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

by Tony Robbins

1. It’s a disempowering rule if it’s impossible to meet.

2. A rule is disempowering if something that you can’t control determines whether your rule has been met or not.

3. A rule is disempowering if it gives you only a few ways to feel good and lots of ways to feel bad.

set up a system of evaluating that includes rules that are achievable, that make it easy to feel good and hard to feel bad,

When people are feeling good all the time, they tend to treat others better, and they tend to maximize their potential as human beings.

our self-esteem is tied to our ability to feel like we’re in control of the events in our environment.

create a set of rules for your moving-toward values that makes it easy to feel good, and a set of rules for your moving-away-from values that makes it hard to feel bad. Ideally, create a menu of possibilities with lots of ways to feel good.

set of rules that makes you feel lousy all the time.

People get especially angry when they think others are making up rules or changing them along the way.

RULES REALIGNMENT Right now, begin to take control of your rules by writing down your answers to the following questions. Make your answers as thorough as possible. 1. What does it take for you to feel successful? 2. What does it take for you to feel loved—by your kids, by your spouse, by your parents, and by whoever else is important to you? 3. What does it take for you to feel confident? 4. What does it take for you to feel you are excellent in any area of your life?

Now look at these rules and ask yourself, “Are they appropriate? Have I made it really hard to feel good and easy to feel bad?

Here’s a critical distinction: design your rules so that you’re in control, so that the outside world is not what determines whether you feel good or bad. Set it up so that it’s incredibly easy for you to feel good, and incredibly hard to feel bad.

For the rules that govern your moving-toward values, use the phrase “Anytime I…” In other words, create a menu of possibilities of ways to feel good. For example, “I feel love anytime I give love, or anytime I spend time with people I love, or anytime I smile at someone new, or anytime I talk with an old friend, or anytime I notice someone doing something nice for me, or anytime I appreciate those who already love me.” Do you notice what you’ve done? You’ve made the game winnable by stacking the deck outrageously in your favor!

the most empowering rule is to enjoy yourself no matter what happens.

As part of an in-depth questionnaire participants fill out before the seminar, they list five experiences that they feel have shaped their entire lives.

He visualized over and over again breaking the four-minute mile, hearing and feeling himself break the barrier until pretty soon he had so many reference legs that he felt certain he would succeed—as

He vividly imagined the future of his company, and created references where none existed. He directed his focus and envisioned his goals with clarity, and then backed it up with absolute and active faith.

Into my thirty-one years I’ve packed literally hundreds of years of experience. How can I say that? The number of challenging and enriching experiences that I have in a month relates more closely to what most people experience over a period of years.

Now let’s take inventory of some of the most powerful references that have shaped your life. Take a moment now and write down five of the most powerful experiences that have shaped who you’ve become as a person. Give not only a description of the experience, but how that experience impacted you. If you write down anything that seems to have impacted you negatively, immediately come up with another interpretation of that event, no matter what it takes.

I knew what an incredible set of states the discipline would provide. I earned my black belt in tae kwon do in eight months by studying directly with the great Grandmaster Jhoon Rhee and modeling his incredibly intense focus. I realized that if I could have the experience of disciplining myself so fiercely in that area of my life, then that reference would spill over to many other areas—and it did. So, what else could you do?

We all will act consistently with our views of who we truly are, whether that view is accurate or not. The reason is that one of the strongest forces in the human organism is the need for consistency.

As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identity. The same thing happens with a person who has excess weight whose identity is, “I’m a fat person.” This individual may diet and lose weight in the short term, but he will always gain it back because his sense of certainty about who he is will guide all his behaviors until they are once again consistent with his identity. We all must maintain the integrity of our convictions of who we are, even when they are destructive and disempowering.

Those with excess weight must transform their identity from a fat person to a vital, healthy, and athletic human being. This identity change will shift all their behaviors, from their diet to their exercise, and allow them to create the long-term physiological changes that are consistent with their new identity. This shift may sound like it’s merely a semantic manipulation, but in truth it is a much deeper and more profound transformation of personal reality.

If you’ve repeatedly attempted to make a particular change in your life, only to continually fall short, invariably the challenge is that you were trying to create a behavioral or emotional shift that was inconsistent with your belief about who you are. Shifting, changing, or expanding identity can produce the most profound and rapid improvements in the quality of your life.

Begin to ask yourself, “What more can I be? What more will I be? Who am I becoming now?” Think about your values and dream list, and commit to yourself that, regardless of the environment, “I will consistently act as a person who is already achieving these goals. I will breathe this way. I will move this way. I will respond to people this way. I will treat people with the kind of dignity, respect, compassion, and love that this person would.” If we decide to think, feel, and act as the kind of person we want to be, we will become that person. We won’t just be behaving “like” that person; we will be that person. You are now at a crossroads.

Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don’t think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously.

If you change any one of the five areas of the system, your whole life will change. A change in your habitual questions alone will change your focus and change your life. Making shifts in your values hierarchies will immediately change the direction of your life. Cultivating powerful, resourceful states in your physiology will change the way you think and the way you feel. This alone could change your identity. So could changing some of your global beliefs. Pursuing additional references will provide the raw materials for assembling a new experience of who you are. And certainly, deciding to expand your identity could transform virtually everything.

Lower heart rates make these activities aerobic, and higher heart rates make them anaerobic.…

We live in a society that is anaerobic-excessive and aerobic-deficient, and it’s negatively impacting the quality of health across the nation.

Your body won’t burn fat unless you specifically train it to do so.

If you find yourself resenting someone who is wealthy, what message does that send your brain? It’s probably something like “Having excess money is bad.” If you harbor these feelings for others, you’re subconsciously teaching your mind that for you to do well would make you a “bad” person. By resenting others’ success, you condition yourself to avoid the very financial abundance that you need and desire.

All wealth begins in the mind!