Tony Robbins interview, NBC show not about him, but the power of you

By April MacIntyre Jul 26, 2010, 23:23 GMT

NBC\'s latest reality is an inspirational journey hosted byTony Robbins, called "Breakthrough with Tony Robbins," and will premiere on Tuesday July 27 at 8 pm.

NBC's latest reality is an inspirational journey hosted by Tony Robbins, called "Breakthrough with Tony Robbins," and will premiere on Tuesday July 27 at 8 pm.

Robbins is quick to share that the show reveals that we all fall into funks, bad places and negative spaces, and we have the power to reboot and restart our lives, regardless of how bad the setback is. 

"My business is really just helping people that’s been my focus for most of my life. And I do it in a variety of forms," shared Robbins, who spoke to Monsters and Critics on a phone call a few weeks back.

"But if you’re talking about the industry or books or tapes or things of that nature I watched many things come and go over the years but we’re a fad per se, and very few things stick around. And I’ve been doing this for 30 years."

Robbins was realistic about the burdens that some have to overcome. "We all know it takes a hell of lot more than just positive thinking or just thinking right and to believe that that’s the basis of how to change your life by itself is kind of crazy, it’s like somebody in (Osowitz) was there because they thought negatively. Or, if things bad happened to you it’s because you just didn’t have a clear enough conscious."

"I just think there is a lot of things unfortunately in the field that just aren’t true, they’re aren’t real. Or they might be part of the puzzle. Certainly your mindset plays a huge role in how you do in life, but it’s certainly not everything. It’s like one law or many laws of physics."

Robbins placed the onus squarely on each of us to grab the moment and teach ourselves ways of coping and climbing out of any imaginable abyss. "People know they have to become self educated, they have to find the answers to create the changes they want in their life on their own, it’s not something we traditionally get in our traditional schooling. No one showed you this is how you breakthrough, this is how you create the changes that you need. Here is how you deal with economic crisis that hasn’t been here in 80 years," shared Robbins, who downplays his role in the series. "Here is what you do when suddenly find yourself in a position where your relationship is deteriorating or you’re losing your job or you’re in a situation where you lose a child or you’re raped or whatever the case may be. As well as what to do if things are going well to take it to another level."

"The people I try to reach are the people that are hungry...the billionaire and the barber are both reaching out to me at this stage. And I say that not just a punt of words but literally from my barber and a billionaire client of mind. When the 2008 happened and all hell broke loose everybody was shaken by this."

We had specific questions for Mr. Robbins and the new series:

Monsters and Critics:  What is the common denominator with most people that you encounter for this particular NBC effort, regardless of their situation?

Tony Robbins: Well first of all I look for people who have extreme stress people that life is seemingly crushed because I want to give them a second chance.

I picked these people, I didn’t look for a people that typically are in reality television because you have lots of people wanting to be on TV and that is the last thing I wanted.

What I wanted was people that we got referred by other people that needed help. And the common denominator for all these people is there are in a place where the believe circumstance controls them. And they have plenty of good reasons too.

So you saw the first show for those who haven’t seen it, imagine a couple that is in their early 30s going down to Mexico to have their wedding, they bring their mother and father and all their best friends. And they decide at the end to jump in the swimming pool and have the celebration and the husband or the groom jumps in right after the I do’s and everybody else is clapping around and he hits a step that nobody sees and becomes a quadriplegic overnight.

So no one knows this, but so everyone understands what we’re talking about. Here the common denominator here is, here is a man who is in a wheelchair who cannot feel his wife if he touches her. Who has no control over his body his wife has got to feed him and change his catheter every three hours.
They no longer have intimacy, they no longer can have a future of a family. And it seems like his life is over he can’t even leave the house, so he believes and rightfully so that circumstances have taken his life.

Now what is the solution breakthrough when I talk about a breakthrough, it’s a moment in time when suddenly the impossible becomes possible to a person. It’s an opening.

And my job is to create that opening, and then when the opening is there the opening can come from a conversation it can be from being with a friend, it can come from getting so damn angry, you’re sick of it and you finally breakthrough. It can come from inspiration, it can from you know, reading a book. It can come from you know, enough disappointment, there is millions of ways to get to a breakthrough and everyone is different.

