PDF Summary:Awaken the Giant Within, by Tony Robbins
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1-Page PDF Summary of Awaken the Giant Within
Many people assume their ideal life will never be more than fantasy, but in reality, you have the power to create the life you dream about. In this book, life coach and self-help guru Tony Robbins provides insights and strategies to help you take control of every aspect of your life, from your emotions to your focus. In many cases, you can make transformational changes to your life through small adjustments, such as swapping out just one word in your vocabulary.
In this guide you’ll learn how your bad habits are wired in your brain, how to decode your negative emotions to find solutions to them, and how to create your destiny.
This guide compares and contrasts Robbins’s ideas with those of other popular self-help authors, as well as current scientific theories. This will provide you with background and a deeper understanding of the lessons in Awaken the Giant Within, as well as some alternative methods for taking control of your life.
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If you find yourself believing that the changes that Robbins talks about are impossible, you may be stuck in a fixed mindset.
Control Your Focus
In addition to your beliefs and associations, what you choose to focus on determines how you experience life and what emotions you feel. You can think of your focus like a spotlight at a crowded concert: If the light stays on the musicians, you’ll be focused on enjoying the music. If it highlights somebody acting out in the crowd, it’s harder to focus on the performance, and you might feel annoyed or amused by that person’s antics—either way, the experience is different than if the spotlight had stayed focused on the performers.
In this section, we’ll talk about how to control your focus through the questions you ask yourself and the words you use.
How Language Affects Experience
Research reveals you can control your emotions—and thus your experiences—by controlling the language you use to describe them. Specifically, the research focuses on psychological constructionism, a theory of psychology stating that emotions are formed (“constructed”) from several different psychological elements:
Our understanding of a concept. For example, our knowledge of what “excitement” is.
What we perceive. For example: loud music, flashing lights, and a large crowd of people.
Physical sensations. In this example: increased heart rate, explosive energy, and (in extreme cases) muscle tremors.
In simple terms, this theory states that emotions are the results of us explaining our experiences to ourselves.
Therefore, since language is a key part of understanding and explaining concepts, the words we use can affect what emotions we feel and how strongly we feel them. For example, a study showed that participants who had been primed with fear-related words were less likely to take risks than those who were primed with anger-related words, or who were not primed with a specific emotion.
Use Empowering Questions to Direct Your Thoughts
Robbins says that thinking is merely a sequence of asking and answering questions—in other words, virtually every thought you have is preceded by a question, even if it’s not one you consciously asked. Therefore, the questions you ask yourself set the tone for your thought patterns—it’s critical to make a habit of consciously asking yourself positive questions that lead to empowering thoughts.
For example, instead of asking yourself, “What am I doing wrong?” (a negative question that assumes you’re making a mistake), try asking, “What do I need to do differently?” (a positive question that assumes there is a solution and that you can achieve it).
(Shortform note: Limitless author Jim Kwik explains another way to use empowering questions in his podcast Kwik Brain: Intentionally ask yourself questions that prime your brain to look for answers. For example, if you ask yourself, “How can I lose weight?” your mind will naturally focus on things like healthy recipes, local gyms, and convenient at-home workout routines. Kwik’s point is that those things were always there, but your brain was filtering them out until you asked a question that made them relevant. He calls this type of question a dominant question.)
Use Words to Shape Your Experiences
Just as your questions influence your focus and thought patterns, so do your words. Robbins says that you can change your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by changing the words you habitually use to describe feelings and experiences.
1. Use words that dull negative emotions and intensify positive ones. For example, say that you’re “annoyed” instead of “angry” and “thrilled” instead of “happy.”
(Shortform note: As a counterpoint, some psychologists urge you to accept your emotional experiences—especially the negative ones—without trying to judge them or suppress them. They argue that trying to ignore, downplay, or eliminate negative feelings prevents you from dealing with them in a healthy way; as a result, the negative experiences become more intense and last longer.)
2. When you’re upset, use words that disrupt your emotional pattern. For example, replace the word “frustrated” with “overinvested”—it’s a strange enough word choice that it’ll distract you from your negative feelings and redirect your attention toward the thing you’re actually invested in.
