Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement

by Anthony Robbins

Others function best as part of a group. We call their strategy a cooperative one.

Still others have a proximity strategy, which is somewhere in between. They prefer to work with other people while maintaining sole responsibility for a task.

Remember that there is no such thing as resistance, there are only inflexible communicators who push at the wrong time and in the wrong direction.

“The best soldier does not attack. The superior fighter succeeds without violence. The greatest conqueror wins without a struggle. The most successful manager leads without dictating. This is called intelligent nonaggressiveness. This is called mastery of men.“ —Lao-Tsu, Tao Teh King

example, what would happen if you had a communication tool you could use to communicate exactly how you felt about an issue, without compromising your integrity in any way, and yet you never had to disagree with the person, either?

It’s called the agreement frame. It consists of three phrases you can use in any communication to respect the person you’re communicating with, maintain rapport with him, share with him what you feel is true, and yet never resist his opinion in any way.

Here are the three...

“I appreciate a...

“I respect an...

“I agree an...

In each case, you’re doing three things. You’re building rapport by entering the other person’s world and acknowledging his communication rather than ignoring or denigrating it with words like “but” or “however.” You...

Let me give you an example. Someone says to you, “You’re absolutely wrong,” about something. If you say, “No, I’m not wrong,” just as strongly, are you going to remain in rapport? No. There will be a conflict, and there will be resistance. Instead, say to that person, “I respect the intensity of your feelings about this, and I think if you were to hear my side of it you might feel differently.”

“Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment” —Lao-Tsu, Tao Teh King

I’ve found humor is one of the best pattern interrupts.

How we feel about something and what we do in the world are dependent upon our perception of it. A signal has meaning only in the frame or context in which we perceive it.

We tend to frame things based upon how we have perceived them in the past. Many times, by changing these habitual perception patterns, we can create greater choices for our lives.

Remember, we do not see the world as it is because how things are can be interpreted from many points of view. How we are, our frames of reference, our “maps” define the territory.

It is important to note that our past experiences regularly filter our ability to see what is really happening in the world. But there are multiple ways to see or experience any situation.

Reframing in its simplest form is changing a negative statement into a positive one by changing the frame of reference used to perceive the experience.

There are two major types of re-frames, or ways to alter our perception about something: context reframing and content reframing.

Context reframing involves taking an experience that seems to be bad, upsetting, or undesirable and showing how the same behavior or experience is actually a great advantage in another context.

Great innovations are made by those who know how to re-frame activities and problems into potential resources in other contexts.

Content reframing involves taking the exact same situation and changing what it means.

Another kind of content reframe is to actually change the way you see, hear, or represent a situation.

The meaning is whatever you choose to emphasize, just as its content is what you choose to focus on. One of the keys to success is finding the most useful frame for any experience so you can turn it into something that works for you rather than against you.

Take a moment and reframe these situations:

1. My boss yells at me all the time. 2. I had to pay $4,000 more in income tax this year than last year. 3. We have little or no extra money to buy Christmas presents this year. 4. Every time I begin to succeed in a big way, I sabotage my success.

Here are some possible...

la. It’s great that he cares enough to tell you how he really feels. He could have just fired you. 2a. That’s great. You must have made a lot more money this year than last year. 3a. Great! Then you can become much more ingenious and make something people will never forget instead of buying run-of-the-mill gifts. Your gifts will be personal. 4a. It’s great that you’re so aware of wh...

Reframing is crucial to learning how to communicate with oursel...

you need to learn to communicate with yourself with as much purpose and direction and persuasiveness as you would in a business presentation. You need to start framing and re-framing experiences in a way that makes them work for you. One way is simply on the level of careful, conscious thought.

Take a minute and think of three situations in your life that are challenging you. How many different ways can you see each of the situations? How many frames can you put around them? What do you learn by seeing them differently? How does this free you to act differently?

One way to reframe is by changing the meaning of an experience or behavior.

You can learn to do reframing exercises for images and experiences that bother you. For example, think of a person or experience that’s preying on your mind. You come home after a lousy day at work, and all you can think of is the ridiculous project your supervisor gave you at the last minute.

