You Have to Know What You Want Before You Can Get It…

The catch phrase for the positive thinking movement is to seek “the mind of the millionaire”.  In theory what this means is that by learning the concepts of how to focus our positive emotions and thoughts, we too could achieve the same wealth that millionaires know.  It is regrettable that so much of what the culture knows about some of the great teaching that is part of this movement, such as the writings of Anthony Robbins, is focused on that narrow goal of becoming a millionaire.

What that catch phrase really brings to light and what Anthony Robbins focuses on his writings and seminars is that we can harness the power of the mind to become goal driven and to develop the focus to achieve our hopes and dreams.  Putting it that way makes the temptation to become more informed about what Anthony Robbins really teaches much more interesting.  While none of us would turn down the chance to be independently wealthy, which is what “becoming a millionaire” really means, financial wealth is not all there is to using the force of your ability to focus your mind to achieve your dreams and to fulfill your destiny.

What Anthony Robbins really teaches is that we all have certain high ambitions and “dreams” that we may have once held as our destiny in life.  But sometimes life with its trials and tribulations combined with failures and set backs have caused those dreams to fade and we have replaced those dreams with excuses and come to “settle for” something less than what we deserve and what we can achieve if we can recapture that dream and the passion to go after it.

It isn’t enough though to just set out on this quest to “fulfill your destiny” because that kind of platitude is not specific enough to set off your internal focus and dedication to keep pushing past diversions and set backs and sustain the focus until you achieve success.  To energize that process, you need to put some flesh and blood on that dream and get specific about what success really means to you.

For one thing, knowing specifically what your goal is the first step toward knowing how to get there.  Part of the process of making a far away goal become a reality in your life is an exercise called visualization.  Through visualization, you literally create a very vivid mental image of how you see your goal or your deepest wish to come true.  There are two big values to the exercise of visualization.  The first is that when you can “see” the object of your ambitions, it becomes real in your mind and in your thoughts and emotions.  That reality is the first step of bringing that goal or dream to concrete reality.  In other words, if you can visualize it, that is the first step of making it real.

The second value that visualization can bring to you is that when you can put specific and detailed imagery to your goal in life, the path to getting there often becomes very clear.  When you know what you want and you know that to some degree of detail, the differences between your life now and how life will be when you have realized you dream become vividly clear.  Often there is a moment when your visualization reaches a sufficient level of detail that suddenly the path between you and success becomes so clear to you that you can (and should) take a piece of paper and create a step by step plan to get you from where you are to the realization of that dream.

Once you have that broad plan of attack, each step takes on greater and greater detail.  Of course, the step toward success that you need the most detail about is the first step.  But when you see how to start down the road to success, you can easily create the task steps that will take you from where you are to the completion of that first step.  Whether that means simply registering for some classes at the junior college or preparing to sell your home so you can move to the place where your dream to come true, visualization helps you make your plan which you can then carry out systematically as you drive toward that ultimate goal.

“What if?”

That is a pretty powerful two-word question.  But this is the type of question that we can learn how to ask again from the teachings of Anthony Robbins.  In fact, the art of asking questions is at the heart of the Robbins message.   But the questioning talents that we can learn from a seminar or book by Anthony Robbins are just that – skills.  They are questions that are carefully designed to help us turn around the way we think and the way we react to life so we turn ourselves into winners who are on an upward path toward success.

Using this technique of employing questions will empower you in how you react to what life dishes out.  It is both a different way of reacting to daily occurrences and a discipline that will cause a remarkable change in how you think and even in how you behave.  That is because the kinds of questions you learn to pose to yourself are questions that challenge you to bigger and better things.  And when those questions replace negative statements, you are laying a path to success.

An example will go a long way.  Suppose you want to get into a certain school which will enable you to achieve a dream job of yours.  After sending off for the application materials, you get back the package from the school and there are a lot of requirements of you to even qualify to get into the school.  And by the nature of the entrance requirements, you suspect that you might have a hard time being a success once you got accepted to attend the school.

There is a natural reaction you might have which is to make a decisive statement to yourself like, “I will never be able to qualify to even start going to the school”.  But that is a negative declarative statement that we sometimes use to prepare ourselves to accept defeat.  The Anthony Robbins method would have us turn that around and replace that negative declarative statement with one or two questions such as…

“What do I have to do to get started on the application process?”
“How great would it be to even complete the application requirements?”
“What is to stop me from getting started?”

You can see from these questions that they are enabling questions.  These questions take you an opposite direction from the negative self-talk you naturally are inclined to use which give you permission to not try and by not trying, to fail.  These questions open the door for success.  They both ask that age old question of “why not?” and they put a challenge at your feet to at least take the first step on that long road to success.

You can see the genius that Robbins has built into this kind of self enabling question asking.  This is a middle ground between simple positive thinking and negative self-talk that is so paralyzing.  Positive thinking would have you make a positive affirmation like “I can get into that school if I can visualize myself getting in.”  But even if you discover sufficient faith inside yourself to believe positive affirmations, simple positive affirmations miss the boat in one important way.  They do not empower you to take action and begin the path to success one step at a time.

Positive questions like in our example are grounded in the firm belief that you can succeed at the goal that is ahead of you.  But they go to the next level of challenging yourself to discover how to be a success.  By turning each negative statement you might feel into a positive question, you enable your own active participation in your success.  You are not just going to hold your breathe and believe in “The Secret” or any other external force that is working on your behalf.  While those forces are at work, you are doing the best thing you can do to empower the law of the universe to work for you.  You are taking action by empowering yourself with action questions that say…

“How hard is it to get started?”  and
“Why can’t I do the first step right now?”

In that way you are off and running on the path of success before you know it.  And once you get some of the work of achieving that success behind you, your momentum will make you unstoppable.

Why Changing Your Life is Good for Your Kids…

One of the great values that you get from learning the principles taught by Anthony Robbins is how to focus on what really matters to you in life and to set your priorities correctly.  But there is a disconnect between understanding what your priorities are and being able to do something about them.  Too often we give lip service to the areas of life that deserve most of your attention and actually giving those areas priority time and energy every day.

This is especially true when it comes to your family and raising kids.  If you wrote the top five priorities in your life, your children and family life would rank high in that short list.  Most of us are concerned about our children.  Worry about whether you are doing a good job being mom or dad ranks as one of the biggest concerns most adults worry about every day.

We know that the best thing you can do for your kids is to give them not only your quality time but quantity time with you.  If you could plug in with your children for several hours a day, you would understand them better and be better able to speak to their hopes and fears and guide them at each stage of their lives.  Moreover, if the communication lines were stronger with your kids, you would not worry as much about whether you were doing a good job as a parent because you would know what is going on with your children.  And that is what good parents do.

As odd as it may seem, the answer to how to fix the problem of real versus real priorities may lie in the teachings of Anthony Robbins.  The heart of what Robbins teaches is first to understand and document what your real priorities are in life.  But Robbins doesn’t stop there.  Instead, he goes to the next level of identifying what are the enemies of your time and what is getting in the way of making your stated priorities your real priorities which get your quality time each day.

If you evaluate each hour of your day, you know what is robbing you of your time.  Of course, you do have to do your job and take care of the concerns of life.  But what Robbins teaches is that we often allow hobbies, social engagements that do not contribute to our core priorities and distractions to take away from the time we give to what is really important including time with your kids.

A good example is phone calls.  Suppose you set aside two hours to just be with your children to play with them, help them with their homework or talk to them about things that are on their minds.  But that phone just keeps on ringing.  Each time it rings it might be a member of your parents association, someone from the church, a solicitor or someone else who wants fifteen minutes of your evening for what is to you a non-priority conversation.  But you can make a decision that the only kinds of phone call that will get any of your priority time are emergencies.  By investing in a simple caller ID system, you can know who is calling you.  And then you just need the discipline not to answer calls that are not emergencies during the hours you have set aside for your kids.

By using tools and the discipline you learn from Anthony Robbins, you can give your children the time they deserve from you.  And when you do that and you become the parent you really want to be, your life will change and so will your children lives for the better.  That is a wonderful outcome of learning the power of focus from Anthony Robbins teachings.

