Do you let doubt stop you in your track?
Doubt can be both good and bad. Good, because it makes you question things. And bad because it can prevent you from doing important things. This morning as I was practicing my speed reading drills I had an epiphany. When you use speed reading bookmarklets, the words of the text you are reading flash across the screen, and you can adjust the settings to how many words at a time that you want to flash. You can also adjust the words per minute at which you would like to read. Depending on the speed reading bookmarklet, there could be other functionalities as well.
There are three things that slow your reading speed: reading one word at a time, sounding out the words (subvocalization) and rereading the text (regression). When using bookmarklets, you are forced to recognize the word because they are flashing quickly so you have no time to subvocalize. You are encouraged to set the words per minute at which you read much higher than your reading rate to force you to stop trying to say the words, or reread any part of the text. In the book, BrainRead – Effective Speed Reading – Reading like the Swedish
, and during the Iris Reading speed reading course that I took a few years ago, we were instructed to at first focus on reading speed without trying to comprehend what you are reading, that comes later.
And now for my epiphany, each time that I start to use the bookmarklets, and I set the rate at which I read so high that I cannot read the words, after doing it for a while, doubt creeps in because of my logical side, and I believe that the process will never work, so I abandon it. I never recognized this weakness until this morning. I know that I usually stop the process, but I didn't know why. This morning, that little voice that sometimes gives us bad advice, was showing its ugly head. But because I am so committed to giving the process the time it deserves since I have so much riding on my informal liberal arts education, and the necessity to read the right old books, I ignored the voice. This tells me that with awareness, a major part of the battle between doubt and doing what we must is won. Have you had a similar experience?
I am hoping that when I have developed the habit of reading by sight instead of by subvocalizing the words, I will begin to start understanding what I am reading and can work on improving my level of understanding of what I am reading. You get better at a skill by practicing, but it's not intuitive to read by sight because that's not how we are taught to read. A process, in this case, learning to read by subvocalizing is very effective when we first started to read, but when we have mastered the art of reading, and no longer need to subvocalize, we are not introduced to a new method of reading – reading by sight. At what point in our lives, is the appropriate time to change the way we read to be more proficient? It should be way before adulthood, because it is much more difficult to do at that stage.
The trick for me is to shut down the negative chatter and not succumb to the feelings of doubt that reading by sight is impossible. It is a process of not only unlearning what I have been taught, which is subvocalizing, but replacing it with reading by sight because it is important not to have a vacuum since I will revert back to the old behaviors. And that's what I have done in the past when I was practicing my speed reading. Awareness prevents you from allowing doubt to stop you in your track.