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.
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How can you change your story, Tony Robbins style? What great things happen when you change your story?
Change your thoughts, change your life. The story you tell yourself dramatically changes the way you see the world, from your opinion of yourself, to how you respond to problems. Knowing how to change your story will improve your self-confidence, personal relationships, career, and much more.
Keep reading to find out how to change your story, Tony Robbins style.
Tony Robbins: Change Your Story to Change Your Life
If you want to change your story, Tony Robbins says you must first understand how your decisions, values, and beliefs affect you. Change your story the Tony Robbins way with the following advice.
The first step to change your story, Tony Robbins says, is to understand the power of your decisions. Many people mistakenly believe their lives are shaped by their circumstances—they go where the current takes them without making any active decisions, feeling out of control. However, life is actually dictated by decisions. When you make a decision about who you are and what you want, you’re making a commitment to do anything necessary to realize that vision. Each decision—no matter how small—sets into motion a series of actions and events that ultimately shape your life.
To embrace your decision-making power, first, remember that decision-making is like a muscle that you strengthen by making frequent decisions—so keep making them. Second, make your decisions wisely, but don’t mull over them endlessly; if you think about them for too long, you’re likely to lose your conviction. Third, learn from your successful and failed decisions. Finally, be conscious about how you make these three decisions, which impact what you notice, how you feel, what you do, and who you become:
- Decide what to focus on.
- Decide what certain things mean to you.
- Decide what you’re doing to produce the results you want.
1) Understand Neuro-Associations
The driving force behind all of your decisions—and, thus, your actions—is the subconscious motivation to avoid pain (such as inconvenience and humiliation) and seek pleasure (such as ecstasy and comfort).
Pain and pleasure associations start in your brain: Every time you experience a positive or negative emotion, your brain links the emotion with other aspects of the experience, creating a “neuro-association.” As a result, your future thoughts about that activity or subject automatically trigger the same emotion. (Shortform example: If you once got emotionally painful news while listening to a certain song, your brain will associate that song with your negative emotion; so, each time you hear the song in the future, you’ll feel emotional pain.)
When your brain creates neuro-associations, it looks for patterns to form generalizations about which experiences are painful or pleasant. These generalizations create your beliefs about life and the world, and they can be critical to learning, for example, that touching a hot stove hurts. However, some of your generalized beliefs hold you back from achieving what you want—for example, if an ex cheated on you, it could cause you to believe that all intimacy leads to pain, meaning you avoid close relationships.
Create Change by Rewiring Your Brain
If some of your neuro-associations are causing you to act in ways that are not positive or empowering, change them: Rewire your brain by weakening your existing neuro-associations and consciously creating new, empowering ones.
Your brain has billions of neurons that communicate by sending signals to each other via neural pathways, which is the method by which your brain creates neuro-associations. The more you repeat the same or similar experiences, the stronger those connections become—and the stronger they become, the more automatic and habitual that behavior becomes. If you’ve developed strong neural pathways reinforcing a negative emotion or behavior, it’s difficult to fight against the force of that habit and implement a more positive behavior.
To change those neural pathways, associate intense pain with the old, negative behavior and pleasure with the new behavior. You can do this using the Science of Neuro-Associative Conditioning (NAC), a six-step process through which you condition your nervous system to develop neuro-associations that support the changes you want to make:
- Determine exactly what you want and identify the pain you’ve associated with making this change. For example, you may want to lose weight but associate the process with the pain of hunger and the physical pain of exercise.
- Create a sense of urgency to change. What consequences will you face for not changing, and what benefits will you gain if you do change?
- Disrupt your pattern. Every time you catch yourself slipping into your old pattern, do something unexpected to snap out of it. Over time, these disruptions will distort and weaken the neural pathways responsible for your old behavior.
- Create a positive pattern to replace the old, negative one. If you don’t, the change won’t last and you’ll revert to your old pattern or a new, negative one.
- Reinforce your new pattern so that it endures long-term. Rehearse your new response in your mind to strengthen the new neural pathways and create a reward system to reinforce your new pattern.
- Make sure your conditioning is successful. Imagine a scenario that would trigger your old response and see if you still react in the way you used to.
2) Alter Your Beliefs to Change What’s Possible
Now that you know how to recondition your neuro-associations, you can identify which associations and beliefs are impeding your success and recondition yourself to turn your disempowering beliefs and associations into empowering ones. Your beliefs dictate how you interpret your experiences, and these interpretations determine your decisions, which collectively shape your life.
At its heart, a belief is a feeling of certainty about an idea, and your certainty is based on the experiences that you’ve interpreted as evidence—or references—to support the idea. Since, through imagination, you can find or create references to support any belief, you can turn any idea into a belief. Furthermore, you have the power to adopt beliefs that empower you.
Global beliefs are the most influential beliefs, because they determine how you think about life or yourself as a whole. For example, you may have a global belief that life is a struggle. Altering your global beliefs through reconditioning can transform your life. Think of the impact of shifting from the belief that life is full of challenges to a belief that life is full of opportunities.
Another type of belief, a limiting belief, forms when your brain oversimplifies your experiences. For example, if you’ve failed at your first few attempts to launch a business, you may develop a limiting belief that you’re not cut out for entrepreneurship, overlooking the fact that most entrepreneurs endure and overcome failure.
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- 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