Why Having a Million Dollars is a Bad Goal…

The word “millionaire” dominates the positive thinking world.  That word has become a byword for phenomenal success and the realization of your dreams.  It dominates The Secret and dozens if not hundreds of books, articles and web site devoted to teaching you and I how to use the power of your mind to make good come to you and to take that power and become a millionaire.

Here is the problem.  What is a millionaire?  A millionaire, at a very basic definition is a person who owns one million dollars of money.  Now you can play around about if that wealth is represented in the form of an actual bank balance or it exists in form of holdings such as homes, stocks and bonds.  But the definition holds that a millionaire is defined by a certain some of financial wealth.  And the fact that the word “millionaire” dominates the world of positive thinking and self-empowerment would give you the impression that getting money is the only goal.

It is helpful to recognize that probably the most successful writer and teacher on how to turn your life around, Anthony Robbins, does not focus on that specific sum of money as the final judgment of whether you have realized your dreams in life.  And because his teaching gives us greater depth of what it means to be able to summon your powers of self-motivation to achieve success, that teaching moves us away from the idea that “becoming a millionaire” is the end all and be all of success.

It isn’t bad to want to be able to afford a nice lifestyle for you and your family.  It isn’t bad to want to reach a level of success that you and others can see that you are successful and that visual signal of success is in the form of wealth.  But to fixate on money and on a specific amount of money at that robs the teachings on self-enablement that are what make the books and seminars of Anthony Robbins so helpful to millions of people.

By letting the realization of a large sum of money become the central goal of any self-enablement program turns you from looking within yourself to find what it means to you to be a success and forces you toward a quest of seeking monetary wealth.  It also means that if someone who is trying to achieve the goal of using the law of attraction and other self enablement tools to get a million dollars suddenly lucks into money, he will think that his quest is over because he got a million dollars.

What Anthony Robbins teaches is not about money at all.  Money may be part of your dream in life and once you start your climb out of failure to success, money may be part of it.  But everyone in the world doesn’t have the life of becoming a millionaire in their destiny.  And by removing the trapping that getting a million dollars is the goal of all who learn to use positive thinking techniques, Robbins’ teaching allows you to look to your own calling in life to discover what your destiny is on this earth.  And once you find that destiny from within, Robbins gives you the abilities and skills to reach out and grab that goal and make it your own.

It is only in this way that any of us can come to a place of final satisfaction.  Robbins cannot define for me what my destiny is any more than I can define that for you.  But Robbins does teach you and I how to reach out and make our dreams come true.  And that is by far a better gift than even getting a million dollars.

What Anthony Robbins Teaches about Emotions and Meaning…

When you attend an Anthony Robbins seminar, you will come out of that experience with your eyes opened to a lot of new ideas.  And probably the most amazing new ideas you will learn from Robbins’ teaching will have to do with how you tick as a person.

The human heart and mind are complicated things and much of the reason why we get derailed in life has to do with our lack of understanding of how we tick as people.  That is one of the real values of learning the principles that come from reading an Anthony Robbins book or hearing him speak.  You begin to decipher yourself and in doing so, you get control in ways that were never possible before.

Our emotions are an area that we sometimes have trouble understanding how we can get control.  They seem to come and go under their own set of rules and many times we become slaves to our emotions.  You knew before you picked up your first Robbins book that this is a problem.  When sudden surges of emotions take over and hinder your work or your time with someone important, that is when we need some methods for becoming the boss of our emotions and not let them boss us around any more.

Robbins does not teach that we should suppress or get rid of our emotions.  Not only would that dehumanize us if that were even possible, it is not even desirable.  Our emotions are our control panel to our inner machinery.  It is our emotions that surface our true values and what really is important to us.  Suppressing the emotions would not only cut us off from important information about our priorities, it is dangerous to us as people.  To be healthy people, our emotions must have a healthy way to be expressed and to be part of who we are every day.  The key is to take control of the meaning behind our emotions and in doing so, take control of how our emotions motivate us.

The link between meaning and emotion seems a bit odd when you first hear it.  But the more you think about it, the more sense it makes.  Basically, it is grounded in the fact that our emotions are tied to what we value and what is important to us.  Hence, we will get emotional about things relative to our own family but not things that happen to other people’s family.  Emotions also are tied to our ambitions in life.  So if I am frustrated in my goals at work, that causes anger, despair, frustration and other negative emotions but if I see things “going my way”, strong positive emotions will arise.

Maybe the biggest break through of Anthony Robbins teachings about the linkage of meanings and emotions is that this knowledge gives us power to control our emotions, not by trying to suppress our natural instincts but by understanding the priorities and areas of personal devotion that cause emotions to come to the surface, sometimes inappropriately.

This can happen easily at work.  It is good to be ambitious for your personal goals at work.  But when you place a high value or meaning on your personal ambitions so much so that they conflict with the ambitions of peers at work, conflicts can arise.  By understanding how this works, you can mitigate your ambitions by seeing that your own career goals must also be balanced with the goals of the company and of your fellow workers.  By beginning to see them as partners and friends and not competitors, you capture control of the emotions that may have lead to ugly outbursts in the past.

You can apply this principle to any area where emotion is hurting your progress in life or causing you pain or embarrassment rather than joy and the power emotion can give you to accomplish your dreams.  Many of Anthony Robbins’ teachings help us become the boss of not only what emotions we feel but what we feel emotional about.  There is no doubt that getting that kind of control over this volatile part of your personality may be one of the most powerful benefits you can get from any of Anthony Robbins outstanding teachings.

One of the real draws that bring people to the teachings of Anthony Robbins and other positive thinking teachers is the idea of learning to think like a millionaire.  The appeal is that if you can learn to think like a millionaire thinks and live life like a millionaire lives, then by the power of the law of attraction, the millions of dollars that millionaires have will come your way.

Anthony Robbins can teach you to think like a millionaire but there is a fundamental flaw in the formula as we just described it.  The flaw is that if you boil down the real motivation that someone who was going after learning Robbins teaching based on the goal of learning to become a millionaire, that motivation is to have a lot of money.  And within the community of people, you may meet at any Anthony Robbins seminar or some other meeting devoted to learning his ideas, you will find a significant number of your fellow followers are, as they say, “in it for the money”.

If that is the case, there is a tragedy about to happen when that philosophy finally comes to a head.  That mindset will eventually become frustrated waiting for the arrival of the money.  They do all the steps, perform their requisite mental gymnastics on display for the law of attraction but still, where is the money?  You can sense that frustration when you read message board on positive thinking or law of attraction web sites.

“I have been following the rules of the law of attraction for six months.  I have been waiting.  But still I have not seen anything change.  What am I doing wrong?”

This is a common complaint.  Its heartbreaking but if we told that person what they did wrong it is in that one phrase “I have been waiting”.  The true motivation of that follower is not to learn to live a better life and to change the way you fundamentally think and approach life so you can realize your dreams.  The motivation of that person is to get the money.

That attitude misses the boat entirely.  That is because what millionaires do and how they think has almost nothing to do with their money.  A million dollars does not make you a millionaire and a millionaire is one whether he has a million dollars, fifteen dollars or a billion.  That is because a millionaire thinks about wealth and value.  And when your true mission in life is about creating wealth, then money and all that goes with it just follows along.

Wealth is created when you create value.  When R. Buckminster Fuller invented the Geodesic Dome, he created wealth.  That is because he followed his dream and gave something of value to mankind.  And the result of contributing real wealth to society is the reward of money and other tangible rewards.  Bill Gates did the same thing when he created Windows and the other many PC innovations Microsoft has given to the world.  Gates created genuine wealth and the monetary benefits just came along with hat wealth.

This is the heart of learning to think like a millionaire.  Instead of thinking about money, we rewire our minds to make it our goal to create something that contributes genuine value to society or to our field of expertise.  And when you do that, society rewards your contribution with real wealth.  Your focus is never on the money at all.  Your focus is on realizing that dream that is within you and bringing to reality that special contribution tot eh world that you were born to give to society.  When that happens, your dreams come true and many other people benefit as well.  You may become a millionaire but more importantly, you become wealthy.  And that is the best destiny there is.

