Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins

• Empowering people to realize that they determine the outcome of their own lives is not always easy. In fact, it's usually an overwhelming task.
• Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives.
• Controlled focus is like a laser beam that can cut through anything that seams to be stopping you.
• One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power.
• Most people dabble through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.
• I believe most people fail in life simply because they major in the minor things.
• For changes to be of any true value, they've got to be lasting and consistent.
• Any time you want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards.
• Changing an organization, a company, a country--or a world--beings with the simple step of changing yourself.
• If you raise your standards but don't really believe you can meet them, you've already sabotaged yourself.
• Our beliefs are like unquestioned commands, telling us how things are, what's possible and what's impossible, what we can and can not do. They shape every action, every thought, and every feeling that we experience. As a result, changing our belief systems is central to making any real and lasting change in our lives.
• The best strategy in almost any case is to find a role-model, someone who's already getting the results you want, and then tap into their knowledge.
• You see, in life, lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know. Knowing is not enough! You must take action.
• Virtually everything we do is to change the way we feel.
• Other than mastering your own emotions and physical health, there is nothing I can think of that is more important than learning to master your relationships.
• By the time they reach the age of sixty-five, most Americans are either dead broke--or dead!
• Grab hold of the things you think are useful: put them in action immediately.
• You'll find that there are key leverage points within your life that, if you make one small change, will literally transform every aspect of your life.
• In Unlimited Power, I made it abundantly clear that the most powerful way to shape our lives it to get ourselves to take action.
• The difference in the results that people produce comes down to what they've done differently from others in the same situations. Different actions produce different results.
• In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.
• Everything that happens in your life began with a decision. I believe that it's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
• More than anything else, I believe it's our decisions, not the conditions of our lives, that determine our destiny.
• Not only do you have to decide what results you're commit ed to, but also the kind of person that you're commit ed to becoming.
• If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in your life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve. You need to set and live by these standards no matter what happens in your life.
• You can decide to do something else, something new, today. Right now you can make a decision.
• If you truly decide to, you can do almost anything.
• You must know that you can make a decision right now that will immediately change your life.
• Your life changes the moment you make a new, congruent, and commit ed decision.
• The most exciting thing about this force, this power [of decision], is that you already possess it.
• What's important is to decide you will find a way, no matter what.
• In Unlimited Power, I outlined what I call "The Ultimate Success Formula", which is an elementary process for getting you where you want to go:
• 1) Decide what you want.
• 2) Take action.
• 3) Notice what's working and what's not.
• 4) Change your approach until you achieve what you want.
• As soon as you truly commit to making something happen, the "how" will reveal itself.
• Make a true decision means committing to achieving a result, and then cutting yourself off from any other possibility.
• With clarity, you can produce the results that you really want for your life.
• The way to make better decisions is to make more of them.
• Realize that decision making, like any skill you focus on improving, gets better the more often you do it.
• Information is power when it's acted upon.
• Remember that repetition is the mother of skill.
• To me, profound knowledge is any simple distinction, strategy, belief, skill, or tool that, the minute we understand it, we can apply it to make immediate increases in the quality of our lives.
• Three decisions that you make every moment of your life control your destiny.
• 1) Your decisions about what to focus on.
• 2) Your decisions about what things mean to you.
• 3) Your decisions about what to do to create the results you desire.
• It's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.
• Too many of us don't make the majority of our decisions consciously, especially these three absolutely critical ones; in so doing, we pay a major price.
• It's like that whatever challenges you have in your life currently could have been avoided by some better decisions upstream.
• By changing any one of these five elements--whether it's a core belief or rule, a value, a reference, a question, or an emotional state--you can immediately produce a powerful and measure able change in your life.
• We don't have to allow the programming of our past to control our present and future.
• Success truly is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is the result of experience, and experience is often the result of bad judgment!
• We must commit to learning from our mistakes, rather than beating ourselves up, or we're destined to make the same mistakes again in the future.
• Mastery takes as long as you want it to take.
• Remember that there are no failures in life. There are only results. If you didn't get the results you wanted, learn from this experience so that you have references about how to make better decisions in the fut re.
