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Well, it's been a while since I've sat in front of a microphone. This is Eddie at the Readwell podcast. And you know, sometimes life gets in the way. And for me, that's exactly what happened. I was in the process of buying a building in order to start a bookstore, one of my life's greatest passions. And things didn't go as planned. Essentially, in the act of buying that building, I did the inspections and found several issues with the structure. There were mold issues and so many things. But in that process of buying the building, I had to cancel my office, office lease, where I was working for my day job, because I was going to move to that building, and I had to cancel that lease so that the timeline would make sense. All of that to say that when I canceled my purchase of the building, I no longer had a place to work. Well, today I'm going to talk to you about what I've done instead and where I'm now working. And we're also going to talk about how in the sort of craziness of all of this, I lost my reading habit. Life got in the way, and I have not been reading much. And now that things have settled down, I found myself looking at my books and I felt so many different feelings, and I found it was actually hard to get back into the habit of reading. I went back and applied some of my own advice, and I found a few things that helped me settle back in to the art of being with books. So I hope if you find yourself struggling with building a reading habit, that the tips I share with you today will help you the same way they've helped me. Let's get into it. Welcome to this week's episode of the Reading Read well podcast. My name is Eddie Hood and I'm your host, where I believe it's more important to read well than to be well read. So grab your favorite book, open up your notes, and let's get ready to learn something fascinating. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Read well Podcast. My name is Eddie Hood, and I'm so happy to be here with you today. And for all of you who have been supporting me while I've been away from the microphone, thank you. It's been nice to see that the podcast has not died, that people are still listening. I get nice messages consistently in email and through social of people who share their favorite episodes and things they're learning. So today is all about rebuilding a reading habit when life gets in the way. Here's what I've learned, and maybe this is a Wide statement, but I'm going to make it anyway that there are two kinds of readers. You're either in the camp where no matter what happens to you, no matter how you feel, no matter where you stand in life, financially, emotionally, physically, for you, reading is always a pleasure. It never causes anxiety or stress in your life. It's just something that eases the pain. Now, the other group of people, the group that I'm in, feel somewhat different about reading. For those people, reading is something that if not tended to, can start to feel a bit like a project. It can feel like a to do list item. You might walk into your room of books and look at them and feel almost a sense of shame or guilt that you're not doing enough, that you're not reading enough, that you're not, you know, really spending time with the these books you care about. And sometimes it's easier to shut the door and pretend that you'll make time for them later, knowing full well that you probably won't because you're dealing with life. So that reading anxiety is a very real thing. For me now, it doesn't exist all of the time. Once I'm in a good reading habit and I've got my life in a routine that goes away and I remember why I love books. I remember how to have a relationship with them and so on. But yeah, when I fall out of reading, I definitely need a little bit of emotional pickup in order to find my way back to a friendship with them. So here's what happened to me in the process of moving, you know, shutting down my office, I, I needed a place to work. And my son, my oldest son, if you're listening, how you doing? He moved out about a year ago and his room has sat vacant in our home for over a year now. I'm very proud of him. He is going to school to be a pilot. Yeah, he's in aviation school right now, so he's not living at home. And with this bedroom vacant, it was the perfect opportunity for me since I had to close my lease at work to say, you know what? It's time to build my dream home office. And if you know anything about me, I have a couple hobbies. I am a hobby driven human. One of those hobbies is that I love woodworking. I grew up watching woodworking shows instead of cartoons. I loved the New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram. It was one of my favorite shows. He would come in every, every week and just share an amazing build. I would watch that and I was just amazed and so my whole life, I've grown up finding woodworking as this sort of magical art form. And several years ago, I started saving up some money and buying tools here and there and slowly developed a wood shop at my home. And with that sort of blessing, I have been able to find time to build furniture and other things. And I will say my first attempts were terrifying. But over the years, they have gotten slightly better. And I thought I would apply that skill set to this home office at Ergo. I thought, you know what? I'm going to not only build an office, but I'm going to build a home library. And to make it even better, I'm going to put a secret bookcase in there so that when you pull a book, it opens that bookcase into a secret room. My son's old bedroom is quite unique in this case because it actually has two separate doors within that room. One leads to a standard closet, which is pretty small. The other door leads to a small storage room, which is not massive. It's maybe 7ft by 9ft. I should do the measurements. I don't even know. It's not huge, but it's definitely big. And I thought, you know what? I'm going to make that storage room the secret room. And so what I did is I buckled down right before