5. Make a Plan of Action. To achieve and stay focused upon your objective, create an action plan. What are steps you will take to get you from where you are to where you want to be? Your strategies will likely change as you go along, so set your goals in concrete and your plans in sand. Keep your eye on goal, but remain flexible in your path to it.

6. Measure Your Progress. You can't change what you don't measure. Create mechanisms that will allow you to see your progress. Use charts. Log your actions. Use anything that will encourage you by allowing you to objectively track your progress. We all need feedback—it's breakfast of champions.

7. Maintain a Support System. Have a Master Mind Group. Use Buddy System. Surround yourself with people who will encourage and challenge you. Be accountable to someone other than yourself. Read positive books. Review past successes.

8. Focus On Only a Few Goals at a Time. You can achieve anything you desire, but not EVERYTHING you desire. Concentrate your efforts and your energy on just a few. I might have dozens of goals and projects, but I keep three key goals in forefront of my mind.

9. Take Action Every Day. An important objective warrants daily attention. A 400-page novel is not written all at once. To many, writing a 400-page novel would be overwhelming. But a little over a page a day will get it done in a year. Every goal can be broken down into doable tasks done consistently.

10. Celebrate Your Milestones. Mark your successes and acknowledge yourself for your progress. As you achieve one goal, you can see better and believe more easily in accomplishment of others. You deserve to succeed and you deserve to celebrate your successes.

The untrained eye takes about a quarter of a second at each fixation, and takes in 2 or 3 words per fixation.

By speeding up you eye movements, you'll learn to make fewer fixations per line and take in more words per fixation.

Try this exercise:

If you use a glass 'anti-glare' screen, draw 2 vertical lines in felt-tip, 5 cms apart, so that you have a strip 5 cms wide located over middle of text you are reading.

Now move your eyes in a 'Z' pattern down this central strip, at a speed faster slightly faster than is comfortable.

Because your Mind is not reading each word, it is forced to 'fill in gaps'. This engages much more of Mind, since it has to build associations and patterns in written material. This in turn leads to greater comprehension and increased memory of what was read.

This technique takes advantage of fact that much of written English is highly redundant; a lot of words can be skipped without any loss of meaning.

When your eyes move down a central strip of text, you also engage much more of your peripheral vision. And that in turn brings right hemisphere of brain into reading process. You make much more use of right-brain's ability to synthesize and build relationships within material.

So speed reading is not just about reading faster; it also allows you to access much more of brain and thereby increases your comprehension and creativity.

For an excellent, free, speed-reading course, visit:

- The Speed Reading Course http://www.trans4mind.u-net.com/speed_reading/index.html

Here are some more free speed-reading sites:

- The Study Hall Free Speed Reading Programs http://www.studyhall.com/sread.htm

- Road To Reading Home http://www.roadtoreading.org/

- University of Texas Speed Reading http://www.utexas.edu/student/lsc/sprdg.html

- Speed Reading Links http://www.readingsoft.com/flinks.html

- ReadRace: Free Java application for speed reading http://supershareware.co.uk/Apps/8080.asp

- WannaLearn.com: Personal Enrichment : Speed Reading http://www.wannalearn.com/Personal_Enrichment/Speed_Reading/