• One of the most important decisions you can make to ensure your long-term happiness is to decade to use whatever life gives you in the moment.
• In order to succeeded, you must have a long-term focus.
• Success is the result of making small decisions.
• No individual or organization that has become successful has done so with short-term focus.
• Deciding to commit yourself to long-term results, rather than short-term fixes, is as important as any decision you'll make in your lifetime. Failing to do this can cause not only massive financial or societal pain, but sometimes even the ultimate personal pain.
• You literally begin to change your life the moment you make a new decision.
• Carrying out your commitment is often much easier than the decision itself, so make your decisions intelligently, but make them quickly.
• A critical rule I've made for myself is never to leave the scene of a decision without first taking a specific action toward its realization.
• Once you've decided who you want to be as a person, don't get stuck on the means to achieving it. It's the end you're after.
• Don't become rigid in your approach. Cultivate the art of flexibility.
• Know that it's your decisions, not your conditions, that determine your destiny.
• Remember that a truly commit ed decision is the force that changes your life. It's a power available to you in any moment if you just decide to use it.
• Everything you and I do, we do either out of our need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.
• For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain.
• One decision that has made a tremendous difference in the quality of my life is that at an early age I began to link incredible pleasure to learning.
• If we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually any thin in our lives.
• One of the things that makes us so special is our marvelous ability to adapt, to transform, to manipulate objects or ideas to produce something more pleasing or useful.
• What you linker pain and pleasure to will shape your destiny.
• Though we'd like to deny it, the fact remains that what drives our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation.
• Although we'd like to believe it's our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions--the sensations that we link to our thoughts--are what truly drives us.
• Ultimately, in order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior, and condition it until it's consistent.
• Most Pele focus on how to avoid pain and gain pleasure in the short term, and thereby create long-term pain for themselves.
• Remember, anything you want that's valuable requires that you break through some short-term pain in order to gain long-term pleasure.
• The key thing to remember is that we don't move away from real pain; we move away from what we believe will lead to pain.
• It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.
• Generalizations can be very useful: they are simply the identification of similar patterns.
• Most of our beliefs are generalizations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasure able experiences.
• The challenge is threefold:
• 1) Most of us do not consciously decide what we're going to believe.
• 2) Often our beliefs are based on misinterpretation of past experiences.
• 3) Once we adopt a belief, we forget it's merely an interpretation.
• If you want to create long-term and consistent changes in your behaviors, you must change the beliefs that are holding you back.
• Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy.
• Once accepted, our beliefs become unquestioned commands to our nervous systems, and they have the power to expand or destroy the possibilities of our present and future.
• Most people treat a belief as if it's a thing, when really all it is is a feeling of certainty about so meting.
• A simple way of understanding a belief is to think about its basic building block: an idea.
• With enough emotional intensity and repetition, our nervous systems experience something as real, even if it hasn't occur ed yet.
• Great leaders are rarely "realistic". They are intelligent and they are accurate, but they are not realistic by other people's standards.
• If you're going to make an error in life, err on the side of overestimating your capabilities.
• All great leaders, all people who have achieved success in any area of life, know Th power of continuously pursuing their vision, even if all the details of how to achieve it aren't yet available.
• If you developer the absolute certainty that powerful beliefs proved, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually annoying, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.
• One of the biggest challenges in anyone's life is knowing how to interpret "failures".
• How we deal with adversity and challenges will shape our lives more than almost anything else.
• Achievers rarely, if ever, see a problem as permanent, while those who fail see even the smallest problems as permanent.
• Remember, as long as you belief something, your brain operates on automatic pilot, filtering any input from the environment and searching for references to validate your belief, regardless of what it is.
• All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in belief.
• If you question anything enough, eventually you'll begin to doubt it.
• Using social proof is a great way to limit your life--to make it just like everybody Elise's.
• Pain is still the most powerful way to change a belief.
• The way to expand our lives is to model the lives of those people who are already seceding.
• One of the most important global beliefs that you and I can adopt is a belief that in order to succeed and be happy, we've got to be constantly improving the quality of our lives, constantly growing and expanding.
