I’ve had plenty of comments about my book reviews I write and one of my readers and good friend, Khalid, asked how I go about actually writing one. Its a great question and I never really thought about it much until asked so I’ll let you know what I’ve learned from book reviews and how I go about writing them.

Keep in Mind the Review

This is something I think a lot of people neglect when reading a book and I think it is very important. To me, it helps me look at the book from a high level and watch specifically for overall themes and concepts that the author is getting trying to make a point of. If you don’t look for these, sometimes you can get through a book and while you may pick up on little bits of useful information, you may not be left with an overall single theme or concept that the author was making. This doesn’t always work since it obviously depends on the author, however, I find that more often than not, if you are thinking about this, it will be more obvious as well.

Look through the chapter headers, reread any summaries that may be given and look for commonalities between different concepts and chapters. There is often a single underlying theme and that is important to capture whenever possible. Put what you discover on paper and describe it in your own words. This is important for your own learning from the book since once you’ve thought about it and paraphrased it, you will remember much longer than if you simple copy or re-write something the author said in the first place.

Take Notes, Underline or Highlight Important Content

Marking important points in a book is very valuable. I use a technique of simply drawing a line down the page beside any content I thought was very important or useful. Just a simple mark in the margins and nothing more. That way, I can easily flip through a book and quickly see the pages that have points of interest on them and I can reread those parts and refresh my memory. This is particularly useful if you reread a book a year or more later and have forgotten a lot fo the content. Rereading just those important areas will quickly let you remind yourself of all the important points in the book and it just takes a few minutes to have a great refresher!

Some people (and I’ve done this too) will write notes, underline or even yellow highlight important text right in there book. Not everyone will be willing to do this and I’ve had discussions with some friends that would NEVER write in a book since they want to preserve the authors writing without adding your own thoughts for the next reader. You can always make notes in a notepad while you read or just jot down page numbers to come back to that you felt were particularly useful. Tear that page out and leave it in the book so you can easily come back to it at a later date.

Always Include Your Own Opinion

People are social beings and love the opinion of others. They like to make their own opinions as well, but for something new, they will latch on to yours until they form there own, so your opinion is particularly useful for a book review. Think of these two examples, which are you more likely to read?

1. This book was a superbly written and one of the best books in its genre, but I really didn’t enjoy reading it personally, I couldn’t relate to it.
2. This book got bad ratings and some people said they didn’t like it, but I absolutely loved it! It is now one of my favorite books of all time and I’ll definitely be reading it again sometime!

Did you pick #1, or #2. Most people pick #2, especially if that is from someone they know, since we all value a personal opinion more than ratings or a critic.

A book review should always include your personal opinion of the book and how you felt about it. Did you like it, was it enjoyable, useful or easy to relate to? How did it make you feel? Was it easy to read? Exciting? Boring? Whatever you felt while reading it, capture that in your review. It’s often great to make comparisons to other similar books as the reader may have read that book so will easily connect your references to your new review.

Apply Something From the Book and Your Review

The best part of any book is remembering it and whenever possible using that in your life somehow. A great way for this is to look for at minimum, one thing, you will definitely apply from the book. I usually have a few items that I look to apply and if you always plan to apply something from a book, its much easier to find things that are practical and easy to apply, no matter how subtle they are presented in the book. Mark them down, remind yourself of them after the book and schedule yourself a follow up to check if you’ve done it in a week and then a month later. No matter what it is, applying something from a book will help you remember other content from the book as well, as actions are always more tightly associated in your mind so those actions help strengthen your memory recall with others portions of the book as well.

Tell Someone Else About the Book

One more things that makes your review even more useful and easier to remember is to tell someone else about it. Whether this is written or just spoken with a friend or colleague, its great to share something you’ve learned from a book. Its even better to share with them what you plan to apply and your opinions on the book if they are curious or interested in reading it as well. Even though I put up a review of many of the books I read here on LearnThis.ca , I always make a habit of telling someone in person about my latest book I’ve read as well. Don’t always tell the same person about every book you read unless you know they are interested. If you own it the book, always offer to lend it to them if they are interested in reading it themselves after your recommendation or review.

