Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement

by Anthony Robbins

Kinesthetic people use phrases like “It doesn’t feel right” or “I’m just not in touch with things.”

the next several days, listen to the people you are talking with and determine what kind of words they use most. Then speak to them using the same kind of words. What happens? Then speak for a while using a different representational system. What happens this time?

If you’re the head of an organization, one of the most valuable states you can achieve with your key workers is trust and rapport. If they know you care about them, they’ll work harder and better for you. If they don’t trust you, they won’t deliver for you. But part of establishing that trust is being attentive to the different needs of different people. Some people will establish a relationship and maintain it. If they know that you play fair and that you care about them, you can establish a bond that will last until you do something to betray

The same process plays out with even greater intensity in personal relationships. With some people, if you can prove your love once, you’ve proved it forever. With others, you have to prove it every day. The value of understanding these metaprograms is that they provide you with the game plan for convincing someone.

They do something because they must. They’re not pulled to take action by what is possible.

Another metaprogram is a person’s working style. Everyone has his own strategy for work. Some people are not happy unless they’re independent. They have great difficulty working closely with other people and can’t work well under a great deal of supervision. They have to run their own show. Others function best as part of a group. We call their strategy a cooperative one. They want to share responsibility for any task they take on. 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. They’re in charge but not alone.

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. Like an aikido master, a good communicator, instead of opposing someone’s views, is flexible and resourceful enough to sense the creation of resistance, find points of agreement, align himself with them, and then redirect communication in a way he wants to go.

Great leaders and communicators realize this and pay close attention to the words they use and the effect they have.

develop the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence, never using, when I advanced anything that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any other that give the air of positiveness to an opinion, but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so: It appears to me or I should not think it, so or so, for such and such reasons; or, I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit I believe has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinion and persuade men into measures that I have been, time to time, engaged in promoting.”

There are other words. Let me give you the example of one ever-present, three-letter word—“but.” Used unconsciously and automatically, it can be one of the most destructive words in our language. If someone says, “That’s true, but... “ what is he saying? He’s saying it’s not true, or it’s irrelevant. The word “but” has negated everything said before it.

How do you feel if someone says to you that they agree with you, but ... ? What if you simply substitute the word “and” instead? What if you say, “That’s true, and here’s something else that’s also true”? Or, “That’s an interesting idea, and here’s another way to think about it.” In both cases, you start with agreement. Instead of creating resistance, you’ve created an avenue of redirection.

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.”

“I really appreciate your commitment and desire to create security for our children, and I think there may be a more effective way than nuking the Russians that will accomplish this. What about the possibility of ...

you will always buildd rapport if you are understanding off the other persons pov

He got General Mills to decide the value of his company based upon what it would be worth if they did not buy it within five years and it continued to expand. He could easily wait to sell it to them. But they needed it now to achieve their corporate goals, so they agreed to his frame. All persuasion is an altering of perception.

Whenever a person is in an intense state where the mind and body are strongly involved together and a specific stimulus is consistently and simultaneously provided at the peak of the state, the stimulus and the state become neurologically linked.

You must provide the stimulus at the peak of the experience.

Let’s do a simple anchoring exercise now. Stand up and think of a time when you were totally confident, when you knew you could do whatever you wanted to do. Put your body in the same physiology it was in then. Stand the way you did when you were totally confident. At the peak of that feeling, make a fist and say, “Yes!” with a strength and certainty. Breathe the way you did when you were totally confident. Again make the same fist and say, “Yes!” in the same tonality. Now speak in the tone of a person with total confidence and control. As you do this, create the same fist and then say, “Yes!” in the same way.

now, when I make the same fist, all those powerful feelings and physiologies are simultaneously triggered within my nervous system.

You want to feel more decisive. To anchor the feeling of being able to make a decision quickly, effectively, and easily, you might select the knuckle of your pointer finger. Next, think of a time in your life when you felt totally decisive, step into that situation in your mind, and fully associate to it so you feel the same way you did then. Begin to experience yourself making that great decision from your past. At the peak of the experience, while you feel most decisive, squeeze your knuckle and make a sound in your mind—like the word “yes.” Now think of another such experience, and at the peak of that decision-making process create the same pressure and the same sound. Do this five or six times to stack a series of powerful anchors. Now think of a decision you need to make—think of all the facts you need to know. Then reach down and fire off the anchor—and you should be able to make a decision quickly and easily now. You can use another finger to anchor feelings of relaxation, if you need to. I anchored creativity feelings

Then for the first time in your life you’ll understand why you do certain things, or why other people do what they do. Values are one of the most important tools for discovering how a person works.

