Giant Steps by Tony Robbins
Synopsis:
“Based on the finest tools, techniques, principles, and strategies offered in Awaken the Giant Within, best-selling author and peak-performance consultant Anthony Robins offers daily inspiration and small actions (exercises) that will compel you to take giant steps forward in the quality of your life.
From the simple power of decision-making to the more specific tools that can redefine the quality of your relationships, finances, health, and emotions, Robbins shows you how to get maximum results with a minimum investment of time.” -Audible
Opening thoughts:
This is one of the few Tony Robbins books I haven’t read yet the only version on Audible is the abridged version. I usually do not like listening to abridged books, especially from my favorite authors like Tony. However, I feel like this would be a good read for the new year.
Key notes:
- 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?
- Right now, consciously choose your goals
- 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
- Nuro-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
- Nuro-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?
- Realize you may have misinterpreted the situation
- 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 tend 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
- Break this pattern by breaking down the situation down into simple bite-sized steps:
- 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
- It is calling you to reach out and connect
Emotions of Power
- 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
- Love and Warmth
- 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
- 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 do you 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
- The ability to create 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 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
- 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
- Nuro-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
Closing thoughts:
As usual, Tony never disappoints.
In my opinion, great books on personal development have a combination of motivation and application. All of Tony’s books usually have both which is why his books are always in my top recommends.
Not only will you leave inspired, but you will get a solid list of action steps and principles you can put into practice immediately so that you can reap the benefits of the information
Another great aspect of this book is that it hits many different aspects of your life. Similar to the book I read before this one, Make Time, I feel like any good book on personal development will take a holistic approach and address improving multiple areas of your life in order to add value to the first area in question. I believe this is necessary because different aspects of are lives are more interconnected than we may think.
Just like a halo effect, improving one aspect of your life will surely affect others. Therefore, to address an issue in your life, you may have to improve several different points in several different areas to get the desired effect.
Overall, I cannot recommend this book enough.
Nutshell:
Solid principles and action steps on how to improve your life, achieve your goals, and find true success and fulfillment.
Rating:
4.5/5
Marlo Yonocruz 
5 thoughts on “Book notes: Giant Steps by Tony Robbins”