Personal Power is a month-long training program that covers many areas of personal development. You see this program advertised on late night television and many successful people offer testimonials supporting it. In this set of 30 tapes, Tony Robbins describes a variety of self-help techniques and provides exercises to help internalize the experience.
Key Ideas
On the first tape, Robbins talks about
the keys to personal power as the ability to make effective decisions and take
consistent action. His ultimate success formula:
1. Know
your outcome (what you want).
2. Get
yourself to take action by deciding to do so.
3. Notice
what you are getting from your actions and change your approach if necessary.
Use role modeling to accelerate the pace of success. Seek out
people who are already successful and find
To change ourselves, we
must focus our attention on how not changing our behavior will be more
painful than actually changing it.
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out what the person is doing to be successful. Model what
they are doing and you will get the same results.
Robbins includes practice exercises with each lesson. On this
tape he asks listeners to write down two important decisions that they have
been putting off and decide to take action on these decisions immediately.
Tape two of this volume is about the controlling forces of
pain and pleasure. Robbins says that we will do far more to avoid pain than to
gain pleasure. To change ourselves, we must focus our attention on how not
changing our behavior will be more painful than actually changing it. Also
determine how changing will bring you more pleasure. Change what you link pain
and pleasure to in order to help change your behavior. Use pain and pleasure
instead of letting them use you.
The exercise for this lesson is to write down four actions
that you know you should take and evaluate the pain that has kept you from
taking these actions, along with the pleasure from not following through. The
strategy then is to reverse the process by determining what it will cost you if
you don't follow through along with the pleasure that you will get from taking
action.
Here are the main concepts from the remaining tapes. They
follow the same format with a discussion by Robbins along with a set of
exercises to follow:
Neuro-Associative conditioning (NAC)- is a technique,
developed by Tony Robbins, for conditioning yourself where you are aware of how
your thoughts, feelings and actions directly affect your life. Everything that
you think or do is a cause set in motion, and will have an effect or result in
your life. These events begin to stack up and take your life in a particular
direction. It's important to decide what is your ultimate destiny- what you
want your life to be. Write down previous positive and negative NACÕs that have
shaped your life.
The emotional state that you're in determines your behavior
and performance. You are always responsible for your own states. Some of the
ways to change your state include:
Using
physiology- move your body differently (as if you are already
successful). Use your voice to help put yourself into a peak state by
projecting more enthusiasm. Practice changing your breathing patterns and
facial expressions so that you have more control over your emotional state.
Exercises-
practice going from dispassionate to passionate, determine the
difference in how you moved and breathed, your facial expressions,
The emotional state that you're in determines your behavior
and performance. You are always responsible for your own states.
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voice, etc. Robbins has participants practice speaking in a
flat, dull tone, to projecting more excitement. Get leverage on yourself- list
10 reasons why you must change your behavior now and the reasons that you know
that you can. Interrupt your present pattern of association- design four to
five ways to get yourself out of the limiting beliefs or associations.
Condition a new empowering association until it is consistent by feeling and
thinking about it over and over until you have internalized it.
To change a belief, you
must identify it, and link enough pain
to it so your brain wants to move away from it.
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Change your state by controlling and directing your focus-
since most of what is going on around us is being deleted or ignored, we must
control what we are picturing in our minds, and how we are seeing it
(dimension, brightness, etc). Control the questions you ask yourself- eliminate
endless loop questions (such as: "why can't I get thin?") and replace
them with empowering questions ("What is the healthiest food I could enjoy
right now?").
Values-
we want certain things or conditions in our life because of the pleasurable
states we think they will give us (means values). Changing a value changes what
the brain is paying attention to and how we respond to different situations.
Belief-
a feeling of certainty about the meaning of something. Your beliefs determine
whether or not you feel like you're meeting your values and they can either
limit or liberate you. Types of beliefs-
global beliefs (generalizations such as: life is. people are) Rules (for me to
feel successful, I must have___). By
being aware of your beliefs and changing some of your rules and global beliefs,
you have much more control over your emotional state.
Exercises-
look at what is most important in your life, along with your rules and values.
List the negative emotions you would do almost anything to avoid. Find out what
your rules are by writing down what has to happen for you to experience all of
these emotional states. Begin to question your rules and determine which ones
are limiting you so you can change them.
To change a belief, you must identify
it, and link enough pain to it so your brain wants to move away from it. Link
massive pleasure to the new belief, condition the new belief by rehearsing over
and over how your life will be better with this new belief. Some sample core
beliefs- the past does not equal the future. There is always a way- if you're
committed.
Exercises- identify a belief that you want to change and
think about the consequences in 5, 10 or 20 years if you don't change. Step
back and realize that none of this has happened yet. Determine what new beliefs
that you need to reverse the process. List areas of your life that are not what
you want them to be and write down what additional beliefs you would need to
live by in order to set goals and achieve them.
Power of
Why. We must have a big enough "why" to succeed, enough
compelling reasons to drive us forward to do whatever it takes to achieve our
goals. Who you become in the process of achieving your goals is the real
purpose.