I hope this was useful to see not only how to write a review about a book, but how to take something from reading any book. I started reading reviews on books as a tool to remember them and that eventually spun off into a desire to write other topics which is why I started this blog in the first place. I’ve certainly refined my reviews in the last couple of years and I’d love to hear from others any way I could improve them further and if you have any suggestions on writing great book reviews. If you are just interested in reading and learning them well, here is a great article at The Practice of Leadership called, How to read a Business Book . Enjoy!

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 3 Comments »

Obviously I write a lot of articles about learning things on this site. Learning is a great way to gain knowledge and you probably already know if you read many of my articles that I like to also talk about what you can actually do with that information or what steps you can take to put it into practice. That is the key with making change in your life because it is not enough simply to know something or learn it, you need to actually practice it. That is one reason I love the blog, "Practice This ", which is a blog on that topic I regularly read with a perfect name!)

This is important for influencing and leading others as well. You want to demonstrate what you know, instead of just talking about it. Its easy to come across as being arrogant or even a hypocrite to some if you are not able to demonstrate or practice what you preach. So, always look for ways to show others what you know through your actions, not just from talking about your wealth of knowledge. When you read an article, a book or take a training course, look for some specific things you can practice from that as soon as possible. Take some actions steps to ensure you do something to make a shift and you are not just talking about it.

After putting that into practice, the next progression for change is to become reliable with it, or habitual. This is the point where you no longer have to think or work hard to make it happen, it is just something you regularly do without even putting extra attention to it. And finally, once you are truly reliable in these actions the final step would be to teach it to others to really demonstrate your mastery of that subject.

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 3 Comments »

One of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned is to master the control of my state of mind. I first learned this from Anthony Robbins’ books and audio courses and I’ve since reinforced and enhanced this learning by studying the mind, dreams, and other authors and teachers of the mind and psychology. The premise behind what this is about, is that your state of mind affects everything you do in life, either directly or indirectly. Your state of mind has a direct impact on many actions within the body and these are highly tied to your emotions, or how you feel. So if you are willing to learn to control those things that affect your state of mind, then you can have whatever state of mind you like which ultimately leads you to feeling however you like!

What Affects Your State

Many physical attributes affect your state of mind as well as your experiences, words, actions and even things like your diet. However, a number of physical attributes are directly under your own control and so once you learn this, you can understand ways to control your own state. Here are some important things that have a direct response in your mind and on your body.

• Body posture – Hold your head up high and your shoulders back and its an automatic response in the mind of more confidence.
• Breathing – Slow deep breathing does many things for your health and body to remove toxins, this also delivers needed oxygen to your brain which affects your state.
• Facial Expressions – The most significant here is smiling. Its physically impossible to really smile and NOT affect the mind, its subconscious and automatic.
• Energy Levels – How well you energize your self including your activity, exercise, and health affect your mind as well.
• Diet – what you eat has an impact on your state of mind as well.
• Thoughts – Directly and massively impact your state of mind.
  

So, all these things are important, yet the most critical of all is your thoughts. It affects your emotions completely and the good thing, thoughts are controlled entirely by the conscious mind, nothing else! What this means is that the way you feel and your state of mind is controlled by your thoughts.

