Unlimited Power By Tony Robbins 

 

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Key Takeaways 

1. “The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives.”
2. Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word “power” is “the ability to act.”
3. How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening. Successful people’s lives have shown us over and over again that the quality of our lives is determined not by what happens to us, but rather by what we do about what happens.
4. “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.”
5. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can precisely determine what we will be. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting beliefs about who they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it. 
6. 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 experiences rather than their own. They know how to save the one commodity none of us ever get enough of—time.

“Great leaders and achievers have in common that they operate from the belief that they create their world. The phrase you’ll hear time and again is, ‘I am responsible. I’ll take care of it.’

The Ultimate Success Formula

1. The first step to this formula is to know your outcome, that is, to define precisely what you want.
2. The second step is to take action—otherwise, your desires will always be dreams.
3. The third step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of responses and results you’re getting from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or farther away. You must know what you’re getting from your actions, whether it be in a conversation or from your daily habits.
4. The fourth step, which is to develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you get what you want.

 

7 Traits of The Successful 

• Passion!
• Belief!
• Strategy!
• Clarity of Values!
• Bonding Power!
• Mastery of Communication!

 

The Seven Lies of Success

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 playing.

Belief #7: There’s no abiding success without commitment.

 

SECTION I The Modeling of Human Excellence 

CHAPTER I The Commodity of Kings

• You shape your perceptions, or someone shapes them for you. You do what you want to do, or you respond to someone else’s plan for you. To me, ultimate power is the ability to produce the results you desire most and create value for others in the process. Power is the ability to change your life, to shape your perceptions, to make things work for you and not against you. Real power is shared, not imposed. It’s the ability to define human needs and to fulfill them—both your needs and the needs of the people you care about. It’s the ability to direct your own personal kingdom—your own thought processes, your own behavior—so you produce the precise results you desire.

Action is what unites every great success. Action is what produces results. Knowledge is only potential power until it comes into the hands of someone who knows how to get himself to take effective action. In fact, the literal definition of the word “power” is “the ability to act.”

 

Communication

• What we do in life is determined by how we communicate to ourselves.
• What we picture and say to ourselves, how we move and use the muscles of our bodies and our facial expressions will determine how much of what we know we will use. The level of success you experience internally—the happiness, joy, ecstasy, love, or anything else you desire—is the direct result of how you communicate to yourself.
• Yet a closer look shows that the greatest gift that extraordinarily successful people have over the average person is their ability to get themselves to take action. It’s a “gift” that any of us can develop within ourselves.
• We all produce two forms of communication from which the experience of our lives is fashioned. 
  • First, we conduct internal communications: those things we picture, say, and feel within ourselves.
  • Second, we experience external communications: words, tonalities, facial expressions, body postures, and physical actions to communicate with the world. Every communication we make is an action, a cause set in motion. And all communications have some kind of effect on ourselves and on others.

• All behavior and feelings find their original roots in some form of communication. Those who affect the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the majority of us are those who know how to use this tool of power.
• What these men all had in common was that they were master communicators. They were able to take their vision, whether it was to transport people into space or to create a hate-filled Third Reich, and communicate it to others with such congruency that they influenced the way the masses thought and acted. Through their communication power, they changed the world.

 

How you feel is not the result of what is happening in your life—it is your interpretation of what is happening. Successful people’s lives have shown us over and over again that the quality of our lives is determined not by what happens to us, but rather by what we do about what happens.

 

• 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.
• This book is about taking the kinds of massive, focused, congruent actions that lead to overwhelming results. In fact, if I were to say to you in two words what this book is about, I’d say: Producing results!
• It’s important to remember that emotions like depression do not happen to you. You don’t “catch” depression. You create it, like every other result in your life, through specific mental and physical actions.

The Success Formula

People who have attained excellence follow a consistent path to success. I call it the Ultimate Success Formula. 

1. The first step to this formula is to know your outcome, that is, to define precisely what you want.
2. The second step is to take action—otherwise your desires will always be dreams.
3. The third step is to develop the sensory acuity to recognize the kinds of responses and results you’re getting from your actions and to note as quickly as possible if they are taking you closer to your goals or farther away. You must know what you’re getting from your actions, whether it be in a conversation or from your daily habits.
4. The fourth step, which is to develop the flexibility to change your behavior until you get what you want.

If you look at successful people, you’ll find they followed these steps. They started with a target, because you can’t hit one if you don’t have one. They took action because just knowing isn’t enough. They had the ability to read others, to know what response they were getting. And they kept adapting, kept adjusting, kept changing their behavior until they found what worked.

Traits of the Successful 

1. Trait Number One: Passion! All of these people have discovered a reason, a consuming, energizing, almost obsessive purpose that drives them to do, to grow, and to be more! It gives them the fuel that powers their success train and causes them to tap their true potential.
2. Trait Number Two: Belief! Every religious book on the planet talks about the power and effect of faith and belief on mankind. People who succeed on a major scale differ greatly in their beliefs from those who fail. Our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be. Many people are passionate, but because of their limiting beliefs about who they are and what they can do, they never take the actions that could make their dream a reality. People who succeed know what they want and believe that they can get it. 
3. Trait Number Three: Strategy! A strategy is a way of organizing resources. When Steven Spielberg decided to become a filmmaker, he mapped out a course that would lead to the world he wanted to conquer. He figured out what he wanted to learn, whom he needed to know, and what he needed to do. A strategy is a recognition that the best talents and ambitions also need to find the right avenue. You can open a door by breaking it down, or you can find the key that opens it intact.
4. Trait Number Four: Clarity of Values! These things are values, the fundamental, ethical, moral, and practical judgments we make about what’s important, what really matters. Values are specific belief systems we have about what is right and wrong for our lives. They’re the judgments we make about what makes life worth living. If your strategy for success requires you to do things that do not fit your unconscious beliefs about what is right or wrong for your life, then even the best strategy will not work. This is often seen in individuals who begin to succeed only to end up sabotaging their own success. The problem is there’s an internal conflict between the individual’s values and his strategy for achievement.
5. Trait Number Five: Energy! People of excellence take opportunities and shape them. They live as if obsessed with the wondrous opportunities of each day and the recognition that the one thing no one has enough of is time. There are many people in this world who have a passion they believe in. They know the strategy that would ensure it, and their values are aligned, but they just don’t have the physical vitality to take action on what they know. Great success is inseparable from the physical, intellectual, and spiritual energy that allows us to make the most of what we have.
6. Trait Number Six: Bonding Power! Nearly all successful people have in common an extraordinary ability to bond with others, the ability to connect with and develop rapport with people from a variety of backgrounds and beliefs.
7. Trait Number Seven: Mastery of Communication! This is the essence of what this book is about. The way we communicate with others and the way we communicate with ourselves ultimately determine the quality of our lives. The people who shape our lives and our cultures are also masters of communication with others. What they have in common is an ability to communicate a vision or a quest or a joy or a mission.

 

People who succeed in life are those who have learned how to take any challenge that life gives them and communicate that experience to themselves in a way that causes them to successfully change things. People who fail take the adversities of life and accept them as limitations.

Success is simple. First, you decide what you want specifically; and second, you decide you’re willing to pay the price to make it happen—and then pay that price.

CHAPTER II 

The Difference that Makes the Difference 

“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.” —W. Somerset Maugham

• In every man and woman’s life there comes a time of ultimate challenge—a time when every resource we have is tested. A time when life seems unfair. A time when our faith, our values, our patience, our compassion, our ability to persist, are all pushed to our limits and beyond. Some people use such tests as opportunities to become better people—others allow these experiences of life to destroy them.
• For most of my life, I have been fascinated by what triggers human beings to behave the way they do. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with discovering what sets certain men and women apart from their peers. What creates a leader, an achiever? How is it that there are so many people in this world who live such joyous lives in spite of almost every adversity, while others who would seem to have it all live lives of despair, anger, and depression? The difference all comes down to the way in which we communicate with ourselves and the actions we take. What do we do when we try everything we can and things still turn out wrong? People who succeed do not have fewer problems than people who fail. The only people without problems are those in cemeteries. It is not what happens to us that separates failures from successes. It is how we perceive it and what we do about what “happens” that makes the difference.
• What I was always curious about was specifically how people produce results. Long ago, I realized that success leaves clues, that people who produce outstanding results do specific things to create those results. So I began my pursuit of models of personal excellence. And in my own search for excellence, I studied every avenue I could find.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

• I came across a science known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming—or NLP for short. If you analyze it, the name comes from “neuro,” referring to the brain, and “linguistic,” referring to language. Programming is the installation of a plan or procedure. NLP is the study of how language, both verbal and nonverbal, affects our nervous system. NLP studies how people communicate to themselves in ways that produce optimum resourceful states and thus create the largest number of behavioral choices.
• Our ability to do anything in life is based upon our ability to direct our own nervous system. Those who are able to produce some outstanding results do so by producing specific communications to and through the nervous system.