• The only true security in life comes from knowing that every single day you are improving yourself in some way.
• Nothing in life has any meaning except the meaning you give it.
• Leaders are those individuals who live by empowering beliefs and teach others to tap their full capabilities by shifting the beliefs that have been limiting them.
• All changes are created in a moment. It's just that most of us wait until certain things happen before we finally decide to make a shift.
• Once we effect a change, we should reinforce it immediately. Then, we have to condition our nervous systems to succeed not just once, but consistently.
• Nothing changes until we change the sensations we link to an experience in our nervous system.
• 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.
• The first step to creating any change is deciding what you do want so that you have something to move toward.
• The more specific you can be about what you want, the more clarity you will have, and the more power you will command to achieve what you want more rapidly.
• Change is usually not a problem of capability; it's almost always a question of motivation.
• Leverage is absolutely crucial in creating any change.
• 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.
• One of the strongest forces in the human personality is the drive to preserve the integrity of our own identity.
• One of the key distinctions to interrupting a pattern is that you must do it in the moment the pattern is recurring.
• A simple way of breaking a pattern is by scrambling the sensations we link to our memories.
• The Scramble Pattern
• 1) See the situation in your mind that was bothering you so much.
• 2) Take that same experience and turn it into a cartoon.
• 3) Now think about the situation that was bothering you, and notice how you feel now.
• You can simply find the answers by modeling people who have turned things around for themselves.
• External pressure rarely has a lasting impact.
• Conditioning is the way to make sure that a change you create is consistent and lasts long-term. The simplest way to condition something is simply to rehearse it again and again until a neurological way is created.
• Remember, your brain can't tell the difference between something you vividly imagine and something you actually experience.
• Understanding the power of reinforcement will speed up the process of condition a new pattern.
• Any pattern of emotion or behavior that is continually reinforced will become an automatic and conditioned response. Anything we fail to reinforce will eventually dissipate.
• Reinforcement is resounding to a behavior immediately after it occurs, while punishment and reward may occur long afterward.
• Appropriate timing is absolutely critical to effective conditioning.
• There is a point of diminishing return at which all the additional incentives don't really induce a greater quality of work from people.
• By helping your employees to grow and expand personally, they begin to feel passionate about life, people, and their jobs.
• The most important thing to remember about conditioning, however, is to reinforce the desired behavior immediately.
• One of the most powerful distinctions that I've made in the last ten years of my life is simply this: Emotion is created by motion.
• Your body leads your emotion.
• Anyone can continue to feel good if they already feel good, or if they're "on a roll"; it doesn't take much to accomplish this. But the real key in life is to be able to make yourself feel good when you don't feel good, or when you don't want to feel good.
• The key to success, then, is to create patterns of movement that create confidence, a sense of strength, flexibility, a sense of personal power, and fun.
• Whatever we focus on becomes our idea of reality.
• Focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear.
• Focusing on the solution is always to your benefit.
• A mind out of control will play tricks on you. Directed, it's your greatest Friend.
• The most powerful way to control focus is through the use of questions.
• Questions provide the key to unlock gin our unlimited potential.
• You've got to realize that you must take conscious control of running your own mind. You've got to do it deliberately; otherwise, you're going to be at the mercy of whatever happens around you.
• The first skill you must master is to be able to change your state instantly no matter what the environment, no matter how scared or frustrated you are.
• The second skill is that you should be able to change state consistently in any environment.
• The third skill, of course, is to establish a set of habitual patterns of using your physiology and focus so that you consistently feel good without any conscious effort whatsoever.
• The fourth goal is to enable others to change their state instantly, to change their state in any environment, and to change their state for their whole life.
• All that you really want in life is to change how you feel.
• Again, all your emotions are nothing but bio mechanical storms in your brain, and you are in control of them at any moment in time.
• Our questions determine our thoughts.
• I began to realize that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions.
• I realized that the main difference between the people who seemed to be successful--in any area!--and those who weren't was that successful people asked better questions, and as a result, thy got better answers.
• Quality questions create a quality life.
• Questions set off a processional effect that has an impact beyond our imagination. Questioning our limitations is what tears down the walls in life--in business, in relationships, between countries. I believe all human progress is preceded by new questions.
