Awaken The Giant WithinAnthony Robbins - Book Review
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Anthony Robbins' Awaken The Giant Within is a book that I've read quite recently. I knew about it but I'd always felt a bit unsure about Anthony Robbins' products. Sure, I knew that he had crowds of admirers, but he also has detractors who claim that he just uses his books to sell expensive training programs. Other people say 'it's just NLP under a different name'. So I admit to being a bit sceptical before opening the book. However, I have to say that I found Awaken The Giant Within full of extremely interesting ideas. My copy is quite well marked with pencil underlinings and stars in the margins, plus various notes I've written where other ideas sparked off. I also found there was a lot of good information relevant to achieving goals. I'd also say that it takes quite a bit for a book to impress me nowadays, as I've read a lot of self help books relating to goal setting. Many of them rehash the same material - some better some not so good. However, I found Awaken The Giant Within both absorbing and offering something different. Let me start with some overall points about what impressed me about the 'format' of the book. Clearly Anthony Robbins is trying pretty hard to get his key messages across. As well as the text he uses bold type, underlining, italics, sub-headings, quotes, graphics and cartoons. These really helped me. For example, when he's discussing the power we have to define our own lives rather than just drifting along, he uses a Gary Larsen cartoon. There's a flock of sheet and one of the sheep is standing on his hind legs saying "Wait! Wait! Listen to me!...we don't have to be just sheep!" It made me laugh and it really drove the point home - better than another 10 pages of explanation would have done. Having said that, there are more than enough pages in Awaken The Giant Within. I felt that the early chapters were particularly strong, but that some of the effectiveness of the book tailed off towards the end. One of the best bits of Awaken The Giant Within is Anthony Robbins' explanation of beliefs. For more detail on this see my self limiting belief page. Rather than just discussing beliefs Robbins gets right down to the nitty gritty and asks "What are beliefs?". Another of the key ideas in the book is the division of our motives into two categories: pain and pleasure. So let's say you set a goal. Why do you want to achieve that goal? What is the pain you are seeking to leave behind? What is the pleasure you are moving towards? Is Robbins just writing about NLP? Not according to NLP experts Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in their book 'Introducing NLP'. They say that Awaken The Giant Within is "exciting and motivating, though not strictly NLP". Is Anthony Robbins just using this book to sell expensive training programs? I don't think so - at least it didn't trigger me to rush out and sign up for one. He does describe incidents from some of his seminars to illustrate points but to me that simply added to the clarity of the book.
So I strongly recommend this book. One warning though - and this applies to all self help books and audios: in order to make practical use of Awaken The Giant Within you have to do the exercises in the book.
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