Modeling Others

• 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 experiences 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.
• Once again, the point is if it’s possible for others in the world, it’s possible for you. It’s not a matter of whether you can produce the results that another person produces; it’s a matter of strategy—that is, how does that person produce the results? If someone is a terrific speller, there’s a way to model him.
• Simply model how other people direct their nervous systems. Obviously, some tasks are more complex than others and may take more time to model and then duplicate. However, if you have enough desire and the belief that will support you while continuing to adjust and change, virtually anything any human being does can be modeled.

 

Bandler and Grinder (Founders of NLP) found that there are three fundamental ingredients that must be duplicated in order to reproduce any form of human excellence.

• The first door represents a person’s belief system. What a person believes, what he thinks is possible or impossible, to a great extent determines what he can or cannot do. There’s an old phrase that says, “Whether you believe you can do something or you believe you can’t, you’re right.”
• The second door that must be opened is a person’s mental syntax. Mental syntax is the way people organize their thoughts. Syntax is like a code. There are seven digits in a phone number, but you have to dial them in the right order to reach the person you want. The same is true in reaching the part of your brain and nervous system that could most effectively help you get the outcome you desire.
• The third door is physiology. The mind and body are totally linked. The way you use your physiology—the way you breathe and hold your body, your posture, facial expressions, the nature and quality of your movements—actually determines what state you are in. The state you’re in then will determine the range and quality of the behaviors you’re able to produce. We’ll look further at physiology in chapter 9.

The difference between those who succeed and those who fail isn’t what they have—it’s what they choose to see and do with their resources and their experience of life.

 

CHAPTER III 

The Power of State 

“It is the mind that maketh good or ill, That maketh wretch or happy, rich or poor.” —Edmund Spenser

• Why do even the best athletes have days when they do everything right and follow them with days when they can’t buy a basket or a base hit? The difference is the neurophysiological state you’re in. There are enabling states—confidence, love, inner strength, joy, ecstasy, belief—that tap great wellsprings of personal power.
• There are paralyzing states—confusion, depression, fear, anxiety, sadness, frustration—that leave us powerless. We all go in and out of good and bad states.
• If you can change her state, you can change her behavior. The understanding state is the key to understanding change and achieving excellence. Our behavior is the result of the state we’re in.
• Shift your state- I did or said things that later I regretted or was embarrassed about. Maybe you have, too. It’s important to remember these times when someone treats you poorly. Thus, you create a sense of compassion instead of anger.
• The difference between those who fail to achieve their goals in life and those who succeed is the difference between those who cannot put themselves in a supportive state and those who can consistently put themselves in a state that supports them in their achievements.
• Almost everything people want is some possible state. Make a list of the things you want in life. Do you want love? Well, love is a state, a feeling or emotion we signal to ourselves and feel within ourselves based on certain stimuli from the environment. Confidence? Respect? They’re all things that we create. We produce these states within ourselves.

 

• The first key to directing your state and producing the results you desire in life is to learn to effectively run your brain.
• Then the next question is, What creates the state we’re in? There are two main components of state. 
  • The first is our internal representations
  • second is the condition and use of our physiology

• What and how you picture things, as well as what and how you say things to yourself about the situation at hand, create the state you’re in and thus the kinds of behaviors you produce.

The next obvious question is, What causes one person to represent things out of a state of concern, while another creates internal representations that put her in a state of distrust or anger? Well, there are many factors. We may have modeled the reactions of our parents or other role models to such experiences. Thus, our beliefs, attitudes, values, and past experiences with the particular person all affect the kinds of representations we will make about their behaviors.

• The condition and our pattern of use of our own physiology. Things like muscle tension, what we eat, how we breathe, our posture, our overall level of biochemical functioning, all have a huge impact on our state.

• Think of it: When you’re feeling physically vibrant and totally alive, don’t you perceive the world differently than when you’re tired or sick? The condition of your physiology literally changes the way you represent and thus experience the world. When you perceive things as being difficult or upsetting, doesn’t your body follow suit and become tense?

Understand How We Experience 

• Before we can direct our experiences of life, we must first understand how we experience. As mammals, humans receive and represent information about their environment through specialized receptors and sense organs. There are five senses: gustation or taste, olfaction or smell, vision or sight, audition or hearing, and kinesthesis or feeling.
• We make most of the decisions that affect our behavior primarily using only three of these senses: the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic systems.
• These specialized receptors transmit external stimuli to the brain. Through the process of generalization, distortion, and deletion, the brain then takes these electrical signals and filters them into an internal representation. Thus, your internal representation, your experience of the event, isn’t precisely what happened but rather a personalized internal representation. The conscious mind of an individual can’t use all the signals being sent to it. So the brain filters and stores the information it needs, or expects to need later, and allows the conscious mind of the individual to ignore the rest.
• This filtering process explains the huge range in human perception. Two people can see the same traffic accident but give utterly different accounts of it.
• The map is not the territory.” As Alfred Korzybski
• The meaning for individuals is that their internal representation is not a precise rendering of an event. It’s just one interpretation as filtered through specific personal beliefs, attitudes, values, and something called metaprograms.
• Since we don’t know how things really are, but only how we represent them to ourselves, why not represent them in a way that empowers ourselves and others, rather than creating limitations?

Representations for the Powerful States

• The key to doing this successfully is memory management—the forming of representations that consistently create the most empowering states for an individual.
• No matter how terrible a situation is, you can represent it in a way that empowers you. Successful people are able to gain access to their most resourceful state on a consistent basis. Remember, nothing is inherently bad or good. Value is how we represent it to ourselves. We can represent things in a way that puts us in a positive state, or we can do the opposite.
• 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 internal representations and physiology work together to create the state from which behaviors spring, what determines the specific kind of behavior we produce when we’re in that state? The answer is, When we go into a state, our brain then accesses possible behavioral choices. The number of choices is determined by our models of the world. 
  • What we need to do in modeling people is to find out the specific beliefs that cause them to represent the world in a way that allows them to take effective action. We need to find out exactly how they represent to themselves their experience of the world.
  • What do they do visually in their minds? What do they say? What do they feel? Once again, if we produce the same exact messages in our bodies, we can produce similar results. That’s what modeling is all about.

 

Life is like a river. It’s moving, and you can be at the mercy of the river if you don’t take deliberate, conscious action to steer yourself in a direction you have predetermined. If you don’t plant the mental and physiological seeds of the results you want, weeds will grow automatically.

• If we don’t consciously direct our own minds and states, our environment may produce undesirable haphazard states. The results can be disastrous. Thus it’s critical that—on a daily basis—we stand guard at the door of our mind, that we know how we are consistently representing things to ourselves. We must daily weed our garden.
• Remember, your behavior is the result of your state, and your state is the result of your internal representations and your physiology, both of which you can change in a matter of moments. If in the past you have been jealous, that simply means that you have represented things in a way that created this state.
• You now can represent things in a new way and produce new states and accompanying behaviors. Remember, we always have a choice of how to represent things to ourselves.

“The ancestor of every action is a thought.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ultimate Success Formula. He knew his outcome, he took action, he learned from what worked—and if it didn’t, he tried something else until he succeeded.

CHAPTER IV 

The Birth of Excellence: Belief

 “Man is what he believes.” —Anton Chekhov

• A belief is any guiding principle, dictum, faith, or passion that can provide meaning and direction in life. Unlimited stimuli are available to us.
• John Stuart Mill once wrote, “One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”
• That’s precisely why beliefs open the door to excellence. Belief delivers a direct command to your nervous system. When you believe something is true, you literally go into the state of its being true. Handled effectively, beliefs can be the most powerful force for creating good in your life.
• On the other hand, beliefs that limit your actions and thoughts can be as devastating as resourceful beliefs can be empowering.

To Change Behavior, Change Your Beliefs 

• To change our own behaviors, we have to start with our own beliefs. If we want to model excellence, we need to learn to model the beliefs of those who achieve excellence.
  • One case involved a woman with a split personality. Normally, her blood sugar levels were completely normal. But when she believed she was a diabetic, her whole physiology changed to become that of a diabetic. Her belief had become her reality.
  • Studies conducted by Dr. Andrew Weil have shown that the experiences of drug users correspond almost exactly to their expectations. He found he could lead a person given a dose of amphetamine to feel sedated or a person given a barbiturate to feel stimulated. “The ’magic’ of drugs resides within the mind of the user, not in the drugs,” Weil concluded.

