How to STOP Living in the Past | Tony Robbins' Advice in 20 Minutes

I created the Mentor Me series to hang around famous and successful entrepreneurs a little bit more and soak up some of their energy, wisdom, and ideas. So today we're going to learn from Tony Robbins on relationships.

One of the things that we found is we meet couples and very often people say, you guys seem like, you know, you're newlyweds. Or they'll ask us, did you guys just get married? Which we're really proud of after 12 years. But it's not a matter of time that makes that difference. If you're single One of the reasons that people find themselves in a relationship that they're unhappy with is they're filtering today's relationship through the past. And one of the things that we've done for anybody we're gonna help is get you to clear the decks of the past and step into who you're with right here and right now. That can start to create a difference. Because in the beginning of a relationship, what were you willing to do for that person? Anything, right? Anything, whatever it takes. Now after a few months or a few weeks or a few years, all of a sudden you're saying, you know, would you take out the trash? In the beginning you're like, whatever you want, the trash, I'm happy to do it for you. Now it's like, you know, what do I look like, I'm your janitor? So learning how to be able to create that aliveness again and not filter your partner through an old story is one of the most important things you can do to have a passionate relationship. I found in my life for years I had a relationship with someone who was a great lady and we had tons of love but very little passion and I wanted more passion. But I didn't understand what the triggers were. I didn't understand the differences in values and rules. I didn't know how to shift anything. Nobody teaches you this. And so I'd be in this experience where it's like, wow, you know. I remember being on stage vividly in a room that would have been my ultimate years before. It was at the Continental Center in New York City. There were 13,000 people in the room, 12,000-something-hundred, almost 13,000 people. And I was doing my gig, and we were rocking. Like what we're doing here with 5,000, imagine 13,000. And we were going full tilt with a level of intensity that was unbelievable, and people were out of their mind. And during one of the stretch breaks, one of my partners came up and told me my company had gone public that morning. And that's the morning where my stock alone was worth $400 million. He says, "Tony, you just made $400 million this morning while you're doing what you love." I was like, "Shit, good morning." It was a great morning. But you know what was interesting? It was really great. It was like, "Wow, that's wonderful." And then what I really wanted to do was get right back into what I loved. It didn't— like, it was a cool thing, but it didn't change my life. But the biggest thing is, the end of that night, I'm connecting with people, high-fiving, signing, hugging people, and it's just a beautiful day. And I get home, and I'd made $400 million. I've been with almost 13,000 people. I'd done what I loved. I was on fire and alive. And I went home, and I was miserable. Because when I went home, the person I was with wanted me to be something different than what I was. Kind of like, that's why I understood Sarah Mae. Sarah Mae was trying to be something she thinks people want or people are expecting from her, but it's not her. So the person I was in a relationship with when she met me, she's like, "God, he's unbelievable. He's this powerful force of nature. He can shake a building with people and move people." And then it was like, "Why are you so fucking loud?" I was like, "Loud? This is me." Right? And so what I learned to do was be something different than I really wasn't. And so when you're being something you're not, you're miserable. Who knows what I'm talking about here? Say, "I." And I'm such a lover. I love people. I never want somebody to not be happy, so I would always sacrifice everything to try to make somebody happy, but by not being who I was. There was nothing wrong with her. I was just miserable because I didn't understand the game. When I finally figured this process out, and by the way, guess how I did it? I interviewed people. I had a couple that was— guy was 92, woman's 89, came to my Date with Destiny seminar, and these two were physically all over each other all the time. I mean, so much so it was like, get a room. I mean, this is hard to watch, right? And everybody in the whole seminar noticed it, so I finally brought them on stage and interviewed them. Ah, shit, they're young punks in their 60s. So I bring this 92-year-old man, this 89-year-old woman up, and I said, "I gotta interview you guys." So I'm interviewing them, I said to them, I said, "Tell me something." I said, "You two seem to not just love each other, you like love each other." And they went, "Oh yeah." I mean, like, "You're rather physical, aren't you?" They said, "Oh yes, we love everything. We love to be together." I said, "And you guys have intimate relations?" "Oh yes, every day." Every day? Sometimes several times a day, the woman says. No exaggeration. And they were so adorable, and they were like all over each other, hugging each other, grabbing each other, touching each other. And I said to them, I said, okay, there are a lot of people that think when you're together 3, 4, 5, 10 years, you know, there's nothing new. They said, nothing new? They just aren't being flexible enough. They're not trying new things. I said, well, tell me something. I said, "What's your belief about, like, how do you stay intimate?" The woman says, "Well, you can't just talk. You gotta touch." And she said, "Like touch lots of things?" And she's so adorable. And so I said, "So you guys have this passion all the time?" "Yeah." And I said, "What's your belief?" And he said, "Well, we believe that it's never boring because we believe there's nothing ugly between two people who love each other. Nothing dirty between two people who love each other." She said, "Yeah, here's our rule. We try anything once, and if we like it, we do it again." So I spent 5 years interviewing people who've been together 20, 30, 40, 50 years, and they don't just have love, they have passion. They're not hanging out, they love each other. And it changed the game for me. And the biggest change in my life, I would give up everything in my life without a— no exaggeration, no hyperbole. Everything I've ever learned, everything I've ever done, for the relationship I have with my Sage. She has been the great— I'd die for this woman, no exaggeration. But I couldn't have gotten to that place if I hadn't been through all those other places first. And the gift that I've got in that area is a gift you deserve. And anybody can have it. You could be with somebody together for 10 years and you could reignite it because you just didn't know the triggers. Or some of you may find that you're in a relationship where truthfully you have nothing in common. You're just scared shitless to end it. Because you're afraid of being alone. But there's a way to do this in a way where things can be elegant, but you can be free, and you can bring to your life what you deserve. I tell people one thing: if you're not happy in your intimate relationship, you're not happy. Because I don't give a shit how hard you work, I don't care how much money you make, how many trophies you get. In the end, if you don't have that aliveness and passion, a part of you is dead inside. It's one thing to have strategies to know how to fix things, but oftentimes you don't apply what you know because you got a story about your relationship, a story about your partner. They don't really you know, you've got frustrations or pains or disappointments that got interpreted in the past, and now you're generalizing about your partner. And whenever we generalize about anybody, we do them a disservice and ourselves as well. So maybe this week during Valentine's Week, maybe discover what are the empowering stories about your relationship. If you ask a couple, how did you meet? And they talk about it with such passion, excitement, you know the relationship's still alive. If they go, yeah, we met, you know, this is what happened, and we bumped into each other, there's no energy for it. Even the story of how you met affects you. It does. So part of this week, you might want to You also want to take a look at the stories that you tell about your partner to yourself, to your friends, to your partner, because we start to believe our stories. And I always tell people, you want to change your life, change your story. Divorce the story of how your partner's not enough, or you'll never find the partner you want if you're single, or the good ones are gone. Whatever's stopping you from getting what you want in a relationship, there's a story about it. If you can uncover it, you can get rid of it. Divorce your story and marry the truth. The truth is always something that will empower you much more.

