PNTV: Tony Robbins (#28)

Hey, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we're going to profile Tony Robbins. I don't have a book here because I'm going to base this one Philosopher's Notes. I have about six pages with maybe a dozen, actually maybe 20 different big ideas that I got not from his books, but from a couple of his incredible seminars. So Unleash. What was it called? Unleash the Power within, which I went to maybe seven years ago. And then Date With Destiny, which I went to maybe five years ago. Unleash the Power within is a weekend workshop. You walk on fire. Pretty fun stuff. And then the Date with Destiny is a week long, which is just incredible. I filled up literally an entire journal in the span of that week. And I like to say that Tony Robbins is part rock star, part comedian, and part philosopher in. And really, really, really good at what he does. The way he can create energy in a room, a few thousand people is just extraordinary. So in this note, we take a look at about 20 or so of my favorite big ideas from those workshops. And in this episode, we'll look at a few of them in detail and a handful of them quickly. So, so much we could talk about. But we're going to focus on a few things we. One, Tony likes to talk about the fact that thinking is really just a series of asking and answering questions, asking and answering questions, Asking and answering questions. If you think about it, that's really what we're doing throughout the day, right? We're asking ourselves questions and then we're answering them without even really being aware of it. And he says we want to start paying attention to the quality of those questions, Right? Because too often we're asking really, really, really bad questions and that have a bad answer implicit in the question. And he talks about the importance of this, generally speaking, and specifically with what he calls our primary question. And we spent like half of a day, if not more, figuring out what our primary question was during the Date with Destiny workshop. Really powerful stuff. Quickly. The idea here is, again, we ask ourselves these questions, we answer them, and. And we have a dominant primary question that we come back to more often than any other question. And we tend to come back to it unconsciously when we're particularly stressed. Right? So think about whether you can imagine what your primary question is, and I'll give you an example of what mine was. So my primary question In December of 2004, when I did this Date With Destiny workshop was, am I going to look like an idiot? That was a question I Asked myself way too often. Now, when you ask yourself a question like, am I going to look like an idiot or am I going to look stupid? Or something to that effect, the answer to that question is never going to be, no, you're not going to look like an idiot. You're going to look like a stud. Like, you're going to look great. Don't worry about it. The answer is going to be something like, I don't know, I might or might, or worse. And often more likely, yeah, you probably are going to look stupid. Don't do whatever you were thinking about doing. And for me, having that question come up again and again and again was one of the reasons why I was afraid to make phone calls. Totally nervous about that. I was afraid to get on a dance floor, and I was afraid of all kinds of other stuff because I was afraid of looking stupid. So whatever your question is, you want to get kind of clear on that question. Realize it's probably been driving a lot of your emotional show for a while. That. And the idea is we want to observe the questions we ask, ask better questions, and particularly focus on that primary question and then swap it out for a more empowering question. So my more empowering question that I came up with in the workshop was, how can I let God flow through me more in this moment? How can I let God flow through me? Now, that's a very different question than am I going to look stupid? And I remember in that week we did some exercises, one where we were dancing with a partner, someone we never met before, and dancing in different rhythms and different tempos. Now, the old version of me with the primary question of am I going to look stupid? Is really, really, really inhibited. Would have been really inhibited during that exercise. But I used it as an opportunity to practice my new question, which was, how do I let God flow through me and just let myself go to the rhythms of the music? It was awesome to see the. The difference. And now here as I film this, I can be thinking, am I going to look stupid right now? Well, if that was the dominant question still in my mind, I never would do this, because I do look stupid sometimes, and I need to be open to that and allow myself to grow. But when I say, how can I let God flow through me? And I live that question as my primary question, things unfold powerfully. So in five minutes, it's going to be challenging. But if you can discover what your primary question is and get some hints on it, it doesn't need to be perfect, but Some hints and see how you can swap in some more effective questions. That would be awesome. So that's one of my favorite big ideas. Really transformed my life. And hopefully you can see something in your question and answering process from that description. So moving on. Tony also talks about the fact that good judgment and success and bad judgment and how they relate. He says success is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is a result of experience. And experience is often the result of bad judgment. Right. We get experience oftentimes through bad judgment. But it's that experience that allows us to have the good judgment, that allows us to have the success. Now, looking at that formula, we've got to be willing to exercise bad judgment to get the experience, to get the good judgment to ultimately have the success. Which means we got to be willing to make mistakes. If you remember in the note and the episode on Michael Beckwith's Spiritual Liberation, we talked about this. Mistakes. Mistakes are just mistakes. Just take it again. Take another shot. We've got to view life that way as we develop good judgment. Really big idea. He's got a great idea. Of horror movies. If you go to a bad movie, one that you hated, you didn't even enjoy it, right? And you might have even left halfway through the movie, would you go back and watch that movie again and again and again and again and again, thousands of times, would you do that? Of course you would never do that. But we do that with our memories. We do that with our worst memories. We play them again and again and again. And it's not any different than going to a terrible movie again and again and again. So when you start replaying that terrible scene in your life when someone let you down or you felt like an idiot or whatever it is, stop it. And realize it's just as insane and absurd as going to a terrible movie again and again and again. So that's an awesome idea. I love that one. So many here we could go through. But check out the note. Check out his books, check out his workshop. Check out. I've also done Personal Power and all those things. Get the edge. Awesome stuff, Rear View Mirrors. He talks about the fact that rear view mirrors are helpful to a very limited degree. We do not drive looking into our rear view mirror unless we're driving backwards, which we do infrequently. Right? But if we're trying to go forward and we're staring into our past into the rear view mirror, we're gonna get into accidents. We're gonna have problems. So we wanna focus on this moment. We wanna Focus on looking forward at the goals and the things that are inspiring us and use the rear view mirror. Use reflecting on the past selectively and effectively. But don't obsess and stare into the past all the time. You're not going to get very far and when you do travel, you're going to run into stuff. Not a good idea. He has a great idea here, talking about looking at the past. He says 10 years from now, whatever's stressing you out right now, 10 years from now, you're going to laugh at it. So why wait? Laugh now. I love that. So whatever is stressing you out. I know for me, I look back 10 years ago. For me I was. What was I doing 12 years ago? I was dropping out of law school, which was the most terrible event at that time in my life. I was freaked out, totally stressed out and thought my world was over. Now I look back at that and I literally laugh because it was not only one of the best decisions I've made, but just funny that I would take it that seriously. So what about you? What's happened 10 years ago that you need to laugh at if you haven't yet? What's stressing you out right now? And can you laugh about it now rather than being stressed about it? Because you're going to laugh about it in the future anyway, so that's pretty sweet. Tony. Like everybody else says, the only thing we can control is the meaning we give something. We can't control someone else. We can't control outcomes to events, but we can control the meaning we give to stuff. Everyone talks about this as you know, if you've been following these things. How about one more, maybe two shoulding on ourselves. Tony's got a great one here. All kinds of teachers talk about this too. He says quit shoulding on yourself. I should, should, should, should, should. I should do this, I should do that. I should do that. Whatever. It's shoulding on yourself. Louise Hay says turn your shoulds into coulds. Totally different energy to that. Check out the note on youn Can Heal youl Life by Louise Hay. I talk about it more but. But turn your shoulds into coulds and quit shoulding on yourself. So we could talk about Tony for about a year and get through half of his stuff, if that. But that's a quick 10 minute look at it. Hope you enjoyed. And here's to rocking it. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See you.