Awaken the Giant Within

Robbins presents a system for changing behaviour, emotion and circumstances built around the argument that people are driven by the association of pain and pleasure with specific actions, and that changing those associations changes behaviour more reliably than willpower does.

His central technique is what he calls neuro-associative conditioning, a six-step process: decide what you want and what prevents it, get leverage by associating enormous immediate pain with not changing and pleasure with changing, interrupt the existing pattern, create an alternative pattern, condition the new pattern through repetition, and test it.

Other components include the argument that beliefs are decisions rather than facts and can be changed deliberately; that questions direct attention and therefore determine what a person notices, so habitual questions shape experience; that the vocabulary a person uses changes the intensity of what they feel; that physical state including posture and breathing determines emotional state and can be changed directly; and that values and rules should be examined explicitly, since most people hold rules that make satisfaction nearly impossible without knowing it.

He covers goal setting, time management framed as life management, financial habits, and relationships. The book contains no research and Robbins has no relevant credentials. The neurolinguistic programming background of several techniques has no empirical support. The book is long, repetitive and heavily self-promoting, with references to seminars throughout. The physical state and habitual question techniques have some support in the wider psychology literature. Readers should treat it as a set of practices to test rather than as a validated method.