David Chiu

Today I listened to the last day of Anthony Robbins “Get the Edge” series. In this final session Anthony Robbins talks about dreams, goals, destiny and a purpose filled life. When we are kids we dream about the future: who we want to be, what we want to do and what our life would be like. What happened to those dreams? Did we accomplish them? Did they change? What stops us from creating new dreams and goals?

Personally I’ve always been a big dreamer. My dreams would change year by year. I wanted to grow up to be a spy , security specialist, pilot, inventor, scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, computer technology specialist, stock broker/investor, entrepreneur, special effects designer, a dancer, a model and now an actor. I’ve never stopped dreaming and I will never stop going after my dreams.

The last thing Anthony Robbins talks about is finding your purpose. He asks you to think about a time when you were most happy in your life. When you were doing something that engaged every fiber of your being and you felt fully confident and satisified doing. Now think about the essence of what it was you did. Now with this essence you can find your purpose in life. My example goes back to my high school senior talent show. Up till the talent show a lot of people knew me as the shy, quiet (albeit, flashy dresser) Asian student in class. Then at the talent show I busted out a self choreographed hip-hop dance routine which shocked the audience into chanting my name. It was a magical moment I will never forget. The essence of this experience and all my great experiences of performing for an audience is that emotional connection. Being able to connect with other people and inspire them or entertain them. This is now my purpose in life.

Ultimately what I like about his message is that he emphasizes giving to others and enriching peoples lives around you no matter what your purpose is. To “Get the Edge” is to not be self centered, but instead to invest in yourself so that you may have the abundance to give to others.

I HIGHLY recommend this series to anyone who really wants to create change in their life. There is a lot of practical information and exercises that are invaluable in creating positive change.

Current weight: 176lbs/19% bodyfat | Goal: 180lbs/10% bodyfat

One of the main reasons why I started this self journey of transformation is because of a critique I received in acting class about my lack of self confidence. My self confidence waivers. In certain situations I can come off cocky or overly self confident, but for the most part I do struggle with self confidence - especially in acting. So today I listened to Anthony Robbins talking about self confidence in his Personal Power II series. He talks about a NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) technique called anchoring. The easiest way to explain anchoring is this: have you ever been somewhere and heard a song which brought back strong memories of a specific time in your life and the emotions you felt at that time? Well those emotions are “anchored” to that stimulus, the song. NLP uses this fact to deliberately anchor specific emotions and feelings to a specific stimulus. For example, NLP would ask you to close your eyes and go back to a moment in your life where you felt completely self confident. The emotions and memory have to be strong in order to be most effective. Once you can feel yourself back in that situation and feel the emotions you had, then anchor it with a unique physical stimulus - for instance, squeezing your thumbnail. Then open your eyes and let go of the memory. You would then repeat this process a couple times anchoring the emotions. Once the emotions and confidence are anchored, you will be able to recall those feelings instantly by squeezing your thumbnail.

What’s fascinating about this process is how close it is to method acting techniques. We are taught in method acting to be able to anchor emotions to actions and words in a script. We are also taught to anchor feelings to objects and our scene partners. So this NLP technique looks like the perfect tool to help me in confidence and in acting. Tonight I will try anchoring some emotions of confidence and see what happens.

http://www.nlpweekly.com/?p=271
http://www.mindworks.uk.com/website/anchors.htm

Today I continued listening to “Get the Edge”. On day 3 of the series Anthony Robbins spends a lot of time talking about relationships. At first I thought about skipping forward to the next tape since the majority of his message is geared towards singles. But then I realized that a lot of what he was saying could also be applied to acting. Questions such as - “Why do I feel this way? Do I feel this way because of past or present circumstances? Why am I in this relationship?” All of these questions are perfect when working on a scene and building/finding the relationship with your scene partner.

The next thing he talks about is loving yourself because if you don’t love yourself you won’t have much to give in a relationship. For instance, the Biblical saying “Love thy neighbor as thyself” pre-supposes that you actually love yourself. This also affects your self confidence. The more you accept who you are and are able to love yourself for who you are, all your flaws and who you want to be, the more you will be able to walk confidently in the world.

So one of the exercises he urges people to do daily is look in the mirror and tell yourself what you love about yourself. For instance, I would say something like, “David, I love you for your spirit and not giving up on your dreams”. It sounds stupid and self centered, but sometimes I think we do need to be a little more self centered and concentrate more on our own positive attributes than to be self critic all the time.

This exercise reminds me of a scene in Jerry Maguire where Cuba Gooding Jr’s character is nervous about walking through the conference hall with all the corporate sponsors. Jerry Maguire starts telling him how he is one of the greatest quarter backs in football and reassures him by reciting all of his impressive football stats. Cuba’s character is reassured with confidence and he goes on to become successful. Anthony Robbins exercise is exactly the same except you are reassuring yourself. “Psyching ourself up” for everyday challenges and achieving your wildest dreams. Pro athletes do it all the time before a game. Maybe they don’t look in a mirror and recite affirmations out loud, but they do their own rituals. Mohammed Ali always talked about how great he was. I’m sure his positive affirmations he made in public did help him always strive to be the greatest.

On another note, I weighed myself tonight as a checkin to my current progress. Two weeks now and no change. Not good. I guess I really need to start doing some serious cardio…