If you study meditation or one of the eastern disciplines that combine mental and physical discipline, it is easy to see that by putting yourself into training, you can develop an ability to sustain concentration and to focus your mind that will pay off in a lot of ways.  In fact, that is why these programs are so popular.  Most of us realize at some level that our inability to focus and concentrate on one thing for extended periods of time is a big hold up to moving forward toward your goals in life.

It is no wonder then that the methods taught by Anthony Robbins also deal to a large extent on giving you a greater capability to focus.  But the focus Robbins teaches is much more integrated into your life than just being able to read a book or meditate for long periods of time.  The focus you will learn to develop and use to accomplish your goals based on the teachings of Anthony Robbins will enable you to sustain a vision of your goal and your dreams so you can continue to move in a positive way toward that goal despite what is going on around you day to day.

One aspect of the teachings of Anthony Robbins and others who advocate developing greater powers of the mind is how to sustain that passion over time.  We all know that just getting excited about achieving great success and wealth at an Anthony Robbins rally does not mean that you will automatically “arrive” at your ideal place in life by the next day.  Robbins’ teachings are a realistic guide to success, not an Aladdin’s lamp.

The path to wealth and success using the methods you learn from Anthony Robbins first involve a reorientation of your own mind and the learning of some new skills and abilities.  That alone doesn’t happen overnight.  It will take some commitment and discipline on your part to continue to study the materials that Robbins can supply to reorient and reprogram your mind so negative and self-defeating thinking patterns are no longer the norm.  Instead, you will learn methods of asking questions and seeking opportunity in every circumstance that will always be used as a path to your ultimate goal, whatever that is for you.

We all know how common it is for life to bring tremendous interruptions and distractions to your mind.  The people who are successful in life are those who can deal with those distractions and temporary “emergencies” and never lose focus on their ultimate goal.  This takes an almost religious commitment to success and to never losing sight of what you are seeking in life.

It also requires a focus that comes from an internal passion that drives you toward success no matter how long it takes and no matter how much resistance the world, your life or your friends and family introduce.  When your focus, passion and dogged determination are too great for any distraction, you can’t help but be successful.

This is not to say that the ability to focus your mind that you can get from a regimen of mediation and mental training isn’t an outstanding additional skill to learn as you reprogram yourself to become a success in reaching your goal.  Meditation is an outstanding discipline that will help you learn serenity and how to focus your thoughts on a moment by moment basis.

By combining those skills with the focus on always looking toward success so your positive energies bring that success to you, you are taking the best of many disciplines and doing “anything it takes” to win in life.  And that kind of commitment is what will give you the focus you need to finally win in life and in reaching your dreams using what you have been taught by Anthony Robbins.

Maybe it is because the category of work that Anthony Robbins does might be called “motivational speaking” or “self help books”, there are some who do not give credit to the man for the tremendous work he has done and continues to do.  You don’t have to subscribe to every credo that is part of the teaching of Anthony Robbins to appreciate that he is capable of introducing any of us to a new way of thinking and a more positive approach to living.  And that is his great contribution which is what makes Robbins one of the leaders in his field.

It is one thing to teach something or even write a bunch of books that might be successful.  There are lots of areas of expertise where a tremendous personal commitment is not called for.  You can teach and write about history, chemistry or physics and be a success if you just get the principles across to your students.  But the subject matter that Robbins focuses on is not an impersonal and theoretical field.  To both educate and convince his audiences that what he is teaching will help them, there is a greater demand on the teacher who in this case is Anthony Robbins himself.

That is because for the principles of motivation and success to be proven correct, more is needed from the student than just to listen politely and store the information away.  Robbins knows well that the only way he is successful is if the very lives of his listeners are changed.  The principles that he teaches have to be adopted at a very personal level in order to bear fruit in the lives of the audience of Robbins’ talks.  They are principles that will alter the listener’s self-concept, his or her personal philosophy of life and even the way each person lives his or her life on a daily basis.

It is for that reason that Anthony Robbins has to be more than just a teacher and author.  He has to be a role model.  And because his teachings so dramatically emphasize attitude and outlook on life, those principles must be dramatically on display when he speaks.  So one reason that Robbins has achieved such success in his chosen field is that he deeply believes what he is teaching.  He believes it because he is living it and the power of his commitment to helping others live better lives through the principles of NLP and positive thinking comes through when he speaks at his seminars and even in the text of the books and articles he publishes.

In addition to a deep commitment to what he teaches that it is true and that it will work for you and I, Robbins brings a single minded focus on passing along what he has learned and what has made him a success to others.  That focus is evident to anyone who sees or hears Robbins speak.  That focus also models a 100% commitment to seeing your life turn around.  It takes that kind of commitment to both teach and role model great life change and Robbins is a master of both explaining how we can see greater success by managing our thoughts and attitudes and in showing that those teachings work through personal example.

But probably one of the greatest assets Anthony Robbins brings with him to any engagement or speaking opportunity he has is his relaxed and confident manner accompanied by a winning sense of humor that makes taking in an Anthony Robbins seminar both educational and enjoyable.  The humor that Robbins uses when he speaks is, of course, just good public speaking on display.  But it is more than that.  It also communicates a love for what he does and a love for the ideas he is teaching.

That winning charm and personality combined with his deep commitment and focus are what make the ideas that Anthony Robbins teaches so contagious and why so many people walk away from a Robbins seminar “converts”.  And when that conversion results in lasting change in the lives of the people who learn so much from Anthony Robbins, that is a change that his followers are vocally thankful they got to go through because of the teachings Anthony Robbins gives to the world.

Not long ago, a book called “The Secret” came out that propelled the positive thinking movement into the spotlight.  While there was a lot of humor and curiosity about The Secret, it might have sparked your curiosity about whether there is any substance to this teaching.  Your curiosity is justified, as is your caution.

The purpose of this article is to help you find ways to begin to understand more about the positive thinking concept and how to make those first steps toward investigating if it could really be a benefit to you.  First of all, because you have already begun your quest to find out more about this line of teaching.  The very fact that you are reading this article shows that you have a curiosity and you are not going to let rumors or public images that make the movement took foolish for your opinion.  The fact that you are the kind of person that makes up your own mind about things rather than follow the crowd shows that you are also the kind of person that could reap the most benefit from teachings such as you found in The Secret.

There is an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.  So you have made that first step and the next step is to find out where you can go next without making a huge commitment and without spending a lot of money.  After all, you are still at the curiosity stage.  But if you learn that there is some very real and a valid teaching here that could empower you to greater success in life, that is worth investigating.

One place that a lot of people go to find out more is the book that got the momentum moving in the first place, The Secret.  Now, it is a fine book that is well written and it is definitely inspirational.  However, some have noticed that it is written in rather poetic language and the use of parable or illustrative language is strong.  To put it more bluntly, some of us need something that is a little more down to earth and written to the how you and I think.  We need a teacher that knows where we are and can guide us step by step toward a greater understanding about how we can use the power of our minds to achieve greater success in life.

For many that writer is Anthony Robbins.  Robbins came up from a simple life to where he is now holding a position of one of the premier teachers about self-actualization and positive thinking.  At one time, Anthony Robbins was barely getting by as a janitor with little vision or ambition in his life.  He followed a path to greater vision, greater passion and through that path he discovered the principles that helped him overcome self-limiting behavior and free his mind to realize his fullest potential.

Perhaps one reason we can connect to Anthony Robbins is he teaches that we all have a destiny and an inner calling or dream but most of us have not realized it.  In fact, life has a way of stealing away our energy and our ability to strive to become what we were put here to be and to “settle for less”.  While we might not be miserable, if you feel that you were made for greater things and that you just need a guide to help you release that greatness within you again, then Anthony Robbins is a perfect guide for you.

