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Writer's pictureLars Christensen

Unlimited Power by Tony Robbins



Re-read December 2024. I recommend this book 10/10.


Why you should read this book:

It is one of the best self-coaching books ever written. Gives you the tools to model successful people, place yourself in your strongest state, and share a great powerful anchoring technique that will make you the strongest person possible.


Get your copy here.


🚀 The book in three sentences

  1. Change your mindset and look to model high performers.

  2. Connect with others by mirroring, asking good questions, and listening well.

  3. Change your state into your ideal super power-mode


✍️ My favorite quotes

  • John Stuart Mill said, "One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests."


📝 My notes and thoughts

  • P55. John Stuart Mill said, "One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests."

  • P100. Change a habit:

    • 1. Identify the behavior you want to change. Now, make an internal representation of that behavior as you see it through your own eyes.

    • 2. Once you have a clear picture of the behavior you want to change, you need to create a different representation, a picture of yourself as you would be if you made the desired change and what that change would mean to you.

    • 3. "Swish" the two pictures so that the un-resourceful experience automatically triggers the resourceful experience. Here is how you swish: Start by making a big bright picture of the behavior you want to change. Then, in the bottom right-hand corner of that picture, make a small dark picture of the way you want to be. Now take that small picture, and in less than one second, have it grown in size and brightness and literally burst through the picture of the behavior you no longer desire. Do this 6-7 times, add smell and noise.

  • P107. We can control any representation we make in our brains. Remember when we learned the power of our beliefs? We learned that we're not born with beliefs, that they can change. When we were little, we believed in some things that we think are ridiculous now. We finished the chapter on beliefs with a key question. How do we adopt the enabling beliefs and drop the negative ones? The first Step was becoming aware of their powerful effects on our lives. You've been taking the second Step throughout this chapter: changing the way you represent those beliefs to yourself. For if you change the structure of how you represent something to yourself, you will change how you feel about it and thus change what is true in your experience of life. You can represent things to yourself in a way that consistently empowers you—now!

  • P109. This same process can be used to discover the difference in your mind between things you're confused about and things you feel you understand. If you're confused about the things you feel, you understand. If you're confused about something, it may be because your internal representation is small, unfocused, dim, or far away, while the things you understand are represented as closer, brighter, and more focused. See what happens to your feelings when you change your representations to be exactly like those of the things you understand. Of course, bringing things closer or making them brighter does not intensify the experience for everyone. The opposite may be true. Some people feel things intensify when they get darker or more unfocused. The point is to find out which submodalities are the key ones for you or for the person you want to help to create change and then to have enough personal power to follow through and use these tools.

  • P111. Have states for different situations: Work, weekend, workout, and parent.

  • P140. So, to be effective, a salesman must take his clients back to a time when they bought something they loved. He has to find out what caused them to decide to buy it. What were the key ingredients and submodalities? A salesman who learns how to elicit strategies will be learning his customer's exact needs. He will then be empowered to truly satisfy those needs and create a longstanding customer relationship. When you elicit someone's strategy, you can learn in moments what might otherwise take days or weeks to learn.

  • P140. How about using this to stop eating? I changed my behavior by changing my strategy. I set it up so that seeing the food sign triggered my picturing myself looking in the mirror at my fat, ugly body and saying to myself, "I look disgusting. I can pass on this meal." Then I imagined myself working out, seeing my body getting stronger, and saying to myself, "Great job! You're looking good," which created a desire to go and work out. I linked all these through repetition—seeing the sign, immediately seeing the fat image of myself, hearing my internal dialogue, and so forth, over and over again.

  • P148. Paying attention to people's trickers and words. Being more attentive to their language.

  • P198. The main thing you now know is that there are no limits to what you can do. Your key is the power of modeling. Excellence can be duplicated. If other people can do something, all you need to do is model them with precision, and you can do exactly the same thing, whether it's walking on fire, making a million dollars, or developing a perfect relationship. How do you model? First, you must realize that all results are produced by some specific set of actions. Every effect has a course. If you exactly reproduce someone's actions—both internal and external—then you, too, can produce the same final result. You begin by modeling someone's mental actions, starting with his belief system, then you go on to his mental syntax, and finally, you mirror his physiology. Do all three effectively and elegantly, and you can do just about anything.

  • P203. Setting Outcomes Key Components.

  • P204. Goal Working Process.

  • P218. The five guidelines for asking intelligently and precisely.

    • Ask specifically. You must describe what you want, both to yourself and to someone else. How high, how far, how much? When, where, and with whom? If your business needs a loan, you'll get it—if you know how to ask. You won't get it if you say, "we need some more money to expand into a new product line. Please lend us some." You need to define precisely what you need, why you need it, and when you need it. You need to be able to show what you'll be able to produce with it.

    • Ask someone who can help you. You have to ask someone who has the resources—the knowledge, the capital, the sensitivity, or the business experience.

    • Create value for the person you are asking. Figure out how you can help him first.

    • Ask with focused, congruent belief. If you aren't convinced about what you're asking for, how can anyone else be?

    • Ask until you get what you want. You have to change and adjust until you achieve what you want. When you study the lives of successful people, you'll find over and over again that they kept asking, kept trying, kept changing.

  • P227. During the next several days, begin to focus on the language other people use. Begin to identify things such as universals and unspecified verbs and nouns. How would you challenge these? Turn on your television and watch an interview program. Identify the fluff that is being used, and ask questions to the TV set that would enable you to get the specific information you need. Here are some additional patterns to listen for. Avoid words like "good," "bad," "better," and "worse"—words that indicate some form of evaluation or judgment. When you hear phrases like "That's a bad idea" or " It's good to eat everything on your plate," you can respond with "According to whom?" or "How do you know that?" Sometimes people will make statements linking cause and effect. They might say, "His comments made me mad," or" Your observations made me think." Now, when you hear those, you'll know to ask, "How specifically does X cause Y?" and you will become a better communicator and a better modeler.

