Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins

• Information is not enough. Action is what provides results.
• The literal definition of the word "power" is "the ability to act".
• What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves.
• Communication is power.
• Your level of communication mastery in the external world will determine your level of success with others. More important, the level of success you experience internally is the direct result of how you communicate to yourself.
• You are the one who decides how to feel and act based upon the ways you choose to perceive your life. Nothing has any meaning except the meaning we give it.
• People who have attained excellence follow a consistent path to success. I call it the Ultimate Success Formula. The first step to this formula is to know your outcome, that is to decide precisely what you want. The second step is to take action--otherwise your desires will always be dreams. The actions we take do not always produce the results we desire, so the third step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of response & results you're getting from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or further away.
• The lesson is that people can do virtually anything as long as they master the resources to believe they can and to take effective actions.
• Success is not an accident.
• The 7 basic triggering mechanisms: passion, belief, strategy, clarity of values, energy, bonding power, mastery of communication.
• The greatest success is not on the stage of the world. It is in the deepest recesses of your own heart.
• The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives.
• Success leave clues. People who produce outstanding results do specific things to create these results.
• The point is, if it's possible for others in the world, it's possible for you. It's a matter of strategy.
• 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. They know how to save the one commodity none of us ever get enough of--time.
• To model excellence, you should become a detective, an investigator, someone who asks lots of questions and tracks down all the clues to what produces excellence.
• Building from the successes of others is one of the fundamental aspects of most learning.
• What a person believes, what he things is possible or impossible, to a great extent determines what he can or cannot do.
• "Mental syntax" is the way people organize their thoughts.
• The mind and body are totally linked.
• All you have to do is take a proven system and duplicate it--and maybe even better, improve upon it. People who do this are virtually guaranteed success.
• Understanding state is the key to understanding change and achieving excellence. Our behavior is the result of the state we're in.
• Almost everything people want is some possible state.
• A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
• Successful people are able to gain access to their most resourceful state on a consistent basis.
• The key to producing the results you desire, then, is to represent things to yourself in a way that puts you in such a resourceful state that you're empowered to take the types and qualities of actions that create your desired outcomes.
• If we take control of our own communication with ourselves and produce visual, auditory, and anesthetic signals of what we do want, outstanding positive results can be consistently produced, even in situations where the odds for success seem limited or nonexistent.
• Remember, human behavior is the result of the state we're in.
• Most people take very little conscious action to direct their states.
• State change is what most people are after. They want to be happy, joyous, ecstatic, centered.
• People who have achieved excellence are masters of tapping into the most resourceful parts of their brain.
• They key thing to remember is that your state has awesome power, and you can control it.
• A belief is any guiding principle, dictum, faith, or passion that can provide meaning and direction in life.
• With powerful guiding beliefs, you have the power to take action and create the world you want to live in.
• In essence, human history is the history of human belief. The more we learn about human behavior, the more we learn about the extraordinary power that beliefs have over our lives.
• The birth of excellence begins with our awareness that our beliefs are a choice.
• It is our belief that determines how much of our potential we'll be able to tap.
• Most of us form our beliefs haphazardly.
• Sometimes people produce outstanding results smiley because they don't know something is difficult or impossible. Just not having a limiting belief is enough.
• Life is both subtler and more complex than some of us like to believe.
• Your reality is the reality you create.
• The world we live in is the world we choose to live in, whether consciously or unconsciously. If we choose bliss, that's what we get. If we choose misery, we get that, too.
• The path to success consists of knowing your outcome, taking action, knowing what results you're getting, and having the flexibility to change until you're successful.
• I've found that these seven beliefs have empowered people to use more, do more, take greater action, and produce greater results.
• Belief #1: Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves us.
• Belief #2: There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.
• Belief #3: Whatever happens, take responsibility.
• Belief #4: It's not necessary to understand everything to be able to use everything.
• Belief #5: People are your greatest resource.
• Belief #6: Work is play.
• Belief #7: There's no abiding success without commitment.
• Winners, leaders, masters--people with personal power--all understand that if you try something and do not get the outcome you want, it's simply feedback.
• Another attribute great leaders and achievers have in common is that they operate from the belief that they create their world.
