There will always be people who want to hold you back. Don’t let them. Don’t ever let them disempower you.
(Tony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within)
In this book, Tony Robbins talks about breaking wood with your bare hand, karate-style, as he calls it. He says that instead of taking 18 to 24 months to learn how to do it, he took a different approach. Oh really, Tony?
” One of the things that most powerfully changed my life was something I first learned years ago. In Canada I found a man who was breaking wood karate-style. Instead of spending a year and a half to two years to learn to do it, with no martial arts training, I simply found out what he was focusing on, how he was focusing (the brightness and so on) in his head, what his beliefs were, and what his physical strategy was— how he specifically used his body to break the wood.I practiced over and over his physical movements identically with tremendous emotional intensity, sending my brain deep sensations of certainty. And all the while, my instructor coached me on my movements. Barn! I broke through one piece of wood, then two pieces, then three pieces, then four. What had I done to accomplish this? 1)1 raised my standards and made breaking the wood a must, something I previously would have accepted as a limitation; 2) I changed my limiting belief about my ability to do this by changing my emotional state into one of certainty, and 3) I modeled an effective strategy for producing the result.“
There’s probably no better indication of having healed after rape than forgetting when it happened. When I was just into my earth science journey, I got raped by an intruder. A few years ago, I realized that I no longer know when exactly that was. It had been etched in my mind for a long time but life never stands still and a lot of other things have happened since.
After the rape, I tackled the matter heads on. I for example signed up for self-defense classes for women. I was the first person asked in the group to tell the others why I had enrolled in the class. That broke the ice, if there ever was any.
Well, Tony, break wood is simply something we all did one evening. We all just did it. It took one woman – I remember her face but not her name – three to four tries, but she did it too. Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right, regardless of what it is that you believe. That’s the secret of breaking wood.
Sure, the grain and the type of wood matter too. It was plain pinewood for us, and the grain was likely favorable, but still, we all just did it.
If you have a thorn in your foot, you can either leave it in to remind you of the long road you have walked or you can pull it out (and take care of your foot).
A negative belief can also be like a thorn in your foot.