It isn’t hard to find seminars, books and web sites that can give you tons of additional information about how to move forward to learn more.  By taking our little clues and planning how you will expand your interest in what you can learn about unleashing the greatness within you and realizing your dream once and for all, you can slowly begin to develop a second step then a third and then a fourth.

Before long you will be walking along a path that will bring you closer and closer to seeing your dream become a reality and seeing you realize the wealth that will be yours when you fulfill your destiny.  Then it will be worth it that you took that first step of the journey of a thousand miles.  It is a journey worth taking.

In the business world, you know a good leader when you see one.  So when you set out to reach that level of authority and responsibility, you too can become a leader in your field or businesses, you want those traits too.  Some of the qualities of a good leader in business come from experience in their field of expertise.  People who come up through the ranks know their jobs well which gives them ability to lead others who are doing those jobs now.

But many qualities of leadership come from the inner person.  A leader is someone who people naturally trust and who inspires the best in others.  You can get all the experience in the world.  But to see those inner qualities of leadership begin to shine out of your inner person, it might take some help.  Anthony Robbins is a noted author and speaker on how to get the most from yourself and how to develop your abilities to become a success in all areas of life.  Small wonder the teachings of Anthony Robbins are a perfect place to go to become a great business leader.  When you conquer those personal qualities that can come from learning the teachings of Robbins, financial and career success just naturally follow behind.

The path of learning how to become proficient in using the mental skills that Anthony Robbins teaches don’t come overnight.  Many require a rewiring of your mind, relearning skills and reprogramming your priorities in life.  So it might take weeks or even months before learning to focus your mind and generate the mental energy to achieve your goals comes naturally.  But that discipline is worth staying with because mental discipline is a prime qualification of good leadership.

As a business leader, will power and the ability to find the focus your team needs to have to solve problems and become successful in a business setting is a perfect extension of the focus and disincline you will learn from Anthony Robbins that you are using in your private life.  Not only will you be able to bring to the business world a much improved mental capability for sustained concentration, you will be able to add to that an even more important leadership skill.  You will be able to discern what is important to your business objectives and what is a distraction so you can keep yourself and those who are following your leadership continuously focused on the goals at hand.

There may be no more important leadership skill than to be able to pursue a business objective with a strong will, an unwillingness to fail and an ability to push aside distractions and stay on course until the job is done.  When you demonstrate that skill, you will inspire those who are following your leadership and the success you achieve on each project will only add momentum to your rapidly accelerating business career.

By becoming a student and disciple of Anthony Robbins, you will begin making use of exercises to develop your mental discipline and your ability to focus on a goal for days or months on end.  That talent at not taking your eye off of the ultimate prize is rare inside or outside of business and it will benefit you tremendously in keeping your business on track and on hitting your objectives along the way.

Moreover, you will come to the business world with a calm, a serenity and a self confidence that naturally is part of you because you have learned mental control in your private times of reflection and discipline using the Anthony Robbins methods.  These skills will give you self-confidence that will take you up the latter of business success and make you a leader that others will want to follow.  That is what leadership is all about.

Just because you are taking an interest in the teachings of Anthony Robbins, that does not make you a “disciple” of his.  That may be one of the greatest criticisms and misunderstandings that people who don’t understand what Anthony Robbins teaches have and it often comes across as crude humor.  Some call Robbins a “positive thinking guru”.  First of all, his teachings have much more depth than to just categorize them as “positive thinking” or “self help” or to pigeonhole Robbins as a motivational speaker.

But of more concern is the mistake of seeing Anthony Robbins as a “guru”.  Robbins is not preaching a new religion or seeking “converts” or disciples at all.  He has simply discovered the methods and disciplines that can lead all of us to greater success and wealth in our lives.  These methods have worked for him so he wishes to share them with others.  There is nothing weird or bad about that desire at all and literally tens of thousands have benefited from Anthony Robbins’ teaching.

If Anthony Robbins were trying to build a  following or a “church”, he would teach that we should believe in him and his teachings would become a cult of personality.  While Robbins does have tremendous credibility because what he teaches has been proven true in his life and in the lives of others, we are not invited to believe IN Anthony Robbins but to just believe him when he explains how we can achieve the same amazing results in our lives that he has enjoyed by following the principles of positive self actualization and using the power of the will and the mind to go after your dreams in life.

But Robbins does advocate that you go through a conversion to begin believing in someone else with much greater conviction and devotion.  That person you should believe in is you.  That is because the dream that will be realized when you begin to unleash the power that is already within you will be a power that does not come from some otherworldly outside force.  That power comes from you.  It is the power of your dream, your passion to succeed and that deeply buried inner person who is a winner once the layers of excuses and self-defeating thought patterns are defeated.

“Believe in yourself” sounds like the rather empty advice that our parents gave us when we were young to try to get us to do our homework.  But the approach we learn from the seminars and books by Anthony Robbins is far more practical.  That is because instead of just trying to “buck us up” with a pep talk, Robbins helps us identify myths and self-defeating stories we tell ourselves that keep us from becoming the person we were always meant to be.

Where do these myths and stories come from?  They are coping mechanisms we use to mask the pain and frustration that come from failure or bad experiences in life.  It is too easy to say, “Well if you fail, just pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again”.  If that area of life where the failure occurred is intensely personal like a loss of career or the failure of a marriage or love affair, the damage to your self-concept can be devastating.

The power of emotions to put “punch” behind the excuses and stories we tell to rationalize our failures is understandable.  The emotional system is the most powerful mechanism for self-preservation we have.  But the fact remains that rationalization and creating myths to make the pain of a loss in the past are still falsehoods that will keep us from ever achieving the success and wealth we are capable of and that we deserve.

Only you can face down those “band-aids” that you put in place to cover up a wound.  It is time for that band-aid to come off.  If you lost a job because of you made mistakes, tear off the band-aid.  If your love life suffered because you and your lover did not share the same values and he or she dumped you, that hurts but its time to tear off the band-aid and let that wound heal.  When you do, you will experience release from those past hurts.  And you will be empowered to great success in the future.  And that is what we all really want.

Many adults go through life with an aching doubt in the back of their minds.  That doubt is that somehow you did not live up to your potential in life.  We have good reason to suspect that we settled for less in life.  When we are young, our minds are full of dreams and ambitions.  While many of them are games, somehow we know that there is a dream or a calling inside us that defines why we were put on this earth in the first place.

The process of growing up too often involves the loss of that dream.  But you know a secret that we all know that none of us talk about.  The dream doesn’t die.  It just goes idle and lays in a secret place in your heart and mind.  You can feel it there and it represents who you thought you would be when you grew up and the hopes and aspirations for greatness that you once held dear.

So what happened?  Growing up involves some adjustment to your dreams.  Perhaps you adapted the dream to a real life job that is now your profession.  But even if you enjoy your work, there may be that hidden desire to do something great or to achieve greatness in a way that will be remarkable and memorable perhaps even after your time on this earth is over.

But we do have to shift and adjust how we make our way through life especially after we reach adulthood.  So we make those adjustments and the needs of right now push our youthful dreams out of our minds.  In other words, we “settle for less” than what we always dreamed we could be.  That doesn’t mean what you have done with your life is not worthwhile.  Most of us hold down jobs, buy homes, maybe have a spouse and children and that is an honorable estate.  But no amount of rationalization or self-congratulations makes that nagging feeling that you settled for less go away.

What may be actually happening is that your dream never did die.  And it is dwelling deep in your subconscious whispering to you to grasp that dream again, make it your active dream and find a way to live up to your potential and stop settling for less.  That nagging feeling could make you uncomfortable but it shouldn’t. If your dream is still alive and nagging you, that means you still can make it a reality.  You just have to know how.

We have a teacher who has walked down this same path as we are experiencing.  He had settled for less and his dream would not leave him alone.  So he decided to never settle for less.  Instead, he set out to only settle for more and to set a high standard and never rest until he reached it.  The lessons he learned about motivation, self-actualization and using your will power and the power of your thoughts became the life’s work of Anthony Robbins.  So that is good news if you, like many of us, suspect that you still can make that original youthful dream become a reality.