• Taking responsibility is in my opinion one of the best measures of a person's power and maturity.
• Commitment is an important component of success in any field.
• Remember, success leaves clues. Study those who succeed. Find out about the key beliefs they hold that enhance their ability to take effective action consistently and produce outstanding results.
• Producing more effective results begins, I believe, with creating a new model for the process of change.
• We structure our internal representations through our five senses--sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. In other words, we experience the world in the form of visual, auditory, anesthetic, gustatory, or olfactory sensations. So whatever experiences we have stored in the mind are represented through these senses, primarily through the three major modalities--the visual, auditory, or anesthetic messages.
• When human beings want to change something, they usually want to change one or both of two things: how they feel--that is, their state--and/or how they behave.
• There are two things we can change about our internal representations. We can change what we represent. Or we can change how we represent something.
• Many people access their brain primarily in a visual framework.
• Remember, similar internal representations will create similar states or feelings. And similar feelings or states will trigger similar actions.
• It's important to note that certain key sub modalities affect us more than others.
• As a modeler, you always want to be curious about how Samson is able to produce any result, mental, or physical.
• Once you know how you do things with your new awareness, you can start running your own brain and creating the states that support you in living the quality of life you desire and deserve.
• Here's how the swish pattern works.
• Step #1: Identify the behavior you want to change. Now make an internal representation of that behavior as you see it through your own eyes.
• Step #2: Once you have a clear picture of the behavior you want to change, you need to create a different representation, a picture of yourself as you would if you made the desired change and what that change would mean to you.
• Step #3: "Swish" the two pictures so that the resourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience.
• The key to this [swish] pattern is speed and repetition.
• Remember that your mind can defy the laws of the universe in one crucial way. It can go backward. Time can't, nor can events--but your mind can.
• No one is always depressed. Depressing isn't a permanent condition like losing a leg. It's a state that people can pop into and out of.
• The brain delivers pain only when it receives stimuli that are represented in a way that tells it to feel pain.
• The meaning of an experience is determined by the order of the signals provided to the brain.
• Obviously, you can produce more precise results by having more accurate and precise information about all the things a person does to produce a result.
• Generally, people can consciously process only five to nine chunks of information at once. People who learn rapidly can master even the most complex tasks because they chunk information into small steps and then reassemble them into the original whole.
• What about learning-disabled kids? Many times, these young people are not so much learning-disabled as they are strategy-disabled. They need to learn how to use their resources.
• The key to eliciting strategies is knowing that people will tell you everything you need to know about their strategies. They'll tell you in words. They'll tell you in the way they use their body. They'll even tell you in the way they use their eyes.
• The simplest way to elicit strategies is simply to ask the right questions.
• Every strategy elicitation follows this pattern. You have to get the person in the appropriate state by having him remember a specific time when he was motivated, or felt loved, or felt creative, or whatever strategy you want to elicit. Then heat him to reconstruct his strategy by asking clear, succinct questions about the syntax of what he saw, heard, and felt. Finally, after you have the syntax, get the sub modalities of the strategy. Find out what specifically about the picture, sounds, and sensations caused the person to be in that state.
• There's no substitute for working with people as individuals.
• Awareness is a powerful tool.
• People have strategies for everything.
• Physiology is the most powerful tool we have for instantly changing states, for instantly getting dynamic results.
• If you adopt a vital, dynamic, excited physiology, you automatically adopt the same kind of state.
• We can change our states and empower ourselves to take action either by changing the pickets and dialogues in our minds or by changing how we are standing, how we are breathing, and the tone of voice we are using.
• Developing congruity is a major key to personal power.
• The essence of modeling is to discover which part of the brain an effective person uses in a given situation. If you want to be effective, you want to use your brain in the same way.
• We've seen that physiology is the avenue to excellence. One way to affect physiology is to change the way you use your muscular system--you can change your posture, your facial expressions, and your breathing.
• Medical study after medical study has shown the same thing. The surest way to increase an animal's life span is to cut down on the amount of food it eats. So the message is simple and clear: Eat less, live more.
• What's the greatest marketing plan on earth? It's making people think they'll die unless they use your product.
• Remember, the quality of our physiology affects our perceptions and behaviors.