• What enables you to get anything you want from your own personal data banks is the commanding power of asking questions.
• The difference between people is the difference in the questions they ask consistently.
• So what's the quickest way to change focus? Simply by asking a new question.
• Remember, ask and you shall receive. If you ask a terrible question, you'll get a terrible answer. Your mental computer is ever ready to serve you, and whatever question you give it, it will surely come up with an answer.
• The questions you ask will determine where you focus, how you think, how you feel, and what you do.
• Remember, it's not only the questions you ask, but the questions you fail to ask, that shape your destiny.
• A genuine quality of life comes from consistent, quality questions.
• Questions immediately change what we're focusing on and therefore how we feel.
• Most of us are on autopilot.
• Learning to ask empowering questions in moments of crisis is a critical skill.
• Unconsciously, the mind can do all sorts of things, but consciously we're limited in terms of the number of things we can focus on simultaneously.
• If you're feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it's because you're deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good.
• Questions are the laser of human consciousness. They concentrate our focus and determine what we feel and do.
• Questions have the power to affect our beliefs and thus what we consider possible or impossible.
• Presuppositions program us to accept things that may or may not be true, and they can be used on us by others, or even, subconsciously, by ourselves.
• You and I have the same power at our disposal every moment of the day. At any moment, the questions that we ask ourselves can shape our perception of who we are, what we're capable of, and what we're willing to do to achieve our dreams.
• Learning to consciously control the questions you ask will take you further to achieving your ultimate dis tiny than almost anything I know.
• The key is to develop a pattern of consistent questions that empower you.
• There's a point at which you must stop asking questions in order to make progress. At some point, you've got to stop evaluating and start doing.
• Throughout human history, our greatest leaders and thinkers have used the power of words to transform our emotions, to enlist us in their causes, and to shape the course of destiny.
• Words can not only create emotions, they create actions. And from our actions flow the results of our lives.
• Most beliefs are formed by words--and they can be changed by words as well.
• Realize now the power that your words command if you simply choose them wisely.
• The words you choose also affect how you communicate with yourself and therefore what you experience.
• People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished life; people with rich vocabularies have a multi-hued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.
• Simply by changing your habitual vocabulary--the words you consistently use to describe the emotions of your life--you can instantaneously change how you think, how you feel, and how you live.
• This is the essence of Transformations Vocabulary: the words that we attach to our experience become our experience.
• Our habitual vocabulary is extremely limited.
• If we want to change our lives and shape our destiny, we need to consciously select the words we're going to use, and we need to constantly strive to expand our level of choice.
• It's important to realize that words shape our beliefs and impact our actions.
• If you don't have a way of representing something, you can't experience it.
• If an assemblage of words you're using is creating states that dis empower you, get rid of those words and replace them with those that empower you!
• Effectively using Transformations Vocabulary--vocabulary that transforms our emotional experience--breaks resourceful patterns, makes us smile, produces totally different feelings, changes our states, and allows us to ask more intelligent questions.
• Once you understand the power of words, you become highly sensitized not only to those you use, but to those that people around you use as well.
• Remember, the beauty of Transformations Vocabulary is its utter simplicity.
• The words we use as a corporate culture and as individuals have a profound effect on our experience of reality.
• Decide that you're commit ed to having much more pleasure in your life and a lot less pain.
• By giving myself pleasure for committing and following through, I establish a new pattern.
• Beware of labels that can limit your experience.
• If you're in a profession where you work with people, it's imperative that you understand the power of words to impact those around you.
• Take control.
• Whenever we explain or communicate a concept by likening it to something else, we are using a metaphor.
• Metaphors are symbols and, as such, they can create emotional intensity even more quickly and completely than the traditional words we use. Metaphors can transform us instantly.
• One of the primary ways we learn is through metaphors. Learning is the prices of making new associations in our minds, creating new meanings, and metaphors are ideally suited for this. When we don't understand something, a metaphor provides a way of seeing how what we don't understand is like something we do understand. The metaphor helps us to link up a relationship.
