By: Tony Robbins

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This book is a personal development classic, written by Tony Robbins when he was 25 years old.

These are the principles that Robbins used to go from living in a 400 square foot apartment and washing his dishes in the bathtub to a millionaire many times over in less than three years.

They are the same principles that he has gone on to teach millions of people around the world in one form or another.

We live in an age with more information than we ever thought possible. If information was the answer then we would all be happy, successful, and have six pack abs. But we don't.

The missing ingredient is the ability to take massive action to work towards our most important goals. In fact, the definition of the word power is "the ability to act."

There are seven fundamental character traits that the world's most successful people have cultivated within themselves that give them the power to take action.

Join us for the next 12 minutes as we explore what they are, and how you can model them.

1. Passion

The world's most successful people have discovered an all-consuming purpose that drives them to do more and be more.

Almost all of them tap into the power of goals and defining the outcome they are looking for.

Robbins gives us five rules for formulating our desired outcomes:

1. State the outcome in positive terms.

2. Be as specific as possible. How does your outcome look, see, feel and smell? Engage as many of your senses as possible.

3. Have an evidence procedure. Know how you will look, how you will feel and what you will see when you achieve your goal.

4. Be in control. The outcome must be created and maintained by you. Make sure you choose something you can influence directly.

5. Verify the outcome is ecologically sound and desirable. The outcome must be one that benefits you and other people.

Now that we know the five rules for defining outcomes, we can move on to creating a master list of the things we want in our lives. There are 12 steps to this process.

1. Make an inventory of your dreams, including the things you want to do, be and share. Don't limit yourself - be bold.
2. Estimate when you expect to reach the outcomes.
3. Pick the four most important goals for you this year.
4. Review these four goals against the five rules for outcomes to ensure that they are aligned.
5. Make a list of the important resources you already have at your disposal. This will be your inventory of strengths, skills, resources and tools.
6. Focus in on times you used those resources well. This will prime your mind to see yourself achieving your goals.
7. Describe the kind of person you would have to be in order to attain your goals. Will it take discipline? Education? Something else?
8. Write down what prevents you from having the goals now. This is helping you identify the roadblocks that might get in your way.
9. Create a step-by-step plan on how to achieve your four goals.
10. Come up with some models - people who have achieved great success. Write down one main idea that each of those people would say to you if they were speaking to you personally.
11. Create your ideal day from the time you wake up until the time you go to bed. Feel what having all of your goals accomplished will be like.
12. Design your perfect environment. Where will you be during your perfect day?
    
    

2. Belief

As Robbins points out, our beliefs about what we are and what we can be precisely determine what we will be. What you believe is possible will determine the trajectory of your life.

If we are going to model beliefs that create excellence, we need to understand how beliefs get developed in the first place.

1. Environment. The environment you spend time in will impact what you believe is possible.

2. Events. Some events have such a big impact on our lives that they change our brains forever.

3. Knowledge. No matter how grim your circumstances are right now, if you read about the accomplishments of others, it can create the belief in you that you can succeed too.

4. Past Results. Do something once, and you'll forever know you can do it again.

5. Creating the Future in Your Mind. You can "step into your future" any time you want by creating a mental image of it.

So that's where beliefs come from. Now let's review the seven beliefs that Robbins suggests will help you foster excellence.

1. Everything happens for a reason and a purpose, and it serves me.
2. There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.
3. Whatever happens, take responsibility.
4. I do not need to understand everything to be able to use everything.
5. People are my greatest resource.
6. Work is play.
7. There is no abiding success without commitment.
   
   

3. Strategy

Now that we know where we want to go and the beliefs that will help us get there, it's time to figure out the actions that will help us get there.

People that are able to consistently produce outstanding results follow a specific set of actions and mindsets. The quickest path to replicate their results is to adopt their actions and mindsets.

In order to create a "recipe" we can follow, we need to to have a system to describe what to do and when to do it. Robbins calls this syntax - the way people order their actions - and it makes a huge difference in the kind of results that we produce.

Here is the shorthand notation:

• V Visual

• A Auditory

• K Kinesthetic

• E external

• I internal

• D digital (words)

• T tonal (tone of sound)

For instance, when you see something in the outside world, it's represented as Ve. When you have a feeling inside, that would be represented as Ki.

The combination of those things can help you create a recipe for whatever you want to create in your life. The trick is to find the right sequence of thoughts and actions that produce the results.

So, we find somebody who has created the results we are looking for, we do something that Robbins calls "strategy elicitation."