• Powerful tools aren't much use if you don't have a good idea what you want to use them for.
• The main thing you now know is that there are no limits to what you can do. Your key is the power of modeling. Excellence can be duplicated. If other people can do something, all you need to do is model them with precision and you can do exactly the same thing.
• You've learned the Ultimate Success Formula: Know your outcome, develop the sensory acuity to know what you're getting, develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you find out what works--and you will reach your outcome.
• The more resources you develop, the more power you have; the more strength you feel, the more you can tap into even greater resources and even more powerful states.
• A key part of this process is knowing what you want.
• There is no need to put any limitations on what's possible.
• Follow these five rules in formulating your outcomes.
• 1. State your outcome in positive terms.
• 2. Be as specific as possible.
• 3. Have an evidence procedure.
• 4. Be in control.
• 5. Verify that your outcome is ecologically sound and desire able.
• Your outcome must be initiated and maintained by you. Make sure your outcome reflects things that you can affect directly.
• One way to overcome the limitations you've created is to know exactly what they are.
• By working backward, step by step, for outcomes in everything from business to personal life, you can map out the precise path to follow from your ultimate goal down to what you can do today.
• Design an environment that would bring out the best of all that you are as a person.
• Your mind has the power to give you everything you want. But it can only do that if it's getting clear, bright, intense, focused signals.
• If you don't provide your mind with the programming of the results you desire, someone else will provide that programming for you.
• One of the reasons most people don't do well in life is because success is usually disguised behind hard work.
• Sometimes people get so fixated on what they want, they fail to appreciate or use what they already have.
• Making an assumption is the mark of a lazy communicator.
• Much of our language is nothing more than wild generalization and assumption. That sort of language can suck the guts out of real communication. The key to effective communication is to break through that fog, to become a fluff-buster.
• The purpose of precision in language patterns is to find out as much useful information as possible.
• Remember, the closer the map approximates a real territory, the more valuable it is.
• Good communicators aren't interested in rationalizations of why something is going wrong. They want to find out how to do it right. The right questions will lead you in that direction.
• Rapport is the ultimate tool for producing results with other people. The ability to establish rapport is one of the most important skills a person can have.
• A lot of people make life very complicated and difficult. It doesn't have to be.
• How do we create rapport? We do it by creating or discovering things in common. In NLP language, we call this process "mirroring" or "matching".
• When you break it down, there are two keys to mirroring--keen observation and personal flexibility.
• Anyone can become an expert mirrorer, but you need to begin with the recognition that people use their bodies in hundreds of ways, and the more aware you are of these positions, the more successful you'll be.
• Massive cultural success results from rapport with the masses.
• One essential tenet of NLP is that the meaning of your communication is the response you elicit. The responsibility in communication rests upon you.
• The great es trad edgy in education is that most teachers know their subjects, but they don't know their students.
• One of the best ways to become aware of the astonishing diversity of human reactions is to speak to a group of people.
• Meta programs are the internal programs (or sorts) we use in deciding what to pay attention to. We distort, delete, and generalize information because the conscious mind can only pay attention to so many pieces of information at any given time.
• People have patterns of behavior, and they have patterns by which they organize their experience to create those behaviors. Only through understanding those mental patterns can you expect to get your message across.
• All human behavior revolves around the urge to gain pleasure or avoid pain.
• A truly effective leader has to have a strong internal frame. He wouldn't be much of a leader if he spent all his time asking people what they thought of something before he took any action.
• A truly effective leader has to be able to take in information effectively from the outside as well. When he doesn't, leadership becomes megalomania.
• Simple people look at human interactions primarily in terms of what's in it for them personally, some in terms of what they can do for themselves and others.
• People are not Pavlovian dogs. They can modify their strategies to some extent, but only if someone talks to them in their own language about how to do that.
• One of the keys to success in anything is the ability to make new distinctions.
• When you deal with others, a certain amount of trial and error is inevitable.
• Model ling excellence is crucial to learning to rapidly create the results you desire.
• You can only communicate by constant, resourceful, attentive flexibility.
• It's important for us to remember that certain words and phrases create resistance and problems. Great leaders and communicators realize this and pay close attention to the words they use and the effect they have.
