10 Lessons on Mindset from Tony Robbins
Want to change your mindset and make 2018 the BEST YEAR yet? Here are the best tips Tony Robbins gives us on setting our minds for success!
Tony Robbins. Everyone’s self-help guru, he has launched a multi million dollar franchise on helping people become their best selves. Known for being a foul-mouthed, crazy, intense but extremely soft-hearted person, Tony is the inspiration behind most self-help moguls out there. He is also a genius when it comes to self-improvement. No one knows more, does more and gives you more clarity than Tony. Here are the 10 lessons I’ve learned throughout my many years of reading his (amazing) stuff.
1. Make a Decision
Most people don’t have the guts to make the tough decisions ’cause they want to make the right decisions, so they make no decision. And that’s a decision. — Tony Robbins
Read or listen to any of Tony’s stuff for a second and you’ll be persuaded on the power of decisions. A decision towards your ideal life is the first step in living that life. Without that decision, you’ll remain where you are forever.
But if it were that easy, everyone would make these types of decisions every day, and yet they don’t. Why don’t people make the decisions necessary to change their life? Because they are scared. People usually have this monstrous idea of what a decision looks like, as if you have to decide to change every little thing about yourself overnight, which feels completely unattainable and scary.
What if, instead, you were to make small, actionable decisions towards your goals? What if you were to decide today to just sign up for a real estate class? And then decide to talk to a broker about employment? What if you were to decide to go to one gym class a week and then decide to increase that to two and then three times? THESE are the decisions that are life changing! As Tony says, decision making is like a muscle. The more you work it, the better you’ll become. Soon, you’ll be ready to make the jump to the BIG decisions.
For me, the decision that changed my life was to take the GRE test a couple of years ago and work towards my masters. I found the master’s program I wanted and then decided to apply. My next decision to apply to a certain job, which I then got. That job then opened my mind to so many other possibilities of what I could do with my life. If I hadn’t taken a small, actionable decision three years ago, I don’t even know where I’d be today. I can tell you my mind would be in a totally different place.
So, decide. Make a small decision. Take an itty step towards your goal. Decide something today. Make a decision every day and your life will change! What are the decisions you are sitting on? Take the plunge and act towards them!
2. Use the Right Kind of Self Talk
The words you use have so much power! I myself just wrote about the power of the word “NO” and Tony is really big on changing your vocabulary to fit your mindset. A person who uses words like “can’t”, “don’t”, “not able”, etc. is absolutely not a person who is moving towards success. Rather, I will bet you anything that such a person is stuck, depressed, angry at the world and fed up with themselves.
And yet, what would happen if that person were to just change their vocabulary? Nothing else would change right away except that person would wake up using words like: “I can do xxx”, “I am able to get xxx done today”. Do you think that, in a couple of weeks, that person would have a completely different life? For sure.
Use words that fit into the person you want to become. Tony’s book Awaken the Giant Within has a whole list of words you should and shouldn’t be using. Words matter. Find some good ones and stick to them. Pick and choose the ones you want to use and THROW OUT the ones that you know are harming you.
How has your vocabulary limited you? Have you been using defeatist words to describe your situation? Remove the words “always” or “never” from your vocabulary. Use positive adjectives to describe you and your life. Use inspiring words to describe your dreams. Let your vocabulary guide your success!
3. Change Your Story
To me, this more than any other thing Tony talks about has made a different in my life. What is the “Story” you tell yourself about your life and the things that happen during your day? This is different than the vocabulary you use — rather, it’s the reasoning you give for the things that happen or don’t happen.
For example, I noticed that the story I was telling myself was that successful people do things effortlessly, that the work comes naturally and is always aligned with that they want. This “story” was ruining me because it told me that any work that didn’t come naturally and felt hard was not something that I should be doing. You can imagine the problem that caused me for a while, as I had major disdain for the necessary work that must be done. I started noticing the fallacy of this story the more I read about how truly hardworking successful people are. They will often spend years and years putting in grueling, tiresome work before ever being recognized.
