This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here .
Do you want to know more about the Tony Robbins change your state method? How can changing your posture and focus change your mindset?
According to Tony Robbins’ change your state method, emotions and mood are products of your mental-emotional-physiological state. If you learn how to change your posture and focus, you can instantly change your mood and mindset.
Learn about Tony Robbins’ change your state method below.
Tony Robbins: Change Your State
Although many people mistakenly think that emotions happen to them, emotions are actually the product of your mental-emotional-physiological state, which is determined by how you position your body (your physiology) and what you choose to focus on. This is the basis of Tony Robbins’ change your state method. Learning how to control your focus and physiology empowers you to manage your state, which enables you to feel whatever emotions you want, whenever you want.
Since your emotions impact your actions, controlling your emotional state empowers you to promote the behaviors you want to sustain to improve your life. For instance, remaining calm in a situation that would have previously made you angry enables you to make clear-headed, constructive decisions instead of reactive, potentially damaging ones.
In this article, you’ll learn more about Tony Robbins’ change your state method. Using this, you can always feel the way you want by:
- Using your body
- Directing your focus
- Discovering how certain physical sensations (such as sight and sound) affect your state and learning how to manipulate them
To learn how to control our mental-emotional-physiological states, we need to explore the factors that influence our states in the first place. As mentioned, your physiology—your posture, facial expressions, breathing, and gestures—and the things you focus on both determine your state.
Most people develop physiological and mental patterns that consistently produce the same states. For example, if you have a habit of hanging your head down and dwelling on thoughts about your failures, you will habitually feel disheartened and depressed; as we know from our discussion of how habits are wired into the brain, the neural pathways for these postures, thoughts, and emotions become well-trodden, reinforcing the patterns.
Developing these patterns creates two consequences:
- You only experience a handful of emotions in your day-to-day life, which means that you miss out on a rich spectrum of emotional experiences.
- If the patterns are disempowering, you are habitually in negative states.
Let’s explore Tony Robbins’ change your state method, and how to break out of negative patterns by changing your physiology and your focus.
#1: Change Your Body
First, develop patterns of physical states and movements that support a happy, powerful, strong emotional state. For example, if you’re standing tall and breathing deeply, you’ll feel more confident than if you have your shoulders slumped and your eyes down.
To get started, try this exercise for the next seven days: Five times a day, spend one minute giving yourself a huge smile in the mirror. Each time you do, your smile will strengthen your neural pathway for happiness. Go a step further by also making yourself laugh three times a day.
#2: Change Your Focus
In addition to adopting empowering physical patterns, make a habit of focusing on the positive aspects of your experiences. Your focus dictates how you view reality: Whatever you choose to focus on determines how you experience things and what emotions you feel. Therefore, if you focus on negative things, such as sad memories or future problems, you’ll feel negative, too. But, if you focus on positive things—like happy memories, or the good things about your present situation—you’ll feel positive.
Think of your focus as a camera lens and reality as a party: Your camera can only capture one small piece of the whole scene. If the camera focuses on a couple arguing at the party, it gives the impression that the party is full of conflict, but if you focus on a group of friends dancing and laughing, it makes it seem like the party is fun and lively.
Your focus not only affects your interpretation of events, but also impacts your ability to overcome challenges. When you focus on the outcome you want, you will move toward it and increase your chances of reaching it. By contrast, when you focus on a problem or something that you’re afraid could happen, you’re more likely to manifest it—and if it comes to fruition, you’ll have wasted your time worrying about the potential problem instead of coming up with a potential solution. Similarly, when you’re driving a car, you subconsciously turn the steering wheel toward whatever you focus on, whether that’s the road ahead or the guard rail.
Now that you know the positive effects of shifting your focus, let’s discuss several strategies for doing so. First, we’ll explore how to change your focus by manipulating the way you interpret your physical sensations. Then, in the next two chapters, we’ll talk about how to direct your focus through language—specifically, the questions you ask yourself and the words and metaphors you habitually use.
Be Aware of How Your Sensations Affect Your State
The power of focus isn’t just about what you focus on, but also how you focus using your different senses. You experience everything through your five senses, but sight, sound, or touch impact some people’s emotional experiences more strongly than others. Whichever sense is most influential for you is your modality.
The details within each modality—such as brightness for a visual modality or loudness for an auditory modality—are called submodalities. You have unique positive or negative associations with various submodalities, and when those submodalities are present, they make you perceive that experience more positively or negatively; in other words, if you have positive associations with brightness, you’ll feel more positively about a meeting in a well-lit conference room than a dim one. You can manipulate your submodalities to positively alter your feelings about your experiences.
For example, if you have an auditory modality and you envision a stressful work meeting you had this morning, submodalities such as the speed at which you recall people talking and the pitches of their voices impact the emotions tied to that memory. (This doesn’t just apply to memories but also to future experiences that you’re anticipating.) As we’ll explain, you can replay a version of that memory that alters those submodalities, thereby changing your feelings about it.
First, let’s talk about how to identify your dominant modality. Then we’ll discuss how to manipulate your submodalities to alter your feelings about an experience.
Determine Your Dominant Modality
The first step in using your modality to influence your emotions is to actually identify what your modality is. Become attuned to which modalities are most powerful for you so that you can understand how they’re affecting your experiences and learn how to manipulate your submodalities to achieve the outcomes you want.
If you have a visual modality, the intensity of your experience will be affected by submodalities such as brightness, color, distance, movement, and size. Additionally, you may say things like:
- Picture the outcome.
- That brightens my day.
- Let’s put it in perspective.
- You’re not looking at the big picture.
- The answer is staring you in the face.
———End of Preview———
Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best book summary and analysis of Tony Robbins's "Awaken the Giant Within" at Shortform .
Here's what you'll find in our full Awaken the Giant Within summary :
- How to make transformational changes to your life through small adjustments
- How you create your destiny every time you start a sentence with “I am…”
- Strategies to take control of your thoughts and emotions