(Shortform note: Another way to disrupt your patterns is to think about upsetting events and emotions in the second-person or third-person. Removing the “I” helps you to create mental and emotional distance between yourself and what’s upsetting you. It can be easier to think about things if you ask yourself, “Why do you feel that way,” or “Why is he upset about that?”)
3. Expand your vocabulary to include words that accurately reflect how you feel. Having a limited vocabulary limits your ability to feel and express emotions. For example, when you say you feel “fine,” does this mean you are peacefully content, or dejectedly resigned?
(Shortform note: One way to more accurately observe and describe your feelings is to consider not only what you’re feeling, but how strongly you feel it. Try gauging your emotional response on a scale from 1 (barely noticeable) to 10 (utterly overwhelming), and consider which words you could use to describe each of those intensity levels.)
Interpret and Learn From Your Emotions
Although you’ve learned strategies for controlling your emotions, Robbins cautions you not to overlook the fact that emotions provide feedback for your actions: Positive emotions let you know that you’re doing something right, and negative emotions signal that you need to alter something.
For this reason, Robbins says, negative emotions (which people often try to avoid) are actually invaluable, because they guide you to the life you want—if you know how to interpret them. For example, fear tells you that there’s a problem looming and you’ll need to be ready to handle it; anger tells you that somebody’s violated one of your personal values.
Robbins asserts that understanding your feelings and acting on them is one way to build a happy and fulfilling life for yourself. Just remember that emotions are only feedback from your mind and body, and that you decide how to respond; the emotions don’t control your actions.
Understanding Emotional Intelligence
The ability to understand your emotions and use them effectively is called emotional intelligence. There are four aspects of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness: Recognizing your emotions, being able to tell them apart from each other, and understanding why you’re experiencing them.
Self-management: Monitoring and regulating your emotions.
Social-awareness: Practicing recognition and empathy for others’ feelings.
Relationship management: Using your emotions to connect with others more deeply and improve your interpersonal skills.
There are also a number of different activities you can do to boost your emotional intelligence, ranging from cataloging your emotional strengths and weaknesses to practicing mindfulness meditation.
Take the Seven-Day Challenge
You’ve learned practical strategies to transform your life—from reconditioning your beliefs and neuro-associations to altering your habitual questions and words. Now, Robbins urges you to jumpstart your life transformation with a seven-day challenge: Each day for the next week, you’ll tackle an assignment to begin improving a different area of your life.
(Shortform note: Robbins introduces this challenge as a way to begin making significant changes in your life. With this in mind, it could help you to approach this with a mindset of “kaizen,” which Robin Sharma describes in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. Kaizen is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “continuous improvement”—it means that you understand you won’t reach all your goals in a day, but you’re committed to being a little better every day than you were the day before.)
Day 1: Master Your Emotional Patterns
Robbins’s first challenge is to change your habitual emotional patterns. The goal is to experience fewer negative emotions and spend more time in positive, empowering states.
He suggests writing a list of every emotion you experience in a typical week, as well as the situations and events that trigger each one. Next, develop a plan for addressing each negative emotion and replacing it with a different, empowering emotion. The more consistently you do this, the more effectively you’ll change your emotional patterns.
Counterpoint: Accept Your Emotions
It’s not always possible (or even desirable) to dismiss negative emotions and try to force positive ones. In Radical Acceptance, psychologist Tara Brach says that there are two steps to mastering your emotions, neither of which have to do with controlling them:
Recognition: Understand what you’re experiencing; name it and acknowledge it. For example, if you notice that your hands are shaking and you’re flooded with nervous energy, you would recognize that experience as anxiety.
Compassion: Once you understand your feelings, the second step is to meet that experience with compassion. In other words, don’t try to control what you’re feeling or berate yourself for your emotions; let the experience happen and then fade away.
Brach says this method—which is based on Buddhist mindfulness practices—allows you to fully experience your emotions without dwelling on them. As a result, you spend less time in negative mental states.
Day 2: Master Your Physical Life
Robbins’s second challenge is to make a commitment to your physical well-being so that you can enjoy your emotional health to the fullest. Assess your current level of health, make a commitment to maintain your health (or improve it, if needed), and make regular exercise part of your routine.
(Shortform note: Scientific evidence links good physical health to good mental health, which supports Robbins’s Day 2 challenge. For example, regular exercise reduces the effects of anxiety and depression, while boosting your mood and self-esteem. Among other reasons, experts believe exercise improves your mood by increasing blood circulation to the brain.)