Remembering a Specific State

The reasons this is important is that you can learn to remember a specific state of mind, and by thinking about that and visualizing everything about that state of mind, you can easily reproduce it and the response of feelings that it generated. You do this by:

1. First pick the feeling you want to reproduce. For most people this is joy or happiness or peace or satisfaction.
2. Then, think of the times that you completely feel that way. Spend some time to remember the details about those feelings and pick what has been the most intense moments of those feelings.
3. Visualize the things you saw in that moment, put yourself into that surrounding, see the colors, the lights, the objects. Spend time visualizing the major components as well as the minor details, the imperfections you can see, the textures and shading, the shadows and reflections if there are any. Remember as many details as possible. Close your eyes if it helps to really visualize it in your mind. There is an interesting article on Practice This about closing your eyes to see more which is about visualization.
4. Now remember the things you could hear in that moment. Think of all the sounds every object makes, or the actions or nature in that environment. Think of the sounds that each object makes when put into motion or moved.
5. Move on to the sense of smell next. What specific smells can you remember. What season was it, can you smell it? Can you smell and sense the air, the humidity, the people and objects in that setting?
6. What feelings or senses of touch did you have. What were you feeling in your body? What clothes are touching you skin? Can you feel anything against your skin, the wind perhaps? What are you touching and how does it feel exactly. Rough, smooth, what other textures. Spend some time and just imagine feeling all those things to put yourself into the same place that you experiences this emotion you are after.
7. Change your own body or face to match what you remember. Were you smiling? Were you moving about in motion, if you can, do those things while visualizing all these other senses to put yourself back exactly into that memory.

All of these steps will bring back memories of that same emotion and state of mind which will in turn, leave you feeling that same state of mind just from remembering it.

Activate that State

The best thing to do with the ability to follow these visualization steps to get into a state of mind is to next, associate that state of mind with something instant. This allows you to activate that state and learn to call upon it whenever you want. One technique for this is to associate that state of mind with some words and actions you can do and say. Pick something that isn’t common for you to do and use that to activate that same state of mind. You want something unique. It could be to snap your fingers, clap your hands, a funny face, a specific body stance, a weird or loud word or phrase, any of these things could be used to associate with your state of mind. To associate it, just do your action or say your words and immediately begin thinking of all those feelings and memories about that state. Do this out loud and in action a number of times over and over. Put some energy into it and be enthusiastic. Keep repeating it until you seem to be able to really feel that every time you activate your state with your words or action you can feel or sense that state of mind and memories it is generated from.

Practice Switching States

And finally practice is where this all becomes useful. To change state, you need to not only associate that state but practice switching states quickly. Pick another state of mind (ideally something quite opposite to the state you first picked) and go through this process again. Do all the steps to learn that new state and really identify with the feelings and senses for that new state. Make a new association (or action) and repeat it a number of times.

Now, you have two separate states, each with its own action. Practice switching between these states by alternating your activation. Start off by giving yourself about 15 seconds in each state. Practice to change faster and faster until you can literally change your state of mind in just an instant. You should be able to activate all those feelings, your memories, thoughts and even all the senses in just a short moment. This can take a bit of time to practice, but just 10 minute sessions for a few nights in a row can really get you quick with this.

Actually Using your State of Mind

So, now that you know you can change your state of mind just by activating it and changing your thoughts and since you’ve conditioned your mind to instantly change its state basically on command, you can do this whenever you want. I’m assuming most people picked a positive set of feelings to learn to associate so you can now use that to change your perception, mood and responses in more difficult or not as friendly environments. Maybe its with someone or something you don’t like but want to kill the negative emotions that go along with that? Well, this will work for that too. As long as you have a stronger associations with your activation to put you into that state of mind, than the things in that situations to put in the state you don’t want, then you can instantly change your mindset make things more like how you really want them.

The more you use this, the more you’ll look to use it and the more you will train your subconscious to recover from feelings and mind sets you don’t want to experience. You can literally get to a point where anything you consider bad or to be replaced state wise, happens automatically by your mind once you’ve become so practiced at doing this.

So, I encourage you to look for ever opportunity to use your knew state associations and practice it. Learn new associations and use them as well. You will eventually be doing this to every negative response subconsciously or automatically without even thinking about. You can experience a lot more joy and happiness in life if you change the way your mind responds to stimuli. My next article I’m going to publish is about how you can use this idea of controlling your mind to impact EVERY response you make in your life.