So I have to find that different way. But the biggest piece I’ve got to do in this case with this man is I’ve got to be able to get this man to realize his life is not over.

I know people that have billions of dollars who are miserable. And I know people that are missing a good deal of their faculties physically and who have the most extraordinary life because the quality of our life is the quality of our emotions, where you live.
You live, you got a billion dollars and you’re angry, and frustrated and pissed off. Your life is angry, frustrated and pissed off.

So I need to get this guy to find that balance and I can’t do it by conversation in order to make a successful show as well. I need to make it by demonstration, by experience. I can tell you all day long, this is what you can do and you look at me and I’m able bodied, I can use all my physical faculties so it doesn’t mean squat.
But if I can get you to experience something you think is impossible that destroys the old believe system, because the belief system is a weak substitute for life experience. I can believe what it’s like to be in China but if I can go to China I have an experience.

And so what I try to do here with all these people is give them some experiences that cause them to see what they thought was impossible is possible, create that opening and to get them to act on that moment to do something to kind of lock it in place.

In the case of you know, the (Signer)’s it sounds like you saw also. That show is a show where you’ve got a couple that you know, he’s lost his job, he started a business, lost everything in that business.

Their finances are gone, they are losing their home and his wife wants to divorce him and take his two kids.

He is so broke and if you see in the beginning that is just - there is no way to turn it around from his prospective.

But by the end through the process again, this case I take these people and take their deepest fear and make them live it. Get them to be homeless for 10 days. And you give them this experience that first jolts them into seeing what is possible, I get them flying.  They think they know what stress is, and I have them take on 5Gs going the speed of sound in a jet they never thought they could handle.

And I bond them together, I do an intervention with them where they come together and realize they can do it. But I got to put them in an environment where it’s impossible for them not to come together, April, without to survive.

I mean he has to step up and be this man that would protect her when they are living on the streets there. And so you know, each and you know, there are multiples stages in their evolution but now they have their home, they both have jobs, they are both doing incredibly well, they’ve never been closer than they’ve ever been in their lives and their relationship they are bonded at the level that can never be.

This is all seemingly impossible - well it is possible, it’s just a matter of trading that opening and then locking - conditioning that opening open.

So every person to answer your question specifically, every person feels like circumstance has taken their life, that circumstances outside their control that their life has been broken by some force beyond themselves.

And what I’m showing them is you cannot control the outside world that is obvious, nobody can. But you sure as hell can take control of the inside world and when you do that, life changes. That is the essence of what we’re really showing.

But again, using the extreme examples because you think you have a problem - I used to do a seminar years ago and I would bring in people who had extreme problems, locked up in Vietnam for six years, beat everyday. And the guy comes out and he is the happiest person in the world.

A woman who was born deaf whose father sexually abused her. When he sent her away to an institution she learned how to talk and told people so he took her out of the institution, didn’t let her learn to speak.

She went through all of that, she was lying on a beach one day sleeping and she is deaf, she doesn’t hear the truck coming and a lifeguard of all people runs over her legs and she feels she’ll never walk again. Well she walks today, she is comedian she has got a great life.

And so people who watch these stories and they go, oh my God - the common phrase was, I have no problems.

And I really wanted to do a show because I’ve been offered shows for 15 years and all those years it was always my Number 1 problem was time and NBC was willing to do, I didn’t have to do a series, I could do a special. And then we finally agreed on these six specials.

But the biggest piece was they were all either daytime television which I didn’t have the time for with all my other companies and jobs and opportunities, but also they were you know, vote somebody off the island, was humiliation even though that is you know, very attractive to watch on television again, I didn’t want that.

When I saw 2008 come and grab people the way that it did I thought I’d like to create some contrast for people that can show them some role models of doing things much more difficult than what you are facing. And then hopefully inspire you to say dammit, you know, I can still make the shift in my own life as well especially in these times.