The birth of excellence begins with our awareness that our beliefs are a choice. We usually don’t think of it that way, but belief can be a conscious choice. You can choose beliefs that limit you, or you can choose beliefs that support you.

 

Where do beliefs come from? 

Why do some people have beliefs that push them toward success while others have beliefs that only help them to fail?

• The first source is the environment. This is where the cycles of success breeding success and failure breeding failure are played out in the most relentless fashion.
  • Dr. Benjamin Bloom of the University of Chicago studied one hundred extraordinarily successful young athletes, musicians, and students. He was surprised to find that most of the young prodigies didn’t begin by showing great flashes of brilliance. Instead, most received careful attention, guidance, and support, and then they began to develop. The belief that they could be special came before any overt signs of great talent. Ex- Venus & Serena Williams father, Tiger Woods. 

• Events, small or large, can help foster beliefs. There are certain events in everyone’s life that they will never forget.
• A third way to foster belief is through knowledge. Direct experience is one form of knowledge. Another is gained through reading, seeing movies, viewing the world as it is portrayed by others. Knowledge is one of the great ways to break the shackles of a limiting environment. No matter how grim your world is, if you can read about the accomplishments of others, you can create the beliefs that will allow you to succeed.
• A fourth way that results are created is through our past results. The surest way to create a belief that you can do something is to do it once, just once. If you succeed once, it’s far easier to form the belief that you’ll succeed again.
• The fifth way to establish beliefs is through creating in your mind the experience you desire in the future as if it were here now. Just as past experiences can change your internal representations and thus what you believe is possible, so can your imagined experience of how you want things to be in the future. I call this experiencing results in advance.

All these things are ways to mobilize belief. Most of us form our beliefs haphazardly. We soak up things—good and bad—from the world around us. But one of the key ideas of this book is that you’re not just a leaf in the wind. You can control your beliefs. You can control the ways you model others. You can consciously direct your life. You can change. If there’s a keyword in this book, that’s it—change.

Exercise:

• What are some of the beliefs you have about who you are and what you’re capable of? Please take a moment and jot down five key beliefs that have limited you in the past. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
• your highest goals. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

CHAPTER V 

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 Molton

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. As we learned in the last chapter, belief is the foundation of excellence.

• 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 in 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 “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.

Belief #1: Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves us.

• 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.
• 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.

Belief #2: There is no such thing as failure. There are only 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.
• Mark Twain once said, “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.”Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.” —William Shakespeare
• 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.”

Exercise:

• Take a minute to reflect on the five greatest so-called “failures” in your life. What did you learn from those experiences? Chances are they were some of the most valuable lessons you’ve learned in your life.
• 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?”
  • 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?

Belief #3: Whatever happens, take responsibility. 

• Another attribute great leaders and achievers have in common is that they operate from the belief that they create their world. The phrase you’ll hear time and again is, “I am responsible. I’ll take care of it.”
• I believe that we generate our experiences in life—either by behavior or by thought—and that we can learn from all of them.
• Those who take responsibility are in power. Those who avoid it are disempowered.

Belief #4: It’s not necessary to understand everything to be able to use everything.

• They don’t believe they have to know everything about something in order to use it. They know how to use what’s essential without feeling a need to get bogged down in every detail of it. If you study people who are in power, you’ll find they have a working knowledge about a lot of things but often have little mastery of each and every detail of their enterprise.
• They exact the essence from a situation, take out what they need, and don’t dwell on the rest. They’re always aware of how much they need. They always know what’s essential and what’s not.

Belief #5: People are your greatest resource. 

• Individuals of excellence—that is, people who produce outstanding results—almost universally have a tremendous sense of respect and appreciation for people. They have a sense of team, a sense of common purpose and unity.

Belief #6: Work is play. 

• Do you know any person who has achieved massive success by doing what he hates? I don’t.

Belief #7: There’s no abiding success without commitment. 

• Individuals who succeed have a belief in the power of commitment. If there’s a single belief that seems almost inseparable from success, it’s that there’s no great success without great commitment.
• Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova once said, “To follow, without halt, one aim: there’s the secret of success.” It’s just another way of stating our Ultimate Success Formula—know your outcome, model what works, take action, develop the sensory acuity to know what you’re getting, and keep refining it until you get what you want.

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.

 

CHAPTER VI 

Mastering Your Mind: How to Run Your Brain 

“Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” —Henry Ford

In this section, you’re going to learn how to change your states so you can produce whatever you want, when you want it. People don’t usually lack resources; they lack control over their resources.

• We don’t have to experience all that remembered pain to change our state. What we have to do is change the internal representation from a negative to a positive one that is automatically triggered and causes us to produce more effective results.
• 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—thus, for example, if we imagine the worst possible scenario, we can change to picturing the best-possible scenario. Or we can change how we represent something. Many of us have certain keys within our own minds that trigger our brains to respond in a particular way.
  • For example, some people find that picturing something as being very, very large motivates them greatly. Other people find that the tone of voice they use when they talk to themselves about something makes a major difference in their motivation. Once we discover the different ways we represent things and how they affect us, we can take charge of our own minds and begin to represent things in a way that empowers rather than limits us.

• We need sharper tools to really access what’s going on in the mind. That’s where submodalities come in. They are like the precise amounts of ingredients required to create a result. They’re the smallest and most precise building blocks that make up the structure of human experience.

Associated vs Disassociated 

• Another important distinction is whether an image is associated or disassociated. An associated image is one you experience as if you were really there. You see it through your own eyes, hear and feel what you would if you were actually at that time, and place it in your own body. A disassociated image is one you experience as if you were watching it from outside yourself. If you see a disassociated image of yourself, it’s like watching a movie of yourself. Take a minute to remember a recent pleasant experience you’ve had. Actually, step into that experience. See what you saw through your own eyes: the events, images, colors, brightness, and so on. Hear what you heard: Feel what you felt: emotions, temperature, and so on. Experience what that’s like. Now step out of your body and feel yourself stepping away from the situation but from a place where you can still see yourself over there in the experience. Imagine the experience as if you were watching yourself in a movie. What’s the difference in your feelings? In which were the feelings most intense, the first example or the second? The difference between these is the difference between an associated experience and a disassociated experience.
• By using submodality distinctions like association versus disassociation, you can radically change your experience of life. Remember, we’ve learned that all human behavior is the result of the state we’re in and that our states are created by our internal representations—the things we picture, say to ourselves, and so on. Just as a movie director can change the effect his movie has on an audience, you can change the effect any experience in life has upon yourself.
• You can direct your brain in the same way to generate any state or behavior that supports your highest goals or needs.

Exercise:

• I want you to think of a very pleasant memory. It can be recent or distant. Just close your eyes, relax, and think of it. Now take that image and make it brighter and brighter. As the image brightens, be aware of how your state changes. Next I want you to bring your mental picture closer to you. Now stop and make it bigger. What happens when you manipulate the image? It changes the intensity of the experience, doesn’t it? For the vast majority of people, making an already pleasant memory bigger and brighter and closer creates an even more powerful image and more pleasant.
• All people have access to the three modalities or representational systems—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.
• Many people access their brains primarily in a visual framework. They react to the pictures they see in their head. Others are primarily auditory. Others kinesthetic. These people react most strongly to what they hear or feel. So after you’ve varied the visual frames, let’s try the same thing with the other representational systems.
• Let’s try the same thing with a negative image. I want you to think of something that upset you and caused you pain. Now take that image and make it brighter. Bring it closer to you. Make it bigger. What’s going on in your brain? Most people find that their negative state has intensified. The bad feelings they felt before are more powerful than ever. Now put the image back where it was. What happens if you make it smaller and dimmer and farther away? Try it and note the difference in your feelings. You’ll discover that the negative feelings have lost their power.
• You can implant the cues you want. You can take bad experiences and images and sap them of their strength and power. You can represent them to yourself in a way that no longer overpowers you, a way that “cuts them down” to a size where you know you can effectively handle things.

The king had the ability to direct his kingdom. Well, your kingdom is your brain. Just as the king can run his kingdom, you can run yours. Remember, we don’t know how life really is. We only know how we represent life to ourselves.

• If we take that negative image and shrink it, darken it, make it a still frame, then we take away its power, and the brain will respond accordingly. Instead of it puts us in a negative state, we can just shrug it off or deal with it without giant upset.

