Tony Robbins Reveals His Secrets for Overcoming Your Fears
He's one of the most respected life and business coaches in the world. From Kim Kardashian, to Bill Clinton and Oprah, his work has transformed the lives of some of the most powerful people in our society. In this interview, Tony Robbins is sharing his lessons of success, and his secret to overcoming the fears that are holding you back. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And if you tell yourself a story over and over again, we convince ourselves, now I've tried everything.
Or if they're single, all the good ones are gone.
You always come up with a lousy story when you're in a lousy state.
And so the number one thing I show people do is how to change your emotional state.
Your emotional state controls the story you have about your life, and then your story determines whether you find a strategy, or even if you know the strategy, whether you really do it or not.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll be right back.
He's one of the most respected life and business strategists in the world and has transformed the lives of some of the most powerful people in our society.
Today, he's sharing his lessons of success with you.
Joining me now, my friend Tony Robbins.
I first heard of Tony when I was a resident because my wife, who absolutely adores Tony, would listen to those Tony Robbins tapes all the time.
So I, through osmosis, took in so much of what you taught, but I wasn't alone.
You've been doing this for a long, long time with some really prominent people who have shaped this globe.
Well, it's different for everybody.
You know, I deal with every kind of person, the most challenged, the most successful.
You know, I can remember when President Clinton called me, I was only 31, 32 years old, and he called me up and said, they're going to impeach me in the morning.
What should I do?
And I was like, first, could you have called me sooner?
Interesting.
But by having situations like that where I was put on the line with no net, I had to find the answers.
Or Serena Williams, her sister was killed, as I'm sure you remember, and she can't get on the court.
What are you gonna do right now?
And when there's no way out, like I always tell people, if you wanna take the island, burn your boats.
You know, if there's no way back, if there's a way back, your mind will rationalize and give yourself an excuse.
I wouldn't give myself an excuse.
And so I found answers.
And then your confidence builds as you find answers like that.
And nobody's perfect.
But over the last 41 years, I've had the privilege of working with some of the most amazing human beings.
And I don't just teach them.
I learn from them as well.
I want to talk about you for one second.
Sure.
And I know we talked a lot.
We spent a lot of time together.
But it's your personal story that always inspires me.
It didn't start off so easy for you.
Huh.
No.
I had an amazing mom, and I wouldn't be who I am without her.
But like all human beings who go through a lot of stress, she sometimes adapted, and her adapting was with drugs and alcohol, unfortunately, prescription drugs.
But they changed your personality.
She became really physically abusive.
I've never talked about it when she's alive, and I'm not denigrating her because I wouldn't be who I am without her.
She really did love me.
But I have a younger brother, a younger sister, and so I became a practical psychologist because I had to learn how to manage her emotions and her states.
She'd smack me against the wall with my head until I bled or poured liquid soap down my throat.
And again, she wasn't trying to hurt me.
She was afraid she was losing me.
And people do crazy things.
And it's hard when somebody you love does that.
But it also, I wouldn't be who I am without it because it made me have a decent level of compassion because I suffered.
I didn't want my brother and sister to suffer.
I look at them as my kids.
They're five and seven years younger.
And then that's what drove my whole life.
And I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for having to learn those things from her and for her love.
She gave me so many great gifts.
And so sometimes the things people do that aren't so great What was the first step for you when you broke through and you finally realized you could have success?
I think it was just helping people.
I just like to light people up.
I hate to see people suffer because I've suffered.
And I think early on in my life, I used to do this in school.
I would find somebody that had a problem.
I'll give you an example.
I had a girlfriend and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
And I was really young and I thought I was going to succeed and things were going well for that stage of life.
And I was definitely afraid that I was going to die of cancer myself.
I don't know why.
It was in my head.
I'm not going to die quick like a truck.
It's going to be, you know, I'm going to waste away from cancer.
But when she was suddenly on the line, I was like, there are plenty of people that have made it through cancer.
Let's study them.
Let's study success instead of failure.
Let's find out what they did.
And I found this book called One Answer to Cancer.