Day 3: Master Your Relationship
Robbins’s third challenge is to improve your relationship with your partner. Relationships are not only essential to your well-being, but they are also powerful forces in influencing your beliefs, values, and character.
Robbins urges you to maintain a healthy relationship in the following ways:
1. Talk to your partner about what each of you values most in a relationship.
(Shortform note: In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that everything from your emotions to your goals ultimately stem from values. That’s why mastering your relationship begins with comparing values—it helps you to understand each other much more deeply, and to see where your values align and where they differ.)
2. Prioritize the health of your relationship over winning arguments.
3. Brainstorm pattern disruptions that you’ll both use when either or both of you become really upset.
4. When you notice yourself feeling resistance toward your partner, immediately communicate your feelings and use vocabulary that minimizes the intensity of your negative feelings. For example, using the word “annoyed” instead of “furious,” as we talked about earlier.
(Shortform note: The book Difficult Conversations is a guide for approaching uncomfortable, upsetting, and offensive topics in a productive way. The first and most important piece of advice is: A conversation is not a contest. In other words, don’t go into the conversation assuming that you’re right and your partner is wrong, or with a mindset that you have to win an argument—instead, do whatever it takes to understand your partner’s point of view. Once you understand each other, even if you don’t agree, you’ll be able to have a conversation instead of an argument.)
Day 4: Master Your Financial Life
Financial stress causes intensely disempowering negative emotions. Robbins’s next challenge is to take charge of your finances by doing the following:
- Make a list of your beliefs about money and evaluate whether any of them are holding you back from creating and maintaining wealth. Read books about finance so you can accurately evaluate your beliefs.
- 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 financial coach to help you create a thorough financial plan, and make sure that you understand it.
(Shortform note: In The Total Money Makeover, Dave Ramsey similarly argues that to take control of your financial life, you must first overcome false beliefs about money; however, Ramsey argues that many obstacles are societal myths, rather than individual beliefs. He also suggests that you set aside an emergency fund of at least $1,000 before taking any other step, such as investing or paying off debt—Ramsey believes a buffer against unexpected expenses is a crucial first step toward financial security and peace of mind. Finally, he doesn’t specifically suggest getting a financial adviser, but he does emphasize the importance of educating yourself about finances.)
Day 5: Master Your Behavior
Robbins’s fifth challenge is to create a personal code of conduct that ensures you live by your values every single day.
Because acting in line with your values creates positive emotions, Robbins suggests you start by writing a list of seven to 10 emotional states you want to experience every day. Next, write some guidelines for each emotional state: How do you reach it? How do you know when you have?
(Shortform note: Robbins suggests that the seven to 10 emotional states you choose should align with your values, but doesn’t specify how many values should be covered. In Dare to Lead, Brené Brown advises you to choose only two core values. She argues that having too many values renders them meaningless. If you’re having trouble narrowing down the values that are most important to you, Brown suggests starting with a list of 10 and whittling it down.)
Day 6: Master Your Time
Depending upon what you’re doing and the frame of mind you’re in, time can seemingly pass too quickly or drag on forever. However, Robbins says you can learn to control your perception of time and work it to your advantage. He offers two strategies:
1. Practice switching your focus to the past, present, or future. Focusing too much on one time frame puts you in a disempowered state, while exercising this muscle gives you control.
(Shortform note: There’s a common belief that focusing too much on the past leads to depression, while focusing too much on the future leads to anxiety. The given solution is usually to be present—however, Robbins is arguing that focusing too much on the present causes its own problems, such as an inability to learn from past mistakes or plan for the future. Therefore, the key is to take a broad view of time that encompasses past, present, and future, and limit the time you spend dwelling on any one of those.)
2. Create a to-do list of tasks that will have the most meaningful impact on your life (like the exercises in this book), rather than those that are merely urgent (like returning phone calls). Focusing on what’s important instead of what’s urgent will help you escape the feeling that there’s never enough time.
Make the Most of Your Time With the Eisenhower Matrix
Former US President Dwight Eisenhower created the Eisenhower Matrix as a method to prioritize items on your to-do list and determine how to approach each task. The matrix is divided into four quadrants:
Important and urgent—do it. You should do tasks that are both significant and time-sensitive as soon as possible (or at the required time). Examples include treating a serious injury or going to a doctor’s appointment.
