Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement – Anthony Robbins
Would you like to take control of your mind and change certain areas of your life that need change? Would you like to increase your energy level and achieve much more than you have ever achieved in your business, finances, relationships, career, and life in general? If your answer is years, then you must read Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement.
This is one, if not the most impactful self-help books I’ve read so far. Unlike many books in the self-help category, Unlimited Power doesn’t just teach personal development concepts, it gives you the strategies to apply and see measurable changes in your life.
Many of the change producing strategies in the book are based on the science of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). With this knowledge, you can take total control of your mind by programming or reprogramming it to achieve a set goal or to change limiting habits, beliefs, fears, attitude, etc.
This is a must-read book for anyone looking for the secrets of achieving success in every aspect of life. It’s a book for you if you need to change certain aspects of your life that are affecting you negatively and you don’t know just how to achieve it, whatever it is, be it nail biting, excessive eating and drinking, or quarrelsome, applying the strategies in Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement will help you become the better person that you desire.
Here is an excerpt from the book. Sit back and enjoy it!
The Seven Lies of Success
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.†– John Milton
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. As we learned in the last chapter, belief is the foundation of excellence.
Our beliefs are specific, consistent organizational approaches to perception. They’re the fundamental choices we make about how to perceive our lives and thus how to live them. They’re how we turn on or turn off our brain. So the first step toward excellence is to find the beliefs that guide us toward the outcomes we want.
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. The same is true of beliefs. You have to find the beliefs that support your outcome – the beliefs that get you where you want to go. If your beliefs don’t do that, you have to throw them out and try something new.
People are sometimes put off when I talk about the “lies†of success. Who wants to live by lies? But all I mean is that we don’t know how the world really is. We don’t know if the line is concave or convex. We don’t know if our beliefs are true or false. What we can know, though, is if they work – if they support us, if they make our lives richer, if they make us better people, if they help us and help others.
The word “lies’ is used in this chapter as a consistent reminder that we do not know for certain exactly how things are. Once we know the line is concave, for example, we are no longer free to see it as convex.
The word “lie†does not mean “to be deceitful or dishonest†but, rather, is a useful way to remind us that no matter how much we believe in a concept, we should be open to other possibilities and continuous learning. I suggest you look at these seven beliefs and decide whether they’re useful for you.
I’ve found them time and again in successful people I have modeled. To model excellence, we have to start with the belief systems of excellence. I’ve found that these seven beliefs have empowered people to use more, do more, take greater action, and produce greater results. I’m not saying they’re the only useful beliefs of success. They are a start. They’ve worked for others, and I’d like you to see if they can work for you.
Belief #1: Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves us. Remember the story of W. Mitchell? What was the central belief that helped him overcome adversity? He decided to take what happened to him and make it work for him in whatever way he could.
In the same way, all successful people have the uncanny ability to focus on what is possible in a situation, what positive results could come from it. No matter how much negative feedback they get from their environment, they think in terms of possibilities.
They think that everything happens for a reason, and it serves them. They believe that every adversity contains the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit.
I can guarantee you that people who produce outstanding results think this way. Think about it in your own life. There are an infinite number of ways to react to any situation. Let’s say your business fails to get a contract you had counted on, one that you were certain you deserved. Some of us would be hurt and frustrated. We might sit home and mope or go out and get drunk.
Some of us would be mad. We might blame the company that awarded the contract, figuring they were a bunch of ignorant individuals. Or we might blame our own people for ruining a sure thing.
All of that might allow us to let off some steam, but it doesn’t help us. It doesn’t bring us any closer to our desired outcome. It takes a lot of discipline to be able to retrace your steps, learn painful lessons, mend fences, and take a good look at new possibilities. But that’s the only way to get a positive outcome from what seems like a negative result.
Let me give you a good example of possibility. Marilyn Hamilton, a former teacher and beauty queen, is a successful businesswoman in Fresno, California. She’s also the survivor of a terrible accident. When she was twenty-nine, she fell down a rocky cliff in a hang-gliding accident that left her in a wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist.
Marilyn Hamilton certainly could have focused on a lot of things she could no longer do. Instead, she focused on the possibilities that were open to her. She managed to see the opportunity in tragedy. From the start she was frustrated with her wheelchairs.
She found them too confining, too restrictive. Now you or I probably wouldn’t have any idea how to judge the effectiveness of a wheelchair. But Marilyn Hamilton could. She figured she was uniquely equipped to design a better one. So she got together with two friends who built hang gliders and started working on a prototype for a better wheelchair.
The three went on to form a company called Motion Designs. It is now a multimillion-dollar success story that revolutionized the wheelchair industry and went on to become California’s Small Business of the Year for 1984. They hired their first employee in 1981 and now have eighty employees and more than eight hundred dealers.
I don’t know if Marilyn Hamilton ever consciously sat down and tried to figure out her beliefs, but she operated from a dynamic sense of possibility, a sense of what she could do. Virtually all great successes work from the same frame.
