Book Review – Awakening the Giant Within

It’s been awhile, but I happened to stumble on my notes for this book, so please forgive me if things seem out of sync or don’t make any sense. I wanted to write this all out in order to help myself and you to awake the giant within us.

If you didn’t know, I’m all for efficiency and maximizing everything in life. I personally want to be the best possible version I can possibly be every day. To do that, I often listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts (because I don’t really like to read) to keep my head right. On this journey, one of the books I decided to take on is “Awakening the Giant Within” by Tony Robbins.

If you don’t know who Tony Robbins is, just Google him.

The book goes over a lot of steps to wake up the giant that is within you, but here are a few of the topics that stuck with me. I also do a little quick overview of them as well.

The Power of Decision

We as humans have the awesome power of deciding what we want to do with our lives. To figure where we want to be, what we want to do, or where we want to go, we need to use that power and decide to figure it out.

Ultimate Success Formula

Tony has a 4 step formula to help you have that ultimate success you’ve always wanted in whatever the subject may be:

1. Decide what you want
2. Take massive actions towards it
3. Notice what works and what doesn’t
4. If things aren’t working, constantly change until it does work

Plain Pleasure Principle (Triple P’s)

There is this principle that Tony has where he states that decisions were made to avoid pain or to gain pleasure. As humans, our bodies tend to do whatever it takes to avoid pain. One way to avoid pain is to be consistent and to know what will happen, meaning that change is bad. By becoming aware of what links your mind to pain or pleasure, you can ultimately change how your mind thinks/works by what’s called neuro-association conditioning (NAC).

Neuro-Association Conditioning (NAC)

NAC is a way to basically condition your mind to work the way you want it to work to help you get what you want. Tony has 6 steps to help you with this conditioning:

1. Decide what you really want and what is stopping you from getting it
2. Get leverage and associate massive pleasure for changes versus associating massive pain
   1. Ask pain inducing questions such as “What will the pain be if I don’t do it?’, then pleasure inducing questions such as “What will happen to me when I do it?”
3. Interrupt the living pattern; break the pattern you are currently living (change)
4. Create a new empowering alternative to your current pattern
5. Condition a new pattern until consistent.
   1. Keep working at the new life pattern until you get it right. Set milestones to keep you going.
6. Test the new pattern for effectiveness
   1. Make sure pain is fully associated with the old pattern you had.

And this very last bit I have is too sloppy from my notes to read. I don’t know what I was writing and I can’t remember, but it looks important. So I’m just going to put it here like real notes:

• Create energy and momentum
• Create goals
  • Personal Development/Growth
  • Career/Business/Economic
  • Adventures – traveling, playing Michael Jordan one-on-one
  • Contributions – adoption, volunteering
• Write your goals, create timelines for each, then choose the one you want to do the most within one year, and write a paragraph about it.

Overall, I know I enjoyed it and I recommend it to you all. I feel bad because I don’t remember much, but I will definitely go back and listen to it again and update this post.