What’s
left to say about 2020 that hasn’t already been said? Dumpster fires and train
wrecks think it was a bad year.
hen
viewed through the narrow prism of work, it was a nightmare for companies big
and small, for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, employees, freelancers, members of
the gig economy, and everybody in between.
Maybe
for you 2020 was bad enough to prompt, or even require, a reimagining of your
work, your focus, or your dreams. Tony Robbins feels your pain. He knows,
understands and shares in what you’re going through because he went through it,
too
A life
and business strategist, No. 1 New York Times best-selling author,
entrepreneur and philanthropist, Robbins spent decades traveling the world
speaking in front of thousands of people, and all of that disappeared seemingly
in an instant. But did the end of large gatherings forecast the end of Robbins?
Nope.
He
looked for solutions; finding them took time. The low-hanging fruit
fix—speaking via Zoom—didn’t appeal to him. He dreamed bigger than that and
eventually landed on an innovative and expansive way to use video—think of it
as a worldwide, interactive video call on steroids. And now what once seemed
like a disaster for his lifelong purpose of helping people could enable him
reach more people than ever. He plans to speak to a million or more viewers for
one gig in January.
He
wants you to reach new heights, too. It won’t be easy. But what fun would it be
if it was? You are probably nervous, timid or afraid. All of that, Robbins
says, is natural. The key is not to figure out a way to not be afraid or
pretend those fears aren’t real or valid. They are. The key is to forge ahead
anyway, in the face of your fears. It’s not courage, Robbins says, if you’re
not afraid.
“Courage
is a muscle,” he says. “You have to start using it.”
In the
wake of so much change, uncertainty and opportunity, SUCCESS asked
Robbins for his step-by-step guide to starting from scratch. Here, he offers
tips on how to navigate your life and career in 2021, the year of your
comeback:
1 Be careful how you frame this situation to yourself.
When
answering questions about how readers might “start over” in 2021, Robbins
pushed back against that mindset. He encouraged solopreneurs to instead see
their turnaround (his word) in a different way.
Call
it a comeback, Robbins says, and you will feel like the leading character in a
powerful story.
Imagine,
he says, going to a movie or reading a book that opens with the main character
having his or her life figured out. They are successful at home and work, loved
and understood by their family and friends, and spiritually mature. They never
forget a birthday or anniversary or to take the garbage out. At the middle of
the story, nothing has changed. They are still perfect. Life is an unbroken
string of successes. At the end, the same. There has been no growth, no
catharsis, no epiphany, no change. No challenge has been overcome, no fear has
been stared down. Nothing has been learned, either.
“Who’s
going to go to that movie? Who’s going to read that book?” Robbins asks
“Nobody. We as human beings love comebacks. The greatest stories of all time
are comeback stories.”
If you
see yourself starting over, you focus on where you used to be. If you see
yourself as engineering a comeback that will take you to higher heights than
you reached before, that forces you to set your sights on the end, where you’re
going, how your new dream will make your life better than ever.
“Everybody
is taken to their knees by something,” he says. “The real question of life is
not where you are now. It’s where are you going to go? It’s are you willing to
create a vision larger than yourself so you can create something even better
than before?”
2 Don’t wait too long.
You
are probably asking yourself, How do I know when or even if I should
begin my comeback? You might be worried that whatever new thing you
try will turn out worse than whatever you are turning away from.
Fair
enough. But that’s not a reason to do nothing. Robbins suggests asking yourself
a series of questions: If I was not attached to life this way, what
could be possible? What could be a new life for me if I really wanted to go for
it?
If you
wait until you are 100 percent sure you’re ready, you’ll be waiting a long
time. Few things in life are certain; one is is that you’ll always face
uncertainty, and that’s even more true today. “Ignoring when to start over will
probably make it worse,” Robbins says.
Nor is
it wise to be a perfectionist once you get your comeback rolling. “You’ve got
to try different things. They’re not all going to work. If you’re successful in
life, you try new things,” he says. “Most people are trying to wait until
something’s perfect. All the greatest Internet companies or tech companies,
they all iterate. They get what they think is the best possible thing, but it’s
not perfect, and they try it. They test. They see what works. What works, they
do more of, what doesn’t work, they change.”
Play the opposite game.
So you
decide to dive headfirst into your (admittedly potentially imperfect) comeback.
Great! Now comes the hard part (or, rather, another hard part): What should you
do?
If you
can’t answer, don’t worry. Robbins says he often asks people to lay out their
hopes and dreams about relationships, work and life, and they struggle to
articulate them. When that happens, he asks them to play the opposite game.
Get
out a piece of paper and pencil and make lists, he says. “Describe the
relationship from hell,” he says. “Describe who you don’t want to be with, what
they’re like, how they behave, how they treat you, how they treat themselves,
their bodies, their emotions, their spirits. Or tell me the job from hell. You
don’t want to be around people who do what? You don’t want to do what? And once
they write the job from hell or the relationship from hell, I say, ‘now do the
opposite,’ ” he says.
This
is a way to turn anger and frustration about relationships and jobs into
positives.
“You
can use them. Say, ‘This is what I don’t want,’ ” Robbins says. “Most people
know what they don’t want, but they don’t know what they do want. Write the
opposite, and you’ll have the relationship from heaven or job
from heaven.”
4 Don’t stress about being afraid.
And
don’t be afraid of stress, either. “How could you not be [afraid] in the middle
of COVID when every day you turn on the TV and they project more deaths?”
Robbins says.
The
way to defeat fear is through action.“Humans are incredibly resilient. We can
use fear to turn on itself, where you’re more afraid of doing nothing than to
try something and fail.”
