Tony Robbins: What Happens When You Don’t Face Fear

What happens when we don't lean into our fears or we just allow our fears to stay inside of us, our insecurities to stay inside of us for years or decades, and we never actually learn to act on them and improve them? What happens to us if we just allow these fears to hold us back?

Or what happens to a muscle if you don't use it? We say you lose it. You don't actually lose it, but it gets weaker and weaker, as you well know. Right? And what happens the minute you start making demands on it, especially if you haven't made demands in a while, it doesn't take much to see real muscle growth, Right? And so it's like, if you constantly live in fear, your world gets smaller and smaller, and it tends to get more fearful. Like, who's more fearful? Someone has broken 10 bones in their body and healed them as a kid, or someone never broke a bone. You know, the answer is, the kids that are overprotected are fearful all the time. But if you've gone out in the street and, you know, you got in a fight and you busted your arm or your hand or finger, or you played football or whatever the hell it is, or boxed or something, it's like, now it's like, I'm not afraid of that crap because you've lived it, and there's no substitute. I always tell people a belief is a poor substitute for an experience. You think you know what China is, but I take you to China, you have a little different experience. And so almost everything I do is give someone an experience. That's the reason, you know, I did the firewalk. I still do, but did for so many years. I did. Before that, I used to do skydiving. But it's hard to get 15,000 people above the sky in New York in the middle of the night. So I had to come up with other tools. But the firewalk was, again, giving you an experience of something that seemed difficult or impossible. And then you get yourself to do it, and your brain goes, wait a second. If I could do that, what else could I get myself to do? That psychological shift is the most important shift that people can make. It's a shift in your identity.

Why is identity so important for us to shape a positive, powerful identity?

Well, first of all, so everybody understands what I mean by identity is we all have a way of identifying ourselves. We have a way of labeling ourselves. So most of us came up with our labels based on how we behaved. But really smart people can do stupid things. Really nice people can be Mean, mean people can be nice. And so if you judge yourself too soon. And most people's identity, their labels for themselves, who they think they are, has been based on their past and often many years ago, and so they don't update it. So the metaphor I'd give for identity is like, it's your comfort zone, it's not your goals. So if you like, if you took a temperature in the room and said, 68 degrees is my comfort zone, physically, emotionally, financially, I want more in my relationship, I want more physically, energy wise, I want more financially in my career. But this is what I'm used to. And so what happens? People stay in their comfort zone for the most part. And then let's say something happens and you dip, you're a 68 degree, or that's your mentality. And you drop down to 62, 61, 60, somewhere around 60 or 59, the heaters kick on and go, whoa, whoa, Whoa, you're a 68°. What the hell are you doing? We've all experienced that. All of a sudden you go, I'm not going to live like this anymore. I'm not going to be in this relationship. I'm not going to be fat like this. Boom. And you get this drive and you start to change. But what most people don't understand is it happens on the upper end, too. Meaning, let's say you got momentum, you start crushing it, you start doing even better than you think. You go from 68 to 70, 88, you're in 98 degrees financially, emotionally, spiritually, whatever the metaphor is. And then what happens? You're going to say, hey, hey. Your brain goes, who the hell do you think you are? You're not a 98 degree here, right? Get back to 68. And if nothing else, the heaters stop, you lose your drive, and that'll drift you back, and not enough. The air conditioner can kick on. You start to kind of sabotage yourself till you get back to your comfort zone. So unless you expand your identity, change is temper. It's like when someone says to me, I've stopped smoking. It's been eight days. I go, why are you counting? And I say, why are you counting? So you can tell people how long you lasted this time. Like if I went to somebody and I said to you, hey, you know, Louis, you want a cigarette? You're not gonna say, what brand is it? You go, no, I'm not a smoker. Notice how people, I'm not one of those. That's not my identity. Identity is the strongest force in the human personality. If you look Lance Armstrong, who has a mixed identity and helmet culture, this is a guy that had to win and found a way to win. So when he was told he had cancer in his lungs, in his brain, and in his testicles, and he rides a bike and he's going to die, his answer was, no. I'm a champion. I find the way, I will find the answer. And he did. Now, unfortunately, he bent the rules around the sport and it kind of ruined his reputation, obviously, but that mentality, his identity, is why he survived. Other people told they have cancer and they're like, it's over, they give up, they start arranging their affairs. And so that psychological difference is the number one thing I work with people on, because unless you expand your identity, you're going to basically keep where you are. You might improve a little, or not. You might go up and down a bit, but you're going to stay within a realm. If you're going to have an explosive breakthrough to another level, physically, mentally, financially, spiritually, then we got to not only give you the tools, we got to shift that internal sense of who you really are and have you find that you are more than anything that's ever happened to you, that you can handle whatever shows up, even if it's incredibly scary or uncomfortable. You could call success getting what you want. I don't define it that way, but that's how most people do. And that's sure as hell not how you build a business. It's not a straight line, but if it really grows, it keeps going. But it's a winding process.