Hey friends. Welcome back to the milspouse mastermind show. I am so excited to be kicking off this summer quick tip series with you today. I decided to create this series because I know that so many of us have schedules that shift during the summer. And sometimes we just. A little short bite sized episodes that we can listen to in the course of our everyday life, you don’t have the same amount of time that you might have during the year that you’re traveling to different activities or you’re waiting in the school pickup line.

[00:00:35] But most of us are still going to have those moments where we’re either in the car or we’re folding lines. And so I wanted to give you some short to the point episodes that you can listen to that answer some common questions that we all face as military spouses, trying to grow ourselves and learn to live with more meaning and less overwhelmed in our everyday life.

[00:00:59] Today, I’m answering the question. How can I read more books? For some of us reading just doesn’t happen. And so we’re going to talk about. How we actually carve out time and make it happen. And this is possible and doable for you, regardless of what season of life you’re in and spoiler alert. It doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money.

[00:01:24] So let’s go ahead and dive in to the show.

Today is a very exciting day because the day that this episode releases is also my birthday. And so the best thing that you could do to celebrate with me and wish me a happy birthday is by sharing this show with someone in your life, you can post it up in your stories.

Tag me at milspousemastermind. You can talk about it with your friends. You can leave us a review on apple iTunes. All of those are great ways to share this show. Listen to more episodes, help us spread the word. The milspouse mastermind community and how we are creating a space for military spouses who want to get unstuck, learn to thrive and live with more purpose, more meaning and less overwhelm in their everyday life.

[00:03:17] It is possible to thrive as a military spouse in your current season, and I’m here to help facilitate this conversation and bring encouraging and uplifting and empowering voices that are going to help us discover who it is that we are created to be, and help us learn how to pursue this in the midst of the craziness of the military life.

[00:03:44] If you want to give me a birthday present, the best thing you can do is share this show with someone in your life. I would absolutely love it. I also want to let you know, I announced this last week, but July is coming. In July we are going to do another 30 day clarity challenge in our milspouse Facebook group.

This is a free community for military spouses seeking to live a life of purpose. We did this about a year ago. Every day. I have a journal prompt for you, something that’s going to help you get clarity on who you are, what you love, what lights you up and how you can make an impact in the lives of.

[00:04:31] I can’t wait to hear what kind of insights you get from this. Be sure to invite your friends, to join us for this clarity challenge, because I think one of the most important things we can do as a military spouses, even if we don’t have a lot of extra time in our schedule is a week. Begain to get clarity today on who we are, what lights us up, what our purpose is, and make a plan for how you’re going to make progress towards who we are meant to be.

When you get clarity on in your current season of life, it’s going to help you live a life of greater purpose, joy, and impact in both your current season of life and in your future season. So whatever season of life you’re in, you’re probably not going to stay in that season forever.

[00:05:24] The more clarity we get today, the more action we take today, the greater impact we will have, the greater meaning we will live, the more fulfilling life we will have. And it all starts with clarity. You can pursue goals, you can pursue dreams, but if you don’t have that clarity piece of the. You’re going to wind up down a path that probably doesn’t let you up.

[00:05:49] You will still feel empty inside. You still will think. Feel unfulfilled, but if you get that clarity today, it’s going to help you for the rest of your life. So the clarity challenge kicks off July 1st. I would love to see you inside our Facebook group, sharing what you’re learning your insights and really encouraging each other.

[00:06:13] In this process to living a life of impact and discovering who you are meant to be. All right. Let’s dive into talking about how we actually read more books and how to do it in an affordable way.

And I’ve come up with four steps to get you started. Number one, you need to know what your options are. A lot of times our brain just thinks of the first thing that comes to our head.

[00:06:44] And that’s a physical book. Now, physical books are great, but there’s a lot of limitations to reading a physical book. So if that’s where your head space is at, I want to show you a couple of other options to help you read. Now, I guess I need to back up a little bit and say, why does reading books even matter?

[00:07:07] Well, number one, if you would hate to read books, that might be a problem, but books are a great way to open ourselves up to new ideas, new possibilities, to keep learning, to keep growing. Keep expanding our knowledge. If you are curious about a particular subject, read a book about it, it’s the easiest and most affordable way to learn a new skill, to expand your mind and to continue to foster a growth mindset.