I changed that stupid story and the work didn’t feel as burdensome anymore.
I bet you have a bunch of stories you tell yourself that are holding you back. Here’s one: “I’ll never be rich because I don’t have the contacts. Rich people help rich people” — I hear that all the time and yet there are just so many examples of people who prove that it can be done.
Pay attention to the reasons you give to yourself as to why you’re not where you want to be. Find the story behind it. Then kill that story with FACTS. Work on this until the story you tell yourself aligns with the reality you want to create.
4. Set your body to succeed
Tony Robbins is one crazy, out of his mind individual. One prime example is his insane morning ritual: Jumping into freezing cold water to wake his body up. Yup, he does this every single morning. He wakes up and jumps in a pool of cold water. I don’t even like to take a cold shower in the summer so you can imagine how pleasurable I find this.
But why? WHY would he do this? Because he is a big believer that what the body does, the mind follows. Wake up your body and your mind is awoken. This is called State Changing and you can do this without needing a bucket of ice water.
For example, what is your posture at this moment? How do you carry yourself? How do you dress yourself? How does your face look at this exact moment?
Try changing your physical state: Sit up, put a smile on your face, dress the part, carry yourself high and see if that doesn’t have an immediate effect on your mindset. It absolutely does.
So no more slouching, dressing in oversized t-shirts, looking downcast. Perk yourself up, look the part and be who you want to be. Learn to change and control your state every day and your mind will follow suit!
If you’re interested, look into the book/audio book “Presence” where the author Amy Cuddy explains the science behind this and even shows you a couple of power poses to do. Here is her fantastic Ted Talk.
5. Use the Pleasure over Pain Principle
The first time I read about pain/pleasure, in Tony Robbin’s Awaken the Giant book, it blew my mind. Everything we do in life we do to either run away from pain or to experience pleasure. Why is this important? Well, because we need to do some things that cause us pain (paying bills) and we need to run far, far away from other things that cause us pleasure (overeating).
How can we use this principle to become more successful? By flipping pain/pleasure on its head. Instead of focusing on the pleasure of stuffing your face, focus on the pain of being overweight, the uncomfortable feeling of being bloated and full, the tiresome sensation of feeling heavy. Make that feeling big and bright in your mind. The more you do this, the more overeating will feel painful rather than pleasurable for you. The more painful overeating is, the less you’re likely to do it. Do this mental exercise enough times and you’ll feel more pain than pleasure about overeating.
Isn’t this an amazing tip? Try it with procrastination, your work habits, sleeping, etc. This works wonders!
6. Study, Study, study
Successful people are the most well-informed. They study, they read, they keep up with market trends, with the news, with the latest tax breaks, with the current self-help tips. They go to conferences. They go to meetings. They talk to people about the things they’ve learned. They read. They READ.
Tony reads a lot. Some sources say he read around 700 books just on Neuro Linguistic Programing (NLP) alone. Bill Gates reads a lot and always has a book in hand.
You need to know your stuff to be successful.
7. Meditate
As mentioned, Tony is a big believer in setting your body’s state for success. Posture, waking your body up, etc. But what about your mind? What do you do to make sure your mind is primed for success? Some meditate, which is great and which Robbins recommends. But Tony has said many times that meditation is a bit out of his grasp since his mind moves so fast. What he does instead is called “priming” and he does it every morning, starting with a 10-minute breathing exercise called Kapalabhati Pranayama. It’s a bit involved and supposedly only for advanced practitioners so I’ll leave the link here for you to check it out. Tony then expresses gratitude and prays.
Every single morning, after setting his state by taking a cold dip, he primes himself. What about you? How do you prime your mind every day? Do you meditate? Do you take 5–10 minutes of alone time to set your goals and intentions for the day? Do you do a breathing exercise? Do you pray? Successful people all around the world go on and on about how important it is to set your mind for success.