Exercise:

• Have you ever been plagued by an insistent internal dialogue? Have you ever been in a position where your brain wouldn’t shut up? Lots of times our brain runs dialogues over and over again. We debate points with ourselves or try to win old arguments or settle old scores. If that happens to you, just turn down the volume. Make the voice in your head softer, farther away, and weaker. That takes care of the problem for many people. Or do you have one of those internal dialogues that are always limiting you? Now hear it say the same things, only in a sexy voice, in an almost flirtatious tone and tempo: “You can’t do that.” How does it feel now? You may feel that you’re even more motivated to do what the voice is telling you not to. Try it now and experience the difference. 
• This time think of something in your experience that you were totally motivated to do. Relax and form as clear a mental picture of that experience as possible. As you look at the image, do you see a movie or a snapshot? Is it in color or black and white? Is it close or far away? Is it to the left, to the right, or in the center? Is it high, low, or in the middle of your field of vision? Is it associated—do you see it through your own eyes—or is it disassociated—do you see it like an outsider viewing it? Does it have a frame around it, or do you see a panorama that goes on forever? Is it bright or dim, dark or light? Is it focused or unfocused? As you do this exercise, be sure to note which submodalities are the strongest for you, which ones have the most power when you focus on them.
• Now run through your auditory and kinesthetic submodalities.
• you’ve just seen and experienced the structure of something that you once were strongly motivated to do. Now I want you to think of something you would like to be strongly motivated to do, something that at present you have no special feeling for, no real motivation to do. Once again, form a mental image. Now run through the exact same questions, being careful to note the way your responses differ from those that you had for the thing you were strongly motivated to do. Now take the thing you were motivated by—let’s call it experience #1—and the thing you want to be motivated by—experience #2—and look at them simultaneously. It’s not hard to do. Think of your brain as a split-screen TV, and look at both images at the same time. 
• Now take what we’ve learned about which kinds of submodalities motivate us and then, bit by bit, readjust the submodalities of the thing you were not yet motivated to do (experience #2) so that they match those of the thing you are motivated to do (the submodalities of experience #1). I want you to concentrate on the differences between them, and manipulate the second representation so it becomes more and more like the first one. Remember to do the same thing with the auditory and kinesthetic representations as well.

 

I don’t ask, “Why are you depressed?” and then ask them to represent to themselves and me why they are. That would just put them into a depressed state. I don’t want to know why they’re depressed; I want to know how they’re depressed. I’ll ask instead, “How do you do that?”

• So I’ll ask, “If I were in your body, how would I get depressed? What would I picture? What would I say to myself? How would I say it? What tonality would I use?” These processes create specific mental and physical actions and thus specific emotional results. If you change the structure of a process, it can become something else, something other than a depressed state.
• 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. Example: How do you get frustrated or depressed?
• Do you take something and make a towering image of it in your mind? Do you keep talking to yourself in a sad tone of voice? Now, how do you create ecstatic feelings, fun? Do you make bright pictures? Do they move fast or slow? What tone of voice do you use when you speak to yourself?
• After all, frustration, depression, and ecstasy aren’t things. They are processes created by specific mental images, sounds, and physical actions that you consciously or unconsciously control.
• What if you were to take all the things you hate to do but believe you must and attach to them the submodalities of pleasure? Remember, few things have any inherent feeling. You’ve learned what is pleasurable and you’ve learned what is uncomfortable. You can simply relabel these experiences in your brain and immediately create a new feeling about them. What if you took all your problems, shrank them down, and put a little distance between them and you?

Swish Pattern

• A Swish pattern can be used to deal with some of the most persistent problems and bad habits people have. A swish pattern takes internal representations that normally produce states of unresourcefulness and causes them to automatically trigger new internal representations that put you in the resourceful states you desire.
• When you find out, for example, what internal representations make you feel like overeating, with the swish pattern you can create a new internal representation of something else that is more powerful and would cause you, if you saw or heard it, to push food away.
• What if you were to take all the things you hate to do but believe you must and attach to them the submodalities of pleasure? Remember, few things have any inherent feeling. You’ve learned what is pleasurable and you’ve learned what is uncomfortable.
• You can simply relabel these experiences in your brain and immediately create a new feeling about them. What if you took all your problems, shrank them down, and put a little distance between them and you?
• Swish patterns can be used to deal with some of the most persistent problems and bad habits people have. A swish pattern takes internal representations that normally produce states of unresourcefulness and causes them to automatically trigger new internal representations that put you in the resourceful states you desire.
  • When you find out, for example, what internal representations make you feel like overeating, with the swish pattern you can create a new internal representation of something else that is more powerful and would cause you, if you saw or heard it, to push food away.

• If you link the two representations, whenever you think of overeating, the first representation will instantly trigger the second and put you in a state of not desiring food. 

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 be if you made the desired change, and what that change would mean to you. 

• The picture you make of yourself in that desired state should be disassociated. The reason for this is that we want to create an ideal internal representation, one that you will continue to be drawn to rather than one you feel you already have. 

Step #3: “Swish” the two pictures so that the unresourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience. Once you hook up this triggering mechanism, anything that used to trigger biting your nails will now trigger you into a state where you are moving toward that ideal picture of yourself. Thus, you’re creating a whole new way for your brain to deal with what in the past may have upset you. 

• Here’s how to do the swish: Start by making a big bright picture of the behavior you want to change. Then, in the bottom right-hand corner of that picture, make a small dark picture of the way you want to be. Now take that small picture, and in less than one second, have it grow in size and brightness and literally burst through the picture of the behavior you no longer desire. 
• As you do this process, say the word “wooosh” with all the excitement and enthusiasm you can. I realize this may sound a bit juvenile. 
• Once you’ve set up the pictures in your mind, this whole process should only take about as long as it takes to say the word “wooosh.” Now in front of you is a big, bright, focused, colorful picture of how you want to be. The old picture of how you were has been smashed. 
• The key to this pattern is speed and repetition. You must see and feel that small dark picture become huge and bright and explode through the big picture, destroying it and replacing it with an even bigger, brighter picture of how you want things to be. Then open your eyes for a split second in order to break the state. When you close your eyes again, do the swish once more. Start by seeing the thing you want to change as large, and then have your small picture grow in size and brightness and explode through Wooosh! Pause to experience it. Open your eyes. Close your eyes. See what you want to change. See the original picture and how you want to change it. Wooosh it again. Do this five or six times, as fast as you can.
• It’s very important that it be extremely attractive, something that puts you in a motivated or desirous state—something you really want or something that is more important to you than the old behavior. Sometimes it helps to add new submodalities, like smell or taste.
• You can also do this with fears or frustrations. Take something you’re afraid to do. Now picture it working out the way you want it to. Make this picture really exciting. Now swish the two of them seven times. Now think of the thing you feared. How does it make you feel now? If the swish pattern has been done effectively, the moment you think of the things you feared, you should automatically switch to thinking of how you want things to be.
• What we’re really doing as we work with submodalities is relabeling the stimulus system that tells the brain how to feel about an experience. Your brain responds to whatever signals (submodalities) you give it. If you provide signals of one type, the brain will feel pain. If you provide different submodalities, you can feel fine in a matter of moments.

CHAPTER VII The Syntax of Success 

“Let all things be done decently and in order.” —I Corinthians 14:40

• There is another factor that affects the results—the syntax of action. The syntax—the way we order the actions—can make a huge difference in the kind of results we produce.
• The words are exactly the same. The difference is syntax, the way they’re arranged. The meaning of the experience is determined by the order of the signals provided to the brain. The same stimuli are involved, the same words, yet the meaning is different.
• The order in which things are presented causes them to register in the brain in a specific way. It’s like the commands to a computer. In order to create a recipe, we must have a system to describe what to do and when. So we have a notation system to describe strategies. We represent sensory processes in a shorthand notation, using V for visual, A for auditory, K for kinesthetic, i for internal, e for external, t for tonal, and d for digital. When you see something in the outside world (visual external), it can be represented as Ve. When you have a feeling inside, it’s Ki.
• A simpler strategy is one used by many athletes to model the best in their field. If you wanted to model an expert skier, you might first watch carefully to see what his technique is (Ve). As you watch, you might move your body in the same motions (Ke), until they feel like a part of you (Ki). (If you’ve ever watched skiing, you may have done this involuntarily. When the skier you are watching needs to turn, you turn for him as if you were the one skiing.) Next you would want to make an internal picture of expert skiing (Vi).
• You’ve gone from visual external to kinesthetic external to kinesthetic internal. Then you would make a new visual internal image, this time a disassociated image of yourself skiing (Vi). It would be like watching a movie of yourself modeling the other person as precisely as possible. Next, you would step inside that picture and, in an associated way, experience how it would feel to perform the same action precisely the way the expert athlete did (Ki).
• You would repeat that as often as it would take for you to feel completely comfortable doing it. Thus you would have provided yourself with the specific neurological strategy that could help you move and perform at optimum levels. Then you would try it in the real world (Ke).
• Most people remember visual images best by looking up and to their left. The best way to learn to spell Albuquerque is to place the word up and to your left and form a clear visual image of it.

