Book-Based Behavioral Change

By the time I was in middle school, I had read most of the books at the school library so I began pursuing my parents’ numerous bookshelves. I read The Millionaire Next Door, and wondered how many of our neighbors were secretly wealthy. I read Zig Ziglar’s See You at the Top, intrigued that someone would name their kid “Zig”. I picked up The 5 Love Languages a decade before I would start dating. And I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People long before I had any concept of what “success” might look like.

I have always love reading. For most of my life, I averaged over 100 books per year, often pushing through books that I didn’t enjoy. While seriously ill, I was lucky to read a single book per year. Nowadays, I’m averaging a book a month with a focus on those which will enhance my life, either through learning and inspiration or as part of social gathering with my book club.

When I first met my boyfriend, nearly a decade ago, I was appalled when he said that he had decided in his early-30s that he would only read books that promote and provide tools for behavioral change. Fiction, if I understood correctly, was the luxury of youth. I vehemently disagreed.

However, over the last two decades, I’ve come to categorize books. The books I read are either art or a tool. I enjoy poetry, biographies, and historical fiction, and I expect nothing more from those books than an escape, some inspiration, or a new perspective. Some books, on the other hand, are levers for life change.

In my early-20s, I read Bird by Bird, The Gifts of Imperfection, and The Four Hour Workweek. I read A New Earth, The Doors of Perception, and The Alchemist. In a 2009 positive psychology course, I read Flow, Authentic Happiness, Stumbling on Happiness, and The How of Happiness, and gave presentations on the science of life satisfaction before it was trendy.

By my late-20s, my focused had shifted from spiritual wellness to health, with readings of Deep Nutrition, The End of Alzheimer’s, Abundant Health in a Toxic World, Metabolical, and Eat to Beat Disease. As I read, I adjusted my diet and my lifestyle. And as I made changes to my behavior, I observed the changes to my outcomes.

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Shifting our actions in small ways can have monumental impacts. When it comes to books, someone else has poured hundreds of hours into consolidating and summarizing their life-changing findings. With time, I am realizing that book, are in fact, tools which we can leverage for our own benefit.

Every book listed above influenced behavioral change, and most of those adjustments have been lasting and permanent fixtures in my life. In between those periods of reading focused on happiness and on health was a time of free books galore–books addressing spirituality from angles I had never considered. When I first became ill, I couldn’t help but look back on two in particular that had provided me the tools and habits to face an uncertain future. Intrigued? Check out my latest post on The Heart of The Matter: Two Free Books: Priceless.

Have any books deeply impacted you, changing your life and behavior for the better?