• All great teachers have used metaphors to convey their meaning to the common man.
• We must take charge of our metaphors, not just to avoid the problem metaphors, but so that we can adopt the empowering metaphors as well.
• A whole set of rules, ideas, and preconceived notions accompany any metaphor you adopt.
• Having only one metaphor is a great way to limit your life.
• Changing one global metaphor can instantly transform they way you look at your entire life.
• Remember, the metaphors we use will determine our actions.
• With all the power that metaphors wield over our lives, the scary part is that most of us have never consciously selected the metaphors with which we represent things to ourselves.
• The metaphors we adopt culturally can shape our perceptions and our actions--or lack of action.
• Being aware of the vast power contained in metaphors includes knowing how to use them in an appropriate context. The challenge is that a lot of people have metaphors that help them in their professions, but create challenges at home.
• Metaphors can change the meaning you associate to anything, change what you link pain and pleasure to, and transform your life as effectively as they transform your language. Select them carefully, select them intelligently, select them so they will deepen and enrich your experience of life and that of the people you care about.
• Take control of your metaphors now and create a new world for yourself: a world of possibility, of richness, of wonder, and of joy.
• We all want to avoid painful emotions. As a result, most people try to avoid any situation that could lead to the emotions that they fear.
• Experiencing an emotion and trying to pretend it's not there only creates more pain.
• If the message your emotions are Turing to deli ever is ignored, the emotions simply increase their amperage; they intensify until you finally pay attention.
• If you want to make your life really work, you must make your emotions work for you.
• The only way to effectively use your emotions is to understand that they all serve you. You must learn from your emotions and use them to create the results you want for a greater quality of life. The emotions you once thought of as a negative are merely a call to action. In fact, instead of calling them negative emotions let's call them Action Signals.
• They [emotions] are action signals trying to guide you to the promise of a greater quality of life.
• Realize that the emotions you are feeling at this very moment are a gift, a guideline, a support system, a call to action. If you suppress your emotions and try to drive them out of your life, or if you magnify them and allow them to take over everything, then you're squandering one of life's most precious resources.
• You are the source of all of your emotions; you are the one who creates them.
• You can feel any way you choose at any moment of time.
• You don't need any special reason to feel good--you can just decide to feel good right now, simply because you're alive, simply because you want to.
• What is the message of these action signals? They're telling you that what you're currently doing is not working, that the reason you have pain is either the way you're perceiving things or the procedures you're using: specifically, the way you're communicating your needs and desires to people, or the actions you're taking.
• Feeling depression is norther call to action, telling you that you need to change your perception that the problems you're dealing with are permanent or out of your control.
• Six steps to emotional mastery:
• 1) Identify what you're really feeling.
• 2) Acknowledge and appreciate your emotions, knowing they support you.
• 3) Get curios about the message this emotion is offering you.
• 4) Get confident.
• 5) Get certain you can handle this not only today, but in the future as well.
• Cultivate the feeling of appreciation for all emotions.
• Getting curious helps you master your emotion, solve the challenge, and prevent the same problem from occurring in the future.
• The quickest, simplest, and most powerful way I know to handle any emotion is to remember a time when you felt a similar emotion and realize that you've successfully handles this emotion before.
• Remember, the best time to handle an emotion is when you first begin to feel it.
• My philosophy is, "Kill the monster while it's little."
• Boredom, impatience, unease, distress, or mild embarrassment are all sending you a message that something is not quite right.
• Fear is simply the anticipation that something that's going to happen soon needs to be prepared for.
• Figure out what actions you need to take tot deal with the situation in the best possible way.
• Feelings of hurt are usually generated by a sense of loss.
• The message the hurt signal gives us is that we have an expectation that has not been met.
• The message of anger is that an important rule or standard that you hold for your life has been violated by someone else, or maybe even by you.
• The message of frustration is an exciting signal. It means that your brain believes you chordal be doing better than you currently are.
• Realize that frustration is your friend, and brainstorm new ways to get a result.
• The message disappointment offers you is that an expectation you have had--a goal you were really going for--is probably not going to happen, so it's time to change your expectations to make them more appropriate for this situation and take action to set and achieve a new goal immediately.