Train your mind.
Early
in his career, Robbins studied under Jim Rohn, the author, entrepreneur and
motivational speaker. Robbins quotes Rohn telling him, “You can miss a meal,
but don’t miss reading a book 30 minutes a day.”
Robbins
reads voraciously and encourages solopreneurs to do the same. “Pursue a book
that will give you new strategies, new insights, new philosophies,” he says.
The
library is full of books about comebacks, and Robbins likes biographies in
general and autobiographies in particular. To be worthy of a biography, a
person is almost always successful. Their roads to the top were never easy.
“You’re reading their words, you’re thinking their thoughts. You begin to think
and feel like them,” he says.
The
benefits of reading go far beyond giving you ideas or motivation to launch your
comeback. It will make you stronger mentally, period. “Every day, I’m going to
train and strengthen my mind,” Robbins says. “I’m going to stand guard at the
door of my mind, like my teacher Jim Rohn taught me.”
6 Train your body.
Every
morning, Robbins jumps into frigid water. Every morning, he doesn’t want to.
Every morning, he does it anyway.
“I
walk through the snow in the winter and I jump in this 38, 39-degree water,” he
says. (That’s when he’s in Idaho; when he’s in Florida, he jumps in a cold
pool.) “It’s intense. There’s never a day I’m looking forward to it, ever. I
don’t let uncertainty get in the way. I don’t negotiate with myself. You can
train your body by the way you use it.”
7 Ask new questions, have new conversations and seek out new
perspectives.
When
the shutdowns closed big gatherings, Robbins was forced to come up with a new
way, or new ways, to reach people. He thought movie theaters or churches might
be good substitutes, but soon those closed, too. “What the hell do we do?” he
asked himself.
“I’m
not going to do some freaking webinar,” he told himself. “I need to get some
perspective.”
He
found some people using Zoom to reach large groups. He looked into that, but
wasn’t excited by what he saw, and it’s easy to understand why. Zoom maxed out
at 1,000 viewers; he routinely spoke to groups many times larger than that.
One
day he visited a production company in North Carolina. They set up a studio
with a curtain and a stage and a bank of screens. He walked onto the stage,
which was maybe four feet by four feet. Again, he was discouraged. “I can’t do
this,” he thought to himself.
In his
old way of doing things—speaking at stadiums in front of tens of thousands of
people—bursting through the curtain served as a trigger for him. Even on days
when he felt terrible (he suffers from mercury poisoning, which often leaves
him drained), invariably crossing through the curtain awakened his body. After
10 or 15 minutes on stage, he would feel physically rejuvenated and be able to
talk for hours.
On
that small stage in North Carolina, with the screens in front of him, he felt
triggered again. He started riffing, brainstorming out loud, about what his
comeback might look like. Somebody recorded his thoughts as they poured out of
him for an hour. He envisioned a live, interactive experience. He wanted to be
surrounded by 16-foot high, 50-foot wide screens. He wanted to be able see
3,000 people at a time, swipe, and see that many again.
He
hired six different companies to turn his vision into reality. They told him it
would take nine months. “I told them, no, we have nine weeks. And we did it in
nine weeks. It was insane,” he says. “The result was we had the biggest event
we’ve ever done of this type.”
He
reached 35,000 people over the course of a four-day event. None of that would
have been possible if he hadn’t forced himself to pursue new ways of doing
things. “By getting around these new voices and having new conversations and
asking new questions and getting new perspectives, I was able to create, not
just survive where we were,” he says.
8 Analyze your habits of focus.
To
illustrate this point, he tells the familiar story of a Thanksgiving dinner
when he was 11. His family was poor and couldn’t afford a big meal. As his
parents fought, he heard a knock on the door. Young Tony answered it. A man was
standing there with bags of groceries and an uncooked turkey.
Tony
summoned his father, who angrily told the man he wouldn’t accept charity and
tried to slam the door. The door hit the man’s foot. He tried to persuade
Tony’s father to accept the food. He said he was just a delivery person, that
the donor was anonymous, that nobody even knew where the food came from. Tony’s
father again tried to shut the door.
This
time, the man blocked it with his shoulder. He again pleaded with Tony’s father
to accept the food. “He said, ‘Sir, please don’t make your family suffer
because of your ego,’” Robbins says. “It was one of those moments you never
forget.”
Veins
bulged out of Robbins’ father’s head. He was as mad as Robbins had ever seen
him. His father grabbed the groceries and slammed the door shut. This time, the
man allowed it to close. His father never said thank you. “I was flabbergasted.
How could my dad not be happy?” Robbins says.
It
took Robbins years to understand what happened. He gets it now. He said people
are controlled by three decisions, often made subconsciously. They are, what
am I going to focus on, what does it mean, and what am I going to do about it?
“My
dad focused on the fact he had not fed his family,” Robbins says. He didn’t
want to accept charity and was ashamed, apparently, of the fact somebody
thought he had to. That meant he was unable to provide for his family. What he
did about it was get angry.
“What
we focus on, we feel,” Robbins says. “Even if it’s not true.”
The
application of that is obvious for the solopreneur. “If you think something is
terrible, you’ll find ways to prove it’s terrible,” he says. “If you think
something’s great, you’ll find what’s great.
“Your
mindset is the most important thing in a turnaround.”
Source: https://bit.ly/3h1V9eW
About the author
Matt Crossman is a writer based in St. Louis. He writes about sports, travel,
adventure and professional development. Email him at mcrossman98@gmail.com.
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