Tony Robbins -Re-Awaken_the_Giant_Within

So many people feel powerless and insignificant when it comes to social issues and world events,
thinking that even if they did everything right in their own personal lives, their welfare would still be at
the mercy of the actions of others. They feel beset by the proliferation of gang warfare and violent crime,
perplexed by massive government deficits, massive unemployment, saddened by homelessness and
illiteracy, and overwhelmed by global warming and the relentless extinction of the other species that live
on this planet. Such people fall into the mindset of thinking, “Even if I get my own life and the lives of
my family in order, what good will it do? Some nut in a position of power could accidentally push the
button and blow us all up anyway!” This kind of belief system fosters the feeling of being out of control
and impotent to create change at any significant level, and naturally leads to the learned helplessness
typified by the phrase, “Why even try?”
Nothing could be more crippling to a person’s ability to take action than learned helplessness; it is the
primary obstacle that prevents us from changing our lives or taking action to help other people change
theirs. If you’ve come this far in the book, you know without a doubt my central message: you have the
power right now to control how you think, how you feel, and what you do. Perhaps for the first time
you are empowered to take control of the Master System that has unconsciously guided you until this
point. With the strategies and distinctions you’ve gained from reading and doing the exercises in this
book, you have awakened to the conviction that you are truly the master of your fate, the director of
your destiny.
Together we’ve discovered the giant power that shapes destiny—decision—and that our decisions about
what to focus on, what things mean, and what to do are the decisions that will determine the quality of
our present and future.
Now it’s time to address the power of joint decisions to shape the destiny of our community, our country,
and our world. What will determine the quality of life for generations to come will be the collective
decisions we make today about how to deal with such current challenges as widespread drug abuse, the
imbalance of trade, ineffective public education, and the shortcomings of our prison system.
By fixating on everything that’s not working, we limit our focus to effects, and we neglect the causes of
these problems. We fail to recognize that it is the small decisions you and I make every day that create
our destinies. Remember that all decisions are followed by consequences. If we make our decisions
unconsciously—that is, let other people or other factors in our environment do the thinking for us—
and act without at least anticipating the potential effects, then we may be unwittingly perpetuating the
problems we dread most. By trying to avoid pain in the short term, we often end up making decisions
that create pain in the long term, and when we arrive further down the river we tell ourselves that the
problems are permanent and unchangeable, that they come with the territory.
Probably the most pervasive false belief most of us harbor is the fallacy that only some superhuman
act would have the power to turn our problems around. Nothing could be further from the truth. Life
is cumulative. Whatever results we’re experiencing in our lives are the accumulation of a host of small
decisions we’ve made as individuals, as a family, as a community, as a society, and as a species. The
success or failure of our lives is usually not the result of one cataclysmic event or earth-shaking decision,
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