Chunking

• 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.
• The way to learn to spell Albuquerque is to break it down into three smaller chunks like this: Albulquerlque. I want you to write the three parts on a piece of paper, hold them above and to the left of your eyes, see Albu, then close your eyes and see it in your mind. Open your eyes. See Albu. Do not say it, just see it; then close your eyes and see it in your mind. Continue to do this four or five or six times until you can close your eyes and clearly see Albu. Next take the second chunk, quer. Flash on the letters faster and follow the same process with it, and then with the que chunk, until the entire image Albuquerque is stored in your mind. If you have a clear picture, you’ll probably have a feeling (kinesthetic) it’s spelled right.

 

CHAPTER VIII How to Elicit Someone’s Strategy 

“’ Begin at the beginning,’ the king said gravely, ’and go till you come to the end; then stop.’” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

• Master communicators work the same way. You can figure out anyone’s mental syntax—you can open the combination to the vault of his mind or your own by thinking like a master locksmith. You have to look for things you weren’t seeing before, listen for things you weren’t hearing before, feel things you weren’t feeling before, and ask the questions you didn’t know to ask before.
• If you do that elegantly and attentively, you can elicit anyone’s strategies in any situation. You can learn how to give people precisely what they want, and you can teach them how to do the same thing for themselves.
• 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.

Visual

• People who are primarily visual tend to see the world in pictures; they achieve their greatest sense of power by tapping into the visual part of their brain. Because they’re trying to keep up with the pictures in their brain, visual people tend to speak quickly. They don’t care exactly how they get it out; they’re just trying to put words to the pictures. These people tend to speak in visual metaphors. They talk about how things look to them, what patterns they see emerging, whether things look bright or dark.

Auditory

• People who are more auditory tend to be more selective about the words they use. They have more resonant voices, and their speech is slower, more rhythmic, and more measured. Since words mean a lot to them, they are careful about what they say. They tend to say things like, “That sounds right to me” or “I can hear what you’re saying” or “Everything clicks.”

Kinesthetic

• People who are more kinesthetic tend to be even slower. They react primarily to feelings. Their voices tend to be deep, and their words often ooze out slowly like molasses. Kinesthetic people use metaphors from the physical world. They’re always “grasping” for something “concrete.” Things are “heavy” and “intense,” and they need to “get in touch” with things. They say things like, “I’m reaching for an answer, but I haven’t got a hold on it yet.”

 

Everyone has elements of all three modes, but most people have one system that dominates.

• If you’re dealing with a visually-oriented person, you don’t want to amble up slowly, take a deep breath, and speak at a snaillike pace. You’ll drive him crazy. You’ve got to speak up so your message matches the way his mind works.
• Answer this: What colors were the candles on your birthday cake when you were twelve years old? Take a moment and remember…. To answer that question, 90 percent of you looked up and to the left. That’s where right-handed people and even some left-handed people access visual remembered images.
• Here’s another question: How would Mickey Mouse look with a beard? Take a moment to picture this. This time your eyes probably went up and to the right. That’s where people’s eyes go to access constructed images. So, just by looking at people’s eyes, it’s possible to know what sensory system they’re accessing. If, for example, a person’s eyes go up to the left, he just pictured something from his memory. If they now go toward the left ear, he listened to something. When the eyes go down to the right, the person is accessing the kinesthetic part of his representational system.
• In the same way, if you’re having a difficult time remembering something, it’s probably because you are not placing your eyes in a position that gives you clear access to the information you need. If you’re trying to remember something you saw a few days ago, looking down to the right will not help you see that image. However, if you look up to the left, you’ll discover that you’ll be able to remember the information rapidly.
• When people are breathing high in their chest, they’re thinking visually. When breathing is even, from the diaphragm or the whole chest, they’re in an auditory mode. Deep breathing low in the stomach indicates kinesthetic accessing. Observe three people breathing, and note the rate and location of their breathing.
• The voice is equally expressive. Visual people speak in quick bursts and usually have high-pitched, nasal, or strained tonalities. Low, deep tonality and slow speech are usually kinesthetic. An even rhythm and clear, resonant tonality indicate auditory accessing.
• You can even read skin tone. When you think visually, your face tends to grow paler. A flushed face indicates kinesthetic accessing.
• When someone’s head is up, he’s in a visual mode. If it’s balanced or slightly cocked (as in listening), he’s in auditory. If it’s down or the neck muscles are relaxed, he’s in kinesthetic.
• 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 get 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 submodalities of the strategy. Find out what specifically about the picture, sounds, and sensations caused the person to be in that state.
• Try this technique for eliciting a motivation strategy with someone else. First, put the other person in a receptive state. Ask, “Can you remember a time when you were totally motivated to do something?” You’re looking for a congruent answer, one in which the person’s voice and body language give you the same message in a clear, firm, believable way.
• Remember, he won’t be aware of much of his sequence. If it’s been a part of his behavior for a while, he does it very quickly. In order to get each of his steps, you have to ask him to slow down and then pay careful attention to what he says and what his eyes and body tell you.
• What does it mean if you ask a person, “Can you remember when you felt very motivated?” and the person shrugs and says, “Yeah”? It means he’s not yet in the state you want. Sometimes someone will say yes and shake his head no. Same thing. He isn’t really associated to the experience; he’s not in state. So you have to make sure he’s tapped into the specific experience that put him in the right state. So you ask, “Can you remember a specific time when you were totally motivated to do something? Can you go back to that time and step back into that experience?” That should do it almost every time.
• When you get him in an involved state, ask, “As you remember that time, what was the very first thing that caused you to be totally motivated? Was it something you saw, something you heard or was it the touch of something or someone?” If he answers that he once heard a powerful speech and immediately felt motivated to do something, his motivational strategy begins with auditory external (Ae).
• You wouldn’t motivate him by showing him something or by having him do something physical. He responds best to words and sounds.
• People respond to things both externally and internally. So you will need to find the internal part of his strategy. Next you ask, “After you heard that thing, what was the very next thing that caused you to be totally motivated to do something? Did you picture something in your mind? Did you say something to yourself? Or did you have a certain feeling or emotion?” If he answers that he got a picture in his mind, the second part of his strategy is visual internal (Vi). After he hears something that motivates him, he immediately forms a mental picture that gets him more motivated. Chances are it’s a picture that helps him focus on what he wants to do.

Group Speaking

• First, every motivational technique aimed at a group should have something for everyone—something visual, something auditory, and something kinesthetic. You should show them things, you should let them hear things, and you should give them feelings. And you should be able to vary your voice and intonations so you hook all three types.
• Second, there’s no substitute for working with people as individuals. You can provide broad cues to a group that will give everyone something to work with. To tap into the full strategies different people use, it would be ideal to elicit individual strategies.
• Knowing the love strategy of your partner or your child can be one of the most powerful understandings you develop in supporting your relationship. If you know how to make that person feel loved at any moment, that’s a pretty powerful tool to have available. If you don’t know his/her love strategy, it can be pretty sad. I’m sure we’ve all been in the situation at least once in our lives when we loved someone and expressed our love, but we weren’t believed, or someone expressed love to us, but we didn’t believe it.

Relationships

• There is an interesting dynamic that develops in relationships. At the very beginning of a relationship, the stage I call courting, we are very mobilized. So how do we let people know we love them? Do we just tell them that we love them? Do we just show them or just touch them? Of course not! During “courting,” we do it all. We show each other, we tell each other, we touch each other all the time. Now as time goes on, do we still do all three? Some couples do. They are the exception, not the rule.
• If a husband has an auditory love strategy, how is the most likely to express his love to his wife? By telling her, of course. But what if she has a visual love strategy, so her brain causes her to feel deeply loved only after it receives certain visual stimuli? What will happen as time goes by? Neither member of this relationship is going to feel totally loved. When they were courting, they did it all—showed, told, and touched—and triggered each other’s love strategies. Now the husband comes in and says, “I love you, honey,” and she replies, “No, you don’t!” He asks, “What are you ’talking’ about?
• Or consider the opposite: the husband is visual and the wife is auditory. He shows his wife he loves her by buying her things, taking her places, sending her flowers. One day she says, “You don’t love me.” He’s upset: “How can you say that? Look at this home I’ve bought for you, all the places I take you.”
• Or how about one of the greatest mismatches of all time—a kinesthetic man and a visually oriented woman. He comes home and wants to hug her. “Don’t touch me,” she says. “You’re always grabbing at me. All you ever want to do is hunker down and hug. Why can’t we go someplace? Look at me before you touch me.”
• Now that you know how to elicit a love strategy, sit down with your partner and find out what makes him or her feel totally loved. And having elicited your own love strategy, teach your partner how to trigger your feeling totally loved.

