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Are you an avid reader of self help or self improvement books? Because many people that I know are constantly reading, constantly learning, constantly searching, constantly gaining a deeper understanding of what it takes to change your life. Unfortunately, however, it is not reading that changes your life, but doing – and far too many people are content with the feel good factor that self help books often give you, whilst nothing concrete actually changes for the better in their lives.

The constant reading of self help books is very similar to collecting a large number of brochures and travel guides about some beautiful place that you would really love to visit. You pour over the descriptions and other people’s experiences, you admire the beautiful photographs, read and re-read all the reviews, imagine what it would be like to be there, immerse yourself in this wonderful voyage that you so dearly want to take. But you never actually make the reservation or purchase the ticket – you never commit to taking the trip yourself. What’s my point? Reading about how to achieve the life that you really want and doing something about it are two entirely different things. Reading all those feel-good stories about how others have changed their minds and, as a consequence, changed their lives, may well give you that warm feeling inside, you may even fully understand and appreciate how they’ve done it and how you could do it. But tomorrow morning, when you drag yourself out of bed for another day’s drudgery, what has changed? Precious little! When you face another day of worry, doubt, stress, financial difficulty, low self-esteem or simply even boredom, what good will all that reading have done you? If anything, it will have made you even more restless and more dissatisfied than you were in the first place.

Reading, understanding and intellectually appreciating what it takes to change your life is going to make no difference to your life until you put your learning into practice – and daily practice at that! And therein lies the problem for the vast majority of us so-called normal people – we’re afraid of stepping outside our cocoon of normality, we’re afraid to be different, we’re fearful of standing up and being counted. In short, we are afraid to take what we perceive as some risk-laden leap of faith.

On the other hand, if you’ve managed to come across a self help book (or a really good website for that matter!) that gives you simple and practical step-by-step instructions on how to change your life (and there aren’t many of them – most of them are ‘feel-good books’ or ‘treble your income in six weeks’ nonsense) then it should have dawned on you by now that there is no leap of faith required. All you need to take is take small daily – there’s that word again ‘daily’ – steps that shake you out of the stupor in which most normal people are just about existing. This stupor is the net result of a normal subconscious mind that operates your life on automatic pilot so that you keep doing the same things the same way. As a result, your life will never change until you take some simple practical action.

To change your life, you’ve got to change the way you’re living the life that you have at present. In other words, you’ve got to find some way of grabbing your subconscious mind’s attention, to bring it back to reality, to switch off that automatic pilot. As I said, no leap of faith is required. Indeed, no major action is required of you at all. All you have to do is to start small – by doing something as simple as changing your morning routine – because small things shock your subconscious mind out of its comfort zone. Your success and happiness – an end to all worry and the creation of the life that you would really like to live – depends on your ability to focus your mind or, to put it more simply, to pay attention – not to what you want out of life, but to pay attention to the all important business of living in the only place and time that you can actually live – the here and now. Something as apparently insignificant as dressing yourself the other way (think about it, you always put the same leg into your pants first, you always lead with the same arm when putting on your shirt) will do for starters.

Because once you begin to do anything differently, once you begin to call your subconscious mind to attention, once out of your routine, you will begin to realize that absolutely everything in your life can be done differently. When this realization dawns upon you, you will find yourself in a completely different place – where things that were otherwise unconscionable suddenly become obvious – and easily doable. And where anything and everything great in life can come about. I know this to be true, my clients or even people that have read a couple of my articles or watched some of my videos, know this to be not just true, but the key to happiness and effortless success. At the end of the day, however, it’s up to you to start doing the things that will change your life, to stop reading and start doing.