Tony Robbins: Questions to Start Your Day Right

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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What are Tony Robbins’ questions for empowerment? What kinds of questions should you ask yourself in the morning?

According to Tony Robbins, questions are a great way to change your mindset. Ask the right questions and you’ll feel positive and optimistic. But ask the wrong questions, and you could put yourself in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Ask yourself empowering questions each morning to improve your mood and foster a positive mindset.

Read on to find out Tony Robbins’ questions to ask yourself.

Tony Robbins: Questions for Empowerment

Your emotional state can be altered by shifting your focus to positive things. Even changing your physical position can dramatically change your mood. For Tony Robbins, questions (and asking yourself the right ones) is one of the best ways to control your focus.

In this article, we’ll explore Tony Robbins’ questions for empowerment. Specifically, we’ll discuss:

How your questions influence your thoughts and emotions
What empowering and disempowering questions are
Why you must be cautious in the way you word your questions
Which questions to ask yourself every day to make you feel more empowered and happy
Which questions to ask yourself to help you persevere and find solutions when you’re facing challenges

The questions you ask yourself set the tone for your thought patterns, so it’s critical to make a habit of asking yourself positive, empowering questions that will lead to empowering thoughts.

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. Some questions are straightforward ways of evaluating your environment, like asking what made a noise. Other questions interpret your circumstances subjectively, and the answers you come up with strongly influence your emotional state.

Everyone has a set of subjective habitual questions or types of questions that they ask themselves regularly. Since your habitual questions create your thought patterns, and thoughts determine your behavior, if you consistently ask yourself disempowering questions, you will feel worse and you do less to improve your life. You can change your life by becoming aware of your habitual questions and changing those that are disempowering. Disempowering questions include:

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.

Your Emotional State

Questions are such a powerful force to change your mental and emotional state because answering an empowering question requires you to come up with empowering references to support your answer. Let’s look at the process step by step:

You ask an empowering question.
As you think of an empowering answer, you naturally come up with empowering references to support it.
The process of scanning your brain for empowering references naturally focuses your attention on those positive references.
As we discussed, focus determines your state—in this case, focusing on empowering references puts you in a positive state.
Your empowered state then influences your subsequent questions, creating a feedback loop.

The same process occurs when you ask yourself disempowering questions, so it’s critical that you start with empowering questions so that you create a positive cycle instead of a negative one. For instance, imagine you’re feeling down. Let’s look at how an empowering question and a disempowering question would each take you down a different mental and emotional path:

The disempowered path: You ask yourself, “Why do I feel so depressed?” In search of an answer, you focus on all the unfortunate circumstances in your life (references) that could cause you to feel depressed. Thinking of all these reasons to be depressed then makes you feel more depressed, leading to more disempowering questions like “Why is my life so awful?”
The empowered path: You ask yourself, “What could I do to make myself feel happier?” You then think of empowering references, such as happy memories, things in your life that bring you joy, and activities you could do that would lift your spirits. With your focus on these positive references, you may then ask yourself more empowering questions such as, “How did I get so lucky?”

Be conscious not only of the questions you ask yourself, but also of the way they’re worded and what they assume or cause you to ignore. Some questions include a presupposition, or an assumption that’s built into the question and, thus, the answer. For example, if you ask yourself, “Why do I always choose the wrong partner?” then your question has made your consistent poor romantic choices a fact without ever stopping to consider whether that’s even true. As a result, your answer will provide evidence for this supposed fact, reinforcing the belief and creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Additionally, the questions others ask you can also contain presuppositions. Be aware of how questions are phrased before accepting the question as fact or framing your answer around it.

Tony Robbins: Questions for the Morning

Now that you know how powerfully your internal questions impact your state, it’s time to take stock of your own habitual questions and condition yourself to ask empowering questions. In order to seize your power and control your questions, use the NAC steps, which are (briefly):

Become aware of what you want.
Identify your limiting pattern.
Create leverage.
Interrupt your pattern.
Create a new, empowering alternative with better questions.
Rehearse your new questions to condition them to be consistent.

Let’s elaborate on the fifth step of NAC: Creating new, empowering questions to replace old, disempowering ones. First, we’ll look at questions you can ask yourself daily to maintain a positive, empowered mindset.

Each morning, ask yourself a series of questions to set the tone for your pattern of thinking for the day. For each of the questions, think of two or three answers, elaborate on how it makes you feel, and specify why you feel that way. If you struggle to come up with an answer to any question, add “could” to the question—for example, if you can’t think of anything that makes you happy, try to come up with an answer for “What could make me happy?”

The Morning Power Questions include:

What in my life makes me happy?
What in my life excites me?
What in my life am I proud of?
What in my life am I grateful for?
What in my life do I enjoy most?
What in my life am I committed to?
Who do I love? What makes me a loving person?
Who loves me?

Also consider asking yourself questions each evening that help you reflect on your day and find empowerment in your experiences. When you make a habit of asking these questions, they’ll begin to shape your experiences. For example, if you always ask yourself what you’ve learned each day, you’ll start going through your days looking for things you can learn.

The Evening Power Questions include:

In what ways did I give today?
What have I learned today?
How can my experiences today improve my future?

Customize these questions and add questions to fit you and your life. If you ask yourself these questions every day, they will become habitual, and they will shape your thinking, beliefs, and behavior.

The above Tony Robbins questions can help you to reframe your mindset before you start your day.

Tony Robbins: Questions to Start Your Day Right