• I've found that confusion is one of the greatest ways to interrupt patterns. People fall into patterns because they don't know how to do anything else.
• If you believe that you're in control, that you can change your patterns, you'll be able to.
• We can change our representation or perception about anything and in a moment change our states and behaviors.
• It is important to note that our past experiences regularly filter our ability to see what is really happening in the world. But there are multiple ways to see or experience any situation.
• The key to success in life is to consistently represent your experience in ways that support you in producing even greater results for yourself and others.
• Re-framing in its simplest form is changing a negative statement into a positive one by changing the frame of reference used to perceive the experience.
• Context re-framing involves taking an experience that seems to be bad, upsetting, or undesirable and showing how the same behavior or experience is actually a great advantage in another context.
• Great innovations are made by those who know how to re-frame activities and problems into potential resources in other contexts.
• Content re-framing involves taking the exact same situation and changing what it means.
• Re-framing is crucial to learning how to communicate with ourselves and with others. On the personal level, it's how we choose to put meaning on events. On a broader level, it's one of the most effective communication tools available.
• You need to learn to communicate with yourself with as much purpose and direction and persuasiveness as you would in a business presentation. You need to start framing and re-framing experiences in a way hat makes them work for you.
• All human behavior is adaptive in one way or another; it's designed to fill a need.
• Leaders and all other great communicators are masters of the art of re framing. They know how to motivate and empower people by taking anything that happens and making it a model for possibility.
• There's a valuable lesson in everything that happens. The best leaders are the ones who learn the lesson and put the most empowering frame on outside events.
• All anchoring is a created association of thoughts, ideas, feelings, or states with a specific stimulus.
• We live in a stimulus/response world, where much of human behavior consists of unconscious programmed responses.
• It's essential that the anchor gives a clear and unmistakable signal to the brain.
• It's important for you to know that acorns can be made Morse powerful by being "stacked"--one piled on top of another--adding many of the same or very similar resourceful experiences together on a cumulative basis.
• Anchoring is often most effective when the person who has been anchored doesn't know what's happened.
• Anchoring can be remarkably successful in overcoming fears and changing behaviors.
• Remember, successful anchoring depends on precise repetition.
• It's crucial to be aware of anchoring because it is always going on around us. If you're aware when it's going on, you can deal with it and change it. If you're not aware of it, you'll be mystified at the states that come and go seemingly without reason.
• This is the key ingredient of success: the ability to eliminate from your own environment triggers that tend to put you in negative or resourceful states, while installing positive ones in yourself and in others.
• Once you know what your anchors are, you should go about collapsing the negative ones and making best use of the positive ones.
• To deal effectively with people, we need to know what's most important to them, specifically what their hierarchy of values is.
• It's important to learn what your values are so you will be able to direct, motivate, and support yourself at the deepest level.
• People have certain values that when violated cause them to leave a relationship.
• Putting together one of your own value hierarchies is one of the most valuable exercises you can do.
• One simple but invaluable technique is to listen carefully to the words people use. People tend to use over and over key words that denote the values at the top of their hierarchy.
• Values are the most powerful motivating tool we have. If you want to change a bad habit, the change can be made very rapidly if you will link the successful maintenance of that change with high values.
• There's no closer way to bond people than to align them through their highest values. There's no more traumatic way to drive people apart than to create behaviors that put their highest values in conflict.
• Very often, ideas of values vary so much that two people who profess common values may have nothing in common, and two people who profess very different values may find they really want the same thing.
• Common values form the basis for the ultimate rapport.
• Remember that in any context, the system with the most flexibility, with the most choices, will be the most effective.
• Values change, and people change. The only people who don't change are those who don't breathe. So the important thing is to be aware of that flux and to move with it.
• Discovering someone's values is simply a matter of finding out what is most important to him or her.
• Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion. Affirmation with discipline creates miracles.
• You must learn how to handle frustration. If you want to become all you can become, do all you can do, hear all you can hear, see all you can see, you've got to learn how to handle frustration.
• The worst thing a negative attitude does is wipe out self-discipline. And when that discipline is gone, the results you desire are gone.
• The key to success is massive frustration.
• People get paid very well to handle frustration. If you're broke, it's probably because you're not handling very much frustration.
• There's great frustration on the road to any great success--in a business, in a relationship, in a life.
