In this short blog post I want to take on a belief that far too many of my students have when they come to my course - and that is the notion of reading being a skill that you learn once and will then be fixed and unchangeable. This, however, could not be further from the truth.

Reading, like any skill, is learned, trained and mastered.

Reading, like any skill, gets better with the amount of time we apply to reading in our daily life. If you hardly ever read - don't expect that you enjoy reading or that you possess great reading skills.

A man who reads one book a year does not have the same reading skills as a person who reads one book a day.

In sports, the key to success is training and applying the trained methods - again and again - until we master them. This same principle applies to your reading skill.

To the same effect if you only read fiction - you've mastered reading fiction in no time. But if you change genre and begin reading non-fiction - you'll leave your comfort...

This is without a doubt one of the major reasons people sign up for my speed reading courses. Their constant lack of focus while they are reading. They begin reading some text and half-way through the page – and not even half-way through – their mind begins to wander. They get caught up with their everyday worries, trying to remember some task, a quote from a movie, a conversation with a friend, what they want for dinner, what they want to do over the weekend and so on.

Has this happened to you?

Well, it most likely has since over 97% of the people joining my course have experienced this.

One of the main reasons for this is that we are bored while reading – our old reading habits hamper the flow of information that is processed in our mind – and our mind tunes out – begins to wander.

The main problem is our habit to read silently aloud – to vocalize the words - in our mind. A habit that starts at an early age – when we are asked to read...