And that truth of that magnification remembering, it's like, One of the gifts that we give each other, especially actually at a time like this, like Valentine's Week, is actually reliving those moments, you know, reliving the magic and appreciating the magic. And it's just, I don't know, it infuses into your life rather than looking and letting those stackings stack up for you, become frustrations. And the story, knowing that this man, I was born to love this man.

I love that story. And God gifted me for all that I've done with millions of people, the good I've done. This has been the gift of my life. I've gotten from that. I believe that's my positive karma. That's the core story I believe about this woman. And that produces a love and a commitment and a devotion to each other that gets through any of the other BS that shows up when you get caught up in the daily stresses of things.

So rewrite your story. What is your love affair and who are you for the one that you love?

And if you're single, it's time to rewrite the story of who you are and the one that you're going to attract. Because whatever we focus on, wherever— we all know wherever energy goes, wherever focus goes, energy flows. So your story controls the energy of your life. If you think all the good ones are gone, it's self-fulfilling. If you're overweight and you aren't losing weight, the strategies are there, but you're not doing it because you go, "I've tried everything." You haven't tried everything, not all the good ones are gone, and your partner who's right with you, if there was ever a passion, that passion can be brought back to life with the right strategies, but first you gotta have the story that says it can. What really is important though is if you consistently feel like there's a loss of attraction in the relationship, it changes your filter on each other's behaviors.

It does.

And it goes to the second stressor now. All of a sudden, with a loss of attraction, there's an increase in irritation. There's irritation. Yeah. People start to get very often where they get emotionally stacked, like little things start to bug them. And in worst case, they get to stonewalling. So we'll give you an example. There's 4 Rs that we talk about that actually this came out of a couple of our friends who are both relationship experts who got divorced, but they learned from that experience and they both were trying to figure out what destroyed their relationship. And they were sharing with us and they said, well, the first thing is there's that initial resistance, you know, where somebody says something or somebody does something, your partner does it, and you're like, "Ugh, you know, wish they wouldn't do that," but you don't say anything because, you know, it's not appropriate to say anything. It's not that big a deal. But if you don't deal with the resistance level—

And you don't, we always call it speaking the unspoken. If you don't speak the unspoken and you don't speak that resistance, then that resistance becomes the next, and it becomes a little bit deeper, which is the resentment. And all of these unspoken and the anchors and the stackings, they all go deeper.

