Awaken The Giant Within

by Anthony Robbins

The first belief we must have if we’re going to create change quickly is that we can change now.

We must adopt the belief that we can change in a moment.

The second belief that you and I must have if we’re going to create long-term change is that we’re responsible for our own change, not anyone else.

1) First, we must believe, “Something must change”—

2) Second, we must not only believe that things must change, but we must believe, “I must change it.” We must see ourselves as the source of the change. Otherwise, we’ll always be looking for someone else to make the changes for us,

3) Third, we have to believe, “I can change it.”

nothing changes until we change the sensations we link to an experience in our nervous system,

Each time we experience a significant amount of pain or pleasure, our brains search for the cause and record it in our nervous systems to enable us to make better decisions about what to do in the future. For

When we do something for the first time, we create a physical connection, a thin neural strand that allows us to re-access that emotion or behavior again in the future. Think of it this way: each time we repeat the behavior, the connection strengthens.

“trunk line”

This neuro-association is a biological reality—it’s physical.

Again, this is why thinking our way into a change is usually ineffective;

An illustration of this in human behavior might be that of a person who no longer enjoys smoking but still feels a compulsion to do so. Why would this be the case? This person is physically “wired” to smoke. This explains why you may have found it difficult to create a change in your emotional patterns or behaviors in the past.

This is good news for those who want to change their habits! If you’ll just stop indulging in a particular behavior or emotion long enough, if you just interrupt your pattern of using the old pathway for a long enough period of time, the neural connection will weaken and atrophy. Thus

Any time you experience significant amounts of pain or pleasure, your brain immediately searches for the cause. It uses

mixed neuro-associations, the classic source of self-sabotage. If you’ve ever found yourself starting to accomplish something, and then destroying it, mixed neuro-associations are usually the culprit. Perhaps

One example a lot of us can relate to is money. In our culture, people have incredibly mixed associations to wealth. There’s no doubt that people want money. They think it would provide them with more freedom, more security, a chance to contribute, a chance to travel, to learn, to expand, to make a difference. But simultaneously, most people never climb above a certain earnings plateau because deep down they associate having “excess” money

to a lot of negatives. They associate it to greed, to being judged, to stress, with immorality or a lack of spirituality.

and the power to take the decisive actions that could give you what you want. When you give your brain mixed messages, you’re going to get mixed results. Think of your brain’s decision-making process as being like a scale: “If I were to do this, would it mean pain or pleasure?”

What happens when you get to a point where you feel that you’re going to have pain no matter what you do? I call this the pain-pain barrier. Often, when this occurs, we become immobilized—we don’t know what to do. Usually we choose what we believe will be the least painful alternative. Some people, however, allow this pain to overwhelm them completely and they experience learned helplessness.

Decide What You Really Want and What’s Preventing You From Having It Now.

it. The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward. The more specific

But change is usually not a question of capability; it’s almost always a question of motivation. If

The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense that we’re compelled to follow through.

How do we turn this around? One of the things that turns virtually anyone around is reaching a pain threshold. This means experiencing pain at such an intense level that you know you must change now—a point at which your brain says, “I’ve had it; I can’t spend another day, not another moment, living or feeling this way.”

The greatest leverage you can create for yourself is the pain that comes from inside, not outside. Knowing that you have failed to live up to your own standards for your life is the ultimate pain.

necessary. Let’s face it; the human animal responds to pressure. So

should? They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse

pain-inducing questions:

“What will this cost me if I don’t change?”

“Ultimately what will I miss out on in my life if I don’t make the shift?

Make the pain of not changing feel so real to you, so intense, so immediate that you can’t put off taking that action any longer.

pleasure-associating questions

“If I do change, how will that make me feel about myself?

What kind of momentum could I create if I change this in my life? What other things could I accomplish if I...

Why does it work? Because all of our feelings are based on the images we focus on in our minds and the sounds and sensations we link to those specific images.

As we change the images and sounds, we change how we feel. Conditioning this again and again makes it difficult to get back into the old pattern.

What can you replace worry with? How about massive action on a plan you have for meeting your goals? Depression can be replaced with a focus on how to help others who are in need.

you can simply find the answers by modeling people who have turned things around for themselves. Find

If you rehearse the new, empowering alternative again and again with tremendous emotional intensity,

you’ll carve out a pathway, and with even more repetition and emotion, it will become a highway to this new way of achieving results,

Remember, your brain can’t tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and someth...

reinforce your new behavior.

Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic

and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate.

Reinforcement is responding to a behavior immediately after it occurs, while punishment and reward may occur long afterward.

The third and most powerful way to motivate people is through personal development.

is why people who discontinue a bad habit (like smoking or gambling) for a period of months, and then decide to have “just one more hit,” are actually reinforcing the very pattern that they’re trying to break and making it much more difficult to be free of the habit for a lifetime. If you smoke one more cigarette, you’re stimulating your nervous system to expect that in the future you’ll reward yourself this way again. You’re keeping that neuro-association highly active and, in fact, strengthening the very habit you’re trying to break!

The most important thing to remember about conditioning, however, is to reinforce the desired behavior immediately.

Step 1. Are you really clear about what you want and why you want it?