Take a moment to think again about your beliefs. Do you generally expect things to work out well or to work out poorly? Do you expect your best efforts to be successful, or do you expect them to be thwarted? Do you see the potential in a situation, or do you see the roadblocks?
Many people tend to focus on the negative more than the positive. The first step toward changing that is to recognize it. Belief in limits creates limited people. The key is to let go of those limitations and operate from a higher set of resources.
The leaders in our culture are the people who see the possibilities, who can go into a desert and see a garden. Impossible? What happened in Israel? If you have a strong belief in possibility, it’s likely you’ll achieve it.
Belief #2: There is no such thing as failure. There are only results. This is almost a corollary belief to number one, and it’s equally important on its own. Most people in our culture have been programmed to fear this thing called failure. Yet, all of us can think of times when we wanted one thing and got another.
We’ve all flunked a test, suffered through a frustrating romance that didn’t work out, put together a business plan only to see everything go awry. I’ve used the words “outcome†and “results†throughout this book because that’s what successful people see. They don’t see failure. They don’t believe in it. It doesn’t compute.
People always succeed in getting some sort of results. The super successes of our culture aren’t people who do not fail, but simply people who know that if they try something and it doesn’t give them what they want, they’ve had a learning experience. They use what they’ve learned and simply try something else. They take some new actions and produce some new results.
Think about it. What is the one asset, the one benefit you have today over yesterday? The answer, of course, is experience. People who fear failure make internal representations of what might not work in advance. This is what keeps them from taking the very action that could ensure the accomplishment of their desires. Are you afraid of failure? Well, how do you feel about learning? You can learn from every human experience and can thereby always succeed in anything you do.
Mark Twain once said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.†He’s right. People who believe in failure are almost guaranteed a mediocre existence. Failure is something that is just not perceived by people who achieve greatness. They don’t dwell on it. They don’t attach negative emotions to something that doesn’t work.
Let me share someone’s life history with you. This was a man who
Failed in business at age 31.
Was defeated in a legislative race at age 32
Failed again in business at age 34
Overcame the death of his sweetheart at age 35
Had a nervous breakdown at age 36.
Lost an election at age 38
Lost a congressional race at age 43
Lost a congressional race at age 46.
Lost a congressional race at age 48.
Lost a senatorial race at age 55
Failed in an effort to become vice-president at age 56.
Lost a senatorial race at age 58.
Was elected president of the United States at age 60.
The man’s name was Abraham Lincoln. Could he have become president if he had seen his election losses as failures? It’s not likely. There’s a famous story about Thomas Edison. After he’d tried 9,999 times to perfect the light bulb and hadn’t succeeded, someone asked him, “Are you going to have ten thousand failures?†He answered, “I didn’t fail. I just discovered another way not to invent the electric light bulb.†He had discovered how another set of actions had produced a different result.
“Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.â€
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
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. You use that information to make finer distinctions about what you need to do to produce the results you desire.
Buckminster Fuller once wrote, “Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes.†Sometimes we learn from our mistakes, sometimes from the mistakes of others. Take a minute to reflect on the five greatest so-called “failures†in your life.
Fuller uses the metaphor of a ship’s rudder. He says when the rudder of a ship is angled to one side or another, the ship tends to keep rotating beyond the helmsman’s intention. He has to correct the rotation, moving it back toward the original direction in a never-ending process of action and reaction, adjustment and correction.
Picture that in your mind – a helmsman on a quiet sea, gently guiding his boat toward its destination by coping with thousands of inevitable deviations from its course. It’s a lovely image, and it’s a wonderful model for the process of living successfully. But most of us don’t think that way. Every error, every mistake, tends to take on emotional baggage. It’s a failure. It reflects badly on us.
For example, many people get down on themselves because they’re overweight. Their attitude about being overweight doesn’t change anything. Instead, they could embrace the fact that they’ve been successful in producing a result called excess fat and that now they’re going to produce a new result called being thin. They would produce this new result by producing new actions.
If you’re not sure what actions to take to produce this result, take special note of chapter 10, or model someone who has produced the result called being thin. Find out what specific action that person produces mentally and physically to consistently remain thin. Produce the same actions, and you will produce the same results. As long as you regard your excess weight as a failure, you’ll be immobilized. However, the minute you change it to a result you produced, therefore one you can change now, then your success is assured.
Belief in failure is a way of poisoning the mind. When we store negative emotions, we affect our physiology, our thinking process, and our state. One of the greatest limitations for most people is their fear of failure. Dr. Robert Schuller, who teaches the concept of possibility thinking, asks a great question: “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?â€
Think about it. How would you answer that? If you really believed you could not fail, you might take a whole new set of actions and produce powerful new desirable results. Wouldn’t you be better off trying them? Isn’t that the only way to grow? So I suggest you start realizing right now that there’s no such thing as failure.
There are only results. You always produce a result. If it’s not the one you desire, you can just change your actions and you’ll produce new results. Cross out the word “failure,†circle the word “outcome†in this book, and commit yourself to learning from every experience.
This is a great book by all standard, and I very much gladly recommend it to you if you desire to gain control of your mind, change whatever you need to change in your life, and achieve much more.