Yeah, and what happens when it starts to become resentment, the way you kind of know that is you start going, "Why does he or why does she always have to tell that story?" Or, you know, "Why is he always late or she always late?" Or, "Why do we have to go through this?" But you still don't necessarily say much at that stage.

It's true, and you feel an emotion sometimes. You just wake up in the morning and feel a charge and you don't even know where it came from.

And it's just that built-up, what it was, resistances that you didn't deal with. And by the way, the resistances may have just been your stuff. Absolutely. But the fact that you didn't come and say, "Gosh, honey," I know this is my stuff, but I was kind of reacting to this thing. It's not you, but I just want to tell you, I got to shift this, or would you help me with this? If you can just talk about it, it's different, but if you don't, that resistance turns into resentment. If that resentment isn't dealt with, it starts to show up as rejection. That's when somebody starts going, why do you always do that? Or they, you know when you overreact to somebody? You're not reacting to this moment. You're reacting to the fact that it happened again in your mind. And so people, by the way, when you start rejecting them or being really overly harsh, They don't know why you're doing this, and so then they feel really wounded. They tend to then reject you back, and it spirals it even worse.

It's the crazy 8 that happens, or the rejection of, you know, I'm out of here. And, you know, in that space, there's words that are spoken that it's just— there's that emotional charge. Now we're getting in deeper, and you're getting a level with a level of charge and honestly toxicity in the relationship that you don't want. And we so stay in our relationship just with these— once again, it's the awareness. And once you have this awareness, you can see where you are, it's like, "You know what, I'm feeling resistance right now," that you can speak that unspoken, so you don't get to level 3 and 4.

And my girl has no difficulty expressing her resistance or her pettiness. But the great thing, seriously, is we both tease, we have these little play fights where she'll say, "You know, honey, you're driving me a little crazy right now," or I'll do the same thing with her, but we do it not from a harsh place.

Not from a harsh place, exactly.

And then it gets the energy out, and then you don't build it up. So there is a 4th level, but we're out of time. And we'll see you tomorrow. Seriously.

Well, all right, well, I'll give you one more.

The last piece to finish there is when you get to a place where now you're repressing. In other words, the resistance grew to resentment, resentment got yourself to a point of rejection where you're kind of being harsh with each other. Some people get tired of being harsh with each other and they just surrender.

And they're just numb.

That's right. They go into what we call learned helplessness where it's just like, not going to get any better, it's how it is. And those times, very often when other couples meet them, they'll say, those guys are best friends.

They're great. They're neutral, like everyone.

They never fight.

All is well.

That's the first thing, they never, the fact that they never fight's a little clue, right?

Very benign.