[00:07:42] So reading books is important and there are. Several different ways you can do it. Obviously you can go to your favorite bookstore and buy a book and read it. But what I realized in my own life is that I never really had time to sit down with a physical book, but I realized that that piece was missing in my life.

[00:08:09] If I take you back several years, I realized I used to read a lot of books growing up and then after school ended and I didn’t have to read books anymore. I kind of put reading books on the back burner and I got busy with other things. Um, but when I started to do this deep dive into my life and really understanding that I was feeling unfulfilled and I wasn’t loving my life and what needed to change book greeting was one of the things that came up for me.

[00:08:40] And so I set a very small goal for myself that year. And that was just to read like six books, maybe one every other month, just to try to start helping myself get back into this reading. And I realized I didn’t have that time to sit down and read a physical book. But what I did have time for was my phone because my phone was always with me.

[00:09:08] And that’s when I really got into reading books on my Kindle app on my phone, because if I had a few minutes where there was nothing going on, or the kids were quiet or we were standing in line waiting somewhere and nothing was going on. What would I do? I would pull out my phone and I’d start scrolling through social media to see what was going on in the world.

[00:09:32] And I wasn’t really learning anything from that, but I still had my phone with me when we went to a doctor’s visit and you’re sitting there in the waiting room. What do you do? You pull out your phone, you start looking at social media or the news or something else. You play a game. What if instead I started using that time to read.

[00:09:54] And that’s really, when I realized I could read books on my phone and I was actually starting to learn things about myself. So the first year that I did this, I think I only read like six books, but it really opened my brain up to, Hey, I can do this. And there’s something for me now. That’s another thing that I love personally about reading books on my Kindle is that it doesn’t take a lot of space on my shelf and we move quite frequently.

[00:10:28] If you’ve listened to this show, you probably know now that we have rarely been anywhere for more than two years. And I get so tired of boxing up books and then putting them, unboxing them, putting them back on the shelf. And I know some people, you love books and you love that physical feeling of a book in your hand.

[00:10:48] If that works for you, I say that’s wonderful. Go for that. Embrace that. But I kind of liked the fact that it’s not actually taking up space on my shelf. Reading books on Kindle is definitely an option. Reading physical books is an option. You can go to the bookstore and buy books, but you also need to understand that you don’t have to spend a lot of money on books.

[00:11:13] The library is a great place to get books treat and did you know, you can get digital books from the. The Libby app, it has become one of my most favorite apps. And you can get that through libraries on base. You can get it through libraries in your local community, but it’s a way to read books digitally. So most of the time I go in and I put a book on hold and then it lets me know when it’s available and then lets me download it to my Kindle app to read for two or three weeks.

[00:11:50] And then at the end of the time, it automatically gets returned to the library. So I don’t have to worry about, oh, did I take the time to actually drive back up to the library and return that book? It’s returned automatically. And that makes my life so much easier because I’m not worried about when my library book is due.

[00:12:09] I just can pull up the app and it says your book is due on this date. And then I know how much time I have left to finish that book before it’s due. So the Libby app is available.

That has become one of my most favorite apps, but my newest obsession is. Audible and the audible app on my phone now. No that I prefer reading a book to listening to a book because I feel like I get more out of it.

[00:12:44] A lot of times I’m highlighting, um, words and sentences and paragraphs that I want to take notice. And that’s harder to do in an audio book format, but there are so many more opportunities to have an audio book, plane that I don’t necessarily have to sit down and open up and read. So when I’m driving in the car, when I’m folding laundry, when I’m making dinner, I can turn on an audio book.

[00:13:13] And so at the beginning of this year, I realized that I could get the Audible app for basically free. Um, if you are a military, then you can apply for an American Express platinum credit card. Your active duty service member has to be the one to apply, but then you get that card and that gives you a credit towards a couple of different apps, but one of them being Audible.

[00:13:47] And so I got an audible subscription and I get the reimbursement for that every month through our credit card. And, that has literally been a game changer for the number of books that I read. Like I said, the first year that I made a commitment, I set a goal for reading books and it was like six books.