  • P235. For the next several days, you should practice mirroring people you are with. Mirror their gestures and posture. Mirror the rate and location of their breathing. Mirror the tone, tempo, and volume of their voice. Do they feel closer to you, and do you feel closer to them? Remember the mirroring experiment in the chapter on physiology? When a person mirrors someone else's physiology, he's able to experience not only the same state but also the same sort of internal experiences and even the same thoughts. Now, what if you could do that in your daily life? What if you became such a skillful mirror that you could know what someone else was thinking? What sort of rapport would you have then, and what could you do with it? It's an awesome thing to contemplate, but professional communicators do it all the time. Mirroring is a skill like any other. It takes practice to develop. However, you can use it right now to get results.

  • P240. For the next several days, listen to the people you are talking with and determine what kind of words they use most. Then, speak to them using the same kind of words. What happens? Then, speak for a while using a different representational system. What happens this time?

  • P244. You're not giving up your identity when you mirror another person. You are not exclusively a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic person. We should all strive to be flexible. Mirroring simply creates a commonality of physiology that underscores our shared humanity. When I'm mirroring, I can get the benefits of another person's feelings, experiences, and thoughts. That's a powerful, beautiful, and empowering lesson to experience about how to share the world with other human beings. Massive cultural success results from rapport with the masses. The most effective leaders are strong in all three representational systems. We tend to trust people who appeal to us on all three levels and who give off a sense of congruity—all the parts of their personality convey the same thing.

  • P251. There's a final wonderful thing about the magic of rapport. It's the most accessible skill in the world. You don't need textbooks, and you don't need courses. You don't need to travel to study at the feet of a master, and you don't need to earn a degree. The only tools you need are your eyes, your ears, and your senses of touch, taste, and smell. You can begin cultivating rapport right now. We are always communicating and interacting. Rapport is simply doing both in the most effective ways possible. You can study rapport when you're waiting for a plane by mirroring the people in line with you. You can use rapport at the grocery store. You can use it at work and at home. If, when you go in for a job interview, you match and mirror the interviewer, he'll like you immediately. Use rapport in your business to create an immediate connection with clients. If you want to become a master communicator, all you need to do is learn how to enter other people's worlds. You already have everything you need to do it now.

  • P300. Many of us find it easier to reframe when communicating with others than when communicating with ourselves. If we're trying to sell someone our old car, we know we have to frame our presentation in a way that highlights what's good about the car and downplays what's bad. If your potential buyer has a different frame, your job is to change his perception. But few of us spend much time thinking about how to frame our communication with ourselves. Something happens to us. We form an internal representation of the experience. And we figure that's what we have to live with. Think how crazy that is. It's like turning on the ignition, starting up your car, and then seeing where it decides to go. Instead, you need to learn to communicate with yourself with as much purpose, direction, and persuasiveness as you would in a business presentation. You need to start framing and reframing experiences in a way that makes them work for you. One way is simply on the level of careful, conscious thought.

  • P303. You come home after a lousy day at work, and all you can think of is the ridiculous project your supervisor gave you at the last minute. Instead of getting away from it, you take the frustration home with you. You're watching television with your kids, and all you're thinking about in this angry state is your "dumb" supervisor and his idiotic project. Instead of letting your brain make you miserable for the weekend, you can learn to reframe the experience in a way that makes you feel better. Start by disassociating yourself from it. Take the image of your supervisor and put it in your hand. Put a pair of funny glasses with a big nose and mustache on him. Hear him talking in a funny, screechy cartoon voice. Feel him as being warm and cuddly, and hear him saying he needs your help on this project, could you please help? After you've concocted this, maybe you can appreciate that he's under stress, and maybe he forgot to tell you what he needs until the last minute. Maybe you can remember a time when you did the same thing with someone else. Ask yourself if this situation is such a big deal that you should allow it to ruin your weekend. If there's any reason to let it bother you when you're at home.

  • P320. Anchoring is a tool used by many professional athletes. They may not call it that or even be aware of what they're doing, yet they are using the principle. Athletes who are known as clutch players are triggered, or anchored, by do-or-die situations to go into their most resourceful and effective states, from which they produce their most outstanding results. Some athletes do certain things to trigger themselves into the state. Tennis players use a certain rhythm for bouncing the ball or a certain breathing pattern to put themselves in their best state before they serve.

  • P325. How to anchor:

    • Clarify the specific outcome you desire to use an anchor for and the specific state that will have the greatest effect in supporting the achievement of that outcome for yourself and/or others.

    • Calibrate baseline experience.

    • Elicit and shape that individual into the desired state through the use of your verbal and nonverbal communication patterns.

    • Use your sensory acuity to determine when the person is at the peak of the state and, at that exact moment, provide the stimulus (anchor).

    • Test anchor by:

      • Changing physiology to break state.

      • Triggering stimulus (anchor), and note if the response is the desired state.

  • P382. Care about what you are capable of. Care about what you create and what you want to do. Work from a set of dynamic, evolving, enabling goals that will help you do what you want, not what someone else has done. There will always be someone who has more than you. There will always be someone who has less. None of that matters. You need to judge yourself by your goals and nothing else.

  • P384. You must learn to handle frustration. You must learn to handle rejection. You must learn to handle financial pressure.


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