Because what they do is they lower their expectation for the relationship and they start filling up through their work or through their kids or through shopping or through something else. And what happens in that relationship is it's really dead. Or maybe it's a decent friendship, but you can be friends with anybody. Again, you can't be intimate with anybody. So our whole thing is about love and passion, not settling for one or the other, like taking it up another notch. And so breaking the pattern of these 4 Rs is really critical. If you want to change a relationship, the number one thing you have to do is master your own emotions. If you don't do that, forget it. There's no hope. And what's wonderful though is it's easy to do if you know how. But none of us have been taught really emotional leadership. Emotional management is the very minimum, much less how to direct and shape ourselves. I don't mean faking your emotions. I don't mean pushing them down. I don't believe in positive thinking, although you may think that from watching some of the media coverage. I am not into positive thinking. I'm not here tonight to tell you to go to your garden and say, there's no weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds, there's no weeds. You know, I'm very clear that I believe that life is about leadership and being truthful to yourself. And so I believe, number one, that the mandate for any great relationship and the mandate for anybody to lead their own life and not be a follower is you got to see things as they are, but not worse than they are, because that's where most people go. That's where they go in relationship. That's why they start to tear it down. That's why the relationship starts to break down, because people get scared when it isn't working out. And then they make it worse than it is so they don't have to try because they don't want to try again and be disappointed. They don't want to feel that sense of rejection. They don't want to feel that sense of failure. So most people make it much worse than it is. People tell me all the time, oh, I'm skeptical or I'm pessimistic. I said, no, no, you're gutless. It takes no guts. It takes no courage to be a pessimist, to say it's not going to work, to try to find out what's wrong. What's wrong is always available. So is what's right. So I'm not into positive thinking, but I am into intelligence. And intelligence says, see it as it is. Don't make it worse than it is. I meet people all the time and say, my problem is I'm big-boned. No, you're fricking fat. Tell the truth. You know, what is this big-boned story? You know, the only way it gets better is if you can see how it is. Don't make it worse than it is. Don't try to make it so it's impossible to change. That's not true. It's not true at all. The second mandate, I think, to changing anything in your life, to leading your life, is once you see it as it is, not worse than it is, then you got to see it better than it is. 'Cause that's the thing that's missing from most relationships. There's no vision. I mean, without a vision, in the Bible it says people what? Perish. And when a relationship has no vision for greater than where they are, that relationship is going downhill, if not destroyed. I believe that every relationship, every part of life, every part of a human being needs a compelling future. If the future's not more compelling than today, today could be tough, but if the future's compelling, we can get there. And that's what every leader does. And every one of you in this room, and I know some of you are here, I guess, from the general public as well, just for your own relationship. I really acknowledge you for— but I know you're from the military here. I know the therapists here, people from all walks of life. You're all leaders. What's your job? To lead. Your job is to help people see it as it is, not worse than it is. What's your job? Help them create a compelling future. See it better than it is so there's a reason to give my all again. Otherwise, there's just no juice. There's no energy. Why? They'll go through the motions. Complain with each other, not really believe it's going to work, and nothing will change. And then finally, the third step that we've all got to do if we're going to change our life or anybody else's is make it the way we see it. And that's where strategy comes in. I try to take things that are complex and make them as simple as possible. I've noticed most people in the psychological world try to make it as complex as humanly possible because it makes us feel so sophisticated. We can talk with all these complex words and elements and so forth, and we can really, you know, we got our degrees and we where somebody, but you know what, that doesn't help anybody. So I look for a nickel word to get to the heart of something. I've tried to take something complex and make it simple so that people really will apply it. The most important part of a relationship is the state you're in. We always call it the state of the union. You know, what's the state of the union? If two people, independent of each other, are in peak states about things in their business, their life, their career, and they meet together, it's a great relationship. If they're both in kind of a so-so state, Eventually the relationship's so-so. If they're both in a crappy state, pretty soon it's a crappy relationship. What people want is when we meet somebody, we get attracted to them because they change our state, they change the way we feel, we get excited, want to be with them. Are you being— are you putting yourself in a state when you're with the partner in your life or the person you want to attract? Are you really in the state that would want them— make them want to be with you like they would be in the beginning? You know, most people are noticing what the other person isn't doing, but the most important thing is you're going to interpret your partner in really negative ways when you're in a lousy state. You ever been mad at somebody about something and you found out later on you were wrong? It was just the state you're in. So we have so many tools for changing state, and we work at it.

We do. And I'm giggling about this one because state— my husband always says I'm the most loving human being on the planet until I don't eat, then he calls me Godzilla. Um, so from a State perspective, be aware. Sometimes, truthfully, we will even, if there's a stacking or we have a frustration, we will literally, uh, it's like, you know what, let me need to change our state. We'll go drink some water, we'll eat something, just taking a breath from what's happening in that moment. So it allows your physiology to change, so you're not like bringing that to the table in that moment, because that can just cause— if you're both frustrated and those two frustrations are just It's like, let's do something physical. Jump in the pool. It sounds crazy, but it actually, like, you know, you come out and you feel different and feeling different, your physiology, you experience a different reality.

When you're stuck in a relationship, you're stuck because you're stuck in a state. People get stuck in the future. Future's not the way they want it to be in their head or something that happened in the past. The best thing is to change something in the present, physically change it, drink some water, have something to eat, jump in the river, do whatever you got to do. Because in the right state, you and I both know, if there's any love there, you will transform and come back and solve the problem. But in the wrong state, good people, the right people in the wrong state will mess up the relationship. So if you want to have a breakthrough, this week look at some of the strategies for understanding, appreciating, and changing. Look at what triggers you to feel attracted, because this week's not just about love, it's love and passion. Because if all you have is love, you have a friendship. Nothing wrong with that, but if you have an intimate relationship, then there's passion there. So what are the strategies to trigger that, the masculine and feminine energy, the dance of it? Take a look at some of those this week.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed. I'd love to know what you think of the video and from the clips that you saw, what was the most impactful one for you? How are you gonna make some changes in your relationships as a result of watching this? I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment below. I'll join in the responses. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe and I'll see you soon.