Christmas with everybody going on break. I had less commitments at work because we were all taking vacation. My son, my second son, Carter, who is going to college to be an engineer, saw this as a great opportunity to help dad out in building something really great. So he helped me design this thing. He got on his. It's sort of one of those modeling programs where you can design anything. Laid out the room and the bookcases and the secret door and figured it all out for me. And then he had time off. So over the Christmas break, we built bookcases, we ripped up carpet, we, we did all of the things. We did the electrical and the drywall and put in the lighting and all that stuff. It took about 30 days of maybe 8 hours of work a day. I, I, I really had to take time off from work. I had to dig in and focus. And the reason why we pushed so hard so quick is because my lease in my office space was ending. I had to be out of my office space by January 25th. Not much time since we started December 23rd. So, yeah, we put in roughly eight hours a day and went to it. And that meant that it was lots of physical labor every day, moving wood around, building, painting, drilling, chopping, all of this stuff. That goes with this madness. Now, if you're curious and if you subscribe to my YouTube channel, I filmed the whole thing and you'll see from start to end what we did. We're currently editing that right now, but it will come out soonish sometime in February. I'm very excited to watch that video itself. And yes, you'll meet Carter there and you'll see him designing the room and all of the fun things we went through because we worked so hard. There really was no time to read books. In fact, I run a book club at the Readable Podcast, something I'm very proud of. And even then I was struggling to read that book with with my friends there. I did manage to keep up with that reading because I have to lead. Well, no, I get to lead that conversation. But in the moment, during the month, it felt like I had to do it because I was just so tired and so exhaust from trying to build this space. So again, life happened to me and the act of actually opening up a book and wanting to sit down and read felt very impossible. Now that it's done, and, well, it's mostly done, I have a few things I need to tweak in this little room of mine, which I'm recording in at the moment. I'm very honored to be here, but now that it's done, I sat down for the first time this Monday, just a few days ago, and I looked at all of these books, felt super grateful for all of them. And I also felt that feeling I spoke about at the beginning of this episode, the feeling of reader guilt and anxiety. I didn't know where to start because I had not kept up my reading habit. It did not feel natural to open a book and sit down and give myself the time and the space to read. It felt like I should go on and do other things with my day. Clean the house, finish the office, answer some emails, and so on. I felt guilty holding a book. So how do you build a reading habit when life happens? Well, there are many ways to do this. And if you're in the second camp with me where you. You feel this reader guilt at times, there's a process I go through and again, this happens to me occasionally. I mean, there are times when I get sick or my kids get sick or something horrible happens at work and I'm pulled out of my normal reading habit. So this process has worked for me many, many times and I'd like to share it with you. And here's what I do. So the first thing, the very first Step is, I don't set reading goals. I don't say, okay, I'm going to start a reading habit, so we're going to read 30 pages a day or we're going to read a book a week. I mean, all of you know that that's not my. My agenda anyway. I never set goals saying I'm going to read 100 books a year or something crazy like that. For me, it's about reading well and reading slowly, taking notes and applying the ideas. So when I get started and I want to establish a reading habit, the very first thing I do is simply hold the book. Now, for me, this sort of brings back feelings of being a kid. When I would go into bookstores and I would go to the library, and I would just be amazed by all of the possibilities that these books bring. There's something about holding a book in my hands that changes the way I feel. And I don't force myself to open it. I don't force myself to read it. I just hold it and I remember what it feels like to be that kid again. Now, once I've picked up a book, the second step is not even to read it, but it's just to carry it around with me for the day. A book is a companion. It's something that I like to keep with me at all times. Because if I am stuck in line, if I have to, I don't know if I'm waiting for lunch or something and I've ordered, it's a great friend to turn to and have a conversation with something I much prefer over, I don't know, Instagram or something. But, you know, in order to get back to that sense of feeling, I don't put pressure on myself. I just simply carry the book around. I'll carry it with me to the grocery store, I'll carry it with me to Starbucks. I'll carry it with me to my. Well, my office is now in my basement, so I'll carry it with me to my basement. But you get the idea. I just bring it with me like a friend. No rules, no pressure. I'm just holding the book. That does several things for me. One, it tells me that it's okay that I'm not constantly reading. It tells me that it's okay that I'm not, you know, getting everything possible out of this book right now. And it also reminds me that this book is always here for me, that it is ready to have a conversation when I'm ready to have that conversation. And I feel like I have to Train my brain to come down from the clouds, right? To come down from that busyness of always being productive and effective and always having the house clean and always, you know, whatever. Fill in the blanks that you struggle with. I have many things that I struggle with and just by holding the book, it seems to anchor me and it reminds me