Jul 25, 2019
Unlimited Power By Tony Robbins — Why You Should Read
“Often we are caught in a mental trap of seeing enormously successful people and thinking they are where they are because they have some special gift. Yet a closer look shows that the greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action.”
- Tony Robbins
In the first chapter of the book, Robbins makes the claim that success leaves clues that can be studied and that to study them is the one true way to give yourself power.
There are seven key traits of successful people:
- Passion
- Belief
- Strategy
- Clarity of Values
- Energy
- Bonding Power
- Mastery of Communication
Successful people are not only able to communicate well with others but are more importantly able to communicate well with themselves. They don’t look at the events that occur to themselves as good or bad, they only focus on the result of a particular action.
If you can learn to correct yourself based on the feedback of your actions then you have learned a major step to achieving success, but this requires you to be open minded which is easier said than done.
Our ability to change the opinions of others and convince them to take action in a certain way, our ability to build things using whatever resources are around us, our practice in figuring out our own ideas about how the world works, all make up the force behind true power.
Modeling
“The movers and shakers of the world are often professional modelers — people who have mastered the art of learning everything they can by following other people’s experience rather than their own.”
- Tony Robbins
Robbins says that the easiest way to become successful is to model yourself after successful people. This is based on the idea that everyone is relatively equal, nobody is special, and that anything that one person can do, anyone else should be able to also.
Robbins decided to model himself after the best riflemen in the U.S. Army and then he gave courses in shooting accuracy (even though he had never held a gun before in his life). Even with no experience or knowledge, if you can learn from the right models, you can learn anything quickly.
While it is good to have mentors, they aren’t totally the end all be all of your success. If you are able to get your hands on books then you have access to humanity’s collective knowledge of accomplishment, and if you keep filling your mind with stories and ideas behind other people’s success it will rub off on you.
But be warned, don’t take advice from just anybody like your drinking buddies or that fun uncle; if you really want a better life look for great achievers both from your real life and from books. These people, not your friends and family, are the ones who should set your standards.
Tony believes that the real disadvantage of poor neighborhoods and ghettos comes not from the daily struggle of survival but from the effect these environments have on personal belief and ambition.
He writes, “If all you see is failure, if all you see is despair, it’s very hard for you to form the internal representations that will foster success.”
Taking Control Of Your Mind
There is a chapter in the book all about “submodalities,” negative influences that make their way into your mind through your hearing, vision, or emotions in order to change the way you see things.
Robbins tells us that bad luck is merely a point of view, there are always positive ways to look at something. This is called “reframing,” recall that successful people don’t look at things as good or bad, they only look at things as results.
The result is the fact of the situation, not your emotional reactions towards it. With enough focus, you can choose the kind of reaction you have towards anything.
If you are aiming to be successful then this kind of thinking is valuable, “for what is an entrepreneur, if not someone who sees existing resources through a different lens?” Robbins asks.
An entrepreneur is a master reframer.
Goals and Vision
With a quote from the Bible, Robbins explains the life and death potentiality of having strong goals.
“Where there is no vision, people perish”
- Proverbs 29:18
The human brain works in such a way that the images and ideas about your life influence it either positively or negatively. Whatever you ask for in life is what you’ll get.
“People are not lazy they simply have impotent goals.”
One night Tony Robbins met a homeless man while walking down the street, the man asked him for a quarter.
Although Tony had more money, a quarter is exactly what he gave the homeless man, he told him “life will pay you exactly whatever price you ask of it.”
Maybe Tony was being a jerk in this instance but there is a good lesson to be learned, whatever we feel we deserve, our subconscious has a way of moving us into a path to gain it.
So, if you don’t ask for anything specific and live your life like a leaf in the wind, you’ll only get blown around. If you ask for wealth and happiness, then you will find yourself reading about it, and putting in the work to get it.
This is what Tony calls the power of precision, use language to be precise with your thoughts, and then your thoughts will determine your actions, which get you results.
What is Rapport?
Rapport is the skill of getting into the mindset of the person you are interacting with, so that you may understand their thoughts and feelings. This creates a productive interaction, you will find that you like the person and because you took the time to understand them, they will like you too.
Anyone who is highly successful is able to build rapport with other people, this is extremely advantageous when it comes to many things, business deals, romance, small talk, and leading your team of employees.
Robbins is telling us that there is more to gain if we choose to be agreeable rather than competitive in our interactions. Competition in the form of comparing yourself to other people and trying to make yourself seem more favorable is always on our minds, it influences our interactions and we always try to come out on top.
But who are we trying to convince? the other person, someone observing the interaction, or ourselves?
We are a lot more effective when we are making the other person feel good about themselves.
In Conclusion
While I was enjoying the book, I noticed that a lot of the references are dated (it was written in the 80s’ after all), but the information found within the pages is timeless.
Through reading this and getting fired up, you’ll see why Tony Robbins is the world’s number one success guru, it blows my mind that he wrote this book when he was only 25.
Success won’t scream and yell at you to find it but it does leave trail of clues for you, you only have to be willing to follow.
Just always remember that gaining unlimited power primarily requires you to be a person of action.
“No matter how grim your world is, if you can read about the accomplishments of others, you can create the beliefs that will allow you to succeed.”
- Tony Robbins
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Originally published at http://forgefinancialfreedom.com on July 25, 2019.