 

CHAPTER IX Physiology: The Avenue of Excellence 

“Devils can be driven out of the heart by the touch of a hand on a hand or a mouth.” —Tennessee Williams

• One way to get yourself into a state that supports your achieving any outcome is to act “as if you were already there. Acting “as if” is most effective when you put your physiology in the state you’d be in if you were already effective.
• Physiology is the most powerful tool we have for instantly changing states, for instantly producing dynamic results. There’s an old saying: “If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful.” Truer words were never spoken.
• If you adopt a vital, dynamic, exciting physiology, you automatically adopt the same kind of state. The biggest leverage we have in any situation is physiology—because it works so fast, and it works without fail. Physiology and internal representations are totally linked. If you change one, you instantly change the other.
• If you change your physiology—that is, your posture, your breathing patterns, your muscle tension, your tonality—you instantly change your internal representations and your state.
• When people come to me and say they can’t do something, I say, “Act as if you could do it.” They usually reply, “Well, I don’t know how.” So I say, “Act as if you did know-how. Stand the way you would be standing if you did know how to do it. Breathe the way you’d be breathing if you did know how to do it right now. Make your face look as if you could do it right now.”
• Over and over again, simply by changing physiology, you can make people do things they could never do before—because the second they change their physiology, they change their state.
• Try this for yourself; if you are upset or crying and want to stop, look up. Put your shoulders back and get into a visual state. Your feelings will change almost instantaneously. You can do this for your kids. When they get hurt, have them lookup. The crying and pain will be stopped, or at least decrease tremendously, in a moment.
• We always hear about the horrible effects of stress or about people losing the will to live after the death of a loved one. We all seem to know that negative states and emotions can literally kill us. But we hear less about the ways positive states can heal us.
  • Smiling and laughing set off biological processes that, in fact, make us feel good. They increase the flow of blood to the brain and change the level of oxygen, the level of stimulation of the neurotransmitters. The same thing happens with other expressions. Put your facial expression in the physiology of fear or anger or disgust or surprise, and that’s what you’ll feel.

“Our bodies are our gardens … our wills are gardeners.” —William Shakespeare

• Dr. Paul Ekman, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California in San Francisco, told the Los Angeles Times (June 5, 1985): “We know that if you have an emotion, it shows on your face. Now we’ve seen it goes the other way too. You become what you put on your face. … If you laugh at suffering, you don’t feel suffering inside. If your face shows sorrow, you do feel it inside.” In fact, Ekman says, the same principle is used regularly to beat lie detectors. People who put themselves in a physiology of belief, even when they’re lying through their teeth, will register belief.

Congruency 

• An important corollary of physiology is congruency. If I’m giving you what I think is a positive message, but my voice is weak and tentative and my body language is disjointed and unfocused, I’m incongruent.
• Developing congruity is a major key to personal power. When I’m communicating, I’m emphatic—in my words, my voice, my breathing, my entire physiology. When my body and my words match, I’m giving clear signals to my brain that this is what I want to produce. And my mind responds accordingly.

 

CHAPTER X Energy: The Fuel of Excellence 

“The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a state depend.” —Benjamin Disraeli

In this chapter, I’m going to give you six keys to powerful, indomitable physiology.

1. Let’s start with the first key to living health—the power of breath.

• If you get nothing else from this chapter but an understanding of the importance of deep breathing, you could dramatically increase the level of your body’s health. It’s the reason that health systems like yoga focus so much attention on healthy breathing. There’s nothing like it to cleanse your body.
• Let me share with you the most effective way to breathe in order to cleanse your system. You should breathe in this ratio: inhale one count, hold four counts, exhale two counts. If you inhaled for four seconds, you would hold for sixteen and exhale for eight. Why exhale for twice as long as you inhale? That’s when you eliminate toxins via your lymphatic system. Why hold four times as long? That’s how you can fully oxygenate the blood and activate your lymphatic system. When you breathe, you should start from deep in your abdomen, like a vacuum cleaner that’s getting rid of all toxins in the blood system.

 

2. The second key is the principle of eating water-rich foods.

3. The third key to living healthy is the principle of effective food combining. 

• Many great scientists have studied food combining. Dr. Herbert Shelton is the best known. Let me explain why these combinations are destructive and how you can save yourself large amounts of nerve energy you may currently be wasting. Different foods are digested differently. Starchy foods (rice, bread, potatoes, and so on) require an alkaline digestive medium, which is initially supplied in the mouth by the enzyme ptyalin. Protein foods (meat, dairy, nuts, seeds, and the like) require an acid medium for digestion—hydrochloric acid and pepsin.
• Here’s a very simple way to think about it. Eat only one condensed food at a meal.

4. The fourth key, the law of controlled consumption.

5. The fifth key to the living health program is the principle of effective fruit consumption.

6. The sixth key to living healthy is the protein myth.

• Do you know what Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Henry David Thoreau, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi have in common? They were all vegetarians.

 

SECTION II The Ultimate Success Formula 

CHAPTER XI Limitation Disengage: What Do You Want? 

“There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.“ —Christopher Morley

• Before we go on, let’s review what we’ve learned thus far. The main thing you now know is that there are no limits to what you can do. Your key is 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. How do you model? First, you must realize that all results are produced by some specific set of actions. Every effect has a cause. If you exactly reproduce someone’s actions—both internal and external—then you, too, can produce the same final result. You begin by modeling someone’s mental actions, starting with his belief system, then you go on to his mental syntax, and finally you mirror his physiology. Do all three effectively and elegantly, and you can do just about anything.
• You’ve learned that success or failure begins with belief. Whether you believe you can do something or you believe you can’t, you’re right.
• 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. If you don’t get it, have you failed? Of course not. Like a helmsman guiding his boat, you just need to change your behavior until you get what you want.
• You’ve learned, about the power of being in a resourceful state, and you’ve learned how to adjust your physiology and your internal representations so they serve you, enable you, embolden you to achieve your desires. You know that if you’re committed to success, you’ll create it.

100th Monkey Syndrome 

• There’s an absolutely fascinating study that deals with something called the “100th monkey syndrome.” In his book Life-Tide, published in 1979, biologist Lyall Watson recounted what happened in a monkey tribe on an island near Japan after a new food, freshly dug sweet potatoes covered with sand, was introduced into their midst. Since their other food required no preparation, the monkeys were reluctant to eat the dirty potatoes.
• Once a certain number of monkeys—about one hundred of them—had acquired this knowledge, other monkeys who had no contact with them at all, even monkeys living on other islands, began to do the same thing. There was no physical way they could have interacted with the original monkeys. But somehow the behavior spread.

Know What You Want

• A key part of this process is knowing what you want. The unconscious mind is constantly processing information in such a way as to move us in particular directions. Even at the unconscious level, the mind is distorting, deleting, and generalizing. So before the mind can work efficiently, we must develop our perception of the outcomes we expect to reach.
• Resources are directly affected by their goals. A study of the 1953 graduates of Yale University clearly demonstrates this point. The graduates interviewed were asked if they had a clear, specific set of goals written down with a plan for achieving those goals. Only 3 percent had such written goals. Twenty years later, in 1973, the researchers went back and interviewed the surviving members of the 1953 graduating class. They discovered that the 3 percent with written specific goals were worth more in financial terms than the entire other 97 percent put together.

 

Follow these five rules in formulating your outcomes. 

1. State your outcome in positive terms. Say what you want to happen. Too often, people state what they don’t want to happen as their goals.
2. Be as specific as possible. How does your outcome look, sound, feel, smell? Engage all of your senses in describing the results you want. The more sensory-rich your description, the more you will empower your brain to create your desire. Also be certain to set a specific completion date and/or term.
3. Have an evidence procedure. Know how you will look, how you will feel, and what you will see and hear in your external world after you have achieved your outcome. If you don’t know how you’ll know when you’ve achieved your goal, you may already have it. You can be winning and feel like you’re losing if you don’t keep score.
4. Be in control. Your outcome must be initiated and maintained by you. It must not be dependent upon other people having to change themselves for you to be happy. Make sure your outcome reflects things that you can affect directly.
5. 5. Verify that your outcome is ecologically sound and desirable. Project into the future the consequences of your actual goal. Your outcome must be one that benefits you and other people.

 

• I always ask a question in my seminars, and I want to ask it now: If you knew you could not fail, what would you do? If you were absolutely certain of success, what activities would you pursue, what actions would you take?

 

Before something happens in the external world, it must first happen in the internal world. There’s something rather amazing about what happens when you get a clear internal representation of what you want. It programs your mind and body to achieve that goal.