[00:14:09] And then it was like, okay, I can do one book per month. And then two books. Per month. And for the last 2, 3, 4 years, that’s kind of been my standard. Hey, I’m going to get through roughly two books per month. I’m going to set a goal that I will read 25 books in a given year. Because I want to take time to absorb the material, to be able to highlight and reference my notes, um, and really dig into the books that I’m choosing to read.

[00:14:40] But what was happening is that my list of books that I wanted to read was growing much faster than I was checking books off my list. And all of that changed when I got the audible app, because while the nonfiction books that I read, the ones that I’m reading primarily to learn and grow from. I still want to actually have words on a page and be able to highlight that text. But things like memoirs and nonfiction, I love listening to through audible.

And I also realized that my Libby app, I can borrow audio books from the library. And that has been an absolute game changer for me this year in the number of books I’ve actually gotten through, I will listen to a book and if it has so much information that I really want to absorb, then I can go back and request to get a version that I can actually read.

I have actually done that. I listened to an audio book. I was like, Hey, this was really valuable. I want to get the Kindle version of this book as well. Thankfully, that was available through my library. And so I basically didn’t pay anything to get both the audio version and the Kindle version of the book.

[00:15:56] So the first thing you want to think about is knowing what options are available to you and knowing that you have more than one option to be able to absorb the material from a book. The second thing is to figure out what works for you. Maybe, you know, that you are a physical book person or maybe you think, you know, I really prefer physical books, but I don’t have time for that.

[00:16:25] So what are some other options for me right now? And then the third thing you want to do is set a goal around reading books, because if you don’t have a goal, if you don’t have something that you are working towards, then you’re less likely to make it a priority in your life. Now I have tried the Good Reads challenge before, so that’s a great way to go put your goal into the good reads app.

[00:16:53] And then you can keep track of all the books that you read in a year and keep it in that app. And that will give you updates on how you’re doing at reach. Your goal, if that’s something that helps you, that is available to you, but I would highly recommend setting some kind of goal, even if it’s just, you know, one book, a quarter or one book every two months or whatever it is set a goal for yourself.

[00:17:18] But I want you to know that it is possible because once you set that goal, the last piece of this is to create a plan to achieve that goal. You’ve got to carve out the space in your calendar and what that’s going to look like is going to differ depending on what season of life you’re in. This is one of the big aha moments I had after I had my third baby.

[00:17:46] I realized that I spend a lot of time nursing when I have newborns. And with the first two I’ve been. Entire TV series while I was sitting at home nursing, a newborn baby with my third baby. I said, what if I did this differently? What if instead of bingeing a TV. I used the time that I was nursing to actually read some books on my list.

[00:18:15] And I got a lot more books read that year because I had that time. And I used that to find books that I really wanted to read, um, that I really wanted to learn about. And so it’s not about saying I don’t have time for this. It’s about saying what if I looked at things different? So look at your life and say, how could I fit reading books into my schedule?

[00:18:41] Or how could I fit listening to audio books in, to my schedule and then create your plan and put it on your schedule. I am so curious to know with this quick tip, how do I read more books? What you’re actually going to do with it? So if there is a particular book that is on your heart. If you know that this is something that you want to be a part of your life, I want to hear about it, head over to our Facebook group and let us know what your goal is or what you’re reading right now.

[00:19:17] Or one book that you really want to read. So I will just wrap this up by saying, I am so excited for you and for your reading goals. I am currently waiting on Atlas of the heart by Brenae brown. And I’m excited to dig into that. Hopefully by the time this episode airs, it will be available in my library.

[00:19:40] Sometimes all it takes is some patience and willing to wait to until a book is available. I hope this encourages you. And inspires you to, to get out there and read some books. Like I said, I would love for you to pop it into our Facebook group. Let us know if you’ve set a goal, what book you’re currently reading or what book you want to read.

[00:20:02] Don’t forget the best birthday present you can give me is by sharing this show with others and helping more people find the mil spouse mastermind show. I would love it. If you share it in your stories, or if you leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time. May you live filled, fueled and fueled and full of joy.