Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 1
Take Charge of Your Life To Reach Your Potential
Do you want to make changes in your life but have trouble following through? Do you often feel like the deck is stacked against you as you go through life?
In this book summary of Awaken The Giant Within, you’ll learn how important decisions and beliefs are for making positive changes and becoming the person you want to be. Anthony Robbins shows with his usual clarity and insight how we each have control over how we see the world and, by extension, how happy we are.
Focus on making and sticking to the right choices if you want to change your life. When did you last think about making a change in your life? Maybe it was New Year’s Eve and you made a promise to yourself to stop smoking. Or, you might have wanted to lose weight and thought about trying a new diet.
But did you actually make those changes in your life? If you didn’t, it was probably because you said, “I’d like to stop eating junk food,” instead of “I’ll start eating more healthily.”
Before you can change anything in your life, you need to make a clear choice. Then, no matter how hard things get, you have to stick to your choice. This means that you have to be willing to change your plan as you run into problems.
Take Soichiro Honda, the man who started the Honda company. When he was in school, he decided he wanted to make piston rings for cars that worked well. History shows that he was able to reach that goal, but he ran into many problems along the way that could have stopped him.
During World War II, for example, the Japanese government wouldn’t give Honda the concrete he required to construct the factories where his product was made. How did he get past that problem?
Honda’s answer was to come up with his own way to make concrete, which let him start building his empire. And even though making big decisions can be hard at first, it gets easier the more you do it. So, don’t give up when you fail when you try to make a change in your life. Think instead about what you can learn from the mistake.
For example, most smokers who try to quit for the first time fail. But if they use that failure as a chance to think about what stopped them from quitting (for example, being around other smokers made them want to smoke too much) and how they might get around those problems in the future (like staying away from places where smokers live), they can reach their goal.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 2
Link Pain and Pleasure to Your Habits to Change
Make new habits by linking the ones you don’t want to do with pain and the ones you do want to do with pleasure. We’ve seen that we have to fully commit to our decisions if we want to reach our goals and make a difference. But even when we have the best of intentions, it can be hard to change the way we have always done things.
Why? Because everything we do is either to get pleasure or to stay away from pain. As soon as you realize this, you can start to use it to your advantage. So, if you want to break a certain habit, a good way to do it is to connect that habit with pain.
Let’s say you don’t want to eat chocolate any more. One way to reach this goal would be to make people think that eating chocolate makes them feel bad. You could make a rule that every time you eat chocolate, you have to sing a song you don’t like. Soon, your brain will connect eating chocolate with how bad it makes you feel when you sing that song. But remember that you have to stick to your decision, so you’ll have to sing out loud even when you’re eating chocolate cake at a dinner party.
But if you want to change your behavior for good, you need to find a new, better habit that gives you the same amount of pleasure as your old one. So, if you want to stop eating chocolate, you need to find something else to do that you enjoy just as much as eating that Snickers bar. This could be a healthier treat, like your favorite fruit, or an activity, like a new sport.
You’ll also feel better if you think about all the good things that will happen once you quit. For instance, if you stop eating chocolate, you’ll soon be able to fit back into your old jeans. This method has been shown to help people break even the most difficult habits.
In one study on how well healthy behaviors can replace unhealthy ones, researchers looked at how drug addicts were rehabilitated. They found that addicts were much less likely to start using again if they found a new, healthier habit that gave them the same amount of pleasure. This could be a new relationship or a hobby.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 3
Change Your Beliefs to Change Who You Are
Picture that two people just turned 60. Now that his best years are over, one of them might feel like his life is coming to an end. The other, on the other hand, might be really excited about everything that’s still to come. What could explain such a big difference in point of view?
The things we believe shape how we see the world and ourselves. But what is a belief, really? A belief is an idea that can be backed up by facts. You might think, for instance, that you are a great chess player. But that idea will only become a belief if it’s backed up by evidence, like the fact that you win most of the time.
Most of us can use any event in our lives as a point of reference for what we believe. Unfortunately, this also means that when something bad happens, like losing a loved one, a lot of people use it as proof that life is terrible.
But we don’t have to think that way. If we can find a more positive way to look at the reference, we can live our lives in a more hopeful way. So, if you’re going through a hard time, you could use that to help you grow as a person.
