Sitting here on the dawn of another beautiful, and what will be a very hot day here in England, I can at last sit back and reflect on the previous weeks, and the next couple of weeks in Bahrain with Philip and Leila Edwards.
After a couple of days rest in the UK, and with great difficulty, (I could find no travel agency in the UK which would sell me an Alitalia airline ticket), I booked a ticket on-line with Alitalia an early morning flight to Milan.
I usually take the early morning flight, which lands at 11:30am local time in Milano, that gives me enough time to travel to the hotel, freshen up, and prepare for the start of the PhotoReading course at 2pm. This has great benefits to me, for one it cuts down on hotel fees, gives me an extra night at home, plus there is no chance of jet lag hitting me, as I enter the “presentation” mode.
It was the first time I have provided training and worked with Gianni Golfera, and I had two courses to give, PhotoReading and Mind Maps.
I ask people to bring five books with them on the course, each of about 300 hundred pages. Four of the books should be on the same subject matter, say the Queens and Kings of England, 1492 – 1556, as I know lots of people are interested in that period of English history (not). The fifth book, again about 300 pages, should have been read, and the subject known by the participant.
PhotoReading with 40 participants, Milan 2008.
Unfortunately, this was not relayed to the participants, and as the course requires us to PhotoRead or absorb these five books, plus another book, plus articles at 20,000 – 30,000 words per minute (WPM) or a page a second, I had to send the participants out to buy the required books.
A misconception of people is that once a book is PhotoRead, or the page turning has taken place with the blip page seen, that at a conscious level, they will understand all the book. This is not the case, as we have to activate the knowledge, bring the unconscious learning to the conscious mind the knowing mind, and that is the fun part, and it can go on for hours, days, or even years, as our knowledge and interest grows.
We sometimes get one participant that takes that attitude or has that belief. At times it is easy to change their understanding or paradigm, but some get stuck in the mud, believes that they should remember every single word and its’ position on the exact page. No.
So it was with one participant who despite other participants trying to help him, decided that he had completed the activation stage in ten minutes (four books), and still said he did not understand anything. One out of forty is not bad, but not good enough for me, but you can take a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.
The rest? Happy faces, they understood, even those who had come all the way from Sardinia, to attend the course free of charge as they had taken it before.
That is the joy of training for me.
I love my job.