By continuing to ask over and over again, “What’s most important?” you begin to develop a list of values.

“Ecstasy means feeling a total sense of personal joy, and growth means overcoming obstacles,” then you can ask, “Which is more important, overcoming obstacles or feeling a total sense of joy?” This will make the decision easier.

vaalues havv different meaning to different people

Take the time now to decide what you desire from a relationship.

Putting a hierarchy together is not enough. As we’ll see later, people mean very different things by the same word when talking about values.

the primary value in a relationship is love, you might ask, “What makes you feel loved?” or, “What causes you to love someone?” or, “How do you know when you’re not loved?”

For some people, it may be money. If you pay them enough, you’ll keep them. But for many others, it’s something else. It might be creativity or challenge or a sense of family.

realize a persons needs and motivation

“What would it take to cause you to join an organization?” Let’s say the employee answers, “A creative environment.”

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

Take five values that are important to you and figure out your evidence procedure. What has to happen for you to know that your values are being met or fulfilled? Answer it now on another piece of paper. Evaluate whether your evidence procedure helps you or holds you back.

In most cases, it’s much easier and more effective to deal with submodalities, but I think you can see just how powerful these techniques can be. In this way, you can change the level of importance of values by changing the way you represent them to your brain.

After reading this chapter, look at your value hierarchy and evidence procedures to see where the conflicts are. Seeing them clearly is the first step to resolving them.

identify values, rank by importance and identify conflicts in values

What would you do if you knew you could not fail? Think about it now. If you knew you couldn’t fail, would that change your behavior? Would that allow you to do exactly what you want to do? So what’s keeping you from doing it? It’s that tiny word “no.” To succeed, you must learn how to cope with rejection, learn how to strip that rejection of all its power.

How many times have you wanted to go up and talk to someone you found attractive, then decided not to do it because you didn’t want to hear the word “no”? How many of you decided not to try for a job or make a sales call or audition for a part because you didn’t want to be rejected? Think about how crazy that is. Think how you’re creating limits just because of your fear of that little two-letter word. The word itself has no power. It can’t cut your skin or sap your strength. Its power comes from the way you represent it to yourself. Its power comes from the limits it makes you create. And what do limited thoughts create? Limited lives.

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.

These people and symbols are already powerful anchors in the culture, and the advertisers are simply transferring the feeling we have for these people or symbols to their products.

Anchor the emmotions people lready have with a symbol to a product

So if we can agree, as a useful generalization, that human behavior is the source of human problems or that new human behaviors can solve most other problems that arise, then we can become quite excited because we will understand that these behaviors are the results of the states human beings are in and are their models of how to respond when they are in these states.

documentary film Scared Straight is a great example of how we can change people’s internal representations and thereby change their behaviors by using the resources of the media.

The idea for the Challenge Foundation is to put together a library of interactive video presentations featuring the most powerful, positive role models in our culture: contemporary people like Supreme Court justices, entertainers, and businessmen as well as powerful figures who are no longer alive, like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi.

Could you imagine what would happen if massive numbers of kids across the country could have regular and consistent access to this kind of positive input and challenge? Such a program could change the future. If you have input about such a system, I invite your letters and comments.

“Man is not the sum of what be has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.“

The challenge of leadership is to have enough power and vision to be able to project in advance what outcome will result from your actions, large and small. The communication skills in this book offer critical ways to make those distinctions.

“I’m not calling for any special reason, I just wanted you to know I love you. I don’t want to interrupt you—I just want to communicate that to you”?

They kissed me and left, saying they would never forget me. I walked upstairs after they left and got into bed. My wife, Becky, who had been listening to the whole thing, was crying, and so was I. She said, “You’re incredible. That child’s life will never be the same.” I said, “Thanks, honey, but anybody with the skills could have helped her.” She said, “Yeah, Tony, any-body could have, but you did.”

“I demand more from myself than anybody else could ever expect.”