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 .
What is Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method? What practical steps can you take to improve your finances?
For many people, finances are a source of worry and stress. Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method involves avoiding common financial mistakes, having a clear financial plan, and building wealth. Following this advice will help you to take control of your financial life and reduce stress about finances.
Find out more about Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method below.
Tony Robbins: Wealth Mastery and Why You Need It
For Tony Robbins, wealth mastery is an important thing to have. Tony Robbins’ idea of wealth mastery includes feeling in control of your finances, avoiding common financial hurdles, and having a financial plan.
Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method is useful because financial stress can cause intensely disempowering negative emotions. This said, most people get in their own way when it comes to creating and maintaining wealth. In this article, we’ll explore the three common obstacles that prevent people from having the financial lives they want, and then we’ll break down five lessons for successfully building and protecting wealth.
Avoid Three Common Obstacles to Wealth
To achieve Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery, you must first address these three obstacles:
Obstacle #1: People Associate Money With Both Pleasure and Pain
Most people have a pain-and-pleasure relationship with money. For example, they want money but they often feel that they don’t have enough, or they enjoy having it but they fear losing it. As we’ve discussed, when you have mixed associations about something, your mind reacts to both the pain and pleasure, and you end up pursuing your goal while simultaneously self-sabotaging your efforts. This means that your negative beliefs about money are causing you to subconsciously impede wealth-building efforts such as working extra hours and saving.
Many common pleasure-oriented beliefs about money revolve around the idea that wealth provides freedom and creates opportunities. By contrast, common pain-oriented beliefs include:
- Making more money requires more time, effort, and sacrifice than it’s worth.
- Having more money makes you a target of other people’s judgments, envy, or manipulations.
- If someone else has a lot of money, they probably did something dishonest to earn it.
To overcome this obstacle, use Neuro-Associative Conditioning to eliminate your negative associations with money. When you have only positive associations with money, you will be able to build wealth without self-sabotaging.
Obstacle #2: People Don’t Control Their Own Financial Lives
Many people believe that their financial lives are too complex for them to tackle, and so they outsource the responsibility to financial advisers. While there’s no problem with seeking help and advice from experts, handing over total control disempowers you. You’re no longer directing your destiny. For example, if you don’t give any input on your investments, and your financial adviser puts your money into stocks that later take a downward turn, it’ll be easy to simply blame your adviser—but you handed over control in the first place.
Instead, take ownership of your financial decisions in order to create the financial future of your dreams. The theme of this entire summary is improving your life by taking control of it, and money is no exception. Research your options, read about the advice and experiences of successful business people and money managers. Even if you choose to work with a financial adviser, be sure that you still understand and agree with how your money is being handled.
Obstacle #3: People Suffer From Scarcity Mentality
Many people have a scarcity mentality, which causes them to believe that there is only a limited amount of resources available. This means that someone has to lose in order for someone else to gain. This view causes people to believe that they can only have wealth if it comes at the expense of others. This is a limiting belief and runs counter to the reality, which is that technology makes it possible for enough resources to be available for everyone.
In contrast, an abundance mindset is essential to a healthy financial life, and you should adopt one in place of a scarcity mentality. If you have an abundance mindset, then you believe that there is plenty—of money, resources, and success—to go around. In other words, your success doesn’t depend on someone else’s failure. To build wealth, you simply need to practice “economic alchemy,” which is the ability to turn something with little value into a valuable resource. Just as medieval alchemists attempted to turn lead into gold, the wealthiest people in the world today are those who took something not inherently valuable (such as an idea, a material, or information) and morphed it into a useful product or service.
Build Lasting Wealth
The next step of Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method is to build lasting wealth. Now we’ll discuss five fundamental lessons for building and maintaining wealth. Consider these lessons a starting point in your financial education, and build upon them with your own research.
Lesson #1: Add Value
Multiply your income without adding to your working hours by finding a way to provide more value to your company or your customers. Expand your knowledge and skills, offer something few other people provide, and be innovative. The more value you continually add to people’s lives, the more money you’ll earn consistently.
Reflect on how you can be more valuable to your company. Can you increase efficiency, develop new systems, improve output quality, or cut costs? How can you make your company more profitable and successful so that they will want to reward you with more money? Find a way to add 10 times the value of the salary raise you want.