You might even come out of your grief with a powerful desire to help others who are also sad. This means that if you want your life to change, you must first change what you believe. The problem is that many of us already have strong beliefs that keep us from doing anything different.
Habitual beliefs, like all habits, can be broken. To change an old belief, you need to link pain to the old one and pleasure to the new one, just like you would with any other habit. One easy way to do this is to find a role model who has already changed her beliefs and figure out how she did it. Then, you can use her method to change your own beliefs.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 4
Change Your Vocabulary to Change Yourself
Changing the words you use can change how you feel and how you think.
Did you know that there are about 4000 words in the English language that describe how someone feels? Surprisingly, though, there are almost twice as many words for negative emotions as there are for positive ones. This could be why many people feel negative emotions more often.
It’s important to pay close attention to the words you use every day because they will shape the way you think and see the world. To change how you think about a situation, you need to change how you talk about it.
Imagine you are on a road trip and your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. In this situation, you could let yourself get angry and say how “annoying” and “angry” it makes you feel. But you could also say something like, “That’s a pain.” Using less negative words to describe a frustrating situation can keep you from feeling worse.
This example gets to the heart of what the author calls “transformational vocabulary,” which is the idea that the words we use to describe how we see the world actually shape how we see it. So how can you change your vocabulary to help you deal with your feelings?
The trick is to use strong words for happy feelings and less strong words for sad ones. For example, instead of saying “happy,” you could say “totally blissed,” which is a stronger word. Or, if you’re about to feel strong negative emotions, you should use less intense words and phrases to describe how you feel, such as “I’m a little worried” instead of “I’m very worried.”
As a last piece of advice, try to use unusual words to talk about bad feelings. This will probably make you laugh and make you feel better right away. It might even make the people around you happy. For example, you could say, “I must say, I’m quite peeved,” when you’re very angry. This unusual word sounds old-fashioned and polite, which can make you feel better right away.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 5
Ask Yourself Better Questions to Find Better Solutions
Ask the right questions to figure out the best way to solve any problem.
You now know that if you want to change your life, you have to change the way you think. Now we’ll go a little further and ask, “What is thinking, exactly?”
Our thoughts are made up of a series of questions and answers. So, the questions we ask shape the way we think, which means they are very important to how we live our lives. So, it follows that the questions we ask have a huge effect on how good our lives are. When you ask a question, the way it is asked will determine where your thoughts go.
If you ask a question that is negative, you will get a negative answer. If you ask a question that is positive, you will get a positive answer. For example, if you find yourself in a bad situation over and over again, asking yourself, “Why does this always happen to me?” will bring your attention right away to the bad things in your life. What happened? Your mood will go down, and this bad feeling will color the rest of your life.
So, when you have a problem, it’s very important to ask yourself the right questions. This is easy to say but hard to do. When things are hard, we tend to feel overwhelmed, so we often ask the wrong questions, like “Why me?”, and the answers make us feel bad.
The answer is to make a list of questions ahead of time. Asking questions like, “What’s good about this?” should become a habit. and “What can I do to make solving this problem fun?” When you’re in the middle of a tough situation, asking yourself these kinds of questions will make you feel better and help you solve the problem or at least deal with the results better.
If you really want to have a good attitude about life in general, you could take this training a step further and ask yourself questions that make you feel good every morning. “What’s great about my life?” is one example. or “What have I done that I’m proud of?”
By getting yourself in a good mood at the beginning of each day, you’ll find it easier to stay happy throughout the day. This will make your life better and more successful. Find out what’s important to you in life to see if you’re living up to your full potential. Can you say for sure what you think is the most important thing? What is it? Your body?
If you don’t know, you should try to find out, because the most successful and happy people are the ones who know what they value and live their lives according to those values. So, if you’re not happy with your life but don’t know why, it could be that you’re not living the way you believe you should.
Imagine getting a great new job offer in a different country. If you take that job, you’ll have to uproot your life and move thousands of miles away with your family. Would you like to? If you can’t decide, it’s because you don’t know what you value. In this case, you need to decide whether personal growth or financial security is more important to you before you can make a choice that will make you happy.
Take some time to think about and write down your most important values in order of importance, and explain why you chose those values. As you make this list, you might realize that some of the things you value right now don’t help you reach your goals.