The teachings of Anthony Robbins fall under the category of positive thinking.  But he can take you from where you are and empower you to put aside the instinct to make excuses and settle for less.  In doing so, you will raise the bar of your expectations.  You will raise your standards about what you expect out of life, what you expect to do with your life and what rewards you expect to achieve.

There is no age limit to set out on this quest.  Just because your dream was birthed in your youth and you are now an adult, that dream never got old or lost its meaning and value.  It is still just as potent as it ever was.  And now that you know that you are not alone in your desire to stop settling for less, you can connect with the teachings of Anthony Robbins.  Then you can only be willing to settle when it is for the best you can be and the realization of your dream.  By settling for more, you are fulfilling your destiny.  That is a quest worth going on.

There is an evolution of thought we have to go through if we are going to reach for the ultimate in what we want from life.  That is the goal any of us have that decide to take advantage of the teachings of people like Anthony Robbins who know how to guide us to great wealth and achievement.  There is a cycle of commitment we go through.  It might start with curiosity and then with taking on the learning cycle of attending Anthony Robbins seminars and reading his books.

At some point, the teaching begins to take hold and you actually find yourself changing in how you think and how you view the world.  This might even happen before you make a conscious decision to implement the teachings of Anthony Robbins in your life.  But even at a very early level, you will begin to see the results.  You will be more energetic and find yourself able to control your thoughts easier and focus better on goals that you set for yourself.

But there comes a moment when your dedication to the discipline of using Robbins’ teachings to reach for only the best in life will cross a threshold and you will be ready to become a true disciple of the process and take seriously your commitment to achieving wealth and becoming a master of your own thoughts and emotions.  This is an important moment that much of the training you have been going through in the teaching of Anthony Robbins has been preparing you for.  But it is a moment when empowering yourself to achieve your dreams stops being a hobby or a game and it becomes the most important thing you are doing in your life.

It isn’t the teaching that makes it important.  The teaching is a resource, a tool and a vehicle to take you from a life of limitations and of accepting defeat in your life to a life of mental power and the ability to focus your energies to succeed in any goal you set out to conquer.  You will learn some important skills along the way.  You will learn to control your thoughts so negative thoughts that seek to trap you in defeat are not welcome in your mind.  You will also learn to work with your emotions rather than against them so you can use your emotions as power generators to propel you toward your goals.

But perhaps the most potent skills and tools Anthony Robbins’ teachings will give you will be the power of focus and self will.  At first identifying what your dream meant to you and what “achieving wealth” looked like in your mind was something you were playing with because it was fascinating.  But as you have become more and more serious that this goal was not an option but the central quest of this part of your life, your focus becomes crystal clear and your self will and resolve so stubborn that you will NOT let down, make excuses and settle for less ever again.  That may have been how you handled your dreams early in life but that will not do any more.

You have your own reasons for taking your discipline to realize real wealth that seriously.  But the teachings of Anthony Robbins are clear that passing through that mental threshold where compromise is not an option is a crucial step that you must accomplish if you hope to see success in your quest for fulfillment and satisfaction.

Where that distant dream was once a whim, it now defines who you are.  What you have learned in your early months of the program is that your dreams always defined you.  You just did not live up to who you were meant to be because you settled for second best.  But Robbins has shown you that second best is never good enough.   And because your will and focus are firm, you will not stop until you have realized your dream and the wealth and accomplishment you were made to achieve has been accomplished.  You will never be the same again because you learned to live the life of a winner.  And that is a very good thing indeed.

Sometimes we go too easy on ourselves.  What that means that as you move through life, its easy to make excuses for lowering your standards about what you hope to achieve in life.  It is a gradual process.  At first, you start out with high standards and dreams for the future that include great achievement that will get you wealth and recognition.

But over time as we go from experience to experience, that vision starts to come down out of the clouds and our true vision for who we will be in life changes and comes closer to who you are today.  That is not to say that where you are in life is a bad thing.  But it doesn’t live up to that grand vision that you had as a youth and that dream of greatness was a dream that may have never really left you.  If it is still in the back of your heart telling you that you can be better than you are, you may have fallen victim to a natural human instinct called making excuses.

How we get from a youthful state where we are full of dreams to our final way of life that settles for less is the subject of much of the writings of famous positive thinking teachers, most notably Anthony Robbins.  Robbins knows well this story because it is his story.  But he has another story to tell.  Because he found out later in life that you can stop making excuses and you can stop letting yourself off the hook.  And by raising the bar and setting your standard for what is acceptable in life to that original dream, you empower yourself to reach that dream, even if this process happens late in adulthood.  You are never too old or too young to dream and never too old to activate that part of you that was destined for greatness.

The excuses we make that allow us to gradually lower the standard for what we expect from life are very easy to make.  Some of them sound like this…

• Well I did not get my law degree but I did get a degree in accounting so I can make a good living.  That is good enough.
• I ran into some rough breaks clawing my way to the top of my profession.  But I can settle for a lower position because it pays the bills.  That is good enough.
• Getting to the top is all politics anyway.  I would rather work at a lower level than fight politics to reach for my dream.  At least by settling for a job I know I can do, I don’t have to worry about being laid off.  And that is good enough.

Making excuses can become a real habit once you get used to it.  The psychology of excuse making is easy to understand.  We go through life learning to adjust our self-concept in light of both failures and successes we encounter.  Failures hurt our ego and our sense of self worth.  So by lowering the expectation and making an excuse, we give ourselves permission to fail because holding that standard high is emotionally difficult.

The good news is that you can get the standard of what you consider to be success raised to its highest level and you can do so without making excuses.  It will take some instruction because you need someone who understands how to reverse decades of accepting defeat and lowered standards.  It won’t work to just decide to go for hat original dream without some mental and spiritual preparation.

Anthony Robbins is uniquely gifted in helping you do those mental and spiritual preparations to start a new chapter in your life.  In this chapter, you will set your eyes on that original dream.  You will learn ways to deal with set backs and failures that do not make excuses but also do not have you living in guilt.

Instead you will learn to gain from every change or circumstance and mine from it the lessons to be learned as well as the hidden opportunities that come with set backs.  These are valuable lessons that can literally change you from someone who makes excuses to one of those phenomenal success stories.  It is just a matter of learning how and Anthony Robbins can take you there.

When you attend an Anthony Robbins seminar, the experience will give an entirely new meaning to the phrase “motivational speaker”.  That is because it is almost impossible to attend one of Robbins’ events and not come out of there motivated to change your life.  And if he does energize you to take action on becoming a better person and taking charge of your destiny perhaps for the first time ever, that is worth the price of admission entirely.

Anthony Robbins is naturally inspirational.  This isn’t just because he is a gifted speaker.  It is because he genuinely believes deeply in the things he is teaching and he wants to pass the truths of self-actualization along to you.  He has the passion of an evangelist and a missionary for the truth and that passion is contagious.  Yes, it does sell books making Robbins wealthy.  But the seminar you attend and the books you bring home do more than just make Anthony Robbins wealthy.  They make you wealthy with the same richness of knowledge that changed Robbins from a night janitor going nowhere in his life to the potent force for change he is today.

There is a good reason that the backbone of the magic that Anthony Robbins brings to his seminars and his writings is motivation.  He knows that maybe the biggest enemy of change in your life is inertia and mental laziness that just accepts things as they are and that things can never change.  That willingness to compromise and not rise up from within to defeat complacency is what keeps most of us stuck in the rut of where we are today.  Complacency tells you to come to terms with the failings, the lost dreams and the distance you have come from your hopes about life and to “grow up” and accept defeat without a struggle.

Anthony Robbins first lights a fire under you that the lies of complacency in your life are just that – lies.  You get to that place because as part of avoidance of the pain that comes when you have a disappointment or failure in something you were trying to accomplish.  The new information we get from a Robbins teaching is that there is no reason to feel pain or embarrassment or sadness because something didn’t work out or you had a failure in your life.  There is no shame in trying something and failing except the shame of giving up and not trying again to be a success in life.

