By Sheri McGregor

Robbins has firsthand experience with how effective personal power can be. While both personally and professionally successful today, he was once 30 pounds overweight and lived in a studio apartment with only his bleak outlook on life to keep him company.

With nowhere to go but up, he took control of his thoughts, changed his focus and put himself back in the driver’s seat of his own destiny. Can you unleash your personal power and take control of your life, too? Absolutely!

Everyone has ‘personal power’

“The bottom line,” says Robbins, “is that people have within them a force that is so powerful that once they unleash or tap into it, there is nothing that can keep them from doing, being, sharing, creating and giving whatever they envision in life.” This is the belief behind Robbins’ personal power philosophy.

In his audio tape Personal Power II, The Driving Force!, Robbins boils human behavior down to two motivations: the need to avoid pain and the desire to gain pleasure. He says these twin forces of pain and pleasure are what drives people and guides their lives — whether they’re aware of it or not.

For example, do you apply makeup in the morning because you enjoy the act? Probably not. Most likely, you apply your makeup to feel good about yourself, believing that other people will respond more favorably toward you when you are made up. In other words, you do something you don’t enjoy (apply makeup each day) to gain the pleasurable outcome that comes from that activity — and to avoid the pain of feeling like you’re not looking your best.

“At any moment of time, what you focus on is the most important or real to you,” says Robbins. “Use pleasure and pain instead of letting them use you.”

How to use pleasure and pain

  If you want something but aren’t attaining it, you’re linking that accomplishment to pain, according to Robbins. He calls this a neuro-association.

For instance, you’re offered the huge promotion you’ve been working toward, yet you discover that making public presentations is part of the job. You dislike public speaking, so you focus on that one little element and let it paralyze you. You pass up the opportunity and end up feeling like a failure. Where did this conditioning come from? Why do you dislike public speaking? Perhaps as a child you remember a humiliating classroom experience when you forgot your lines. Or maybe someone made fun of how you pronounced a word. Will you forever let that eons-ago incident control your life?

For many, just figuring out the origin of a particular neuro-association is enough to break the pattern, allowing them to deliberately focus on the benefits and reassociate the experience with something positive. Did you learn how to pronounce that word? Or realize the importance of being prepared? Then that humiliating experience from childhood will make you a better speaker now.

Changing your focus

If you focus on the benefits this career jump will bring rather than the pain one element of the event will cause, you can view moving toward your goals as a must-do situation. By changing your focus, you control your own pain/pleasure links. Pain you once associated with public speaking no longer means humiliation; it means gaining a pleasurable outcome, namely accomplishing your dreams today through important lessons learned earlier in life.

Changing your focus can help you succeed in any number of areas, says Robbins. He points to the fact that most of us associate dieting with pain and deprivation.

Instead of thinking of dieting as something difficult and painful, focus on the pleasurable result. You’ll be healthy and look and feel good about yourself. Imagine yourself wearing the clothes you want to wear and doing the things you want to do. Control your mind and you control your life — unleash your personal power.

Turning dreams into reality

In extreme circumstances, changing your focus can even help save your life. As an example, Robbins cites the book Man’s Search for Meaning, by Dr. Viktor E. Frankl. In the book, Frankl writes of his experiences in Nazi death camps, telling how some of the prisoners lost the will to live. They associated the camps with death and focused on dying.

Frankl says some prisoners survived by changing the meaning of the camp experience from one of death to one of purpose. These prisoners gave meaning to their suffering. They focused on surviving so they could live to tell about what happened and make sure that such atrocities never happened again. They changed their focus from one of death to one that gave them a reason to live.

This same principle works in everyday situations, says Robbins, who points out that most people have ambitions and dreams. “They wish for more money, a better career, a healthier, more fit body, warmer, more intimate relationships. But that’s where it usually ends,” he says, “— in hopes and dreams.” How can you change your hopes and dreams into reality?

“Change is often a should and not a must,” explains Robbins. “Or it’s a must, but it’s a must for ‘someday.’ The only way we’re going to make a change now is if we create a sense of urgency that’s so intense we’re compelled to follow through. If we want to create change, we have to realize it’s not a question of whether we can do it, but whether we will do it. Whether we will or not comes down to our level of motivation.”

So tap into your personal power. Decide what you want, change your thinking from “someday” to “now,” sit yourself in the driver’s seat and head in the direction of your dreams.

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The Impossible Just Takes a Little...