Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement

by Anthony Robbins

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

To me, success is the ongoing process of striving to become more. It is the opportunity to continually grow emotionally, socially, spiritually, physiologically, intellectually, and financially while contributing in some positive way to others.

The road to success is always under construction. It is a progressive course, not an end to be reached.

To me, ultimate power is the ability to produce the results you desire most and create value for others in the process. Power is the ability to change your life, to shape your perceptions, to make things work for you and not against you.

It’s the ability to define human needs and to fulfill them—both your needs and the needs of the people you care about. It’s the ability to direct your own personal kingdom—your own thought processes, your own behavior—so you produce the precise results you desire.

In the modern world, information is the commodity of kings. Those with access to certain forms of specialized knowledge can transform themselves and, in many ways, our entire world.

Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word “power” is “the ability to act.”

We all produce two forms of communication from which the experience of our lives is fashioned. First, we conduct internal communications: those things we picture, say, and feel within ourselves. Second, we experience external communications: words, tonalities, facial expressions, body postures, and physical actions to communicate with the world.

How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening. Successful people’s lives have shown us over and over again that the quality of our lives is determined not by what happens to us, but rather by what we do about what happens.

Before you can produce new results, however, you must first realize that you’re already producing results. They just may not be the results you desire.

People who have attained excellence follow a consistent path to success. I call it the Ultimate Success Formula.

The first step to this formula is to know your outcome, that is, to define precisely what you want. The second step is to take action—otherwise your desires will always be dreams. You must take the types of actions you believe will create the greatest probability of producing the result you desire. The actions we take do not always produce the results we desire, so the third step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of responses and results you’re getting from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or farther away.

And then you take the fourth step, which is to develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you get what you want.

These are the seven basic triggering mechanisms that can ensure your success as well:

Trait Number One: Passion! All of these people have discovered a reason, a consuming, energizing, almost obsessive purpose that drives them to do, to grow, and to be more!

Trait Number Two: Belief!

People who succeed on a major scale differ greatly in their beliefs from those who fail. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be.

Trait Number Three: Strategy! A strategy is a way of organizing resources.

Trait Number Four: Clarity of Values!

Values are specific belief systems we have about what is right and wrong for our lives. They’re the judgments we make about what makes life worth living.

The more we believe we can accomplish something, the more we’re usually willing to invest in its achievement.

Trait Number Five: Energy!

People of excellence take opportunities and shape them. They live as if obsessed with the wondrous opportunities of each day and the recognition that the one thing no one has enough of is time.

Trait Number Six: Bonding Power! Nearly all successful people have in common an extraordinary ability to bond with others, the ability to connect with and develop rapport with people from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs.

Trait Number Seven: Mastery of Communication!

The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

The only people without problems are those in cemeteries. It is not what happens to us that separates failures from successes. It is how we perceive it and what we do about what “happens” that makes the difference.

The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers—people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people’s experience rather than their own.

To model excellence, you should become a detective, an investigator, someone who asks lots of questions and tracks down all the clues to what produces excellence.

there are three fundamental ingredients that must be duplicated in order to reproduce any form of human excellence.

The first door represents a person’s belief system. What a person believes, what he thinks is possible or impossible, to a great extent determines what he can or cannot do.

The second door that must be opened is a person’s mental syntax. Mental syntax is the way people organize their thoughts. Syntax is like a code.

The third door is physiology. The mind and body are totally linked. The way you use your physiology—the way you breathe and hold your body, your posture, facial expressions, the nature and quality of your movements—actually determines what state you are in.

The difference between those who succeed and those who fail isn’t what they have—it’s what they choose to see and do with their resources and their experience of life.

“The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.” —Anthony Robbins

why do you produce dismal results one time and fabulous results the next? Why do even the best athletes have days when they do everything right and follow them with days when they can’t buy a basket or a base hit?

There are enabling states—confidence, love, inner strength, joy, ecstasy, belief—that tap great wellsprings of personal power. There are paralyzing states—confusion, depression, fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration—that leave us powerless.

Understanding state is the key to understanding change and achieving excellence. Our behavior is the result of the state we’re in.

A state can be defined as the sum of the millions of neurological processes happening within us, in other words, the sum total of our experience at any moment in time.

The difference between those who fail to achieve their goals in life and those who succeed is the difference between those who cannot put themselves in a supportive state and those who can consistently put themselves in a state that supports them in their achievements.

The first key to directing your state and producing the results you desire in life is to learn to effectively run your brain.

There are two main components of state. The first is our internal representations, and the second is the condition and use of our physiology.

There is an even more important and powerful factor in how we perceive and represent the world, and that is the condition and our pattern of use of our own physiology. Things like muscle tension, what we eat, how we breathe, our posture, our overall level of biochemical functioning, all have a huge impact on our state. Internal representation and physiology work together in a cybernetic loop. Anything that affects one will automatically affect the other. So changing states involves changing internal representation and changing physiology.

And the state we are in determines the type of behavior we produce. Thus, to control and direct our behaviors, we must control and direct our states; and to control our states, we must control and consciously direct our internal representations and physiologies.

There are five senses: gustation or taste, olfaction or smell, vision or sight, audition or hearing, and kinesthesis or feeling.

Successful people are able to gain access to their most resourceful state on a consistent basis.

The key to producing the results you desire, then, is to represent things to yourself in a way that puts you in such a resourceful state that you’re empowered to take the types and qualities of actions that create your desired outcomes.

What we need to do in modeling people is to find out the specific beliefs that cause them to represent the world in a way that allows them to take effective action.

What do they do visually in their minds? What do they say? What do they feel?

in the most basic sense, a belief is any guiding principle, dictum, faith, or passion that can provide meaning and direction in life.