Michelle Obama

***This is not a book review***

‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama was not just any other book for me. It was more about fighting my fears. How? Keep reading…

I received this book as a gift about a year ago. As much as I fancied the title and the author, I never considered to read it. Some of the many reasons were: 1. Size of the book – For the simple fact that the book has more than 420 pages and the words are written in very tiny font. Until then (August 2019) the max I had ever read was a 200 page self help book which took me 2-3 months to complete. 2. Genre: I’ve never been a fan of biographies and more over this is written by the ex-first lady, which means that its inevitable to cover ‘politics’. The combination of biography + politics just didn’t appeal to me. 3. My Goal to read 20 books in a year: As I am a slow reader to begin with, I was very careful in the books I chose, carefully balancing the size of the book and the value it had to offer (I typically read either self-help & coaching books, or time management books or books authored by women entrepreneurs). For all the above reasons, I put aside this beautiful book for so long until one morning I decided to challenge myself to read it.

For fun, I took a poll on Instagram asking my followers if I should read Robin Sharma’s 5AM Club or Michelle Obama’s Becoming and the response was a whopping 72% in favour of the latter. With this as a positive trigger, I pushed myself outside my comfort zone to read the book – moreover to fight my fears. Yes, it took me a long time to finish it (33 days of reading approximately 13 pages per day). But it was totally worth it! More often then not, we let our inner resistance win over our grit as it’s the easier thing to do. My fears or logic for not reading as I prefer to call it, seemed valid to me. But let’s face it! That’s still my inner resistance talking. And by facing my fears and conquering them, I chose progress over perfection. I chose to move forward. I chose to learn more. I chose to build my ‘self-discipline’ muscle.

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What is stopping you from growing? What reasons (that might sound absolutely genuine) are you telling yourself for not doing it?