Here are the steps to making it work:

1. Get the person in the appropriate state by having them remember a specific time when they felt motivated, loved, or whatever strategy you are looking to emulate. For instance, you might ask them "Can you remember a time when you were totally motivated to do something? Can you go back to that time and step back into that experience?"

2. Ask them clear, succinct questions about the syntax of what they said, heard and felt. You might ask them "As you remember that time, what was the very first thing that caused you to be totally motivated?"

3. Then, find out what specifically about what they were experiencing caused the person to get in that state. You might ask "After you heard that thing, what was the very next thing that caused you to be totally motivated to do something? Did you picture something in your mind? Did you say something to yourself? Did you have a certain feeling or emotion?"

As you listen to the person you are talking to, record down their answers and you'll have yourself a recipe for getting the results you are looking to achieve.

4. Clarity of Values

Every successful person is clear about their values. Values are your own private, personal and individual beliefs about what is most important to you.

We can learn to produce the most effective behaviours, but they need to support our deepest needs and desires. Without this we have internal conflict, and lack the ability to generate success on a grand scale.

Your values can change over time, and have certainly changed since your childhood. You also have different values in different areas of your life.

In order to understand the most important values, do the following:

1. Start by listing the most important areas of your life. That will likely include home, work, and relationships.
2. Then for each of those areas, ask yourself what's important in that area. Don't filter, just write them down.
3. Finally, rank order the things you wrote down in that area. This will become your value hierarchy.

This is not only an important exercise to do with yourself, it's an important exercise to do with the people in your life that are the closest to you.

5. Energy

The world's most successful people seem to have an unending reservoir of energy. How do they do it?

They understand that your mind and your body are connected to one another in what Robbins calls a cybernetic loop.

You've heard the adage "act as if." Most of the time it's been distorted in the personal development world to mean "act as if you are rich, and you'll become rich." However, there's a lot of science that proves that your physiology has a lot to do with what happens in your mind and with the state you are in. And, because you have complete control over your physiology (what you do with your body), you have complete control of your mental state as well.

As a simple example, if you want to feel happy, smile. Try feeling miserable while you are smiling - it's almost impossible.

The Power of State

Robbins suggests that the key to producing the results you desire is the put yourself into a resourceful state so that you are empowered to take the types and qualities of actions that produce the desired results.

The best way to put yourself into a resourceful state is to use an anchor, which serves to trigger you into the desired state.

For instance, you could use the anchor of balling your hands into fists and screaming the word "yes!" to put yourself into a state of high energy (a little intense for me, but you get the point).

Here are the 4 steps to making it work.

1. Put yourself in a fully associated, congruent state, with your whole body involved. Basically, to continue with the previous example, you need to put yourself in a high energy state.

2. Set the anchor at the peak of the state.

3. Use a unique stimulus or trigger. This should be something that you don't do very often otherwise.

4. Replicate the anchor exactly. If you set the anchor by touching a part of your body, you should to it in the exact some spot, with the exact same amount of pressure, and so on.
   
   

6. Bonding Power

The world most successful people are masters of creating bonds with other people.

One of the ways the do this is through mirroring and matching.

You've heard that words only account for 7% of our communication, our tonality accounts for 38%, and our body language accounts for 55%.

That's why when you match another person's physiology and tonality during an encounter, you build rapport with that person in minutes.

In order to do this well, you need to look for things that you can mirror as unobtrusively and naturally as possible. As Robbins points out, if you mirror a person who has a terrible twitch, they'll just end up thinking you are mocking them.

Once you get into a rhythm of rapport with the other person, you can start doing something called pacing and leading. This is when you gradually change your posture or tone of voice. If you've created rapport with them, they will naturally start to follow your lead.

7. Mastery of Communication

Successful people are masters of using communication to get what they want in business and in life.

First, they understand how to ask for what they want. Follow these five steps, and you can too:

1. Ask specifically.
2. Ask someone who can help you.
3. Create value for the person you are asking.
4. Ask with focused, congruent belief.
5. Ask until you get what you want. Not necessarily from the same person.

Second, they understand how to deal with resistance using the agreement frame. There are three phrases you can use to get another person to see things from your point of view without any resistance:

1. I appreciate and...
2. I respect and...
3. I agree and...

By replacing "but" or "however" with "and", you completely bypass the automatic resistance other people have to those words, keeping their minds open to what comes out of your mouth next.

Conclusion

The principles of Unlimited Power are timeless, and if you start incorporating them into your daily and weekly routine, you'll start to see an uptick in the results you are generating in your business and life.