She was given nine weeks to live.
And she had one in her feminine organ of the size of a fist and one on her back.
And seven weeks later, after practicing the cleansing of what this book taught, it was from a dentist who was also told he had nine weeks to live, you couldn't see it.
And so they went in and did exploratory surgery and only found left with something the size of her pinky.
So that changed my life.
It made me believe there are answers to just about anything.
Not always, but in most cases, if you don't just take the standard thinking, you can find new answers.
That's what you've done your whole life.
You've forged a remarkable career, influenced people at every level.
And I appreciate all the philanthropic work that you do.
And a lot of it came from your ability to drive change.
What is it that prevents people from doing the things they already want to do in life?
The most basic answer.
I'm sorry it's so simple, but it's true.
It's fear.
You know, people make it into this complex process.
This woman's told me that I don't understand why I don't do this, why I feel this way.
I said, it's called fear.
Everybody's afraid we're not enough.
Everybody's afraid we're not rich enough, smart enough, young enough, quick enough, fast enough.
It's human nature.
But the secret is to do it anyway.
I know that sounds so simplistic.
My work when I'm...
Working with somebody is showing them how to condition themselves, like building a muscle so that you take action first automatically.
Because if you don't do that, it's hard.
You lose momentum.
It's like, how do I get started?
Where do I go?
And I tell people, throw a rock.
Wherever it drops, start there.
The next person walks by and you go, you're the first person after the rock.
Do anything to start the process of moving forward rather than fear stop you.
Emotions are a big part of this.
And you spend a lot of time, because I've done your seminars, focusing on that.
And you bring it down to focus, right?
Language and intent.
That's right.
Walk us through those a little bit.
Help us understand tactically what we do to make the change that we want in our lives to happen.
If somebody is, we were mentioning earlier, if somebody is really stressed out, they're not stressed out for no reason.
It's because they're focusing on something that makes them feel stressed.
They often, when they're focusing on it, it changes the body.
You start to feel tight.
You start to feel a certain way.
And then they use language like, I don't know what to do.
Why am I so overwhelmed?
So three things control how you feel every moment.
What you focus on.
What you do with your body.
If your shoulders are down, if you're breathing like, ah, it's not hard to figure out.
You're not going to be in a very resourceful state.
If I take that same person and I change their body radically, I get them to talk at a different tempo.
I get them to move their body differently.
I've taught this for, what, 41 years.
Three years ago at Harvard, they did a study on power postures where they showed that if you stand like this with your hands on your hips like Superman or Wonder Woman, or if you lean back like this, like the guy is obnoxious at the office and do this, it literally changes your testosterone by 25% within two minutes.
It reduces cortisol, which you know is the stress hormone, by 30%, and you're 33% more likely to take an action.
So if we change what we focus on, if we change the way we use our body, if we change our language patterns, we'll instantly feel different.
How do people use their body when they're worried versus when they're excited?
If you learn to use your body first, use your focus first, you can literally change how you feel in moments, and then you develop new habits where you start to feel good all the time, and it isn't some phony fake pump-up.
It's literally the way you've conditioned your body.
Just like being fit as an athlete, you want to be emotionally fit.
You often say that where your focus goes, energy flows.
Yes.
Because it just takes you to that right place.
Then the intent part sneaks in there.
Is the intent because you've got to pick what you want to do or just do something and you'll figure it out as you go?
You need to be clear what it is you really want.
I always tell people, you know, not only what you want, but why you want it.
I know this is simplistic, but...
Most people just don't do the blocking and tackling of their life.
The one we were talking to earlier, a great lady, and you could just see she wants to have a new business, but she never sat down to even put a plan together and says, why aren't I taking action?
Well, when you're not sure what you're gonna do, you're gonna hesitate.
And hesitation kills momentum.
And momentum is what makes a sports team win.
It's what makes an athlete, a business person win.
When you get momentum, it takes enormous energy to get a rocket out of our gravitational pull of the Earth.
But out of the solar system is easy.
Once it has momentum, it takes less fuel, less energy.
