reading enough, just start reading!  But if you find that you are an idea machine, and you’re never stuck for content, then yeah, carry on.  Do what is working for you, and if you have any other tips on where you get your inspiration from, please feel free to share because I am always open to hearing new ideas.