Important but not urgent—schedule it. Something that you need to do, but don’t need to do right now, should be written into your schedule so that you make sure to get to it in a timely manner. Examples include planning for the future, working out, and making time for rest and recreation. Robbins’s exercises and challenges fall into this category.
Urgent but not important—delegate it. The ideal way to handle tasks that are time-sensitive, but not important to you, is to get someone else to do them (preferably someone to whom they are important). Another way of thinking about this quadrant is time-sensitive tasks that don’t need you, specifically, to do them. Examples include running errands and attending (some) meetings.
Neither important nor urgent—ignore it. Something that’s not important and not time-sensitive is, by definition, something that you can safely ignore. Examples include mindlessly scrolling social media, answering unimportant phone calls, and playing video games.
Day 7: Rest
After working diligently all week, it’s time to rest and enjoy yourself. Robbins offers two options for this final challenge:
- Make and execute a plan to do something fun.
- Do something spontaneous that brings you joy.
Rest Is as Important as Work
Psychologists are coming to understand the importance of rest, recreation, and leisure time. Far from being a waste of time, recreation actually improves your health and your mood.
Studies have linked recreational activities with decreased stress, anxiety, and depression, and with increased overall well-being. Furthermore, viewing leisure activities as pointless or a waste of time makes those activities ineffective.
In short, to maintain your health, you have to allow yourself to indulge in things you enjoy. Refusing to do so—or begrudging yourself the time you spend on them—causes your mental and physical health to suffer.
Change Yourself, Then Change the World
You now know that you have the power to make individual decisions that improve your life. However, Robbins says, you also have the power to participate in the joint decisions that people make collectively as communities, societies, nations, and the world. These joint decisions—ranging from how we take care of our neighborhoods to how we tackle climate change—will determine whether we collectively succumb to or overcome the problems we face.
Hold yourself, your community, our society, and our world to a higher standard. Stop thinking that chronic problems such as hunger and homelessness are permanent and inevitable. Instead, recognize that these problems all stem from people’s values and their choices. To solve these problems, Robbins urges us to use and teach the lessons in this book to help people identify their values and make choices that will be better for everyone.
Use Interdependence and Synergy to Solve Big Problems
Stephen Covey’s self-help book First Things First recommends creating the best outcomes for everybody by developing a mindset of interdependence and synergy.
Covey asserts that all of our lives are connected, and that by depending on one another, we create synergy (effective cooperation). For example, think about how many people’s work goes into a simple ear of corn that you buy at the grocery store: the farmer who grew it, the driver who transported it, and the employee who put it on display, just to name a few. The cooperation of these people makes it possible to buy corn cheaply and conveniently. Their efforts synergize with one another to create favorable outcomes for everybody involved—much better than if each of us had to grow our own corn independently.
Robbins’s system is about mastering yourself and overcoming your own problems, but he encourages us to also use this information for the greater good, and interdependence and synergy aids that notion.
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PDF Summary Part 1 | Chapter 1: Harness Your Power to Create the Life You Want
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In four parts, this summary will teach you the principles and practices to transform your life and the world around you:
- In Part 1, you’ll acquire the tools to take control of your thoughts and emotions, which dictate your behavior and shape your life.
- In Part 2, you’ll learn how to leverage the tools from Part 1 to control your Master System, which determines how you interpret and react to life.
- In Part 3, you’ll kickstart your life transformation with a seven-day challenge.
- In Part 4, you’ll learn how to apply the self-improvement skills you’ve learned to benefit those around you.
In the following chapters of Part 1, we’ll talk about the elements that are key to creating change, and how to alter these elements to unlock positive changes in your life. Specifically, we’ll discuss:
- How decisions shape your life
- How subconscious associations (called neuro-associations) dictate how you experience and react to situations and events
- How to change your neuro-associations to improve your life
- How your beliefs influence your thoughts and behaviors
- How to use your body and your focus to control your mental-emotional-physiological state,...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Overcome Harmful Neuro-Associations
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Furthermore, the more you repeat the same or similar experiences, the stronger those neural pathways and neuro-associations become—and the more automatic and habitual that behavior becomes. When it comes to pain and pleasure associations, the habitualized behavior is your response to a particular stimulus (such as feeling happy when you think about the restaurant you and your friends visited).