Starting a relationship, starting a business, changing your body.
It takes so much in the beginning, but once you get going, it's actually really easy.
We have a lot more to talk about, but first, let's take a quick break.
You changed my life by teaching you about three paradoxes.
Six primal needs that are in opposition.
So basically three on each side that are in opposition.
I'm going to walk through them with you if you don't mind.
When I first heard you talk about this, it changed all the things that I was struggling with about balance in life.
Because I was balancing the wrong things.
The first is uncertainty versus certainty.
Or better say comfort versus variety.
Yes.
Well, think about it.
We all have a need for certainty.
We have a need to know we can avoid pain, that we can be comfortable.
Some people do that when they're stressed by smoking.
Some people work out hard to deal with it.
Some people eat to try to get that comfort back.
But if you are certain every moment of your life, you know what people are going to do, when they're going to do it, how they're going to do it, you'd be bored out of your mind.
So we also need uncertainty.
If you have too much uncertainty, you freak out.
If you have too little, you feel bored out of your mind.
And you can get uncertainty or variety by a great conversation, by making love, by taking on a new job or a new career or a new opportunity.
You get a million ways.
The question is, do you meet your needs in ways that are positive or negative?
Because sugar will make you feel good in the moment, but you feel good long term.
Smoking a cigarette will make you comfortable and certain.
But it might be variety.
It changes how you feel when you're stressed.
So it meets two needs.
That's why it's addicted.
It's not sustainable.
That's what makes somebody addicted.
Yeah.
The second big primal need is two of them.
Connection versus significance.
I want to be the best, so I've got to be different, but I want to be in community with you.
I want to be close to you.
I want love and I want connection.
But see, what most people like, you see this in great actors or great entertainers, they'll come to me and in the beginning they work so hard to be significant, to be unique, to be special, to be important.
What they really wanted was love.
But now people stop on the street and they'll say to me, they don't even know who I am.
They just want my time.
They just want this.
They want a picture.
They don't respect my family.
They don't respect it.
You'll hear them so upset.
What they wanted was the love.
But see, we can have both.
But the more significant I am, the more unique I am, the more separate I am from you.
The more connected I am, then some people go, yeah, but where am I? Where am I special?
So finding that balance between the two is what makes people feel alive.
And we can meet all these needs in positive ways or negative ways.
You can get significance by tearing other people down.
They're lucky.
They don't care.
They took advantage of somebody.
You don't know anything about them.
You see people do that with famous people all the time.
Why are they tearing them down?
Because if I don't feel good about myself, if I can make you smaller, I look like I'm moving up.
But you're not, and it doesn't work.
But if you do things where you significantly love someone, if you care for someone, you're the most significant person in life.
If you try to prove you're significant, then you have kind of the Trump effect.
Even people that like him will say, you know, sometimes he can push people aside because he's telling everybody how special he is.
I'm not making a political statement.
I'm saying that gets in the way of relationship.
If we're going to connect, we've got to not make ourselves significant.
We've got to find out what's significant in the other person and honor it.
And there's the one that really is important, which is growth versus contribution.
This one always caught me off guard because unlike the other ones, you have more of one, you get a little less of the other oftentimes.
But when I contribute, when I give to you, I actually grow.
Teach me that.
Well, the first four needs are the needs of the personality.
We all find a way to be certain, even if we have to lie to ourselves or just work hard.
We all find variety.
We all find significance, even if it's tearing other people down.
We all find a least connection, if not love.
But the spiritual needs are to grow.
People say, what does it take to be happy?
I say one word, progress.
If you're not there yet, but you are starting to make some progress in your body, a progress on your relationship, a progress on your career, your finances, you're going to feel good.
And when you achieve it, how long do you feel good for?
Not very long, because when you achieve it, you stop growing.
You kind of celebrate.
Nothing wrong with that.
But how long after you get that thing you wanted are you happy?
A week?
A month?
A year?
Almost never a year.
It's a short time.
And the reason is we're not supposed to just sit there at the table of success and celebrate for years.
