Anthony Robbins: Giant Steps

The secret is making a public commitment, one so forceful that you can’t turn back once you’ve made it
He challenges you to make a decision today:
Do something you’ve been putting off
Master a new skill
Treat people with a newfound love, respect, and compassion
The secret is to set goals that are exciting enough to truly inspire your creativity and they ignite your passion
Right now, consciously choose your goals
Brainstorm everything worth pursuing in your life


Then pick a single goal that excites you the most, something that will get you up early and keep you up late, and assign a deadline for achieving it
And think about why you must absolutely attain it by that date
Is it grand enough to challenge you and push you beyond your limits to uncover your true potential?
Always take small action towards your goal every day
Persistence overshadows even talent as the most valuable resource in shaping the quality of people’s lives
Try simple acts of kindness


To get what you want, you must discover what prevents you from taking action
As humans, we can decide what causes us pain and what causes us pleasure
What are your pain-avoiding or pleasure-inducing patterns?
How have these things shaped your life up until now?
Make things you want so compelling that you are willing to overcome your fear of loss and make the steps to make the steps necessary to make your life happen in a brand new level
What gives you the most pain and what gives you the most pleasure in your life?
How is this shaping your decisions and therefore your life even today?
What stops people from achieving their goals is mixed emotions, also known as mixed associations
If you find yourself taking two steps forward and one step back, you may associate your goal with both pain and pleasure
Use your pain as your strongest ally
Allow yourself to feel pain with such emotional intensity that it gives you leverage to finally do something about it
One of his definitions of success:


Live your life in a way that causes you to consistently feel an immense amount of pleasure and very little pain, but while simultaneously having a lifestyle that positively affects the people around you, and consistently caused them to feel more pleasure and less pain
To do this, we must grow and contribute
Use your mind by controlling what you focus on and you can have as much joy as you desire
Every emotion you feel has a specific physiology attached to it
Release your fears and focus on what you truly desire and what you truly deserve
What’s a new belief that if you adopted it today would open up a whole new set of possibilities for your life?
Because of the passion they inspire within us, convictions propel us to action


The Pygmalion Effect: the power of expectation in enhancing performance
Questions are the answer
A well placed question can change any aspect of your life in a moment
The answer is we receive depend upon the questions we are willing to ask
Example question you can ask yourself everyday:
What did you learn today?
We must take personal responsibility for our change or it’s worthless
Nobody can program you. You must condition yourself for change
Three core beliefs for lasting change:
It must change
I must change it
I can change it
What really makes change happen?
Nothing changes until we change the sensations that we link to an experience in our nervous system
Neuro-Associative Conditioning is a simple yet powerful six step strategy for producing lasting changes
State clearly what you really want
Get leverage on yourself. Make change a must
Interrupt your old limiting pattern
Create a new empowering alternative to an old pattern
Condition it, Test it


Neuro-Associations: The associations that we’ve established in our nervous system that determine what we’ll actually do
Associate massive pain to not changing now, and immense pleasure to immediately making this change
Old patterns must be replaced, not just eliminated
How we feel about anything is shaped by the meaning that we attached to it
Transformational vocabulary: simply adjust your habitual vocabulary, and you can immediately change how you think, how you work, and how you live
Learning is merely the process of creating a relationship between something you already understand and something new
Five steps to learn from and use your emotion as an action signal:
Identify what you’re really feeling
Acknowledge and appreciate your emotions
Knowing that at some level they are supporting you to make a positive change by calling you to action
Get curious
Realize that this emotion is offering you a message to change something
Do you need to change your perceptions or maybe your procedures?
Get confident you can handle this emotion immediately because you’ve done in the past
Get excited and take action on what you just modeled from your past
Use a strategy that has already worked and enjoy the results
Think about the situation you are feeling fearful about and decide what you must do right now to prepare yourself for it here mentally or physically
Figure out what actions you need to take to deal with the situation in the most effective way possible
Once you’ve prepared yourself then stop worrying and mentally see your self consistently and successfully dealing with the situation until you feel a sense of continued confidence
If you are feeling hurt then


Realize you may have misinterpreted the situation
Don’t assume malice when ignorance could be the explanation
Realize that your rules are not necessarily the right rules
Interrupt the anger within yourself by asking yourself a question such as:
In the long run is it true this person really cares about me?
What can I learn from this?
Will this even matter 20 years from now?
How can I communicate the importance of my standards with this person so we can get along better in the future?
Disappointment signal: Frustration
Be flexible. Realize your frustration is your friend
Find a role model. Someone who has found a way to get what you want and learn from him or her
Get fascinated by what you can learn to help you handle this challenge in a way that consumes very little time and energy and actually creates joy for you
The disappointment actions signal calls you to change your expectations


Figure out what you can learn from the situation and or change your expectations right now
Set a new even more inspiring goal toward which you can make some immediate progress
This will change your focus and how you feel
Realize that you may be judging too soon
Often the things you’re disappointed about are only temporary challenges
Have some patience
Reevaluate what you truly want begin developing a more active plan for achieving that
Cultivate an attitude of positive expectancy about what will happen in the future regardless of what’s occurred in the past
Solutions to the action signal of guilt:


Acknowledge that you violated your own critical standards
Absolutely commit to making sure you’ll never repeat this behavior again
Don’t wallow in guilt
The action signal of inadequacy is the call to gather additional resources
Maybe you’ve applied unfair criteria for assessing your performance
If you decide you really don’t have the skills to deal with the situation, appreciate your feelings as a call to improve yourself
Find a role model who is effective in this area of life and learn some simple things you can learn immediately to become more adequate or effective
The action signals of overload, overwhelm, grief, depression, and helplessness end to occur when we think of all the things that have happened to us that we cannot control


Break this pattern by breaking down the situation down into simple bite-sized steps:
Decide which of the many things is absolutely most essential to focus on and limit your focus to 1 task
Prioritize the most important steps from making progress in that area specifically and thus you’ll begin to gain a sense of control
Immediately tackle the first simple item on your list
In dealing with the all encompassing emotions like grief, focus on what you can control instead of what you can’t
Remember there must be some empowering reason for it all
The action signal of loneliness tells you you need to connect with people
It is calling you to reach out and connect
Realize that you can reach out and connect immediately. Caring people are everywhere
Identify what kind of connection with people
Take some immediate action to reach out and connect
Emotions of Power:
Love and Warmth
All communication is either a loving response or a cry for help
Appreciation and Gratitude
Curiosity
Curious people are never bored and life becomes and endless study
Excitement and Passion
Determination
Flexibility
This allows for success through adaptability
Confidence
Cheerfulness
Vitality
Contribution


The secret to living is giving
The mark of a champion is consistency
Never spend more than 10% of your time on a problem, and always spend at least 90% on the solution
10-Day Challenge
Refuse to dwell on any unresourceful thoughts or feelings
When you catch yourself beginning to focus on the negative, use any of the techniques you learned
Ask yourself the following questions:
What am I really happy about in my life right now?
What could I be happy about if I wanted to be?
What am I really excited for in my life right now?
What am I really grateful for in my life right now?
Who do I love and who loves me?
Make sure your focus is on solutions
We can adapt to anything if we make the right demands upon ourselves incrementally
Health and Fitness
Health and fitness are not the same
Fitness is the physical ability to perform athletic actions
Health is defined more broadly as the state where all of the systems of the body are working in an optimal way
Aerobic means with oxygen and it refers to moderate exercise that is sustained over a period of time
If you activate your endurance with aerobic exercise you train your body to burn fat as its primary fuel
Anaerobic exercise means without oxygen and refers to exercise that produces short bursts of power
This burns glycogen as its primary fuel and causes the body to store fat
Relationships
Success is unfulfilling unless you have someone to share with
The most highly sought emotion is one of connection or love
The only way a relationship will last is if you see it as a place you go to give, not a place you go to take or get something
Relationship law: Never threaten the relationship
This creates the possibility of a relationship ending
Instead, focus each day on how you can make the relationship just a little bit better
Reinforce your feelings of connection and renew your feelings of intimacy and attraction by asking a simple question (out loud, to the person, and to yourself):
How did I get so lucky to have you in my life?
If you embark on a never ending quest to find new ways to surprise and show your appreciation for each other, you can’t believe the joy and attraction this creates
Finances


Five major lessons to financial mastery:
The ability to create wealth
Find the way to increase the value of what you do by at least 10 to 15 times, then you can easily increase your income
Ask: What new systems, technology, principles and practices can I implement to help this company?
Maintain your wealth
Spend less than you earn and invest the difference
Increase your wealth by reinvesting your returns for compound growth
Protect your wealth
Enjoy your wealth


In reality, money has no value unless we share its positive impact with the people we care about
Main ideas / Themes:
Set exciting goals that inspire your creativity and ignite your passion
Pick a single goal that excites you the most, something that will get you up early and keep you up late, and assign a deadline for achieving it
Take small actions towards that goal every day
Persistence is the most valuable resource in shaping the quality of people’s lives
Use your pain associations as leverage to take action
Definition of Success:
Live your life in a way that causes you to consistently feel an immense amount of pleasureand very little pain, but while simultaneously having a lifestyle that positively affects the people around you, and consistently caused them to feel more pleasure and less pain
What’s a new belief that if you adopted it today would open up a whole new set of possibilities for your life?
The Pygmalion Effect: the power of expectation in enhancing performance
Questions are the answer
A well placed question can change any aspect of your life in a moment
Three core beliefs for lasting change:
It must change
I must change it
I can change it
Neuro-Associations: The associations that we’ve established in our nervous system that determine what we’ll actually do
Associate massive pain to not changing now, and immense pleasure to immediately making this change
How we feel about anything is shaped by the meaning that we attached to it
Learning is merely the process of creating a relationship between something you already understand and something new
The mark of a champion is consistency
We can adapt to anything if we make the right demands upon ourselves incrementally
Success is unfulfilling unless you have someone to share with
The most highly sought emotion is one of connection or love
The only way a relationship will last is if you see it as a place you go to give, not a place you go to take or get something
Money has no value unless we share its positive impact with the people we care about