In other contexts, deeply embedded neural pathways allow you to perform habitual tasks without thinking about each step. (Shortform example: Strong neural pathways allow you to drive a car without consciously thinking about it. The first time you drive, you have to think about each action, from how much pressure you’re putting on the gas pedal to how often you’re checking your rearview mirror. After you’ve been driving a while and the relevant neural pathways are reinforced, all of those actions become second nature.)
Since they’re based on experiences, your neuro-associations, and the behaviors that they trigger, are entirely unique to you. For example, while you may associate pleasure and joy with the song “Jack and Diane” because it evokes happy memories of your mom singing along...
PDF Summary Chapter 3: Recondition Your Neuro-Associations
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However, as we’ll see, change doesn’t have to take a long time, and you don’t gain anything by prolonging your change—in fact, the opposite may be true, because procrastination delays achieving the goal of change you’ve set for yourself.
In reality, it takes just one action to initiate a change, and transformation can happen in an instant—you just have to commit to the change and do it. However, you must put in sustained effort to make that instant change last. In fact, you must condition yourself to make lasting changes to your thoughts and behaviors by making a change, reinforcing it, and then training your nervous system to maintain it. The conditioning process requires that you adopt certain beliefs:
- Something absolutely has to change. You need this level of certainty to support a true commitment to change. Stop saying that it “should” or “could” change.
- You are the sole person responsible for your change. Don’t look for anyone else to do the work for you or to blame if the change doesn’t stick.
- You have the power to make this change. Use the tools you gain from this book to create the life you want.
Once you have the beliefs to support...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 4: Choose Empowering Beliefs
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- Your generalizations inform beliefs about situations and events. For example, you form a belief that traveling over the holidays is always stressful.
- Next time you have a similar experience, your beliefs color your interpretation of it, creating a feedback loop. For instance, next time you have to travel during the holidays, you expect it to be stressful and unpleasant—and because you’re expecting to be stressed, that’s what you experience. Now you have another painful travel experience (called a reference, which we’ll talk about next) to add to your mental library and support your belief about holiday travel.
- Your interpretations of experiences impact your decisions, which collectively shape your life. For example, you may avoid traveling during holidays, which brings other ripple effects. On one hand, it gives you an opportunity to establish a tradition of having quiet, restful holidays. On the other, it could prevent you from attending gatherings with friends and family.
Appreciate the Importance of References
While your generalizations about neuro-associations form your beliefs, your sense of certainty in those beliefs strengthens them. Without...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Control Your Mental-Emotional-Physiological State
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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 how to break out of these 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...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: Use Questions to Direct Your Focus
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- What’s the point?
- Why is this happening to me?
- Why should I even try?
- What’s wrong with me?
By contrast, questions like these will promote more empowered thinking:
- What in your life makes you happy?
- What’s good about your life?
- What are you grateful for?
For example, imagine you’ve tried and failed to skateboard three times in a row. In this situation, you can ask yourself two different questions that both attempt to diagnose the problem, but which will elicit two distinct answers:
- “Why can’t I get it?” This has a fairly defeatist tone, and it’s likely to lead to answers such as, “I’m not coordinated enough” and “This isn’t the sport for me.” This simple question could discourage you from continuing to try, ultimately preventing you from ever learning to skateboard.
- “What do I need to do differently?” This question is framed to find a solution, and it could lead to answers with more concrete ideas, such as, “Adjust my footing” and “Put my arms out for balance.” This question is likely to encourage you to keep trying, and it could lead you to become a skilled skateboarder.
Understand the Importance of Questions in...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Use Empowering Words and Metaphors to Direct Your Focus
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Use Transformational Vocabulary to Alter Your Experiences
One way to use words to shape your experiences in a positive way is to use “Transformational Vocabulary.” This involves strategically replacing certain words that you use to change your emotional reaction to situations and events. There are two ways to use Transformational Vocabulary:
- Use words that dull negative emotions and intensify positive ones. Replace your negative adjectives with milder or more positive ones (such as “peeved” instead of “livid”) and use softeners (such as “a bit” and “a tad”) and intensifiers (such as “extremely” and “unbelievably”). For example, think of something that recently infuriated you. Now imagine that, in that moment, instead of saying that you were furious or livid, you said that you were “a bit peeved.”