• The problem with positive thinking is that you have to think about it--and by that time, it's often too late to do what you want to do.
• Here's a two step process for handling stress.
• Step 1: Don't sweat the small stuff.
• Step 2: Remember, it's all small stuff.
• You must learn how to handle rejection.
• The biggest challenge for people in our culture is that they can't handle the word "no".
• To succeed, you must learn how to cope with rejection, learn how to strip that rejection of all its power.
• How many "no's" can you take?
• The word [no] itself has no power. Its power comes from the way you represent it to yourself. Its power comes from the limits it makes you create.
• Remember, success is buried on the other side of rejection.
• The more rejection you get, the better you are, the more you've learned, the closer you are to your outcome.
• If you can handle rejection, you'll learn to get everything you want.
• You must learn to handle financial pressure.
• The only way not to have financial pressure is not to have any finances.
• Handling financial pressure means knowing how to get and how to give, knowing how to earn and knowing how to save.
• Remember that all of our actions in life are guided by our philosophies, our guiding internal representations about how to act. They give us the models of how to behave.
• The bottom line is that money is like everything else. You can make it work for you, or you can let it work against you.
• You must learn how to handle complacency.
• Comfort can be one of the most disastrous emotions a body could have.
• You don't want to get too comfortable. If you feel really comfortable, chances are you've stopping growing.
• You're either climbing or your sliding.
• Learn to judge yourself by your goals instead of by what your peers seem to be doing.
• So my challenge to you is to stay away from the garbage of life. Don't major in minor things.
• Always give more than you expect to receive.
• The key to any relationship is that you have to give first and then keep giving. Don't stop and don't wait to receive.
• In a world of persuaders, you can be one too, or you can be someone who gets persuaded. You can direct your life or be directed.
• The people in power are persuaders. The people without power simply act on the images and commands that are directed their way.
• Power today is the ability to communicate and the ability to persuade.
• Persuasion may be the ultimate skill for creating change.
• Communicating what you have to offer is what life is all about. It's the most important skill you can develop.
• Many times we take sets of actions and turn them into nouns as if they were objects, when actually they are processes. As long as we represent human problems as if they were things, I believe we dis empower ourselves by turning them into something big and beyond our control.
• It's important for us to be conscious of what we're placing in our minds and make sure it is supporting our desired outcomes.
• Many people in our culture today give little or no conscious thought to the quality of information and experience being input daily.
• Trend creation is what leadership is about, and it's the real message of this book.
• Remember, the world is governed by the persuaders.
• Ultimate power is synergistic. It comes from work gin together, not working apart.
• You know now that the most powerful tool on the planet is the bio computer between your two ears. Properly run, your brain can make your life greater than any dream you've ever had before.
• You've learned the Ultimate Success Formula: Know your outcome, take action, develop the sensory acuity to know what you're getting, and change your behavior until you get what you want.
• You've learned that we live in an age where fabulous success is available to all of us, but that those who achieve it are those who take action. Knowledge is important, but it's not enough.
• You've learned the importance of modeling. You can learn by experience, by trial and error--or you can speed up the process immeasurably by learning how to model.
• You've learned that the quality of your life is the quality of your communication.
• People of excellence can take any situation and make it work for them.
• Positive beliefs can make you a master. Negative beliefs can make you a loser.
• Changes lead to more changes. Growth leads to more growth. By starting to make changes, by growing in bits and pieces, you can slowly but steadily change your life.
• Every dire action carries with it an ultimate destination.
• Ultimate power means the ability to change, to adapt, to grow, to evolve. Unlimited power doesn't mean you always succeed or that you never fail. Unlimited power just means you learn from every human experience and make every experience work for you in some way. It is unlimited power to change your perceptions, to change your actions, and to change the results you're creating. It's your unlimited power to care and to love that can make the biggest difference in the quality of your life.
• True leaders have a knowledge of the power of procession, a sense that great changes come from many small things. They realize that everything they say and do has an enormous power to empower and embolden others.
• The challenge of leadership is to have enough power and vision to be able to project in advance what outcome will result from your actions, large and small.
• Be a doer. Take charge. Take action. It's not enough to talk the talk. You've got to walk the talk.