Book Summary — Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny by Tony Robbins
Thanks for checking out our Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins book summary!
Awaken the Giant Within is about how creating a positive mindset can be the very beginning of the change you want to bring to your life. The author teaches you how to ultimately achieve happiness in a manageable step-by-step format.
#1 – If you want to create change in your life, you must find a reason to do so. You need a strong enough WHY in order to create change. You must have a passion for whatever you do or want to accomplish. Commitment and determination to your cause, even when faced with difficult adversaries, will help you succeed and never falter!
#2 – To eliminate bad habits, associate them with unpleasurable emotions or ideas. The author’s example was if you want to quit eating chocolate, you could force yourself to sing an awful song in public every time you do eat chocolate. By associating singing a notoriously bad song in public to eating chocolate, you can create a feeling of shame and embarrassment every time you eat chocolate. This is classical conditioning of the mind that is proven effective for changing habits.
#3 – Have you ever heard of the saying “mind over matter”? Well, how we think greatly affects our actions. How we view our environment, our society, ourselves, and everything else is built by our belief system. By turning over your negative beliefs and learning to see the positive in every experience, even if these bring pain and suffering, you can come through them with a great outlook on life. Having negative beliefs is normal and no one should be ashamed of it. However, being able to flip a disaster to a blessing is surely a way of proving that the mind is truly superior over the matter at hand.
#4 – The way you talk says a lot about how you think. We have talked about turning a bad situation into a lesson. But to make sure that you do this successfully, you must be able to learn how to use more positive words over negative words. By describing unpleasurable situations with neutral or positive adjectives, you learn to trick your mind into averting any negative emotions. By describing a negative situation with neutral or positive words, you force your mind to look at the situation through a different lens or at a different angle, or a more positive light! Let’s take this situation for example, say you go on a vacation that you have been planning for months, you book a room at a luxurious hotel. On the day that you arrive at the accommodation, the receptionist tells you that there are no reservations under your name. You might think that the situation is such hassle, the receptionist is annoying, the hotel is the worst, and you start your vacation stressed out and mad. Instead of bumming yourself out because of something you cannot control, you could alter your perception by describing the situation, the people involved, and your feelings differently. You could say, “this situation is very unfortunate,” and the thought will flow with that sentence. It could continue with, “This situation is very unfortunate but at least I will be able to explore other options.”
#5 – In order to obtain positive feedback, you must learn to ask positive questions. People's thought process and decision-making work in direct correlation with your question! So, when you ask a negative question, you are setting yourself up for a negative conversation. Take for example, offering food to another person. If you ask, “You don’t want to eat this, right?” You might be implying that YOU do not want the other person to eat whatever it is that you are offering or that you actually do not want to share the food, even if that is not what you meant. If you ask, however, “Would you like some of my food?” It sounds more sincere which would establish a more positive atmosphere between you and the other person. These types of questions are more likely to yield a more positive answer. The same goes for the questions that you ask yourself. Avoid negative self-talk too!
#6 – Have you been conflicted about choosing between two or more options that all seem favorable to you. This conflict relates directly to your lack of core values. To be able to establish unwavering willpower, you must be able to know your core values. You must be able to identify which values you want to align your life with. Would you want to live as honestly as possible no matter what or is lying okay as long as you get what you want? Do you value loyalty or not? Are you an extra-mile kind of person or are you satisfied with just doing just enough work to slide by? This way, decision-making will come easy for you because you yourself know what you believe in, what you want in life, what qualities in people you are looking for, what your goals are, and how you want to achieve them.
#7 – No matter what we say, we are all governed by rules that we have mentally set for ourselves. These rules will hinder you from achieving optimal life experiences. Especially when the rules you set revolve around things you cannot control. For example, you might feel that you will feel happy when your partner acknowledges your cooking skills after you have been practicing for a while. But, your partner may or may not notice the new dish you learned to cook just for him/her, and that is beyond your control. Instead of feeling bad or unappreciated, you could tell yourself that, “I will feel happy when I am able to learn a new dish!” Also, this is an opportunity to express your feelings with this person so you don’t build up resentment in your mind that they don’t even realize they are creating for you!
#8 – After learning all the previous steps, you could still feel defeated by your emotions. This could be because you are not identifying your emotions correctly. In any problem, you will only land on the true and appropriate solution if you are able to identify its root cause or causes. This is the same for your emotions, especially with your negative emotions. You could start by reflecting whenever you feel sad, lonely, or angry. You could start probing into these emotions, asking yourself why you are feeling this way right now? Most of the time, the negative emotions are rooted from another cause that if only acknowledged can be solvable.
Book Summaries by Coursenvy.com
Join thousands of students in the top-rated online courses www.Coursenvy.com/courses
The goal with Coursenvy is to create a one-stop shop for knowledge so anyone can start their own work from home business; whether that is a Facebook ads pro, social media marketing ad agency, ecommerce store, Amazon FBA seller, website developer, AWS architect… the opportunities to work for yourself after taking Coursenvy’s courses are endless!