• The most powerful antidote to the emotion of disappointment is cultivating an attitude of positive expectancy about what will happen in the future, regardless of what has occur ed in the past.
• Guilt teals you that you have violated one of your own highest standards, and that you must do something immediately to ensure that Ore not going to violate that standard again in the future.
• Some people manage to beat theme selves up mentally and emotion sally because they are constantly failing to meet standards that they hold for themselves in virtually every area of life.
• The message [of inadequacy] is that you don't presently have a level of skill necessary for the task at hand. It's telling you that you need more information, understanding, strategies, tools, or confidence.
• If your feeling is justified, the message of inadequacy is that you need to find a way to do something better Thant you've done it before.
• Whenever you feel inadequate, appreciate the encouragement to improve.
• The message of being overwhelmed is that you need to reevaluate what's most important to you in this situation.
• The message of loneliness is that you need a connection with people.
• The solution to loneliness is to realize that you can reach out and make a connection immediately and end the loneliness.
• The consistent expression of Love seems to be able to melt almost any negative emotions it comes in contact with.
• All communication is either a loving response or a cry for help.
• If you're curious, nothing is a chore.
• Cultivate curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy.
• Passion is unbridled power to move our lives forward at a faster tempo than ever before.
• Determination means the difference between being stuck and being struck with the lightening power of commitment.
• With determination, you can accomplish anything. Without it, you're doomed to frustration and disappointment.
• Our willingness to do whatever it takes, to act in spite of fear, is the basis of courage. And courage is the foundation from which determination is born.
• If there's one seed to plant that will guarantee success, it's the ability to change your approach.
• Choosing to be flexible is choosing to be happy.
• When you're confident, you're willing to experiment, to put yourself on the line. One way to develop faith and confidence is simply to practice using it.
• In order to get yourself to do anything, it's imperative to exercise confidence rather than fear.
• But remember: the source of success for outstanding achievers often finds its origin in a set of nitrated beliefs for which that individual had no references!
• Learning to breath properly is the most important avenue toward good health. Antler critical element to physical vitality is ensuring that you have an absent level of nerve energy.
• The secret to living is giving.
• Every feeling that you have--good or bad--is based on your interpretation of what things mean.
• The most important key to goal setting is to find a goal big enough to inspire you, something that will cause you to unleash your power.
• Setting goals is the first step in turn gin the invisible into the visible--the foundation for all success in life.
• All goal setting must be immediately followed by both the development of a plan, and massive and consistent action toward its fulfillment.
• Remember, dissatisfaction can be a major key to success.
• The direction we're heading is more important than individual results.
• Sometimes we need to trust that our disappointments may truly be opportunities in disguise.
• No one ever achieved a goal by being interested in its achievement. One must be committed.
• Once you decide that so meting is a priority, you give it tremendous emotional intensity, and by continually focusing on it, any resource that supports its attainment will eventually become clear.
• Remember that goals are dreams with a deadline.
• The simple act of deciding when you'll achieve a goal set in motion conscious and unconscious forces to make your goals a reality.
• Goals alone can inspire, but knowing the deepest reasons why you want them in the first place can provide you with the long-term drive and motivation necessary to persist and achieve.
• At least twice a day, you must rehearse and emotionally enjoy the experience of achieving each one of your most valued goals.
• Achieving goals by themselves will never make us happy in the long term; it's who you become, as you overcome the obstacles necessary to achieve your goals, that can give you the deepest and most long-lasting sense of filament.
• Never leave the site of setting a goal without first taking some form of positive action toward its attainment.
• An additional distinction that's critical for long-term success is that achieving our goals can be a curse unless we have already set up a new set of higher goals before we reach the first.
• The most important lesson in this chapter is that a compelling future creates a dynamic sense of growth.
• In order to take our lives to the next level we must realize that the same pattern of thinking that has gotten us to where we are will not get us to where we want to go.
• Remember, our goal is not to ignore the problems of life, but to put ourselves in better mental and emotional states where we can not only come up with solutions, but act upon them.
• In life, never spend more than 10 percent of your time on the problem, and spend at least 90 percent of your time on the solution.