And so that’s why I’m doing it and that is the common denominator, extreme stress where the outside seems to be controlling things. Life seems to (crush) you but get a control, you are not made by the moment is my message. This moment does not control you, the past moment does, the new moment does, the moment you’re going to take on now is.

So that is what I’m passionate about and I think we’ve done a fun job of using a diverse group of people who are locked into those places and all of them are transformed in the end.

M&C: I recently talked to Discovery’s Mike Rowe, of "Dirty Jobs." And he said that in this country - and I want your opinion about this. We’ve lost respect for people who work and make things, fix things and do the dirty jobs. And it seems like we’re MBA obsessed, everyone is going to be a lawyer or an MBA or you’re nothing, or if you don’t have a graduate degree. Do you think there is too much emphasis on people chasing these degrees thinking that they are going to get a better job instead of taking kids maybe in high school that would be better suited for a technical school and a trade and restoring dignity to the trades?

Tony Robbins: Well we’ve lost the focus I think on mastery except for as you said a few things that have become culturally conditioned as superior. And they are mostly based on economics.

And the good news today is those MBA’s are not getting a superior economic experience, they are suffering and trying to figure out how to get a job.

So  the old style learning from a master and being mentored in particular craft and becoming extraordinarily good at it and becoming deep and knowing these little details that only come from years of total focus of working with someone who is the best in the world, I think we’re absolutely missing that as a culture. And I think it hurts and we’ve become the culture of the media sea and we’ve become the culture of significance.

And unfortunately our significance is tied primarily to economics. If you go to India I do a lot of business there and you ask and they have done surveys what you want to be when you grow up of high schools students, the number one answer you get is a software engineer.

If you ask that same question I think it was USA Today that did the survey in America do you know what the number one is?

M&C: MBA, lawyer, doctor?

Tony Robbins: Famous.
And today you could be famous by doing something destructive, stupid I mean some of the - the role models that we have today are just - I’m sounding old now. I’m sounding - by the way, a father and mother would have thought back when I was a kid.

But  it’s just absurd the people that will now look at we’ve shined the light on continuously in the media. And there are people that whose behavior is not something that any of us would really truly respect. In fact nobody does, but everybody loves the contrast of look how screwed up they are, I must feel better about my life by contrast.

I want to use that same contrast but in a different way. I want people to see people that have it worse than they do see them overcome what they’ve gone through, see that it is doable you know, it’s not that I you know, Tony Robbins mentored me every moment. This show is not about Tony Robbins, I’m grateful that NBC thinks that my name is important enough to put in the title and as part of the marketing and so forth.

But I see myself as kind of like the wizard, the focus is on Dorothy. I want people to see Dorothy. The fact that I can go and do something people don’t know what I start out with you know, after 30 years of doing this people have an illusion where he is that you know, happy go lucky guy and everything has gone great for them, they don’t know. I had as somebody say got a tumor in your brain or you know, the four parents that I’ve married or the businesses that were near bankruptcy that I figured out how to turn around, they just don’t know those pieces.

I’m enthusiastic and passionate and I talk 100 miles an hour that is my true nature. I thought you know, get it off of me put it on them let them see what happens to those people, because that is what people find in an advance.

And my hope is that it’ll be a trigger for people to remember what is possible. And it’ll give dignity to the people that people wouldn’t normally look at you know, and show them like you know, this man you know, was living in the Salvation Army you know, his wife got shot, his seven year old son you know, (Anthony) witnessed it she was killed in a drive by shooting.

And  he became broken and he’s living in a Salvation Army and just trying to figure out how to survive and letting his boys take care of him and he feels like he is worthless to his own boys.

To tell that man take back his dignity and become a father to his boys and find himself in the US marines with you know, 18 year olds and he’s - they are having a hard time climbing this mountain and I guess - we get him whipped into shape. And they get him to climb to the top of the mountain is just mind boggling and to have his boy seem him in this French restaurant cooking as a chef again.

And I mean it’s just inspiring it’s why I did it, I don’t do anything that I’m not personally inspired by and I’m not passionate about why you can probably tell I’m out of control. But I hope that answers your question.