Posted by Mike King under Life | 7 Comments »

Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan

From the authors of Crucial Conversations (another highly recommended book), Influencer is another brilliant guide book to day to day things that have a massive impact on people’s lives. This book in particular focuses on a specific set of strategies that anyone can use to influence people in difficult situations. It is not a motivational only type book or a set of vague principles, it has specific steps and real world examples from some of the world’s best influencers which help guide you to learning an effective approach. This book is also NOT a guide to getting people to say yes, its much deeper and longer laster than that, where you want to influence and change people’s lasting behavior!

The book is written in 2 parts, each worth the price of the book on its own!

Part 1 – The Power to Change Anything

The premise of the book is based on learning from the best influencers in the world and everything is presented clearly based on various real life studies that demonstrate each of the author’s findings perfectly. The reader is encouraged to learn more by seeking out and studying the best examples in the areas of interest and the author’s have certainly put that into practice throughout the book as well. Doing this helps to identify areas of influence in a situation, this is something I particularly liked. I’ve always believed that if you have something to learn, its most effective to seek out and learn from the best. Another major premise of the book is looking at behaviors of people and how that can be used with influence. This behavior based analysis is also very dear to me and reinforced with specific techniques well in the early chapters of the book. The last section of Part 1 is about various methods of changing people’s minds. I really like this section as well with regards to using story telling to influence others and change their minds. I’ve always been a good story teller which I now recognize as one of the reasons why I’ve had as much influence in my life as I’ve had. By this point in the book (only about 1/4 of the way through) I figured this is by far one of the best books I’ve EVER read. The rest of the book easily holds up to this as well. This is a book with so much actionable content and techniques, you could easily have to re-read this book each year to really practice and implement all the principles outlined.

Part 2 – Make Change Inevitable

The second part of the book focuses on the strategic model that works to master influence. Its outlined with great clarity using specific real life examples of each of the 6 sources of influence. The sources are categorized as follows:

All of these 6 sources are areas to overcome to be a great influencer. Its important to learn to recognize each of these 6 sources and learn to address all of them, not just one or two. Having a lasting influence requires major work and needs each of these areas to be recognized and addressed before a significant difference can ever be made. Learning to see these is the first step and the book’s examples show how difficult, yet effective it is to see each one. Putting effort into several of these sources (or all) will result in significantly more influence than if they are acted on individually.

I found the stories used as examples to be captivating and impressive since they are areas that most consider the toughest situations to deal with. One illustration of these techniques comes in stories about annihilating the nasty Guinea worm from villages in Nigeria. Another example throughout the book is in studying what Dr. Silbert has done at Delancey with transforming lifelong felons into productive citizens. There are other examples as well used throughout the book.

Overall, I think this is a fantastic book, but it is also not an easy take it and apply it kind of guide book. The data used to come to the conclusions is obviously massive and the work it takes in the stories of influence presented in the book are also huge. However, the book challenges you to change your thinking and to look outside your normal view when wanting to have more influence. I think scaling the steps and the model from the book into day to day life is fairly easy, since simply knowing what to look for helps in how you choose to respond. The difficulty is in how far you take the influence strategies presented. So, its a great book and I highly recommend it if you have ever wished to have more power to change things.

Note: If you’re interested, one of the author’s, David Maxfield, posted a short comment and summary about this book from another review here.

Posted by Mike King under Book Reviews | 3 Comments »

If it’s not already obvious by the new site title here at Learn This, I hope this site will be a resource for people to learn from. While I plan to publish a lot of articles on many topics (the planned queue is getting larger every day), I do this primarily to help others learn some of the things I’ve learned myself. Now some I’ve learned by watching others, some by trial and error, some I’ve learned by talking with or reading articles from others, and some I’ve learned just by practice and observation. In doing this over the years, I’ve learned that the best way to really learn something is to teach that same thing to someone else. Anytime you have to teach something, you are forced to plan, think and act on what you learned which really drives it home.

