Tony Robbins has achieved international fame as a leading life counselor, and his classic book "Awaken the Giant Within" has stood the test of time. Millions of people around the world have benefited from the insights, wisdom and scientific principles in this life-enhancing work.

Suspend your scepticism and discover what has made this book a perennial best-seller in the personal development world.

The book opens with an unforgettable story of total life transformation. Anthony Robbins is on his way by private jet helicopter to speak in front of a capacity crowd in Orange County, California. he looks down at the gridlocked streets and the bumper-to-bumper traffic, hoping whatever is happening doesn't delay people arriving at his seminar. Then he realizes - the crowds are for him. As he swoops over Glendale, the millionaire speaker looks down from his jet helicopter and vaguely recognises a building. Something jogs his memory. Of course. It's the office where he once worked as a janitor, broke,overweight and lonely. It was only twelve years ago, but it could have been another life.

These kind of tantalising personal anecdotes make "Awaken The Giant Within" part-memoir, part philosophy and part training manual. The opening chapters fizz with ideas and the chapters interlink to create a powerful effect of tempo and energy, Of course this pace can't be sustained, and some of the middle chapters meander in the backwoods of NLP theory, but overall the book remains a compelling and readable gem.

Key quotes from "Awaken the Giant Within" by Tony Robbins:

1. Concentration of power. "Most people have no idea of the giant capacity we can immediately command when we focus all of our resources on mastering a single area of our lives". (p.21)

2. The power of decision. "I made a decision in that moment, which was to alter my life forever. I decided to change virtually every aspect of my life. I decided I would never again settle for less than I could be" (p.21)

3. The importance of standards. "If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in your life, you'll find that it's easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve".

4. The power of focus. Whatever we focus on becomes our idea of reality (p.160)

5. The power of belief. Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy (p. 75)

6. The power of questions. "Questions are the answer". If you throw enough questions at a problem, you will get a solution. (p.177)

7. The simple formula for success: Raise your standards, change your limiting beliefs and change your strategy (p. 25)

I can remember the exact place and time when I first heard of Tony Robbins. In the mid-Nineties, I was visiting a 19-year old friend at college, whose life had suddenly taken a very unusual turn. He had two stock trading screens in his dorm room and a full set of Tony Robbins videos on his shelf, including a poster. At the time I was dismissive and cynical of self help books. I should have listened. Within seven years, my friend was a multi-millionaire.

This piqued my curiosity. Had my friend got lucky, or was there something in the Robbins message that actually worked? In the summer of 1999 I bought "Awaken the Giant Within" at Miami Airport, featuring the toothy, grinning Mr Robbins on the front and the rather cheesy tagline "How to take immediate control of your mental, emotional and physical destiny". My next mistake was leaving it on the shelf for ten years.

Maybe my awe was misplaced. This book is no religious text, but merely sound advice from a teacher who understands the psychology of peak performance. Treat it as such, not as infallible but merely as good advice. If nothing else, I understood the connection between energy, physiology and attitude for the first time, and saw the almost magnetic power of goal-setting to deliver tangible results. The upshot is that this book comes with my highest recommendation. It hasn't made me a millionaire yet, but in many other ways it has been an immensely valuable read.

Tom Butler-Bowdon, an English authority on personal development books, has argued that Awaken the Giant Within represents the epitome of a certain strand of self help tomes - those marked by the belief that massive action can create personal change. He contrasts this with a more mystic Eastern approach which stresses calmness, inner peace and faith in an abundant cosmos that yields up its blessings to the patient mind. This shouldn't necessarily be viewed as a negative. In his unyielding optimism, his belief in practical action and his belief that (to paraphase St.Paul) change can happen in an instant, Tony Robbins is a true American thinker in the self-help tradition of Benjamin Franklin.

Some critics are also unconvinced by Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and particularly the role of the "reticular activating system" as described by Robbins. In the Eighties NLP was a fresh, captivating insight, and the ennui induced by a million management courses urging us to self-classify ourselves as "visual, auditory or kinesthetic" had not yet set in. Still, many of the principles appear valid and Robbins should not be faulted for seizing one of the vital psychological insights of the age.

Indeed, there is a charming retro Eighties flavour to the entire book, with references to Pac-Man, Yoda and Ronald Reagan sending us back to that earlier, more innocent age when to many it really felt like "Morning in America". It's all part of the book's convivial period charm.

My favourite part of the book is where Tony Robbins adapts and revives the classic 1930s idea of New Thought pioneer Emmet Fox - the so-called "Ten Day Mental Challenge". The idea here is that the reader decides not to dwell on a single negative thought or emotion for ten consecutive days. Instead, you must focus on a solution and ask positive, empowering questions such as "What's not perfect yet?". If you fail once, then the clock re-starts and the ten day trial must begin again. No exceptions are permitted.

This may seem simple on paper, but in fact is a Herculean feat requiring almost impossible levels of mental self-discipline and self-control. Its real value is as an alarm call revealing the extent to which negative and unproductive thoughts can linger in our minds. This experiment is a powerful booster shot against negativity and is well worth a try.

All text (c) WestOcean 2009. All copyrights, trademarks etc. are acknowledged. The author is not linked in any way with Anthony Robbins or his organizations.