1. Start by making an inventory of your dreams, the things you want to have, do, be, and share. Create the people, feelings, and places you want to be a part of your life. One key to goal setting is play. Let your mind roam free. Whatever limitations you have are limitations you’ve created. Where do they exist? Only in your mind. So whenever you start to place limitations on yourself, throw them off. Do it visually.
2. Let’s do a second exercise. Go over the list you made, estimating when you expect to reach those outcomes: If all your goals are short term, you need to start taking a longer view of potential and possibility. If all your goals are long-term, you need to first develop some steps that can lead you in the direction you expect to go. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It’s important to be aware of both the first steps and the final ones.
3. Now I want you to try something else: Pick out the four most important goals for you for this year. Pick the things you’re most committed to, most excited about, things that would give you the most satisfaction.

• If you can find enough reasons to do something, you can get yourself to do anything. Our purpose for doing something is a much stronger motivator than the object that we pursue. Jim Rohn, my first personal-development teacher, always taught me that if you have enough reasons, you can do anything.

4. Now that you have a list of your key goals, review them against the five rules for formulating outcomes. Are your goals stated in the positive? Are they sensory-specific? Do they have an evidence procedure? Describe what you will experience when you achieve them. In even clearer sensory terms, what will you see, hear, feel, and smell? Also, note if the goals are maintainable by you. Are they ecological and desirable for you and others?
5. Next, make a list of the important resources you already have at your disposal.
6. When you’ve done that, focus on times you used some of those resources most skillfully. Come up with three to five times in your life when you were totally successful. Think of the times in business or sports or financial matters or relationships when you did something particularly well.
7. After you’ve done all that, describe the kind of person you would have to be to attain your goals. Will it take a great deal of discipline, a great deal of education? Would you have to manage your time well? If, for example, you want to be a civic leader who really makes a difference, describe what kind of person gets elected and really has the ability to affect large numbers of people.
8. Next, in a few paragraphs, write down what prevents you from having the things you desire right now.

• We can know what we want, why we want it, who will help us, and a lot of other things, but the critical ingredient that in the end determines whether we succeed in achieving our outcomes is our actions. To guide our actions, we must create a step-by-step plan. What are the necessary actions you must take consistently to produce the result you desire?

9. Take the time now to take each of your four key goals and create your first draft of a step-by-step plan on how to achieve it.
10. So come up with some models. They can be people from your life or famous people who’ve achieved great success. Write down the names of three to five people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve, and specify in a few words the qualities and behaviors that made them successful.

• After you’ve done this, close your eyes and imagine for a moment that each of these people is going to give you some advice about how to best go about accomplishing your goals. Write down one main idea that each would give you if he or she were speaking to you personally.
• Take a dip into your personal history to a time when you were totally successful at something. Close your eyes and form the clearest, brightest possible image of that accomplishment. Take note of whether you put the image to the left or to the right, up, middle, or down. Again, notice all the submodalities—the size, shape, and quality of its movement as well as the type of sound and internal feelings that it creates.
• Now think about the outcomes you’ve written down today. Make a picture of how you would be if you achieved everything you’ve set down today. Put that image on the same side as the other one and make it as big and bright and focused and colorful as you can.

11. It’s great to have all kinds of different goals. However, what’s even nicer is to be able to design what all of them together would mean for you. Now create your ideal day. What people would be involved? What would you do? How would it begin? Where would you go? Where would you be? Do it from the time you get up to the time you go to sleep.
12. Sometimes we forget that dreams begin at home. We forget that the first step toward success is providing ourselves with an atmosphere that nurtures our creativity, that helps us be everything we can be. Finally, design your perfect environment. I want you to accentuate the sense of place. Let your mind go. No limitations. Whatever you want is what you should put

Now you should do one final thing: make a list of the things you already have that were once goals—all the things in your ideal day you can already do, the activities and people of your life you are most grateful for, the resources you already have available to you. I call this a gratitude diary.

 

CHAPTER XII The Power of Precision

• Bandler and Grinder found that the most successful managers seemed to have a genius for getting to the heart of information rapidly and communicating to others what they had learned. They tended to use key phrases and words that conveyed their most important ideas with great precision.

Guideline for Precision 

• There are five guidelines for asking intelligently and precisely. 

1. Ask specifically. You must describe what you want, both to yourself and to someone else. How high, how far, how much? When, where, how, with whom?
2. Ask someone who can help you. It’s not enough to ask specifically, you must ask specifically of someone who has the resources—the knowledge, the capital, the sensitivity, or the business experience. Finding the right person to ask brings us back to the importance of learning how to notice what works. Anything you want—a better relationship, a better job, a smarter program for investing your money—is something someone already has or something someone already does.
3. Create value for the person you’re asking. Don’t just ask and expect someone to give you something. Figure out how you can help him first.
4. Ask with focused, congruent belief.
5. Ask until you get what you want. That doesn’t mean asking the same person. It doesn’t mean asking in precisely the same way. Remember, the Ultimate Success Formula says you need to develop the sensory acuity to know what you’re getting, and you have to have the personal flexibility to change.

• When you say to yourself, “I can’t do that,” the thing to do next is ask yourself, “What would happen if I could?” The reply would be a list of positive, enabling actions and feelings. It would create new representations of possibility and thus new states, new actions, and potentially new results.
• You could ask, “What prevents me from doing this now?” and thereby become clear about what specifically you need to change.
• Here are some additional patterns to listen for. Avoid words like “good,” “bad,” “better,” “worse”—words that indicate some form of evaluation or judgment. When you hear phrases like “That’s a bad idea” or “It’s good to eat everything on your plate,” you can respond with “According to whom?” or “How do you know that?”
• Nominalizations are words that have lost their specificity. When you hear one, you want to turn it back into a process—which gives you the power to redirect and change your experience. If someone says, “I want to change my experience,” the way to redirect it is to say, “What do you want to experience?” If he says, “I want love,” you would respond with, “How do you want to be loved?” or “What is it to be loving?”

Outcome Questions

• One is the “outcome frame.” If you ask someone what’s bothering him or what’s wrong, you’ll get a long dissertation on just that. If you ask, “What do you want?” or “How do you want to change things?” you’ve redirected your conversation from the problem to the solution. In any situation, no matter how dismal, there’s a desirable outcome to be achieved. Your goal should be to change direction toward that outcome and away from the problem.
• NLP they’re referred to as “outcome questions.” “What do I want?” “What is the objective?” “What am I here for?” “What do I want for you?” “What do I want for me?”
• Choose “how” questions over “why” questions. “Why” questions can get you reasons and explanations and justifications and excuses. But they usually don’t come up with useful information. Don’t ask your kid why he is having trouble with his algebra. Ask him what he needs to do to perform better.

CHAPTER XIII The Magic of Rapport 

“The friend who understands you creates you.“ —Romain Rolland

• Rapport is the ability to enter someone else’s world, to make him feel that you understand him, that you have a strong common bond. It’s the ability to go fully from your map of the world to his map of the world. It’s the essence of successful communication.
• No matter what you want in your life, if you can develop rapport with the right people, you’ll be able to fill their needs, and they will be able to fill yours.
• The most common way to match others is through the exchange of information about each other through words. However, studies have shown that only 7 percent of what is communicated between people is transmitted through the words themselves.Thirty-eight percent comes through the tone of voice. Fifty-five percent of communication, the largest part, is a result of physiology or body language. The facial expressions, the gestures, the quality and type of movements of the person delivering a communication provides us with much more about what they’re saying than the words do by themselves.
• One of the best ways to achieve rapport is through mirroring or creating a common physiology with that person.
• Start with his voice. Mirror his tonality and phrasing, his pitch, how fast he talks, what sort of pauses he makes, his volume. Mirror favorite words or phrases.
• Any aspect of physiology, from the way a person plants his feet to the way he tilts his head, is something you can mirror.
• When you break it down, there are two keys to mirroring—keen observation and personal flexibility.

