One of the people that has had a huge influence on me since the day I began getting into personal development way back in the 1990’s was Anthony (Tony) Robbins.  I think what really attracted me to Tony’s work was that much like myself, he has an amazing thirst for learning about personal development and trying to understand what makes people tick.

He has the ability to pick a subject in life, such as health and fitness for example, and just completely immerse himself in anything and everything he can possibly learn about the subject, and then to take this massive clump of scattered information, knowledge and wisdom and turn it into something that everyone can understand and apply in their lives in a simple and easy way.

He has also been able to produce massive results in his life in pretty much every area you could think of, and he has been able to influence probably more people in his life than any other personal development “Guru” in the world.

With the exception of maybe a few smaller programs which I have no interest in, I think I pretty much own every multimedia program he has ever come out with.  One of the greatest things I have always found with his materials is that he completely over-delivers on everything he produces.  When I pay for a $200 product from him, I feel like I got $5,000 worth of value or more.  That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Tony Robbins.

In my earlier days of personal development I was totally into Tony Robbins stuff, and I used to drive my wife nuts always talking about him.  His work really inspired me and he had a huge impact on my life.

For a while there, I used to think that there is nothing else I need to learn as long as I apply all of his stuff.  I became like a mini Tony Robbins, running around and achieving all kinds of goals.  I began to harness the ability to create massive amounts of desire in my life and focus my energy so intensely that I felt virtually unstoppable in everything I did.  If something wasn’t working the way I wanted it to work, I would just apply more energy, more time, more focus, and more action to the problem and it would get fixed. 

I mastered the art of applying “Personal Power” to solve problems.  I guess you could say I developed a lot of “mental strength”.  The challenge I ran into though is that not everything in life can be fixed by taking “massive action”. 

“No amount of action can compensate for misaligned thought.”

  - Abraham / Hicks, Money and the Law of Attraction

When I started working 12-16 hour days, 6 or 7 days a week and applied massive action to running multiple businesses which produced millions of dollars in revenue and my personal take home pay was stuck at $3,000/month or less with no logical explanation for it at all, something finally snapped in my brain and I knew that more “massive action” wasn’t the answer.  I needed another direction to take my growth, and that was when I discovered the Law of Attraction and the whole “spiritual” and “emotional” side of building wealth.

You could say that Tony Robbins helped me to develop the ability to build massive amounts of energy within myself on my masculine / logical side, but I was completely ignoring the feminine / intuitive side of myself and that is why the results I was getting in life sucked big time.

Shortly after tapping into this other “feminine / intuitive” side, I began to see massive changes in the amounts of results I could produce in my life and I haven’t looked back ever since.  You could say that from around 1995 – 2001 I worked on developing the masculine/logical side of me, and from 2002 – 2008 I worked on developing the feminine/intuitive side of me.

Since leaving the corporate world behind and having the time and energy to pursue my true passion in life over the last few months, I’ve been really noticing that my connection to my intuitive side is very strong and continues to grow stronger every day.  Unfortunately, I’ve also realized that what was once a very strong and powerful masculine / logical side to me has been largely ignored by me over the last six years.

Now, I’m predominantly biased towards the masculine / logical side of life anyways so it’s not like I’m completely weak in this area just because I’ve been ignoring it, but it’s not an area that I would say I am currently performing at peak levels in.  Not compared to where I was at in 2001 for example, or where I know I could be at if I began focusing on it again.

The great thing about learning about the intuitive side of life is that you begin to learn the power of being able to accomplish more by doing less.  When I focus on following my intuitive senses, I can now produce the same amount of value and results by taking almost no action at all, compared to the amount of action I had to take in the past to produce the same result.

For example, the house I live in right now is the first house my wife and I came to see when we told our realtor that we want to buy a new house.  I simply went online, and scanned through a bunch of listings online and I intuitively was able to sense which house we would love to live at.  My realtor loves me.  I’m the easiest client for him because I guide him to the house I want to buy and he doesn’t have to really do a lot of work.  This is the first house we came to see and we bought it.

Now, I know that to a person who doesn’t have a deeply developed sense of intuition and that doesn’t TRUST their intuitive sense, they would think that I’m an idiot for buying the first house we went to see.  Well, we’ve lived here for two years now and not a week goes by that my wife and I don’t say something along the lines of “I love this house.” to one another. 

Now, I still had to take action.  I still had to call my realtor and come out to see this house and do my due diligence to get it inspected and arrange for financing etc., but we only had to go see one house which saved me a lot of action steps and stress which I know a lot of other people have to go through.  I know someone who spent probably around 8-9 months looking for a house and probably went to see around one hundred homes before finding the one they wanted to buy.  To me that is someone who is strongly grounded in taking action, but completely out of tune with their intuition.