But the real value of a Robbins seminar or that you take from reading his books or articles is not the fire he lights under you to get moving on realizing your dreams.  The real values are the skills he gives each of us light a fire under ourselves.  Robbins teaches us to be fired up about change and to tackle this new ambition with vigor and aggressive action.  But more than that, he teaches you to stay fired up to continue the quest for greatness even when you do not have one of Robbins tapes or videos handy to give you that fresh transfusion of enthusiasm.

Because many of the skills Anthony Robbins include new mental disciplines for focus and to defeat negative thoughts and emotions, you also will develop the ability to turn on the motivational speaker inside yourself.  By developing a habit of positive thinking and of visualizing your dream every day, you become your own motivational speaker.  And when you can motivate yourself, you have a power that makes it virtually impossible for anyone or anything to stop you from reaching that dream and then dreaming bigger as you pile success on success as a result of what you learned from Anthony Robbins.

Its What you Think AND Who You Know

Turning your life around isn’t easy.  If you are taking advantage of things you are learning form Anthony Robbins though, you have a distinct advantage.  You have the teaching , the coaching and the role models you need to start to change the way you think so you can see yourself as a winner and you can begin to chart a coarse for success that will really work and isn’t just a pipe dream.

Next to growing from childhood to adulthood and the changes you go through when you get married, there may be no more profound a change to your outlook on life than what you are going through as you implement the teachings of Anthony Robbins in your life.  And just as those two life transitions turned you into a completely different person, learning to realize your dreams and to create genuine wealth as Robbins can teach you will make you so profoundly different that you will almost be unrecognizable.

If you have taken this challenge seriously, you know the rewards that await you when you become a success.  But how you think and what you do with your time and what your priorities are will change too.  And we might as well face it today, that may change who you hang out with and who your friends are.  So just as you are evaluating every aspect of your life in light of your new ambitions to learn to live as a person who knows how to win, every relationship falls under that scrutiny as well.

You can remember in high school how often your parents lectured you about the importance of your friendships and about associating with people who have good goals and are going places in life like you are.  That principle didn’t end just because you are not in high school any more.  Who you spend your time with and their attitudes and how they approach life can have a profound effect on your ability to continue to maintain your focus on your goals and dreams and on sustaining a concentration on a positive mental outlook and how that will make you a winner.

Many times when we are in a “dead end” mental state as you may have been before you began to implement the teachings of Anthony Robbins, we associate with people who also are stuck in a mental rut that is not going anywhere.  They say that misery loves company and when it comes to being with people who share your outlook on life, that concept is always the case.  So as you begin to change how you think and that impacts what you talk about, how you talk about it and how you like to spend your time, that may have an influence on your friendships as well.

A good set of friends who are supportive and are also making changes in their lives for the better can be your greatest asset in your quest to conquer the teachings of Anthony Robbins and to put them to work in your life.  But if your friends mock what you are doing or continue to drag you down with negative thinking and self-pity, you have a simple choice between trying to change them or finding new friends.

The best situation is if you attend an Anthony Robbins seminar together and you and your friends all go on this quest together.  That is a powerful support system and you can become an accountability team to keep each other moving forward to greater heights in implementing the positive life changes you are learning from Robbins.

But if you find that is not happening, the change to your social world may not be something you have to take action on.  As your friends ease away from you and you develop new friendships of people who understand your goals and methods, it might be a natural transition.  As long as it doesn’t take you by surprise, this will be yet another positive change in your life because of the impact of the teachings of Anthony Robbins in your life.

Its Not Just What You Do But What You Do…

The first phase of the Anthony Robbins plan for seeing a complete change to your life is to completely change how you think.  That change is more than just looking through rose-colored glasses.  Instead, it represents a completely new way of viewing events, goals, priorities and relationships in your life.  That unique viewpoint uses the positive energy of your mind and your thought processes to empower you to become a success both in what lies ahead each day and in achieving your life’s goals and dreams, sometimes dreams that seemed completely out of reach.

But it is the next phase of growth, as you become a “convert” to the Anthony Robbins method of self-enablement that will bring the most profound change.  That is because Robbins not only teaches massive change to how you think and view the world, he also empowers you to effect the massive and to take massive and drastic action to start going after your hopes and dreams to see them become a reality.

Anthony Robbins does not present his seminars and write his books to make you somewhat more successful.  If you adopt his teachings, you will see massive success come your way.  But if you are going to be ready to receive that level of success and to be able to make tremendous life change to make room in your life for the realization of your dreams, you have to be radically ready for that kind of change.

Suppose that you had that dream experience that you got that phone call that you had won ten million dollars in the lottery.  Within days, you would see the arrival of vast wealth unlike anything you will have ever imagined before.  Do you think your life would change very much?  Of course it would.  Your life would change radically and dramatically for the better.

Sometimes that kind of change can take people by surprise.  They are not ready to see every aspect of life change massively because of the arrival of tremendous success.  But with your training in Anthony Robbins’ teachings, you not only are going to be ready for tremendous success, you will be making those massive changes so you can step into massive success when it comes your way.

When you sign up for an Anthony Robbins seminar or buy a book, be prepared that what you are about to learn is about more than just going to a lecture or some pleasure reading.  Robbins is going to give you the tools to radically change your life and to see your deepest wishes and dreams become a reality not in some distant imagined future but in the present time.  By the time you get done studying what Robbins has to teach, not only will you have embraced your dreams and become energized to give your all to seeing them become real but you will have a firm step by step plan to make them real holding nothing back and putting everything on the line for that kind of success.

That kind of commitment is worth the investment to step into a world of massive success, wealth and satisfaction because you had the courage to grasp your dreams and then the boldness to reach out and make them a reality.  But for now, prepare your mind and your heart and evaluate your life.  Soon everything will change and you will start on a path that will take you places you only imaged going before.  It will be massive change but it will be change you will overjoyed to see come to pass.  So jump in feet first and take the ride of your life.  In the end, you will know success like you never imaged before.  And you will have had the time of your life along the way.

How to Fit the Teachings of Anthony Robbins into Your Busy Lifestyle…

You may have come to that point as many of us have of realizing that the improvement  you have seen in other people’s lives after reading the books that Anthony Robbins has written is something you want.  Of all of the “positive thinking” authors, Robbins is by far the most successful and there is a reason for that.  His teachings are practical and start where you are and take you step by step to a more positive and fulfilling life.  And along the way, he teaches you the principles of positive thinking, self-affirmation and how to use the power of your thoughts to begin realizing your dreams.

But it is hard to realize your dreams if you don’t have time in your life to read the materials you have purchased and to think about them so you can make them part of your life.  There may be no more frustrating situation than to realize that your life will begin to get better when you can take the time to learn the important lessons Robbins has to teach but you cannot take the time to learn them because your life is so hectic and out of control.

When you look at your bookshelf at the several books you have by Robbins, don’t you wish you had an entire evening a week to just sit and read and work through what Anthony Robbins has to teach?  Well the first thing he would tell you based on what he teaches in his seminars and books is you have to be realistic and start where you are.  By knowing where you, then you have a firm foundation to understand where you are going.

There may be another way for you to begin to absorb the teachings of Robbins’ materials without setting aside entire evening for reading.  One idea is to instead set aside about fifteen to thirty minutes one or two mornings each week.  Instead of trying to fit reading time in at night when you have chores to do, children to tend to and you are tired and just ready for bed, just set your alarm clock ahead by a half hour once or twice a week.

When you rise, don’t give yourself an extensive reading assignment.  Robbins principles are taught in small concepts, each of which is suitable for contemplation and reflection.  In fact, if you digest one of Anthony Robbins’ books slowly by reading just 20-30 minutes a day, you give yourself time to absorb what you have learned and think about it all day long.

So sit down with the book you are trying to conquer and simply read one concept or idea from your current chapter.  Read it slowly and if you need to, read it again or read it out loud.  These ideas are revolutionary and their intent is to literally change how you think.  So once you have read the concept until you understand it, put the book down.  If there are exercises that would help you implement that part of Robbin’s teachings, note them for later.  Now you are ready to start your day.

