Personal development is an area that I feel is sadly missing in our educational system today. There is so much valuable information from so many talented and qualified teachers it is a shame that school curriculum’s don’t offer or even mandate it.
One of my favorite personal development people to learn from is Anthony Robbins. In a recent training, he addressed how to improve the quality of your life by breaking through your fears, failures and rejections. What follows are seven tools to go to work on to create new results in your life right now.
He puts communication skills at the top of the list. First, the quality of our personal communication with ourselves. How we do this determines how we feel, how we act, and how we will behave in the future.
Second is how we communicate with others. We all want a feeling of connectedness. We have two counter pulling emotions in us. Tony asked the question, “How many of you want to make a difference in life?” He then asked, “How many of you want to lay on the beach and get a tan?” There is a pull between the two. “How many people would like to be financially independent? How many feel like when you think this it takes away from your spirituality?”
These kind of questions made so much sense to me.
All this is called our inner civil war. Robbins teaches that we can learn how to integrate these two pulls. We can have the best of both worlds. We need to learn to resolve this because that is where the power is …the power comes when you know how to integrate our self.
Tony shared some of his experiences and some ideas on doing this with what is called neuro-linguistic programming or NLP. NLP is simply the study of how the brain is connected to the words that we say and even the words that we think..so being able to say things in a positive way so that our brain can then pattern them in such a way that our behavior changes.
He says that only seven percent of human communication is from words.
Thirty eight percent is tonality or the tone of voice a person uses. The tone of voice we use tells us much more than the actual words themselves.
Finally, fifty five percent of communication is in our body postures or physiology…like our facial expressions or breathing patterns.
When we put all these together we give one message to our nervous system and produce the kind of results that we desire! By becoming aware of these characteristics we can change our behavior patterns.
Tony gave us a little of his background..when he was seventeen and living on the street he attended one of Jim Rohn’s personal development seminars. What he took away was:
- It doesn’t take a lot of ideas to change your life
- It doesn’t take a lot of complicated ideas to change your life
- All it takes is an idea that you can take in and use.
Two additional ideas of Rohn’s were:
- It’s not what happens in your life – it’s what you do with what happens
- For things to change- we have to change.
With those changes in his philosophy Tony spent the next six to seven years attending self-improvement seminars and reading over six to seven hundred books! Wow!
What he said next was amazing! Knowledge is a major key…many have knowledge, but still don’t do what they KNOW to do. How true is that? From smoking to overeating to under achieving. Personal power is the missing key- the ability to act…to take action! This is what sets us apart. The really successful people had the ability to use what they KNOW!
Colonel Sanders was an example he used. He was a sixty-five year old man with a $99 social security check and a chicken recipe that a lot of people liked. How many of you knew that he went to 1009 different establishments before he got someone to say yes to him. (and no 1009 is not a typo) His personal action and philosophy was … try until. That’s what I call personal power!
Affirmations without action or discipline creates dillusion.
Affirmations with action or disciplines creates miracles.
The third thing necessary for a quality life is stretching. If you can’t – you must! We usually do better when we have a deadline – it gets us to do something we didn’t think we could do.
There are some keys to stretching ourselves:
1. Make a commitment to yourself that seems to be beyond your present ability.
2. Make a public declaration to someone who will hold you responsible to that commitment.
3. Ideally, model someone who is already making the results that you want.
4. Do it! Follow the model – if you don’t know- then do what you would if you did know!
The fourth thing he addressed as being helpful for a quality life was committing to unconscious competence rather than cognitive understanding. What that means is don’t hesitate to act. Some people are always studying the roots…he would encourage us to just pick the fruit – study the roots later.
Fifth was to always act from personal integrity. Integrity is a word that is abused. It means wholeness or being true to yourself – your own belief systems. We need to remember and remind ourselves that our beliefs are only our own and they may be inaccurate even though we believe them to be true. We can also be very sincere about our beliefs and still be sincerely wrong. Anyone who has ever done a paradigm shift knows only too well how true this statement is! We must make sure that our daily actions match our belief systems.
Another point was that many people think that intention is everything. However, intention means NOTHING. All intention does is provide us with a direction. RESULTS mean everything. To get results you need commitment. Tony uses WEIT -What Ever It Takes to make it happen without harm to anyone else. We need to commit to practice on a daily basis. Once we are committed to an idea or intention it will happen.
These are the 7 character traits that successful people have:
- all have passion – an obsessive purpose
- belief – they believe that they can succeed
- strategy – they organize the way they do things
- values – look at any battles that are coming from inside
- energy levels – they learn how to eat to get the most energy
- bonding power – they have a sense of connection with others
- communication skills – it is not what happens that makes the difference; it’s how we communicate to ourselves about what happens that makes the difference
Personal development is very rewarding and gratifying. We should all strive to be the best we can be and learning and applying some of these strategies can only improve the quality of your daily life.
Great read!
Thank you for sharing that.
the most important work we ever do is the work on ourselves
and the most important communication is with ourselves.
Keep it coming!