We need to grow to feel alive.
And everything in the universe grows or dies.
But when we grow, we have something to give.
And when we give, people often say human beings are selfish.
I've been selfish.
I'm sure you've been at times.
But That's not my core, and it's not anybody's, and I'll prove it to you.
When you're having, all of you at home and all of you here, when you have something great in your life that happens, you learn something, you experience something beautiful, what's the first thing you want to do?
Tell people.
Share somebody what you love.
Why?
Because when you share with it, it expands.
See, pleasure is something coming in from the outside.
Happiness is something inside you that you share.
And happiness is what people really want.
Pleasure, you can get pleasure from alcohol or sex or anything, but some people, it's all about me.
When you're taking what's inside yourself because you've grown and you're giving to someone you love, your children, a friend, a girlfriend, boyfriend, a coworker, anybody, there's an aliveness you can't feel by yourself.
There's only so much pleasure you can feel.
Happiness and joy comes when that expansion is shared.
So what do you feel with Feeding America?
This is a gargantuan program Tony has.
It's fed tens of millions of Americans.
Why is the mission so personal to you?
When I was 11 years old, I had no money and no food and it was Thanksgiving, so it magnified it.
And my family wasn't going to starve, but we weren't going to have a dinner.
And some man showed up at the door with these groceries and uncooked turkey.
And really, my father was upset by it because he thought it was charity.
But I looked at it and said, my God, this is...
Our family's being supported.
This is beautiful.
Strangers care.
It changed my life.
And so I promised myself I'd someday do the same for another family.
So at 17, I had no money, but I fed two families, and then four, and then eight.
And then I fed about two million people a year for a decade.
Two million myself and two million through my foundation, so four million people.
And then I was writing Money Master the Game and Unshakable, these financial books, interviewing all these billionaires, and Congress cut food stamps.
And it's a different term now, right?
But it was a $5.6 billion.
And I looked around and said, every family in America that needs help has to give up a week's worth of food every month for this to happen unless you and I jump in.
So I called my team and said, how many people have I fed total?
And they said, 48 million people over my life.
I said, what if I fed 50 million people this year?
And then I went, what if it was 100 million?
They said, what if I fed a billion people?
So I fed 400 million people with Feeding America as my partner for the last four years.
And I'm going to feed a billion people over the next six years.
You speak often of making change last.
How do you do that?
How do you make it sustainable so you continue to want that throughout?
If you want to break through, not just a little change, you know, you can change laterally.
You know, you can go from being pissed off to frustrated.
Right.
It doesn't help you much, right?
But if you really want to change, most people are trying to change.
Say you want to lose weight and they want to make money.
They go, how do I do it?
They look for the strategy.
But I like to think of three S's.
Strategy is where most people go first.
Like, how do I do it?
How hard is it really truly to be fit and have energy?
It's not that complex.
It's not like reserved for the 1% or expensive to learn.
You have to interrupt.
You have to hide from answers to those things.
The real problem is the second S, story.
See, the reason the person is making progress, they may not know what to do.
Sometimes that's true.
But some people know what they do and they don't do what they know.
That's most people.
And so why?
They have a story that says, it's a set of beliefs they tell themselves over and again.
I've tried everything.
Or if they're single, all the good ones are gone.
Whatever the story is.
And if you tell yourself a story over and over again, Hitler used to say, tell a story big enough, loud enough, long enough, people believe you.
Well, we're Hitler to ourselves.
We convince ourselves.
The thing we really need, though, is...
You always come up with a lousy story when you're in a lousy state.
And so the number one thing I show people to do is how to change their emotional state.
When you're feeling tired or frustrated, when you learn how to change your body so that you really feel excited and isn't fake, when you learn how to change your biochemistry, which is what I teach people to do.
For example, when you're upset with someone, do you ever notice how you can now remember everything that they've ever done that ever upset you?
But when you're in love, what's wrong with life?
What's wrong with anything?
When you're in love, we have no money.
Who cares?
We're in love.
So your emotional state controls the story you have about your life, and then your story determines whether you find a strategy, or even if you know the strategy, whether you really do it or not.