You might have to get creative: One massage therapist who was constantly booked up couldn’t possibly take additional clients to increase his earnings, but realized that he could connect with a nearby physical therapist and get referral fees. As a result, he nearly doubled his income without increasing his workload.
Look for ways to add value in all areas of your life, including your home and community. Although you may not be paid for these efforts, you’ll feel fulfilled and enjoy a rich life if you live by this principle.
Lesson #2: Manage Your Spending
Now that you’ve increased your wealth, it’s critical that you maintain it. In order to do that, spend less than you make, and invest what you don’t spend. This involves making some decisions about how you’ll use your money before you’re in line at the cash register:
- Determine what percentage of your income you want to invest each year. A common rule of thumb is to invest at least 10 percent of your earnings. Ideally, set up a system in which that 10 percent (or whatever amount you decide) is automatically taken from your paychecks and invested before you have a chance to think twice about it.
- Create a spending plan, in which you decide how you want to spend your money so that you don’t fall into the trap of making impulse purchases and overspending.
Lesson #3: Invest and Reinvest
Once you’re managing your spending and investing, further grow your wealth by taking all the returns from your investments and reinvesting them. Continually reinvesting your returns creates compounded growth that can build to critical mass, which is the point at which your investments produce enough money to live off of. The more dedicated you are to reinvesting the earnings from your investments, the more quickly you’ll reach critical mass.
In order to determine what you want to invest and reinvest in, consider your financial goals, timeline, and risk tolerance. Furthermore, commit to understanding your various investment options and developing a clear investment plan. Arm yourself with knowledge to avoid making these common mistakes that cause investors to make little to no money:
- Not having a goal
- Following your broker’s or financial planner’s advice without doing your own research
- Making emotion-driven investments
- Basing your investments on financial news
- Following investment trends
Lesson #4: Protect Your Money
As your money grows, consider researching and pursuing a plan to protect yourself from losing money in bad investments or frivolous lawsuits. Identify financial experts and wealthy people who manage their money well, and model your asset protection approach after theirs.
Paradoxically, most people feel more insecure when they’re wealthy than when they’re broke. The reason is that if you have no money, you have nothing to lose—but if you have lots of money that you’ve worked hard to accumulate, it would be extremely painful to lose it.
Lesson #5: Enjoy Your Money
Once you’ve mastered earning, managing, investing, and protecting your wealth, enjoy it—and enjoy it now. If you wait until you have a certain amount of money in the bank before you reward yourself, you’ll learn to associate the process of building wealth with the pain of sacrifice and self-restraint instead of pleasure. Don’t blow your spending plan, but do give yourself small rewards along the way to reinforce your efforts.
Additionally, enjoy your wealth by spending it on others as well as yourself. Finding ways to make contributions to causes and people you care about ultimately benefits you, as well, because:
- You feel a sense of fulfillment and joy.
- You eliminate scarcity thinking because giving away some of your money conditions you to believe that you already have more than enough.
- You create a habit of contributing, which makes it easier to make even larger contributions as your wealth grows.
As you improve your financial health, remember that money isn’t the end goal—it’s merely a means to access greater opportunities. Furthermore, wealth has nothing to do with how much money you have in the bank; wealth is a state of knowing that you already have everything you need. When you stop chasing money and start recognizing that you already enjoy abundance, you will free yourself to build even more wealth.
Take Control of Your Financial Life
The final step of Tony Robbins’ wealth mastery method is to take control of your financial life. Start your road to wealth today by completing the following assignment:
- Make a list of your beliefs about money. Evaluate whether any of your beliefs are holding you back from creating and maintaining wealth.
- Create a plan to add value in your work. Brainstorm ways to increase your current value tenfold.
- Commit to investing a portion of your money. Decide how much you’ll invest—at least 10 percent of your income—and set up a system to have that money automatically taken from your paycheck and put directly into your investments.
- Find a trusted financial coach to help you create a thorough financial plan. Make sure that you understand your plan, and bolster your knowledge by reading books about finance.
- If you’re worried about protecting your wealth, look into asset-protection options and create a plan that fits you.
- Jump-start your efforts with a small jackpot. Recall from the Chapter 3 that a jackpot is an intermittent reward that’s unexpectedly larger than usual, and that this kind of reward motivates and reinforces positive behavior by creating a pleasure association. Giving yourself a jackpot right away can spark your motivation to continue your efforts and earn another reward.
———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
