Why I love Tony Robbins

By Fiona Boyd |

This is not a challenge or to in any way disrepect my life partner David at all, but I have loved Tony Robbins since the early 1990s and in this post I’d like to tell you why.

First let’s get clear, that this is not the romantic kind of love. Instead it’s the universal admiration for what a person is, and what a person does, and that value from a distance I’m able to extract from them as learning and growth for myself. These sorts of people in fact, don’t have to do anything, or give you anything, you can just learn and grow by reading their books, listening to their audiotapes or reading their story, their life narrative. I have never met Tony Robbins, so this is not personal.

Some people are just super credible – they start out with a handful of bad cards and after processing and trying to understand the cards they’ve been dealt they then put them aside and get to work building a character that speaks to their fullest potential.

Tony Robbins is one of these people, and because his start in life was pretty negative, parental conflict, poverty mentality, negative mindsets, and overall it appears quite similar to mine – I can really relate to his quest to figure out exactly how to liberate himself and others to overcome external conditioning and other people’s expectations and go to the core of one’s being and to find out one’s purpose. And then to make a really great motivation and human potential development business out of what he found out.

Back when I was working at ABC Radio as a Regional Program Manager I experienced an enormous amount of pressure and what I now know to be, totally unrealistic expectations from those around me. It’s funny, but when you’re young and early career you want to do well so much that you’ll take on Herculean tasks that you have absolutely no experience or background in, and work yourself to the ground solving and learning how to conquer new problems and issues. It’s possible to have a few successes here and there, which I did, however in time without any meaningful encouragement, you can just get worn down and feel used and abused by the system you’re in and the people you report to. And those who report to you.

Tony Robbins is my arm's length mentor - who is yours?

It was at a time of maximum discouragement that I happened across one of Tony Robbins’ first books – Awaken the Giant Within. I’ve checked our bookshelves, but can’t seem to find my copy from the early 90s but a sneaking suspicion tells me that I probably loaned it to someone in need at some time and it never made its way back to me. No matter, what I still have sitting on my bedside table and which I refer to every now and then when life seems to be building up to one of those really tough and difficult crescendos, is the bedside book – Giant Steps – one of those little books that gives you a hint of wisdom for every day of the year.

The thing about Tony Robbins though, is that he doesn’t share pearls of wisdom passively, Giant Steps is a very practical 365 point list if you will of things you can do to radically improve the quality of your life. And guess what? Nothing in this book is radical, outrageous, strange or involves you doing anything unsavoury or weird. Tony Robbins brilliance is that he is wonderfully, fantastically, stupendously full of common-sense. That’s right, common-sense. You know a broad, open-hearted view on how things work and how people are with some really obvious insights into how to be your best self and to inspire the same in others. Practical, I would say old-fashioned, but I’m not someone who believes the ‘old days’ were actually any good (well not if you were a woman, gay, black or any other group considered a ‘minority’ that is), civil and above all wonderfully warm-hearted.

At the core of Tony Robbins books and audio I detect a complete and utter fascination in him for the human species and an absolute belief that in each an every one of us there’s a total potential to become really extraordinary. Now I’m not being a Pollyanna here – in business and in life, I’ve come across my fair share of really brutal, uncivil, cruel and spiteful people – and I bet Tony has done too – in fact if you listen to Tony you get the sense that he met all these people very early on and decided he was not going to be like them, or do as they do. Instead he chose to master his emotions and behaviour and to harness his energy to encourage, inspire and motivate others.

Why am I writing about Tony Robbins now? Well, when I first stumbled on his work, he’d been doing it for coming close to a decade, though he still looked amazingly young for someone so accomplished. Robbins has now been in the motivation game for nearly 30 years and whilst his way of communicating seems so much more polished and refined and ‘right on the essence’ now, he is talking about the same things he was 30 years ago. That to me is someone with super credibility.

I’m also writing about Tony Robbins now because I hadn’t actually given much thought to him over the past year or so and last week an email with a Tony Robbins message dropped into my inbox. It came via a motivational firm in Australia that has a professional relationship with Robbins, but was essentially Tony being Tony and giving a wrap up on how to go about thriving in times of uncertainty and as we head to Christmas, how to harness the disappointments of the year and the negativity that we’ve all lived through and use that to create the best Christmas ever for yourself.

You can take a look at the video here, and I especially encourage you to do so if you’re feeling overwhelmed and a bit empty with Christmas looming and so much uncertainty still going on in the macro economic environment. It’s vintage Tony Robbins, he defines the zeitgeist, talks about how we’re acting and reacting and then challenges what’s going on right now, with some better ways of seeing and dealing with things. One thing in this video I really liked and which resonated massively with me, was Robbins talking about two books that shifted his mindset during his darkest moments, one of these is also my all time favourite – Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. For the other, you’ll need to go watch the video and find out.

As the year draws near the end and you’re casting your mind forward to what you’d like next year to be like – and then have a think about who might be your arm’s length mentor, your version of Tony Robbins. Believe me, when the going gets tough and you find yourself in uncertain and ambiguous situations and times, it really helps to ask yourself what your arm’s length mentor would do or think if they were in the same situation as you. Answering that question can often give you all the insight you need to take make your next move, the right one for you.

So that’s why I love Tony Robbins – because he’s the guy (in my mind) I ask those tough questions of and somehow the answers I need are the ones he tells me.

Image: Flickr Randy Stewart

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