Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement

by Anthony Robbins

What are values? Simply, they are your own private, personal, and individual beliefs about what is most important to you. Your values are your belief systems about right, wrong, good, and bad.

Our values are the things we all fundamentally need to move toward. If we don’t, we won’t feel whole and fulfilled.

To deal effectively with people, we need to know what’s most important to them, specifically what their hierarchy of values is.

How do you discover your own or someone else’s hierarchy of values? First, you need to place a frame around the values you are looking for. That is, you need to elicit them in a specific context.

Then, to have a clear understanding of someone’s hierarchy of values, all you need to do is take this list of words and compare them.

Ask, “Which is more important to you? Being supported or feeling joy?” If the answer is, “Feeling joy,” then obviously it is higher in the hierarchy of values. Next you would ask, “What is more important to you, feeling joy or being loved?” If the answer is, “Feeling joy,” then of those three values, joy is number one.

___________ Love ___________ Ecstasy ___________ Mutual communication ___________ Respect ___________ Fun ___________ Growth ___________ Support ___________ Challenge ___________ Creativity ___________ Beauty ___________ Attraction ___________ Spiritual unity ___________ Freedom ___________ Honesty

These are by no means all the important values there are. You may find many other values more important than the ones listed here. If you can think of some, jot them down now.

Now rank these values in order of importance, with number one as the most important and number fou...

After you’ve created a hierarchy of values for your personal relationships, do the same thing with your work environment. Create the context of work and ask, “What’s important to me about working?”

Values are the most powerful motivating tool we have. If you want to change a bad habit, the change can be made very rapidly if you will link the successful maintenance of that change with high values.

“If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, be isn’t fit to live.’” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Because values have such primacy, they carry an incredible emotional charge. There’s no closer way to bond people than to align them through their highest values.

Common values form the basis for the ultimate rapport. If two people have values that are totally linked, their relationship can last forever. If their values are totally different, there’s little chance for a lasting, harmonious relationship.

As a result, you have to do two things. First, find the values you have in common so that you can use them to help bridge the others that are not alike.

Second, seek to support and fulfill the other person’s most important values as much as you can.

the importance of flexibility. Remember that in any context, the system with the most flexibility, with the most choices, will be the most effective. It’s absolutely crucial to remember that values have primacy for us, but we represent their primacy by the evidence procedures we adopt.

The ultimate way to use values is to integrate them with metaprograms in order to motivate and understand ourselves and others. Values are the ultimate filter. Metaprograms are the operative patterns that guide most of our perceptions and thus our behaviors. If you know how to use the two together, you can develop the most precise motivational patterns.

“He who knows much about others may be learned, but be who understands himself is more intelligent. He who controls others may be powerful, but be who has mastered himself is mightier still.“ —Lao-Tsu, Too Teh King

Discovering someone’s values is simply a matter of finding out what is most important to him or her. In knowing that, you can more effectively know not just their needs but your own.

The Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness

Here’s the first key to the creation of wealth and happiness. You must learn bow to handle frustration.

The key to success is massive frustration. Look at almost any great success, and you’ll find there’s been massive frustration along the way. Anybody who tells you otherwise doesn’t know anything about achieving. There are two kinds of people—those who’ve handled frustration and those who wish they had.

Here’s a two-step formula for handling stress. Step 1: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Step 2: Remember, it’s all small stuff.

All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration. Unfortunately, some people don’t get to the other side.

Here’s the second key. You must learn bow to handle rejection.

There are no real successes without rejection. The more rejection you get, the better you are, the more you’ve learned, the closer you are to your outcome.

Here’s the third key to wealth and happiness. You must learn to handle financial pressure.

The only way not to have financial pressure is not to have any finances.

No amount of financial planning could do more for you than if you give 10 percent away. It teaches you what money can do, and it teaches you what money can’t do.

After you give away 10 percent of your income, take another 10 percent to reduce your debts and a third 10 percent to build up capital to invest. You need to live on 70 percent of what you have.

You must learn how to handle complacency.

Comfort can be one of the most disastrous emotions a body could have. What happens when a person gets too comfortable? He stops growing, stops working, stops creating added value. You don’t want to get too comfortable. If you feel really comfortable, chances are you’ve stopped growing.

One kind of complacency comes from comparison.

Learn to judge yourself by your goals instead of by what your peers seem to be doing. Why? Because you can always find people to justify what you’re doing.

“Little things affect little minds.” —Benjamin Disraeli

Here’s the last key. Always give more than you expect to receive.

You want to know the biggest illusion about success? That it’s like a pinnacle to be climbed, a thing to be possessed, or a static result to be achieved. If you want to succeed, if you want to achieve all your outcomes, you have to think of success as a process, a way of life, a habit of mind, a strategy for life.