Instead of letting your brain make you miserable for the weekend, you can learn to reframe the experience in a way that makes you feel better. Start by disassociating yourself from it. Take the image of your supervisor and put it in your hand. Put a pair of funny glasses with a big nose and mustache on him. Hear him talking in a funny, screechy cartoon voice. Feel him as being warm and cuddly, and hear him saying he needs your help on this project, could you please help? After you’ve concocted this, maybe you can appreciate that he’s under stress, and maybe he forgot to tell you what he needed until the last minute. Maybe you can remember a time when you did the same thing with someone else. Ask yourself if this situation is such a big deal that you should allow it to ruin your weekend, if there’s any reason to let it bother you when you’re at home.

The same technique can work with phobias, but you need to turn up the juice.

Here’s how. A phobia is often rooted at a deep kinesthetic level, so you need to provide more distance from it in order to do an effective reframe. Phobic reactions are so strong that people can react to the mere thought of something. The way to deal with such people is to disassociate them from their representations several times. We call this double disassociation.

For example, if you have a phobia about something, try this exercise. Go back to a time when you felt totally empowered and alive. Go back to that state, and feel those strong, confident feelings. Now see yourself as protected by a radiant, protective bubble. Once you have that protection, go to your favorite mental movie theater. Sit down in a comfortable seat with a good view of the screen. Next, feel yourself float out of your body, up into the projection booth, all the time ...

After you’ve done that, look up at the screen and see a still frame, black-and-white image of the phobia or some terrible experience that really used to bother you. You’re looking down on yourself in the audience and watching yourself observe what’s happening on the screen—you’re doubly disassociated from it. In that state, run the black-and-white image backward at an extremely fast pace so...

Let’s take it a step further. I want the part of you that’s really resourceful, the part that’s up in the booth, to float back down into where your body has been sitting, and then get up and walk to the front of the screen. You should be able to do that in a very strong, confident state. Then tell your earlier self that you’ve been watching over him or her and have come up with two or three ways that can help change that experience, two or three reframes of the meaning or the content that will help him or her to handle it differently, now and in the future—ways that the younger you could handle with your present-day, more mature perceptions.

Help your younger self cope with something he or she couldn’t handle earlier, then stride back to the seat and watch the movie change. Play the same scene in your head, but this time watch as your younger self handles the same situation with utter confidence. When you’ve done that, you should walk back to the screen and congratulate your younger self, give him or her a hug for breaking free of the phobia or trauma or fear.

One important thing to remember about reframing is that all human behaviors have a purpose in some context. If you smoke, you don’t do it because you like to put carcinogens into your lungs. You do it because smoking makes you feel relaxed or more comfortable in certain social situations. You adopted this behavior to create some gain for yourself. So in some cases you may find it impossible to reframe the behavior without confronting the underlying need that the behavior fulfills.

All human behavior is adaptive in one way or another; it’s designed to fill a need. It’s no problem to make people hate smoking. But I also want to make sure that I create for them new behavioral choices that will fill their needs without negative side effects, such as those created by smoking. If smoking made them feel relaxed, confident, or centered, they need to come up with a more elegant behavior that will fulfill the same need.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder designed a six-step re-framing process for changing any undesirable behavior you may have into desirable behavior, while maintaining the important benefits that the old behavior used to provide:

1. Identify the pattern or behavior you w...

2. Establish communication with the part of your unconscious mind that generates the behavior. Go inside and ask the following question of yourself, remaining alertly passive to detect and report any changes in body sensations, visual images, or sounds that occur as a response to your questions. The question is, “Will the par...

Now ask that part, we’ll call it part X, to intensify that signal when it wants to communicate yes, and to diminish it when it wants to communicate no. Now test the response by asking the part to communicate yes ... and then ...

3. Separate intention from behavior. Thank the part for its willingness to cooperate with you. Now ask it if it would be willing to let you know what it’s been trying to do for you by generating behavior X. As you ask that question, once again be alert to detect a yes or no response. Take note of what benefits this behavior has provided for you in...

4. Creating alternative behaviors to satisfy intention. Now go in-side and contact the most creative part of you and ask it to generate three alternative behaviors that are just as good as or better than behavior X for satisfying the intention of the part we’ve been communicating with. Have your creative part signal you with a yes signal when it has generated the three new behaviors......

5. Have part X accept the new choices and the responsibility for generating them when needed. Now ask part X if the three new behaviors a...