• All too often, the security of the mediocre present is more comfortable than the adventure of trying to be more in the future.
• Leaders are readers.
• If someone is doing better than we are in any area of life, it's simply because they have a better way of evaluating what things mean and what they should do about it.
• Masters are often people who just have more references than you do about what leads to success or frustration in any given situation.
• I am the source of all my emotions. Nothing and no one can change how I feel except me. If I find myself in reaction to anything, I can change it in a moment.
• Human beings love to analyze things to death. There is a point, however, when we've got to stop evaluating and take action.
• Values guide our every decision, and, therefore, our destiny. Those who know their values and live by them become the leaders of our society.
• Too often, people have no clear idea of what's important to them.
• We must remember that all decision making comes down to values clarification.
• When you know what's most important to you, making a decision is quite simple.
• Significant emotional events can create shifts in individuals and therefore in companies, organizations, and countries that they make up.
• Get clear about what is most import at in our lives and decide that we will live by these values, no matter what happens.
• The only way for us to have long-term happiness is to live by our highest ideals.
• Anytime you have difficulty making an important decision, you can be sure that it's the result of being unclear about your values.
• So often people are too busy pursuing means values that they don't achieve their true desire: their ends values.
• People don't just pursue pleasure, but they clearly also move away from pain.
• The relative levels of pain we associate with certain emotions will affect all of our decisions.
• People will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure.
• Remember, we truly can design who we become.
• The truth is that nothing has to happen in order for you to feel good.
• Rules are a shortcut for our brains. They help us to have a sense of certainty about the consequences of our actions; thus, they enable us to make lightening quick decisions as to what things mean and what we should do about them.
• Most of us have created numerous ways to feel bad, and only a few ways to truly feel good.
• All we have to do to make our lives work is set up a system of evaluating that includes rules that are achievable, that make it easy to feel good and hard to feel bad, that constantly pull us in the direction we want to go.
• You and I need to remember that our self esteem is tied to our ability to feel like we're in control of the events in our environment.
• We want to make it hard to feel bad, and easy to feel good.
• At the base of every emotional upset you've ever had with another human being is a rules upset.
• Don't expect people to live by your rules if you don't clearly communicate what they are. And don't expect people to live by your rules if you're not willing to compromise and live by some of theirs.
• Remember, the most empowering rule is to enjoy yourself no matter what happens.
• The larger the number and greater the quality of our references, the greater our potential level of choices. A large number and greater quality of references enables us to more effectively evaluate what things mean and what we can do.
• Consciously seek out experiences that expand your sense of who you are and what you're capable of, as well as organize your references in empowering ways.
• Imagination unleashed provides us a sens of certainty and vision that goes far beyond the limitations of the past.
• You want to learn from your past, not live in it--focus on the things that empower you.
• Repletion truly is the mother of all skill.
• No matter how bad you think things are in your life, it's good to remember that someone else has it worse.
• Limited references create a limited life. If you want to expand your life, you must expand your references by pursuing ideas and experiences that wouldn't be a part of your life if you didn't consciously seek them out.
• The most powerful way to have a great understanding of life and people, to give ourselves the greatest level of choice, is to expose ourselves to as many different types of references as possible.
• If you want to expand your life, go for it!
• Expand your references, and you'll immediately expand your life.
• Remember, it's the moments of our lives that shape us.
• The global beliefs you have about the concepts of scarcity and abidance, for example, will determine your stress level and your generosity of time, money, energy, and spirit.
• You capability is constant, but how much of it you use depends upon the identity you have for yourself.
• We all will act consistently whit 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.
• We all have a need for a sense of certainty. Most people have tremendous fear of the unknown. Uncertainty implies the potential of having pain strike us, and we'd rather deal with the pain we already know an out than deal with the pain of the unknown.
• As we develop new beliefs about who we are, our behavior will change to support the new identify.
• Shifting, changing, or expanding identity can produce the most profound and rapid improvements in the quality of your life.
• We look at what we do to determine who we are.
• There is no more potent leverage in shaping human behavior than identity.