that, hey, when you're ready, Eddie, I am here to have that conversation. So then after a day or two of carrying this book around, I feel like lots of the pressure of being a great reader kind of goes away. I don't feel like that guilt or shame is there anymore. I'm just more excited to get into the books again. So then I open the book and again, without pressure, without rules, without goals that are unattainable, I just start to read. Now here's what happens when I begin to read. It's always the same thing. It's always a struggle. This is what happens. I read the pages of the book without my reading brain on. It's more a brain akin to business and family and so on. And so by that, what I'm doing is editing myself and I have lots of self doubt and self concerns. Maybe this all sounds very melodramatic to you. I don't know many of you who are in the first camp who just read no matter what. And it's easy for you. You probably think this whole episode sounds crazy, but for me, when I first start reading again, I have thoughts popping into my head, like, am I doing this right? Should I be taking notes right now? Why am I not understanding more of what I'm reading? Why am I not cleaning the kitchen right now or answering emails? My head is full of everything but what I'm reading on the page. Even though the words are coming into my brain and leaving, I am not fully with them. And this is important to understand. It's okay. It's fine that I'm not with my reading brain yet. All I need to know is that the reading brain will come. I had a great conversation, it's been about a year ago now with Dr. Marianne Wolf, who wrote the book Reader Come Home. And she talks about how our brains are designed for sound and for sight, but not so much for language. Language is something we have to learn. It is a connection we have to build in our brain. And reading is specifically good at helping us do that. But because we have to build those connections, if we don't consistently keep up with reading, then those connections get a little weak, right? And it's normal that you don't feel like a great reader at first, so I just give myself some space. I, I, I go into reading knowing that it's going to take a couple days for me to remember what it feels like to really enjoy the process of reading, to lose myself in these books and to give myself the grace to spend time with them and not feel like I should be doing other things. This moment in time. I started this process on Monday. It is now Thursday. And I did this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. And finally Thursday, this morning I sat down and I read some books I've been meaning to read and I forgot everything and I was fully in that text and it feels so good to have that reading brain back. And I'm looking forward to continuing my reading and establishing this reading habit in my new space. But listen, everybody, it took me, you know, four, four days of consistently showing up and consistently being patient with myself in order for the guilt and the shame to go away and just to dig in and be a reader again. So that's it. You know, if I hope that helps you in your process, I'm not sure where you're at. I wrote about this in my newsletter this week and by the way, if you're not subscribed to the newsletter, go ahead and check it out. You can go to thereadwellpodcast.com and just put in your email. It's free. And every Wednesday I send out a message on reading well and the process of being with books. This week I wrote about this experience and how it was a bit of a challenge for me. And I also, in that newsletter, make a book recommendation every week, which I'm going to do right now in my home library, the Secret Door that I have, which is a ton of fun. It's very mysterious. I don't know, I don't have a good word for it right now, but the biggest, hardest part of this entire build for this library was choosing the book that would open the Secret Door. And I, I did pick one. I chose the Count of Monte Cristo. And if you've read that book, maybe you know why. But I was asked a lot over the past week in social media why I picked that book. I'll tell you why. Well, several reasons. One, I, I love this book. It's a fun book to read. Now, you've probably seen the movie. The movie is really good. And I can tell you this, the book is 100 times better. It is just, it is a fantastic book. So much so that it is the book that got my kids to love reading right I mean, we growing up with them that we read all of the Harry Potter books and so on, and my kids have just been raised around books. But it was the Count of Monte Cristo that they read in high school on their own, by themselves, that got them to realize the power of a great story. This is a book that is full of secret tunnels and hidden treasure and, and you know, sword fighting and romance. And it is the classic just story of just greatness. It, it has all of the good stuff in it. Revenge. And you know, if you haven't read it, go read it. It is worth the time. And if you've been meaning to read more of the classics, the Count of Monte Cristo is not a bad place to start. So that's it for this week. I don't know how the audio is sounding for this podcast. I hope it's well. Please be patient with me as we work through this. I have an incredible podcast editor. Thank you, Paul, for all that you do. I really, really am grateful for him and his talents, but I'm going to have to be playing with the sound of this room. So again, please be patient as we work through the quality of this. It is a new space and new recording environment, but we're going to it. And as always, until next week, remember to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thanks everyone. If you'd like to take your reading to the next level, then head on over to thereadwellpodcast.com there you'll find daily posts on how to read well. You'll also get access to all of my book notes and tools for becoming a better reader. And as always, don't forget to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. Thank you for listening to the Read well podcast.