- When you’re upset, use words that disrupt your emotional pattern to stop you from feeling upset (Step 3 of Neuro-Associative Conditioning). For example, replace the word “jealous” with “overloving,” which is a funny enough word that it might snap you out of jealousy and divert your thoughts to the reasons you love the person who’s making you jealous....
PDF Summary Chapter 8: Interpret and Learn From Your Emotions
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Problem: If you try to suppress your emotions, they become increasingly intense until you finally acknowledge them. In other words, pretending there’s no problem makes the problem grow until it’s too big to ignore.
Method #3: Internalization
Sometimes people give up trying to avoid or deny their difficult feelings and instead make the emotions part of their identity. They use their negative feelings to one-up everyone else’s misfortunes, and they find a sense of pride in perpetually enduring such difficulties.
Problem: When people identify with their negative emotions, they become trapped in them. If being unhappy is part of your identity, then it feels like you can’t become happy without losing your sense of self. This mentality leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy because you must remain unhappy in order to be who (you think) you are.
Process Your Emotions in a Healthy Way
People try to avoid and deny their negative emotions because feeling those emotions is unpleasant. But negative emotions arise to let you know that something you’re doing is causing you pain, and that you need to change some aspect of your approach. Therefore, it’s important to...
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PDF Summary Chapter 9: Set Goals That Inspire You
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Next, generate a motivating pressure called “eustress,” which is a positive tension that’s created when you set goals. Eustress stimulates you and pushes you toward your goals. Learning to harness this tension is the key to creating the life you want.
To have eustress, you need some dissatisfaction with your current circumstances to motivate you to work toward improvements. One way to create eustress is to announce your goals to friends who will cheer you on and keep you accountable.
After setting a goal, immediately create a plan to pursue it and start making efforts to achieve it. As you work toward your goal, maintain your enthusiasm and drive to continue. Constant, consistent effort makes the difference between people who live the lives they want and those who fall short. Change your approach as needed—for instance, if your initial approach to meeting your goal doesn’t work—but never take your eyes off your vision.
Focus on Your Goal
While you’re pursuing a goal, it’s important to focus hard on it. When you focus intensely on anything, a part of your brain called the Reticular Activating System (RAS) scans your experiences and draws your attention...
PDF Summary Chapter 10: Change Your Mindset With a Mental Challenge
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Create New Habits With the 10-Day Mental Challenge
This mental challenge is a mental and emotional cleanse that will kick start your positive life transformation by training you to be disciplined with your focus, thoughts, and emotions. The rules are:
- Begin each day with the Morning Power Questions listed in Chapter 6, and end each day with the Evening Power Questions (as a reminder, these are short sets of questions you should ask yourself each day to reinforce an empowered pattern of thinking). Additionally, when you face challenges, immediately ask yourself the problem-solving questions from that chapter, including “What’s good about this problem?” and “What still needs improvement?”
- Don’t allow yourself to indulge in any disempowering thoughts, emotions, words, questions, or metaphors for 10 consecutive days. If you notice yourself indulging in a disempowering thought or emotion—or focusing on a problem instead of the solution—change your focus and move on; don’t berate yourself for slipping. However, if you continue to dwell on the negative for more than one or two minutes, restart the challenge the following morning. Even if you’re on Day 9, you...
PDF Summary Part 2 | Chapter 11: Take Control of Your Mind’s Operating System
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2) People tend to generalize their evaluations, which can quickly snowball. For example, after you miss the shot in the basketball game, you might start to think that you always shoot bad balls, which puts you in a disempowering state that could lead you to miss your next shot, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. From there, you may start thinking that you’re a terrible basketball player in general, which leads to thinking that you’re bad at all sports, which leads to thinking that you’re not very skilled at anything in your life.
3) Successful people do a better job of evaluating things. Put another way, people who have Master Systems that produce empowering or unique evaluations are more successful than people whose Master Systems create disempowering evaluations. For example, Wayne Gretzky is the National Hockey League’s all-time high-scorer because he evaluated the game differently than other players—while his teammates and opponents skated toward the puck, Gretzky skated toward where the puck was headed. Gretzky’s evaluations weren’t necessarily more empowered than other players’, but they were more clever.