There is a LOT of other personal learning benefits to teaching and sharing what you know. Here are some of the advantages in teaching for the purpose of learning:

• When teaching you review content which refreshes your memory of the content
• You get asked questions so need to understand it in order to respond
• Teaching it often makes you ask questions and research or study things in more depth
• Its wonderful to have others appreciate your help and to see them learn
• Makes you feel great to share with others
• Teaching and learning exercise you memory which keeps the brain healthy longer in life
• Commit things to your long term memory to increase your knowledge
• Helps you give advice or information in various situations (depends what you teach)
• Provides great conversation starters talking about things you teach
• Most people are more interested in a person who can teach them something

Take this site for example, while it does take a lot of time to publish a site like this and I’d love to have people think it is simply generous to do so, its not all for the benefit of others, as you can tell from the list above. What are some other things you get out of teaching?

Posted by Mike King under Learning | 4 Comments »

OK, I wrote recently about not setting any new year’s resolutions and that was really because resolutions are generally missed, forgotten, ignored and never adjusted. They are not written, planned or even thought about that clearly. They are VERY different from goals. So, I’m going to be exploring goals and goal setting, tracking and following goals for the next several articles and I wanted to just introduce a bit about goals and what a difference they can make in one’s life.

Setting and achieving goals is a process, it is not a single event. I think this is the biggest mistake that people make with goals. They set them, leave them and eventually realize when its way to late, that they didn’t achieve them and voila, they no longer believe that goals work. That is simply not true. Goals do work, but to make them work, you also have to work your goals. There is a process that is needed to attend to them, track them, adjust them and even to identify them in the first place. They don’t just happen!

What are Goals Really Good For?

Plain and simply, goals are the one fundamental key to success and achievement. They are the key to accomplishment in every aspect of life. Living without having and utilizing goals means living in the wake of reaction and circumstance. Its living just to live instead of choosing how to live and why to live. Goals allow a person to focus their energy and life for purposes and passions. They help to add value to a person’s life by keeping them on track with what means most to them and they help a person to better understand themselves and what is important to them. Goals are a way to live with meaning and obsession for what brings the most joy and satisfaction to a person. They are something to express passion for, to motivate you and others who see your determinism and they simply bring to your life more of what you want.

Different aspects of Goals

So, the point these articles is that I’m going to reviews goals in a few separate sections. Its a big enough topic its easier to take in pieces and helpful if you are already experienced with goal setting but need some helpful tips in just one area. Goal setting really is important enough (and there are many blogs and series out there to show this) that it can be the sole focus for an entire site or longer series as well. I hope to cover a few specific things I’ve learned from using goals through my life and I want to present it in a short and actionable way so it is easy to help others enhance their experiences with goals as well. So, I’ve broken down a few separate articles into the following sections:

• Setting and Identifying goals
• Tracking and Monitoring goals
• Completing and Closing goals

I believe goals should be focused on achieving life lasting skills, relationships and changed behaviors or habits, not simply temporary or material things. The reason I believe this is because temporary and material things don’t really bring a true lasting satisfaction to anyone, so achieving them doesn’t build on the value of goals nearly as much as goal accomplishment in those other areas. A goal that is remembered and lasts forever will be much higher valued and will re-enforce the value of goal setting in the first place, even more. So, through these goal setting articles, keep focused on behavior impact of your goals, things you want with a lasting impact, not just some new job, toy, or even some dollar figure. What will last for years to come? What will you be most proud of on your death bed? What will help you leave a legacy to others when you pass on? Those are the types of content for great goals and accomplishing them is truly something to be proud of.

Goal Setting Series

Part 1: Goal Setting – Introduction
Part 2: Goal Setting – Setting and Identifying
Part 3: Goal Setting – Tracking and Monitoring
Part 4: Goal Setting – Completing and Close

Posted by Mike King under Success | 8 Comments »