Start your day with a quick meditation session, with a quick breathing exercise, with prayer and with gratitude. Prime your mind for success to set the path for the rest of your day.
8. Connect with other humans
Tony will often start out his talks detailing the 6 Core Human Needs. One of them is connection with other humans. What this means is that we will never feel truly fulfilled until we learn how to connect with others. Not just be around people at work who we barely like, not just hang out with friends we don’t know why we are friends with but truly, really, deeply CONNECT.
How can you connect with others? It begins with communication. Improve your communication with others and you’ll fulfill your need to connect. How does communications the Tony Robbins way work?
First, begin by being honest. Speak your truth, don’t hide behind what you think people want to hear or who you think people want you to be. Be yourself. The right people, who appreciate you for who you are, will enter your life at the right time. If you already have a partner, be open and honest with them — but kind. Lots of people mistake sheer honesty for rudeness.
Second, build rapport with people. Rapport is a feeling of commonality. You can do this by asking people questions to find things in common with them, and you can also do this through your body language. Tony is a big advocate for building rapport through mirroring — mirror their breathing, their tone of voice, their level of energy, their posture and facial expressions, etc. This isn’t meant to negate your identity and make you a puppet of the other person, rather it’s used to create an instant connection with people.
The more you improve your communication with others, the deeper you’ll connect and meet that crucial human need.
9. Change your focus
One of my favorite sayings of Tony’s is: Where focus goes, energy flows
What do you focus on? Do you constantly think about what could have been, what you should but don’t want to do, what is going wrong in your life, what other people have and you don’t, what you haven’t accomplished yet? Here’s the thing, the more you think about those things, the more those things will be attracted to you. The more you focus on what you DON’T want, the more you will spend your energy on what you don’t want.
Have you ever heard of the pink elephant trick? Here goes: Don’t think of a pink elephant. Do NOT think of a pink elephant. Don’t think of a BIG, pink elephant with black spots. Don’t think of a pink elephant with HUGE BLACK spots in the forest. What did you think about? A pink elephant, probably. And the more specific and exaggerated I got, the more you added details to the elephant. Never mind that I said the word “don’t”. That doesn’t matter — where focus goes, energy flows. Even if it’s what you don’t want.
It’s think about what you want. Not what you don’t want or don’t have. Wake up thinking about what you want to accomplish that day. Look at Instagram thinking about inspirations for your own feed. Think about what you could do today to get to where you want to be. Focus on your goals and only your goals every day. That is where your energy will flow.
10. Be grateful — appreciate
Extreme gratitude is as much a hallmark of Tony Robbins as is Neuro Linguistic Programming. Dude’s grateful for everything. In fact, part of his morning “priming” routine as referred to above is to be grateful. Every morning, Robbins takes time to speak gratitude — to be grateful for the opportunities he has, the people in his life, living the life he does, etc. Even if he has earned and worked for everything he has, he still does not take it for granted.
Man, does gratitude change things. You are 100% in charge of your thoughts and emotions. You alone have the power to think what you want to think. And if you’ve been stuck in a rut upset about life, anxious about where you should be at this point, angry with people who didn’t help you (or hurt you), disappointed with yourself, etc. gratitude will change all of that.
Take a little moment every day to feel gratitude. You don’t need to thank God if you don’t believe in him, just be grateful. I’m grateful for my able body that is capable of doing what I want it to do. I am grateful for my sound mind that is capable of creating wonderful things. I am thankful for the opportunities presented to me and for the ability to create my own. I am grateful for the people in my life, even the ones who taught me lessons the hard way.
You want to be like Tony? Be grateful!
There is so much more to talk about with Tony — Beliefs, framing, NLP — but the above 10 are the principles I learned through him that most changed my life. What about you? Care to share what you’ve learned from Tony that made the biggest impact?
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