Maybe the most important thing to you in life is passion. You want to do everything with a lot of passion. But as you think about how your values and goals fit together, you might realize that doing everything with passion is bad for your health. This is the wrong value, because if you’re sick, you won’t be able to care about anything.
Here, the answer is to change what you value. You could decide that your health is more important than your passion from now on. If you put your health first, you can be passionate without the negative effects.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 6
To be Happy, Make Your Own Rules For Living
Make your own rules for living that make you happy and tell other people about them.
We all have rules we have to follow. These rules, like “I’ll be happy when I get to eat that cake,” have a big impact on what we do and how we feel because they tell us what will make us happy and what won’t. But these rules can actually limit what we can do and make it less likely for us to find true happiness.
Think for a moment about what you need to happen for you to be happy. Do you need to get lucky? Do you wish that your friends liked you more? You might be right that these things will make you happy, but you can’t do anything about them. So, it’s important to set up rules for your life that you can control.
For example, instead of saying “I’ll only feel good if someone compliments me on my work,” try a rule that says “I’ll only feel good if I reach my own goals.” Because many of our rules depend on what other people do, we’re likely to get angry or frustrated when they don’t act the way our rules say they should. In fact, if someone makes you mad, it’s because they’re unintentionally breaking your rules.
But you can’t expect other people to follow the same rules as you. So, if you want to live a happy life, you need to tell people your rules and make sure they know what’s important to you. Let’s say you don’t hear from the person you think of as your best friend. You think she’s no longer your friend because you think close friends should talk to each other often.
But she might have a different idea of what friendship is. For example, she might think it’s more important to be there for the other person in times of trouble than to talk on the phone every week. But if you tell your friend what your rules are for friendship, she’ll understand why you were mad at her, and you’ll be able to build a stronger relationship from there.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 7
Understand Why You Feel The Way You Do
By figuring out why you feel the way you do, you can get a handle on them.
We’ve seen that you can decide what will make you happy if you’re not so strict about your own rules. But you can learn to control more than just happiness. You can choose how you feel about everything.
But before we can learn to control our feelings, we need to know what they are. Most of the time, we get too overwhelmed by our bad feelings because we generalize them or don’t recognize them correctly. For example, you might be angry about something, but if you think about what’s really making you feel bad, you might realize that it’s really something else, like being tired.
Once you know what’s making you tired, you can use Transformational Vocabulary (changing your feelings by describing them differently) and say, “I’m feeling a little droopy” to show how tired you are. This will make you feel less bad and make it easier to get over the feeling.
It’s also important to make sure you don’t look at your tougher feelings in a bad way. All of your emotions can help you make positive changes in your life because they let you know that something isn’t quite right. This makes you want to look at them more closely to find the real cause of your problems. You can’t start to change until you know what’s going on. But knowing what makes a certain feeling happen is only the first step.
The next step is harder: you have to do something to deal with the feeling and change whatever is making it. So, if you were able to figure out that your bad feeling was caused by loneliness, you can start looking for why you’re lonely. For example, you might not have talked to any of your friends in a while. If that’s the case, it’s easy to know what to do: call them.
But sometimes you’ll feel like you just can’t deal with a certain feeling. When that happens, think back to a time when you handled it well. This will give you confidence in your ability to deal with hard feelings, since if you were able to do it once, you can do it again.
Book Summary of Awaken the Giant Within Main Idea 8
Giving Back Helps You
Give back to the community to find out what you can do as an individual.
We’ve already talked about how to take charge of your life, be successful, and be happy. But at this point, you might be thinking that no matter how much you change in your own life, you’ll never be able to change anything in society.
Lucky for us, that’s not true. Even the smallest choices you make in your own life can have a big effect on the world around you. Most people don’t even try to change society because they don’t think they have enough power to do so. The truth is, though, that the same decisions that can change your own life can also change society.
There is another way to make the world a better place. Now that you know how to control and think about your own feelings, you could help other people do the same. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store and you see a sad-looking person. You could give him a real compliment instead of minding your own business. And if you smile at people as you go through the world, there’s a chance you’ll make them feel better, which they can then spread to other people.
Final summary
The main point of this book:
Even small decisions and changes in how you act can have a big effect on your life and on society as a whole.