Master the Five Elements of Your Master...
PDF Summary Chapter 12: Live by Your Values
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If you don’t know your values, then you don’t have a compass to guide you to the future you want, which leads to disappointment, frustration, and the sense that you could be getting more from life. Furthermore, not knowing your values means you can’t set goals that help you live up to those values. People in this situation often try to fill the void created by that uncertainty with self-destructive habits such as drinking, smoking, using drugs, and overeating.
Later in this chapter, you’ll have a chance to reflect on what your values actually are. As you reflect on this, it’s important to understand that there are two types of values:
- Ends are the emotional states you want to experience, such as love, happiness, and security. These are the values that make life fulfilling.
- Means are the ways you expect to reach the ends—for example, you may value family because it’s a means to love and happiness.
Distinguish between your values that are means and those that are ends to avoid pursuing values that are merely means without ever achieving their ends. For example, you may value owning your own business because you see it as a way to set your own schedule,...
PDF Summary Chapter 13: Set Rules That Help You Reach Your Values
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Unfortunately, most people have disempowering rules, which cause unnecessary pain because they:
- Have criteria that are impossible to meet
- Depend on external factors over which a person has no control
- Have few routes to happiness and many routes to pain—for example, if a person’s rule is that they must meet five stringent conditions in order to feel loved, then they’re creating countless ways to fail and feel pain and few ways to succeed and feel pleasure.
Many people adopt disempowering rules because society conditions them to believe that strict rules are necessary to motivate them to succeed. In reality, if your rules are so tough that you frequently fall short and feel frustrated and disappointed, then you’ll begin to believe that you can never reach your aim. Over time, you’ll associate the pain of failure with any effort to fulfill your values, and you’ll eventually develop learned helplessness. Furthermore, your self-esteem is dependent upon you feeling in control, and if your rules are impossible to satisfy, then you’ll feel that you have no control over achieving your values. Your self-esteem will suffer.
Fortunately, **you can rework your rules to...
PDF Summary Chapter 14: Build Your Beliefs With References
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Your imagination is a critical source of empowering references because it’s not limited by what’s already happened, but rather makes what could happen possible. Gather references from things that you imagine so vividly that it feels like it actually happened or that it could happen, and use these to support empowering beliefs about what could be. For example, athletes often visualize themselves successfully running plays, scoring points, and winning games—all of which helps them to make those visions a reality when it’s game time.
Use other people’s experiences as references. Books, poems, movies, television, podcasts, seminars, and other media can provide references you may not have encountered or considered on your own. For example, if you want to make a career change late in life, learning about how someone else close to your age successfully made this shift could provide a reference to support your belief that you can do it. Alternatively, you can use other people’s experiences as “contrasting references” to put things into perspective in your own life. On one hand, you can view the tragedies that befall so many people—and the inspiring ways they rise above...
PDF Summary Chapter 15: Recognize How Your Identity Dictates Your Behavior
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- Income (for example, I’m a minimum-wage earner)
- Physical appearance (for example, I’m overweight)
- Possessions (for example, I’m a homeowner)
- Profession (for example, I’m a writer)
- Role (for example, I’m the breadwinner)
- Title (for example, I’m a senior producer)
- What you’re not (for example, I’m not a gambler)
Additionally, your identity depends on the time frame you focus on: Do you define yourself based on your past, your present, or your future? For example, many people define themselves based on past traumas or achievements, such as being an abuse survivor or a former beauty queen. Some people define themselves by the present (for instance, a new parent) or by their future (such as an aspiring chef).
The way you identify is also a reflection of the way you perceive your friends’ identities. For example, if you consider your friends to be fun and adventurous, you probably identify that way too. This perception of your identity can extend to people outside of your friend group, too, who also assume you’re fun and adventurous because you associate with people like that. For this reason, it’s important to be selective about who you...
PDF Summary Part 3 | Chapter 16: Take the Seven-Day Challenge
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- Using that insight, develop a solution-oriented plan for responding to each of these action signals, which will quell the negative emotion. For example, if you frequently feel frustrated with your colleagues for not carrying their weight, remember that frustration is a signal that you need to change your approach. Make a plan to change your question from “Why aren’t they helping?” to “What can I delegate?” and ask for help.
