Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny!

by Tony Robbins

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.

long-term change: 1) First, we must believe, “Something must change”—not

the quality of our lives. 2) Second, we must not only believe that things must change, but we must believe, “I must change it.”

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

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.

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

three criteria. 1. Your brain looks for something that appears to be unique. To narrow down the likely causes, the brain tries to distinguish something that is unusual to the circumstance. It seems logical that if you’re having unusual feelings, there must be an unusual cause. 2. Your brain looks for something that seems to be happening simultaneously. This is known in psychology circles as the Law of Recency. Doesn’t it make sense that what occurs in the moment (or close proximity to it) of intense pleasure or pain is probably the cause of that sensation? 3. Your brain looks for consistency. If you’re feeling pain or pleasure, your brain begins to immediately notice what around you is unique and is happening simultaneously. If the element that meets these two criteria also seems to occur consistently whenever you feel this pain or pleasure, then you can be sure that your brain will determine that it is the cause.

When you give your brain mixed messages, you’re going to get mixed results.

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.

Without changing what you link pain and pleasure to in your nervous system, no change will last.

If you and I want to change our behavior, there is only one effective way to do it: we must link unbearable and immediate sensations of pain to our old behavior, and incredible and immediate sensations of pleasure to a new one.

NAC MASTER STEP 1 Decide What You Really Want and What’s Preventing You From Having It Now.

NAC MASTER STEP 2 Get Leverage: Associate Massive Pain to Not Changing Now and Massive Pleasure to the Experience of Changing Now!

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.

We have mixed emotions where we link both pain and pleasure to changing, which causes our brain to be uncertain as to what to do, and keeps us from utilizing our full resources to make the kinds of changes that can happen literally in a moment if every ounce of our being were committed to them.

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.”

If you’ve tried many times to make a change and you’ve failed to do so, this simply means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. You

20 percent of any change is knowing how; but 80 percent is knowing why.

If we gather a set of strong enough reasons to change, we can change in a minute something we’ve failed to change for years.

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. If we fail to act in accordance with our own view of ourselves, if our behaviors are inconsistent with our standards—with the identity we hold for ourselves—then the chasm between our actions and who we are drives us to make a change. The leverage created by pointing out an inconsistency between someone’s standards and their behavior can be incredibly effective in causing them to change. It’s not just pressure placed on them by the outside world, but pressure built up by themselves from within. One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.

The reason so many of us seem to be walking contradictions is simply that we never recognize inconsistencies for what they are. If you want to help somebody, you won’t access this kind of leverage by making them wrong or pointing out that they’re inconsistent, but rather by asking them questions that cause them to realize for themselves their inconsistencies.

They associate more pain to making the change than to not changing. To change someone, including ourselves, we must simply reverse this so that not changing is incredibly painful (painful beyond our threshold of tolerance), and the idea of changing is attractive and pleasurable!

To get true leverage, ask yourself 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? What is it already costing me mentally, emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually?” 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.

If that doesn’t create enough leverage, then focus on how it affects your loved ones, your children, and other people you care about. Many of us will do more for others than we’ll do for ourselves.

So picture in graphic detail how much your failure to change will negatively impact the people who are most important to you. The second step is to use pleasure-associating questions to help you link those positive sensations to the idea of changing. “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 accomplis...

NAC MASTER STEP 3 Interrupt the Limiting Pattern.

Someone with secondary gain has mixed emotions about changing. They say they want to change, but often they subconsciously believe that maintaining the old behavior or emotional pattern gives them something they couldn’t get any other way.

the more outrageous your approach to breaking a pattern, the more effective it will be.

One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring.

find a new pattern (that’s the next step), and condition it again and again until it becomes our consistent approach.

HOW TO BREAK LIMITING PATTERNS OF FEELING AND ACTING Again, often it’s true that interrupting a pattern enough times can change almost anyone.

NAC MASTER STEP 4 Create a New, Empowering Alternative.

This fourth step is absolutely critical to establishing long-term change. In fact, the failure by most people to find an alternative way of getting out of pain and into the feelings of pleasure is the major reason most people’s attempts at change are only temporary.

If you’ve been following each one of these steps, you’ve gotten clear about what you wanted and what was preventing you from getting it, you’ve gotten leverage on yourself, you’ve interrupted the pattern, and now you need to fill the gap with a new set of choices that will give you the same pleasurable feelings without the negative side effects.

the adoption of a replacement behavior appears to play a major role

The third group replaced their addiction with a new alternative, something that gave them the feelings they had sought originally—or

NAC MASTER STEP 5 Condition the New Pattern Until It’s Consistent.

your brain can’t tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually experience.

I can condition any behavior within ourselves if we do it with enough repetition and emotional intensity.

set up a schedule to reinforce your new behavior. How can you reward yourself for succeeding?

Set up a series of short-term goals, or milestones, and as you reach each one, immediately reward yourself.

it’s important to reward yourself as soon as you take some specific actions or make any positive emotional progress, like choosing to run around the block instead of running to the nearest McDonald’s.

Understanding the power of reinforcement will speed up the process of conditioning a new pattern.

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

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

Conditioning is critical. This is how we produce consistent results. Once again, remember that any pattern of emotional behavior that is reinforced or rewarded on a consistent basis will become conditioned and automatic.

NAC MASTER STEP 6 Test It!

you’ve decided upon the new pattern of emotion or behavior that you desire; you’ve gotten leverage on yourself to change it; you’ve interrupted the old pattern; you’ve found a new alternative; and you’ve conditioned it until it’s consistent. The only step left is to test it to make sure that it’s going to work in the future.