When people say, I tried, what they're really telling me is I have a story that says I should try this, but it's really not going to work.
So I give it a half-reared attempt, and it didn't work, and now I can tell people I tried.
What you really got to do is learn to change your emotion, your state, change your story, and then you can find the strategy, or you can make the strategy to work.
There's a lot more where that came from, but first, a quick break.
How do you get to the core values that are so much of what you speak to?
That's a place where people figure, well, that guy got it from his family.
He was taught it throughout his life.
No, not in my case.
Exactly.
How do you even focus in on those values?
Where do they come from?
Well, I constantly believe you've got to feed your mind and challenge your body because the mind-body works together.
What stops people, as we said, is fear.
Well, fear is physical.
You feel it in your throat, your gut.
But if you do something really physically strong on a regular basis, you develop a new emotional habit.
And that emotional habit will get you to follow through and do things differently that people won't do.
It's really not that complex.
There are a few habits in your life that truly could change your whole life.
I start every single day with this process called priming, training my brain to be in a peak state.
Because we get primed all the time.
People aren't aware of it, but there was a study that was done not long ago where they took some people, 100 actors, they walked up to 100 people in a park.
And they rehearsed doing the same thing every time.
They reach in their pocket to get their phone, or they hand the person a cup of coffee, and then they reach in their pocket looking down and say, would you hold this to me for a second to a total stranger?
And they grab their phone, look at it, type it, and they take it back.
They go, thank you so much.
The same for everybody.
But then they come back 30 minutes later with somebody with, and the only difference, by the way, is 50% of them have iced coffee.
50% of them have hot coffee.
Got it.
Now, a person comes by 30 minutes later with a clipboard, gives them $20 and said, if you'll give me literally a minute and a half of your time to read this three-paragraph story and answer these two questions, this is yours.
Nine, eight, ten people take the 20 bucks and do it.
They read the story.
It's the same story for everybody.
But half the people, when they ask them, the main character, how would you describe the qualities of the main character, the character traits?
The ones that got iced coffee all say the person was cold and uncaring.
81% say that.
Come on.
The person that got hot coffee, 80% or 1% difference say the person is warm and genuine.
And the only difference is 30 minutes earlier somebody primed them.
See, if you think it's your thoughts, much of your thoughts have been primed by the environment, by the media, by what you read to, by your family, by your friends, by your culture, by your background.
So what I do every day is I prime myself for what I want rather than letting the environment control me.
Mentors are a big part of the lives of successful people.
And a lot of folks don't even know where to start looking for them.
How do you find the right mentor for you?
Well, I think today, you know, I'd look for the best mentors.
Because today, because of the web, you can follow someone you don't even know.
You can read what they write.
You can read their blogs.
You can interact in ways with them.
Sometimes you can talk to them.
They'll talk back on social media.
So we have more choices today on that than ever.
But I also try to find...
Don't have the belief that your mentor has to be perfect.
Because none of us are.
There's no perfect human beings.
And even if you are perfect, someone else will turn around saying you're not perfect from their perspective.
So what you really want to do is to say, let me find two or three people that have answers, that have proven it by their life example, not because they can verbalize it.
How people's lips move don't matter.
How do their feet move for 10 or 20 years?
And so I've always looked for people that were not only successful in the exterior world, but they're really happy and that they're contributing to society in a meaningful way because those are the people that are most fulfilled.
And so I think today you have to get clear, what do you want?
And then go looking, and it's not hard to look again because of the world we live in today.
Our beliefs shape our meaning.
A lot of people, especially today when the world seems so divided, start following a certain value system.
They start finding meaning in that.
Yes.
How do they kick the tires on it and make sure they're actually following the right light?
My number one favorite question, and the time that most people use it, is if you're really frustrated or sad or worried or depressed, or you think something horrible's happened, my favorite question, ask myself.
What else could this mean?
And I make myself come up with at least three different meanings.
Because what happens is, beliefs become self-fulfilling.
See, once you believe something, you don't see anything else.