- Throughout the day, focus on replacing your negative emotional patterns with your new, empowering patterns. The more consistently you do this, the more you will condition this change.
PDF Summary Chapter 17: Day 2: Master Your Physical Life
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- Anxiety and depression
- Circulation problems
- Disorientation
- Fatigue
- Headaches
- Premenstrual syndrome
- Repeated injuries
- Stiff joints
Additionally, if you jump into an intense anaerobic workout without properly training and warming up, your body must supply blood to your muscles so quickly that it’s forced to reroute it from your liver, kidneys, and other critical organs. This deprives the organs of oxygen, which can weaken and damage them.
Build an Aerobic Base
Fortunately, you can avoid the issue outlined above by building an aerobic base, which trains your body to burn fat as its primary fuel. To develop your aerobic system, start by doing only aerobic workouts for two to eight months. This will condition your metabolism, which:
- Promotes fat burning
- Boosts your energy
- Supports your immune system
- Minimizes your injuries
- Improves your endurance
If you already own or can buy a portable heart rate monitor, you can ensure that your heart rate doesn’t rise to anaerobic levels (greater than 180 minus your age). If you don’t have a monitor, gauge your intensity level on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being...
PDF Summary Chapter 18: Day 3: Master Your Relationship
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If you don’t address problems when they’re small, they can evolve into harmful patterns as they go through these four stages:
- Resistance: It’s common to reach a point in your relationship when you feel bothered by something that your partner says or does. At this stage, it’s critical to let your partner know how you’re feeling in order to prevent your feelings from graduating to the next stage.
- Resentment: If you haven’t addressed your feelings of resistance, they compound and turn into resentment, which causes you to feel angry with your partner for the things they say or do. Resentment impedes intimacy by creating an emotional barrier that only grows unless you address it.
- Rejection: If you allow your resentment to build, you soon start looking for ways to reject your partner. You find opportunities to attack your partner and you think that everything they do is annoying. At this point, you begin to separate yourself physically as well as emotionally.
- Repression: To cope with the pain of your disintegrating relationship, you eventually repress your feelings and disconnect. Although this eliminates your pain, it also kills the passion and love...
PDF Summary Chapter 19: Day 4: Master Your Financial Life
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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...
PDF Summary Chapter 20: Days 5, 6, and 7: Master Your Behavior and Time, Then Rest
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Alter Your Perception of Time
If you’ve ever looked at the clock and thought, “It’s only 3:00?” or “It’s already 3:00?” then you know that time is relative. Depending upon what you’re doing and what your frame of mind is, time can seemingly pass quickly or drag on. For example, if you’re doing something that you need to do but don’t particularly want to do, it would normally feel that time is crawling and that the task is interminable. Mastering time helps you avoid that uncomfortable feeling and get the job done without causing yourself any additional pain.
Here are two strategies for altering your perception of time:
Strategy #1: Change your time frame. When you feel stressed, it’s often because you feel stuck in one time frame—either the past, present, or future. If one time frame is weighing down on you, simply change your focus to a different time frame in order to improve your state. For example, if you’re in the middle of a huge task and feel overwhelmed, keep working but shift your thoughts to the future, when you’ll have finished everything. Alternatively, if you’re dreading something you have to do tomorrow, change your focus to the things you can...
PDF Summary Part 4 | Chapter 21: Change Yourself, Then Change the World
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3) Remember that everything is the product of countless daily decisions. The issues we face are the results of millions of small decisions that people make every day, and solving these problems will also depend on a critical mass of tiny, daily decisions. For example, climate change has accelerated and now threatens the health of the planet because humans have spent centuries overfishing, using harmful agricultural practices, and polluting water sources. A large segment of the population will have to change their daily habits—from their transportation choices to the food they eat—in order to substantially tackle this problem.
Give Back Regularly
As well as participating in joint decisions, make sure to give back to the community regularly. Brainstorm causes that you care about—whether that’s prison reform or environmental conservation—and commit to dedicate time to that cause each month. Even a couple hours a month can make a huge difference to the cause. You’ll also notice that giving to the cause will improve your life: You’ll feel the sense of joy and fulfillment that comes from selfless contribution to others, and your identity will shift to reflect...