When someone is a living example of the skills they’re teaching, you can have confidence in their ability to help you gain those same skills. Seán M. Kelly helps people all over the world to make the most of their abilities, focusing in particular on ways to improve mental focus, memory, creativity, and learning power.

7SR: You’ve obviously been interested in making the most of your own mental abilities for many years; you graduated with an Honours degree from Trinity College in Dublin. How do your early studies in the fields of physics and mathematics connect to your current work with mental performance?

Great question. Possibly one of the greatest lessons I’ve learnt on learning and mental performance goes back to my college days studying for my degree in Physics and Mathematics, albeit not directly related to physics and mathematics.

One day I was studying hard for exams with my old inefficient way of studying – I would spend hours and hours going through notes and books by making shorter summary notes to revise later. I would “hope” by doing this the information was going into my brain! This is the way many of us study and we think as long as we’re putting the hours in we’re studying! Of course to some degree it did work as I did achieve an honours degree in physics and mathematics but I soon learnt there were far easier and more effective ways of doing it!

One day my Father came into my bedroom where I was studying and says here’s a great book on studying which may help. It was called “How to Study Effectively”. It had chapters in it on setting study goals, mind mapping, memory, speed reading, time management and the other effective study techniques. I looked at the cover and the contents and said “Great thanks Dad”. After he left my room I put it on my book shelf to look at later. There it stayed until after my exams!

When I left college and entered the corporate world I soon realised that the time we had for learning skills in college was far far more than we would get working for a corporation. In college we would study a computer language for a year, in the corporate world we were given a week! I had to learn new ways of learning and fast. That’s when I started looking into what was in the book my Dad had given me while I was in college. I soon realised how helpful it would have been in college but also realised it would be very helpful now in the corporate world too! It also formed a basis of a growing interest I have in the areas of learning and mental performance.

7SR: You’re also a musician and author, which is something people might not expect, given your background in more “left-brained” areas like IT. How have you learned to access your creativity, and what do you tell people who are looking for methods that will help them unleash their own inner artist?

First and foremost my belief is that everyone has infinite creative abilities. They may need a bit of exercise but they’re within us all. I also inform people about different models of our brain and how it works. One of these explores the power of beliefs and how they limit or un-limit us. Another one demonstrates how to cultivate whole brain thinking – that is using both sides of our brain, the logical and the creative. Another one explores how managing our emotions can limit or free us. After these models are explored I show people techniques that we can use to free up our creativity such as the Da Vinci technique, the Disney technique, random word association and indeed we create some of our own on the courses too.

7SR: You work on developing a person’s ability to use the assets found in both their subconscious and their conscious mind. Is learning to speed read something that people need to do consciously, or is it more of a “learned unconscious” process?

Learning any new skill will usually involve some conscious learning and then that goes into the subconscious so we can do it in “autopilot”. If any of us think back to when we first learnt to read, we can recall it was a conscious process. We first learnt to recognise letters, then recognise patterns of letters that made up words, then memorised what those patterns of letters meant. When we were learning to read we’d look at each letter in the word and from that aim to recall what the word meant. Now when we look at a word we don’t have to look at each letter consciously but we do look at them subconsciously, at least most of the letters so we recognise what the word means. In much the same way, learning to speed read would first be a conscious process and then with practice it becomes subconscious – we can do it in “autopilot”.

7SR: What’s the connection between accelerated learning and speed reading?

Basically speed reading is one of the skills that is used to accelerate our learning. Other skills include mind mapping, improving our memory and recall, creativity, goal setting, time management and others.

All of these techniques and others come together to form a generic strategy for Accelerated Learning which when applied can make our learning a lot more effective, easy and enjoyable!

7SR: You’ve had very respectable placements in past years at the World Memory Championships. Are you planning on competing again?

Yes I was 8th in the world in 1997, 12th in 1998 and 51st in 2012.My intention is to compete in the future alright. As you need a lot of time to prepare and practice we’ll see can I schedule it.
My main focus at the moment is on sharing what I’ve learnt with thousands of other people in global organisations, colleges, schools and even very young kids around the world! In the past couple of years alone I’ve travelled extensively to such countries as the USA, Luxembourg, Belguim, the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic and of course delivered a lot in my home country of Ireland. I’ve trained in excess of 10,000 people from many different cultures. One of the reasons I’ve partnered with eReflect with the Speed Reading course is to offer these skills and techniques to many more organisations and people globally.

About Sean Kelly

A leading international expert on how to use more of your minds infinite potential, Sean M Kelly trains and coaches organisations and individuals to greatly improve their performance by learning more about their mind!