I've done this with your audience before.
I said, look around the room and find brown.
Everybody looks around.
And I say, now with your eyes closed, tell me what you saw that was red.
And nobody sees much red.
I say, open your eyes, look for red.
May find more red.
Why do you find more red?
Because you get what you look for.
Your beliefs condition you to find.
And then I say, how many saw, I said, you even saw things that weren't there.
How many saw beige stuff, called it brown just to feel successful?
They all laugh.
Yeah.
How many saw Burgundy in Colorado?
They all laugh.
And the reason is because once we're after something, we'll even make the color different to feel successful.
If you think somebody's mean, you'll find meanness in them and it's not there.
If you think somebody's your dear friend and they do something terrible, you'll say, oh, they're having a bad day.
So our beliefs control us.
So unquestioned beliefs.
That produce stress.
Those are the ones you've got to question.
And there's a great lady out, she wrote a book called The Work.
Her name is Byron Katie, and she's a dear friend of mine.
And she has this four-question format that I'd recommend anybody looking at to question your beliefs, because all our pain comes from believing something that makes us stressed, rather than saying, hey, there's lots of options.
In our country today, we see people on two sides of things.
We're all brothers and sisters.
We all take any of you to guns, right?
People make the other side evil on both sides.
Everybody wants our children protected.
Everyone wants our homes and our churches and our schools to be safe.
Let's stop beating each other up and doing that.
That's the only way we'll make progress is find what we do agree on.
We might have different ideas of how to do that, but that doesn't make the other person evil.
Once you start believing the other person's evil, all you're really doing is feeding your own significance, your own ego.
I'm right, you're wrong, and that'll never solve a damn thing.
Do you want to be right?
Do you want to be in love?
That's what I tell intimate relationships, right?
It's the same thing in life, right?
You often, it's my last question, you say, if you haven't made a decision about what you're going to do in your life, you have actually made a decision.
It was a decision in action.
Where does that decision take people?
I think it happens at different stages of life.
It's not like you have to have this one mission.
A lot of people are paralyzed.
I don't know my purpose.
Your purpose is to enjoy your life, to grow, and to give.
Everyone has different ways, but we all compare it sometimes.
Is it enough?
Is it strong enough?
Is it big enough?
What I found in my life is, do what's in front of you with all your vigor, all your passion.
Give the most you can.
Focus on giving, not trying to receive.
And you'll receive more than you can ever imagine.
But the person who's always trying to get...
Nobody wants to deal with that person.
Nobody wants to be around them.
The secret to living is giving.
It's what makes you feel alive because you're no longer in scarcity.
You're no longer trying to get.
And no one wants to be around them, but you don't want to be around yourself in that state.
How do you get out of it?
It's just a habit.
It's just like, let me find every day one person to start my day that I can sincerely compliment.
No BS. Find something good about them.
Or someone I could help who's in a worse case than I am.
It could be something very little.
But when you get in those habits, then all of a sudden life is...
You know, like, I wake up and do my whole thing before I came here, before I do anything, is like, God use me.
You know, it's like, I want to be a blessing in the life of anybody I need in some way.
Sometimes that blessing is I can take a picture for them and they're excited.
Sometimes I can do an intervention.
Sometimes I can invite them to seminars.
Sometimes I can just love on them.
Sometimes I ask them a great question.
But if we're all focused on being a blessing in each other's lives, then our life is filled with blessings.
Because we're not trying to get all the love you want from others If you feel inside yourself, you'll be expressing it to others, and every time you express it, you feel alive inside.
Otherwise, people would tell you they love you all day long, and you can go, yeah, yeah, yeah, they don't really love me.
And I know lots of celebrities who started out wanting so much love, so they become successful and unique, so they get all this adoration, and they don't like their lives now because they don't think it's sincere.
I say, you know, your focus is, if you're a celebrity, why don't you use your platform to serve in some way outside what you do?
Not attack, but serve.
If you do that, you're going to have a rich life.
I love you.
Thank you very, very much for all you've done for me and Lisa.