You have a lot of small moments in your day when you are waiting and your time is not used.  They might come in traffic as you commute in your car or on the bus or train.  Or you may have moments while waiting for a meeting.  Use those small spans of time to reflect on what you learned that morning.  By allowing that teaching to dwell in the back of your mind, it can integrate into your consciousness.

Then by that evening you will begin to have an understanding of what you read that is deeper than you can get with just a quick read.  You will learn more and learn better and before long you will have conquered those materials and know the satisfaction that you are on your way to a better and happier life because you stuck with it.

Much of the writing and the teaching that is put out about using your ability to focus your thoughts and emotions on a goal to achieve great wealth seems to be focused on motivation.  If you look at The Secret, for example, there is a lot of text used to convince us that the Law of Attraction is real and that we should be motivated to want to use the principles taught by this genre of writing to achieve great success and wealth.

Sadly, sometimes the principles of how to use these important teachings get lost in all the “hype” and the hyperbole that goes into web sites and books devoted to mental focus and positive thinking.  This is one of the many reasons why the teachings of Anthony Robbins are so helpful.  Because he has been in a place where he was severely limited by self-limiting thoughts and behaviors and he got out of that by learning and applying the principles he teaches in his seminars and books, he knows what you and I need to get started on the same path to success that he has enjoyed.

Whenever you are going to set out to conquer a new skill whether it is how to tune up a car or how to tune up your mind and emotions so you can use your thoughts to achieve great success, the first step is to get a teacher who can guide you.  There are some things in life that we cannot just “figure out” and that is where we seek out someone who is a mechanic of that specialization to show us how it is done.

If anyone is a mechanic of the art of training the mind and emotions to turn them into tools of success and wealth, it is Anthony Robbins.  Any good teacher is as good as his track record.  Not only does Robbins own personal story and the great success he has achieved testify that he knows exactly what he is talking about but his army of followers and the thousands of success stories from people who have learned from this teacher provide plenty of validation that if we want to learn from an expert in the field of personal thought and behavior modification, we need look no further than Anthony Robbins for a fine guide to the workings of your own mind, heart and emotions.

But the second big step you must have to ever see success in any new endeavor is a detailed road map or a plan.  The books and web sites that seem to spend the majority of their time on hype and motivation to help you want to realize your dreams through positive thinking miss the boat on this need.  By the time you are going to seminars and reading books by Anthony Robbins, you already want success and to learn these techniques.  Motivation is not your problem.

What you need is someone who can show you the first step and then the second and then the third and so on so you have a solid understandable path to take you from where you are to the realization of your dreams as a result of your use of your new mental skills that you have learned along the way.  Of course, the actual plan is different for everyone because everyone has a specific definition of what success and wealth means to them.  But the steps for defining that roadmap are the same and you can learn the specifics from the books and tapes you will get when you become a student of Anthony Robbins.

By learning how to focus your mind on your dream and to nail down a specific, detailed and unchanging definition of what your dream looks like, you are placing the end point of your map to success firmly in front of you.  That is an evolutionary process because at first you might have a vague statement of your dream for wealth and success.  The exercises and steps of visualization and contemplation that you will learn from your teacher will take you the rest of the way.

From there it is just a matter of taking an honest and hard look at where you are and what limiting behaviors, attitudes and emotions are holding you back.  When those things are well understood, you then have all you need to draft a step-by-step plan for success.

When you set out to learn a discipline of positive thinking and self-motivation, it is easy to see yourself like a guru on the top of a mountain, always in a state of contemplative serenity because you have such total control over your mind and being.  But that image is not in step with how the thousands of people live who have become successful implementing the teachings of Anthony Robbins to turn their lives from ones that embrace failure to lives that embrace success.  And a life that is constantly serene and never devoid of emotion is not in keeping with what Anthony Robbins teaches at all.

In fact, Robbins’ teaching recognizes that not only are emotions a crucial part of who we are as people but they are primary motivators for our actions and the direction our lives take.  The emotions are more than just feelings that take over and seem to turn you from a rational creature to an emotional mess.  The truth is that we all are experiencing emotions at almost every moment of the day.  You even experience them while you are asleep which explains how wild your dreams can get sometimes.

A little known fact is that our emotions could actually be viewed as our early warning system to our priorities and where our heart really lies.  In that way, emotions are as much part of our thinking system and the way we make our decisions as our rational powers are.  To try and deny the emotions robs you of two important jobs they do for you.  The first and most important job is that your emotions are a signal to you of the direction you may want to go about a certain decision.

We recognize this as true the most when it comes to romance where our heart is able to guide us through our emotions.  But it is just as true about decisions about family life, career, finances and friendships.  The emotions simply “think” through feelings what your heart is really telling you.  This is the famous “gut feel” test that so many have come to depend on.  That “gut” is the instinct that can only be communicated through emotions and in many cases, it is telling you something worth listening to.

The second great value that your emotions give you is the power to make change.  If you act on your feelings especially when they are in step with your goals and dreams in life, the power of emotion will propel you toward success much faster than if you went after that goal on sheer will power alone.  Athletes know this so they have trained their emotions to give them power and determination to win at their sport and to endure the grueling training they need to succeed.  Emotions can give you that drive and that determination as well if you can channel it toward the goals and dreams you are trying to achieve in life.

Just as you are learning through the teachings of self-affirmation and positive thinking that Anthony Robbins and others are teaching you that you can take control of your mind, your thoughts, your attitudes and your ambitions, you can also learn to use your emotions in a way that empowers you rather than allowing them to stop you or drag you down.  It means you don’t deny your emotions.  That is like denying your thinking apparatus entirely.

Instead, you get in touch with your emotional center.  You synchronize the goals and motivations of your emotional system so you are a person who is driven in every respect toward the same dreams of success.  And when your emotions are tied in with your ambitions in life, that combination is unstoppable.  And only then are you not avoiding your emotions at all but empowering them and utilizing them as the explosive power to make your success come more quickly and decisively in your life.

The word “passion” is too often interpreted narrowly to apply only to romance or sexual activity.  But the truth is that all of have passions in our lives outside of our romantic endeavors.  All that means it that there is something in you about which you are passionate.  It could be your job, your church, your hobby or even romance.  It is that thing that you think about all day and can’t wait to get back to that lights you up inside.

The teachings of Anthony Robbins are also sometimes misinterpreted.  Because Robbins teaches us how to focus our minds and to guide our thoughts to use the power of thought to mold our destinies, it seems that the methods he prescribed are devoid of emotion and therefore devoid of passion.  Sometimes people who don’t listen to Robbins talk or read his books think they will have to create an artificial fascination with the subject of their positive thoughts and somehow “talk themselves into” sustaining a focus on that goal in order to see the success that Anthony Robbins has experienced and that he is teaching others to enjoy.

You might be surprised and even excited to learn that the true teachings of Anthony Robbins do not deny the emotions.  In fact, Robbins recognizes that our emotional system is what makes us human and that the emotions are part of how we think and interact with the world.  So we can learn to use the emotions and even guide them to give us additional power to the direction we want our thoughts to go.

Similarly, that thing that we are passionate about is more than just a hobby or a side interest.  Your passion in life, whatever it is, represents that thing that makes you tick and that area of life that you were put here on earth to pursue with all of your being.  Instead of denying our passions, Robbins would have us dwell on them and search them because buried in that thing that makes you the most excited is your dream and maybe a quest that will eventually lead you to great success and great wealth.

In fact, the only way to truly achieve the realization of our hopes and dreams using the power of the mind and our abilities to focus and draw success to us is to go after that dream with all of the passion and enthusiasm that is in you.  It is also a misconception that the only goal that fits with the teachings of Anthony Robbins is to become a millionaire.  For some that might be your destiny.  But the methods Robbins teaches are gifts to you and I so we can find out what is our destiny and how we can realize our dreams in life.

If that dream and destiny involve great monetary wealth, then so be it.  But wealth is not only measured in terms of bank account.  For one, that dream might be to live as a medical missionary doing good for others in Africa.  For him or her, great wealth is represented by many hearts and lives touched and helped by that mission.  For another great wealth might be to build houses for Habitat for Humanity.  You may never see financial reward but the photographs of the many families you helped is all the reward you need.