 

CHAPTER XIV Distinctions of Excellence: Metaprograms 

“In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.“ —George Bernard Shaw

• The path is through metaprograms. Metaprograms are the keys to the way a person processes information. They’re powerful internal patterns that help determine how he forms his internal representations and directs his behavior.
• Metaprograms 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.
• The first metaprogram involves moving toward something or moving away. All human behavior revolves around the urge to gain pleasure or avoid pain. To find out which way people move, ask them what they want in a relationship—a house, car, job, or anything else. Do they tell you what they want or what they don’t want?
• The second metaprogram deals with external and internal frames of reference. Ask someone else how he knows when he’s done a good job. For some people, the proof comes from the outside. The boss pats you on the back and says your work was great. You get a raise.
• When you get that sort of external approval, you know your work is good. That’s an external frame of reference. For others, the proof comes from inside. They “just know inside” when they’ve done well. If you have an internal frame of reference, you can design a building that wins all sorts of architectural awards, but if you don’t feel it’s special, no amount of outside approval will convince you it. Conversely, you might do a job that gets a lukewarm reception from your boss or peers, but if you feel it’s good to work, you’ll trust your own instincts rather than theirs. That’s an internal frame of reference.
• If the person you’re talking to has an external frame of reference, chances are you’ll convince him. If all those people say it’s true, he’ll often assume it’s probably true.
• But what if he has an internal frame of reference? You’ll have a difficult time convincing him by telling him what others have said. It doesn’t mean anything to him. It doesn’t compute. You can only convince him by appealing to things he knows himself.
• 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.
• The third set of metaprograms involves sorting by self or sorting by others. Some 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.
• The fourth sorting program involves matches and mismatchers.
• Some people respond to the world by finding sameness. They look at things and see what they have in common. They’re matchers. So when they look at our figures they might say, “Well, they’re all rectangles.” Another kind of matcher finds sameness with exceptions.
• Other people are mismatchers—different people. There are two kinds of them. One type looks at the world and sees how things are different. He might look at the figures and say they are all different and have different relationships to one another. They’re not alike at all.
• The other kind of mismatcher sees differences with exceptions. He’s like a matcher who finds sameness with exceptions in reverse—he sees the differences first, and then he’ll add the things they have in common.
• The next metaprogram involves what it takes to convince someone of something. The convincer strategy has two parts.
• To figure out what consistently convinces someone, you must first find out what sensory building blocks he needs to become convinced, and then you must discover how often he has to receive these stimuli before becoming convinced.
• To discover someone’s convincer metaprogram, ask, “How do you know when someone else is good at a job? Do you have to a) see them or watch them do it, b) hear about how good they are, c) do it with them, or d) read about their ability?”
• The next question is, “How often does someone have to demonstrate he’s good before you’re convinced?” There are four possible answers: a) immediately (for example, if they demonstrate that they’re good at something once, you believe them, b) a number of times (two or more), c) over a period of time (say, a few weeks or a month or a year), and d) consistently. In the last case, a person has to demonstrate that he’s good each and every time.
• Another metaprogram is possibility versus necessity. Ask someone why he went to work for his present company or why he bought his current car or house. Some people are motivated primarily by necessity, rather than by what they want. They do something because they must.
• Others are motivated to look for possibilities. They’re motivated less by what they have to do than by what they want to do. They seek options, experiences, choices, paths. The person who is motivated by necessity is interested in what’s known and what’s secure. The person who is motivated by possibility is equally interested in what’s not known. He wants to know what can evolve, what opportunities might develop.
• The same principle works in motivating your children. Let’s say you’re trying to stress the virtues of education and going to a good college. If your child is motivated by necessity, you have to show her why she needs a good education. You can tell her about all the jobs that absolutely require a degree. You can explain why you need a foundation in math to be a good engineer or in language skills to be a good teacher.
• If your kid is motivated by possibility, you would take a different approach. She’s bored by what she has to do, so you’d stress the infinite possibilities open to those with a good education. Show her how learning itself is the greatest avenue for possibility—fill her brain with images of new avenues to be explored, new dimensions to be opened, new things to be discovered. With each child the result will be the same, although the way you lead her there is very different.
• Another metaprogram is a person’s working style. Everyone has his own strategy for work. Some people are not happy unless they’re independent. They have great difficulty working closely with other people and can’t work well under a great deal of supervision.
• Others function best as part of a group. We call their strategy a cooperative one. They want to share responsibility for any task they take on. Still others have a proximity strategy, which is somewhere in between. They prefer to work with other people while maintaining sole responsibility for a task. They’re in charge but not alone.

 

Here’s an exercise to do today. After reading this chapter, practice eliciting people’s metaprograms. Ask them: What do you want in a relationship (or house or car or career)? How do you know when you have been successful at something? What is the relationship between what you are doing this month and what you did last month? How often does someone have to demonstrate something to you before you are convinced it’s true? Tell me about a favorite work experience and why it was important to you.

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• The crucial thing to remember is that the number of metaprograms you’re aware of is limited only by your sensitivity, awareness, and imagination. One of the keys to success in anything is the ability to make new distinctions.
• Become a student of possibility. Constantly gauge and calibrate the people around you. Take note of specific patterns they have for perceiving the world and begin to analyze if others have similar patterns.
• There are two ways to change metaprograms. One is by Significant Emotional Events—” SEEs.” If you saw your parents constantly moving away from things and not being able to achieve their full potential as a result, it might influence the way you move toward or away.
• The other way you can change is by consciously deciding to do so. Most of us never give a thought to which metaprograms we use. The first step toward change is recognition. The awareness of exactly what we are currently doing provides the opportunity for new choices and thus for change.

 

CHAPTER XXI Living Excellence: The Human Challenge 

“Man is not the sum of what be has but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have.“ —Jean Paul Sartre

• 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. Plenty of people had the same information as Steve Jobs or Ted Turner. But the ones who took action created fabulous success and changed the world.
• You’ve learned about 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.
• Every result produced by an individual was created by some specific set of actions in some specific syntax. You can greatly decrease the time it takes to master something by modeling the internal actions (mental) and external actions (physical) of people who produce outstanding results. In a few hours or a few days or a few years, depending on the type of task, you can learn what took them months or years to discover
• You’ve learned that the quality of your life is the quality of your communication. Communication takes two forms. The first is your communication with yourself. The meaning of any event is the meaning you give it.
• You can send your brain power, positive, empowering signals that will make everything work for you, or you can send your brain signals about what you can’t do. People of excellence can take any situation and make it work for them.
• We can’t change what actually happened. But we can control our representations so they’ll give us something positive for the future. The second form of communication is with others.
• The people who’ve changed our world have been master communicators. You can use everything in this book to discover what people won’t so you can become an effective, masterful, elegant communicator.
• You’ve learned about the awesome power of belief. Positive beliefs can make you a master. Negative beliefs can make you a loser.
• But life has a processional effect. 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.
• Just remember, everything in life is cumulative. If you use one of the principles in this book today, you’ve taken a step. You’ve set a cause in motion, and every cause creates an effect or result, and every result piles on the last one to take us in a direction. Every direction carries with it an ultimate destination.

“There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it.“ —Logan Pearsall Smith

• 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.
• But if we surround ourselves with people who are successful, who are forward-moving, who are positive, who are focused on producing results, who support us, it will challenge us to be more and do more and share more. If you can surround yourself with people who will never let you settle for less than you can be, you have the greatest gift that anyone can hope for. Association is a powerful tool. Make sure the people you surround yourself with make you a better person by your association with them.

 

He (Jim Rohn) taught me that happiness and success in life are not the result of what we have, but rather of how we live. What we do with the things we have makes the biggest difference in the quality of life. He taught me that even the smallest things could make big differences in life. For instance, he told me to always be a two-quarter person. He gave the example of a shoeshine. Let’s say the shoe-shine man is doing a great job. He’s whistling and snapping his shoeshine rag. He’s giving you great value. Jim said when you dip into your pocket to tip him, and you’re not sure whether to give him one quarter or two, always go for the higher number.

• What if you made it a point to call friends, every now and then, just to say, “I’m not calling for any special reason, I just wanted you to know I love you. I don’t want to interrupt you—I just want to communicate that to you”? What if you made it a point to send little thank-you notes to people who have done things for you? What if you spent conscious time and effort figuring new and unique ways to get more joy out of life by adding value to other people’s lives?
• That’s what lifestyle is all about. We all have the time; the question of the quality of life is answered by how we spend it. Do we fall into a pattern, or do we continuously work at making it unique and special?

“The chemist who can extract from bis heart’s elements compassion, respect; longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.“ —Kahlil Gibran

“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.” —Emmett Fox

 

So that’s the ultimate message of this book. Be a doer. Take charge. Take action. Use what you’ve learned here, and use it now. Don’t just do it for you—do it for others as well. The gifts from such actions are greater than can be imagined.

There are a lot of talkers in the world. There are a lot of people who know what’s right and what’s powerful, yet still aren’t producing the results they desire. It’s not enough to talk the talk. You’ve got to walk the talk.

That’s what unlimited power is all about. Unlimited power to get yourself to do the necessary things to produce excellence.

There were two great orators of antiquity. One was Cicero, the other Demosthenes. When Cicero was done speaking, people always gave him a standing ovation and cheered, “What a great speech!” When Demosthenes was done, people said, “Let us march,” and they did. That’s the difference between presentation and persuasion.

I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece.

 

May your hunt for human excellence be fruitful and never-ending. May you dedicate yourself, not only to strive for the goals you have set, but to meet them and set even more; not only to hold to the dreams you have had, but to dream greater dreams than before; not only to enjoy this land and its wealth, but to make it a better place to live, and not only to take what you can from this life but to love and give generously.