• Isn't my identity limited by my experience? No, it's limited by your interpretation of your experience. Your identify is noggin but the decisions you've made about who you are, what you've decided to fuse yourself with. You become the labels you've given yourself. The way you define your identity defines your life.
• Take a moment to identify who you are. Who are you?
• If you'd truly like to expand your identity and your life, then, right now, consciously decide who you want to be.
• We are not our bodies. Neither are we our past, nor our behaviors in the moment.
• Deciding to expand your identity could transform virtually everything.
• Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.
• There is no true success without emotional success.
• Health and fitness are not the same. The failure of most individuals to grasp the difference between fitness and health is what causes them to experience the frustration of working out religiously and still having the same five to ten pounds stubbornly clinging to their midsection.
• Exercise can become a positive addiction.
• Success is worthless if we don't have someone to share it with; indeed, our most desired human emotion is that of connection with other souls.
• In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take.
• Make your relationships one of the highest priorities in your life.
• The most common reason most people do not become financially successful is that they have mixed associates to what it would take to have more money, as well as what it would mean to have excess money.
• True wealth comes from the ability to practice "economic alchemy", which is the ability to take something that has very little value and convert it into something of significantly greater value.
• All wealth begins in the mind!
• The key to wealth is to be more valuable.
• Devise a way to consistently add real value to people's lives, and you will prosper.
• The true purpose of any corporation is to create products and services that increase the quality of life for all the customers they serve.
• There's only one way to maintain your wealth, and that is simply this: spend less than you earn, and invest the difference.
• In order to become wealthy, you must spend less than you earn, invest the difference, and reinvest your returns for compounded growth.
• Most people don't realize that a small amount of money compounded through time can be worth a fortune.
• Without a clear-cut investment plan, you will eventually fail financially.
• The philosophy of protect gin your assets is not one of trying to avoid your legitimate debt, but simply to protect yourself from frivolous attacks.
• People with dishonest motives will sue you for only one of two reasons: because they want a share of your insurance, or they want to seize your assets.
• True wealth is an emotion: it's a sense of absolute abundance.
• Learn how to use time to your advantage rather than allowing it to rule your levels of satisfaction and stress.
• So often we forget that time is a mental construct, that it is completely relative, and that our experience of time is almost exclusively the result of our mental focus.
• The most powerful way I've learned to compress time is to learn through other people's experience. We can never truly master time as long as our primary strategy for learning and mastering our world is based upon trial and error. Modeling those who've already succeeded can save you years of pain.
• Prioritize according to importance instead of urgency.
• Nothing could be more crippling to a person's ability to take action than learned helplessness; it is the primary obstacle that prevents us from changing our lives or taking action to help other people change theirs.
• You have the power right now to control how you think, how you feel, and what you do.
• It is the small decisions you and I make every day that create our destinies.
• The success or failure of our lives is usually not the result of one cataclysmic event or earthshaking decision, although sometimes it may look that way. Rather, success or failure is determined by the decisions we make and the actions we take every day.
• The one thing we have absolute control over is our internal world--we decide what things mean and what to do about them.
• With our actions, we communicate our most deeply held values and beliefs.
• The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment.
• The history of the world is simply the chronicle of what has happened because of the deeds of a small number of ordinary people who had extraordinary levels of commitment to making a difference.
• A hero is a person who courageously contributes under even the most trying circumstances; a hero is an individual who acts unselfishly and who demands more from himself or herself than others would expect; a hero is a man or woman who defies adversity by doing what he or she believes is right in spite of fear.
• Hold yourself to a higher standard.
• Remember, all behaviors can be changed by changing beliefs, values, rules, and identity.
• Real power lies in the decisions you make.
• Small decisions and small actions, consistently made, have far-reaching consequences.
• Demonstrate what's possible by being an example.
• If you want to play the game and win, you've got to play "full out". You've got to be willing to feel stupid, and you've got to be willing to try things that might not work--and if they don't work, be willing to change your approach.
• Nothing gives us a greater sense of personal satisfaction than contribution. Giving unselfishly is the foundation of fulfillment.
• Don't look for hero's; be one!
• Strive for balance rather than perfection.
• Live fully while you're here.