Goal
setting- list your goals and write down the time within you are
committed to accomplishing them. Focus on specific goals that you can achieve
in the next 1, 3, 5 or 10 years. Select the top 3 goals in each category and
list the most compelling reasons to accomplish them. Be aware of the various
types of goals, such as financial goals, personal development goals, family
goals, career goals, etc. For each one, write down what action you could take
right away to make initial progress. Do the rocking chair test to help you
commit- see yourself as an old person who had or had not accomplished these
goals.
Power of
rituals- many positive or negative emotions we feel on a regular
basis are the result of an internal ritual. Rituals are the habitual ways of
looking at the world, talking to yourself, performing daily activities and
moving your body.
Exercise- list your negative and positive emotions and what
rituals (recipes) you have for creating these emotional states. Develop a
pattern interrupt for the negative rituals and think of new rituals that you
could develop that would be more empowering.
Anchoring-
is setting up a trigger to help put yourself into a desired state.
This could be something you say to yourself or the way you clap your hands
together. This technique is an important part of Neuro Linguistic Programming
(NLP) and is also used by many athletes to keep themselves in a peak state.
Whenever you are in an intense emotional state, anything that happens around
you consistently while you are in that state gets associated to it. Positive
anchor- when you are at the peak of a desired state, do something over and over
again until it is conditioned, such as touching your thumb and middle fingers
together. Later you can use this anchor to help put you back into the peak
emotional state.
Swish
patters- get rid of negative emotions by picturing the negative
scene, along with the ideal scene. See a slingshot firing the ideal scene and
it gets bigger and bigger until it bursts through and destroys the negative
scene. Another swish technique is to see the negative scene as getting
One way to encourage more financial abundance is to change the
negative
associations that you have about money and see all of the
positive things that you could do with it.
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smaller and smaller and turning black & white. The
desired scene becomes more vivid and colorful.
Condition
yourself for wealth- money is a means to measure the value between
people. One way to encourage more financial abundance is to change the negative
associations that you have about money and see all of the positive things that
you could do with it. Make abundance an absolute must- set a specific amount of
money that represents financial abundance, and commit to a financial plan.
Figure out what you don't understand
about money and investing, and get help. Develop a belief that who
Robbins emphasizes that you should never threaten to end a
relationship as a way to coerce your partner to conform to some expectation.
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you are is much bigger than
anything that could ever happen to you financially. Robbins believes that
financial abundance comes from doing what you love most, doing it massively,
and making sure it creates tremendous value for other people.
References-
people have many positive and negative references based on their
life experiences. Take control of your references by defining what must happen
for you to feel successful or a failure. Create new definitions that makes it
easier to succeed and more difficult to fail. Eventually you will create enough
positive references to develop more confidence in your daily activities.
Exercise-
list five of your greatest successes and write a paragraph describing each one.
Use these examples to remind yourself that you can always find a way.
Increasing
health and energy- Use daily aerobic exercise and deep breathing
exercises. Breathing controls the flow of lymph, stimulates the immune system
and carries out the body's wastes. Eat at least 70% water rich foods (fruits
& vegetables).
Otherwise your body is not able to process the wastes and
becomes clogged up.
Exercise-
write down everything that has passed through your lips in the last 24 hours
and the percentage of water rich foods. Decide on a diet that will help you
achieve greater vitality.
Relationships-
think of a relationship as a place to give rather than receive. Don't let
arguments get out of control by using pattern interrupts. Look for ways
(triggers) that show our love- some people need to be shown, others need to
hear it or to be touched in a
certain way. Write down exactly what you want and
don't want in a relationship. Robbins emphasizes that you should never threaten
to end a relationship as a way to coerce your partner to conform to some
expectation.
Problems-
see them as challenges that are opportunities for you to grow. Spend 20% of the
time defining the problem and 80% focusing on the solution.
Mentoring
group- develop a team of people you deeply care for, to whom you are
inspired with and want to contribute more and more to. This team of people can
be your "mastermind" group that you share ideas and inspiration with.
Re-evaluate your life on a regular basis.
Rejection-
people are rejecting the impression of you in that moment. This is often based
on their own set of prejudices and expectations. You are the only one who can
set off rejection in yourself. Develop new rules to help you overcome
rejection. For example: rejections may not be pleasant but they are necessary
on the path to success.
Decide how you can add a new component to a boring job
or task to create enjoyment out of it. Robbins uses the example of when he had to
make a large number of phone calls and was frustrated. He made the task more
enjoyable by making calls while in the Jacuzzi.
Strive
for Constant and never ending improvement (CANI) in the important areas of your
life- physical vitality, relationships, finances, etc. Continually evaluate and
improve your standards and make small daily improvements.
About the Author
Anthony Robbins
Tony Robbins is the nation's expert in the psychology and peak performance of personal, professional and organizational “turnaround.” He served as a peak performance consultant to 1992 America's Cup Winner, 1993 Stanley
Cup finalists, the Los Angeles Kings,
André Agassi, and the 1995 San Antonio
Spurs, as well as organisations such as Hallmark, Southwestern Bell and the U.S. Army.
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