By finding out what your passion is, you can then use the power of your devotion to start your path to individual fulfillment and individual wealth.  The presence of that passion inside you is a signpost that has been telling you for your whole life that this was your destiny.  All that Anthony Robbins is doing is making your destiny attainable.  That is his passion and by using his tools to realize your dream, you are giving him wealth as well.

Anthony Robbins Wants You to Be More Than You Are…

When you attend an Anthony Robbins seminar or read one of his books, you will come out of the experience with a lot of questions about yourself.  You should be prepared for a lot of self-evaluation as a result of a good exposure to his teachings.  But that self-examination is very healthy because you are taking a fresh look at who you are, who you want to be and why you are not where you are in life.  Then you take that honest assessment and determine how to get there and go after it with renewed energy and resolve.  The success you achieve is as much attributable to your new resolve as it is to your natural skills and ability to perform the work you are doing to see success in your life.

Do you remember when you was a child and you had a million dreams?  Anyone who has been around a child or young teen will hear him or her confidently express their goal to be a princess, president of the United States, king of the world or the universe and just about any other kind of ambition and goal you can imagine.  That trait of childhood is one we should never lose.  That is because, even though we learn through life that we do have limitations and the price to be paid for success, if we keep our standards high, we will reach higher and see greater victories than if we set out standards low.

There is a simple fact about how our minds work or our “psychology” that Anthony Robbins understands and it is this fact that he wants us to take control over.  That truism is that we will live up to our own standards.  If we set our standards high, we will strive to reach those goals.  But what happens in life unfortunately is as disappointments and problems cause us to go through occasional failures, we tend to adjust our standards lower and lower to avoid feeling hurt.

In order to start the path to true success however, we have to go back to that child that lives inside of you and envision yourself accomplishing great things.  It is easy enough to just say, “I need to set high standards for myself to reach”.  But to make that a reality takes a little visualization, some self-talk and the ability to see a path between where you are and the realization of your dreams.  That all starts with going back and recapturing that dream.

In each of us is a dream that we never really wanted to let go of in the first place.  That is the dream that calls us to be all we can be.  It is also the dream that makes the most of your talents, your abilities and the things in life that you love to do the most.  By going back and reclaiming your God given right to hold on to that dream, that is the first step of setting a standard for yourself that means you wont settle for less.  From there you come to truly believe that not only can that dream be realized but it is you who can realize it.  And because you can realize it, it is your destiny to do so.

From there, it is only a short distance to setting a goal in life to archive that dream no matter what.  And the primary person you will hold accountable for that goal is you.  By holding yourself to a high standard, nothing short of success will be good enough.  And once that is your standard in life, nothing can stand in your way.

Sometimes speakers who work in the fields of motivation and self-improvement are accused of being cheerleaders that just tell you what you want to hear.  That it is true that speakers who tell you that everything will always turn out rosy and focus entirely on self esteem are sometimes guilty of pandering to their audiences and pulling punches when it gets down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to really go through life change for the better.

This is one area that the teachings of Anthony Robbins stand out.  Robbins shoots from the hip.  And because he is not afraid to tell us when we are making mistakes and where we need to grow up and face our fears or failings, his teachings have the kind of “teeth” that lead to success.  That is why people keep coming back to Robbins’ seminars and books.  He teaches from reality about how we can go from failure to success and do so in this world, not in some fantasy world of imaginary rewards.

One focus of the teachings of Anthony Robbins that holds the mirror up for us to see ourselves as we really are is in the area of blame and personal responsibility.  Robbins shows us clearly that one of the most chronic problems of people who get stuck in a rut of failure is placing blame outside of ourselves.  It is a natural instinct especially when it comes to areas of life that we cannot control.  If we can assign blame for our lot in life on other people, on the government or even on God, then we absolve ourselves of blame.  And when we determine that our unwanted circumstances are not our fault, we don’t feel so bad about being where we are in life.

One of the many problems with this kind of rationalization is that we also don’t feel motivated to get out of our circumstances.  Placing blame things that have gone wrong is another way of giving up.  It is conceding that someone or something defeated us and that we are going to come to terms with being beaten.

Whether or not your assessment of blame is on target or not, assessing blame is self-defeating behavior.  This is not news we want to hear but Robbins is a good enough teacher to make us face the truth of the uselessness of finding blame for disappointments in our lives.  That is because the quicker we can put “blame placing” behind us and take personal responsibility for forging a path to success, the faster that past failures will stop haunting us and we will empower ourselves for future success.

Instead of viewing past failures and disappointments as a situation of blame, Robbins teaches us to view them as gold mines of lessons about how not to fail in the future.  We need to have the courage to go back and look at those past failures and mine that good from them before they escape us.  In fact, a proactive exercise would be to start a log and systematically step back through every “failure” situation and instead of identifying who was at fault for the disappointing outcome, catalog what can be learned from the episode that could be used for future success.

But there is even a bigger treasure that often goes down with the ship when we see a dream die with a failure in our past.  That treasure is that ambition, that goal and that dream of success that was attached to that project.  Even if the end of the quest is the result of a relatively small problem with the project, if you give up on your dream of success in that area of life, that is a tragedy.

But it is a tragedy that can be turned into victory.  Just as you use your past failures to create a laundry list of lessons learned, go back and dig through the ruins of past projects.  At the bottom of that pile, you will find a dream for greatness that may have gone out with the trash.  Rescue that dream.  Dust it off and recapture your zeal for ultimate victory even in that area of life.  If you do that, you stop being a victim and you are taking control of every aspect of life.  And that is how winners think and live.

Next to the desire to grow wealthy and become a millionaire, probably the one area of life where most people seek the help of a teacher like Anthony Robbins is in their love life.  For many of us, romance, dating and meeting the right person for a long and satisfying romantic relationship often seems as far away and unachievable as it would be to make it a goal to walk on the moon.  And while Anthony Robbins may not have you walking on the moon by Christmas, his teachings can turn you around and make you a success in your romantic life far more than you have ever experienced before.

Perhaps the reason the principles of how to use positive affirmation and self actualization to achieve successes in life work so well in the arena of romance is that a self defeating attitude is the biggest obstacle to success in romance and that is exactly where the teaching of Anthony Robbins begins to make positive changes in your life.  There are a lot of ways that wallowing in self-defeat and self-pity virtually shut down your love life.

Self-defeat destroys your self-confidence, which means you won’t have the courage to go out and meet new people.  And the only way to find and attract a new romantic partner is to get out there and meet people.
Self-defeat reminds you that you had a failure in your love life before and that it might happen again.  To avoid that pain, many times we ruin our own love lives before they even get started.
Self-defeat makes you insecure.  So if you see that handsome man or gorgeous woman in a social gathering and you feel that inner prompting to try to start a relationship, your insecurities keep you from even that first simple step of talking to him or her.  And without the confidence to at least try, you can never find true love that is always just beyond your grasp.
Self-defeat makes you introspective, shy and socially awkward.  These are three traits that are very difficult to get past when you are trying to start a romance.

Learning and implementing what Anthony Robbins will change all that.  We don’t even say “might change al that” because by the very nature of what will happen in your personality when you begin to change how you think and view the world in light of your abilities to use  your positive mental abilities to realize your dreams, the first place you will see results is in your romantic life.  The reasons for this are clear.

For one thing, when you have adopted a life of positive thinking and seeing opportunities even in adversity, that naturally changes your demeanor.  You greet each new day with enthusiasm and ambition.  You have that gleam in your eye that is only possible for someone who is on coarse to greatness.  To put it bluntly, that gleam in your eye is “drop dead sexy”.

When you smile more readily and speak with passion about your dreams, that is like a magnet drawing people to you.  The opposite sex will be energized and drawn to you because of the power of your personality and the positive energy you are emitting.  And even if the apple of your eye is not a follower of Anthony Robbins, he or she will react to the strong positive energy coming to you and that attraction naturally flows into romance.