Now, the seduction of the feminine / intuitive side of things is that eventually you begin to weaken your power to take action, and you begin to rely on nothing more than your intuitive abilities and your abilities to attract and manifest things in life to get what you want.  At some point though, you hit a threshold where your beliefs no longer allow you to make it any easier and that’s when you begin to get into trouble.

If you completely disconnect from the masculine / logical (Personal Power) side of life, you begin to become completely unbalanced in one direction.  You essentially begin to expect the Universe to bring you everything you desire with absolutely no effort of any kind on your part.  What you don’t realize is that the effort itself is part of the desire.  Let me explain.

Imagine going to Disneyland and standing in line to see the Indiana Jones ride.  When you get to the front of the line, you notice that on your right is the entrance way where everyone gets in the little carts that will take you on the ride.  You also notice that on the left you have all the people who already got off the ride and they are walking towards
the EXIT sign, each holding an Indiana Jones Lollypop souvenir they were handed by the attendant at the end of the ride.

Now imagine that instead of getting on the Indiana Jones ride by getting into the cart on the right, you just walked to your left, grabbed the Lollypop and walked out the EXIT doors.  Instead of realizing that what you really desired was having the experience of the ride, you mistook the Lollypop prize as your desire so you completely missed the 20 minute ride!

This is what happens to people that get TOO far into the direction of trying to spontaneously manifest every desire instantly with no “ride” in between. 

When I was still in high school, I worked at McDonald’s and saved my money like crazy so that I could afford to buy a car.  When I finally saved up $1,800, I went with my dad and I bought my first very own car.  It was a 1983 Brown Honda Accord.  It was a piece of crap car with a lot of rust and I was pretty much the only person who could start that car, but I loved that clunker!  It was my very first taste of freedom.  It was an awesome experience owning that car, and I learned how to repair rust, I learned how a carburetor works, and all kinds of other things you need to know when you own a clunker like that.

A few years later I upgraded the car to a 1987 Honda Accord and that was the second car I totally loved.  For this one I installed a really nice security system, a stereo system, tinted the windows, got some nice rims and tires for it etc.  It was a fun car.  Since then I’ve upgraded my cars to an older BMW 3 series, a BMW 5 series, a Honda Prelude, and now the Mazda 3 I have and I’ll be upgrading that again sometime this year. 

In all that time, each car offered a slightly different experience and I enjoyed those experiences.  Now imagine if my first car was a $150,000 Porsche.  It would be a nice experience, but I could never go from a Porsche like that down to a Honda again, right?  What I’m trying to say is that a lot of times in life, the journey and the experiences along the journey are what counts.  It’s what we really want, not the destination.

There is nothing wrong with having the desire to be a millionaire, a multi-millionaire or even a billionaire, but just don’t forget to take the time to pay attention and experience what it feels like to be a “ten-thounsandaire” first and then maybe a “hundred-thousandaire” and then maybe a “five-hundred-thousandaire” etc. 

Aligning with Personal Power

Today I decided to begin bringing back some of the “Personal Power” I used to really tap into in my life in the past to balance out the amazing growth I’ve experienced in the last 6 years in the area of “Intuitive” development.  I’m not talking about taking mindless action in an attempt to compensate for misaligned intent and limiting beliefs.  I’m talking about balancing out the amazing power of things like the Law of Attraction with the amazing power of connecting with your “Personal Power” and your abilities to take inspired action.

I don’t know any better place for me to start that process than connecting back to the work of Tony Robbins and specifically his Personal Power II program which has been collecting dust on my shelf for years.  In my younger years I’ve gone through this program a few times and I loved it each time I’ve done it.  It’s going to be very interesting to go through this program coming from the perspective of having learned all the “feminine / intuitive” sides of personal development.  I’m going to enjoy this a lot.

I’ve decided to Blog about my experience with this program as I go through the days.  It’s a 30 day program, but I’ve never taken 30 days to do it.  I always like to double up or triple up on the days and get it done quicker.  You’re “allowed” to do that if you want, as long as you complete all the exercises in the program in the order they are given without skipping days. 

I’ll try to report what I learn in terms of insights and any challenges I run into as I go through this.  I’ll write a post for each day and let you guys know how it goes.  If you haven’t checked out this program from Tony Robbins, I highly recommend it.  I think he has a new version of it on his site TonyRobbins.com

Personal Power II – Day 1 – The Key to Personal Power

In today’s lesson Tony talks about the concept of “Personal Power” which is your ability to take consistent action towards an outcome you desire.  A lot of people equate knowledge with power, but knowledge is potential power, not actual power.  For example, I have multiple diplomas in the field of Nutrition, Sports Nutrition and Advanced Nutrition, so I have a lot of knowledge of what foods are good and healthy for us and which ones are crap. 

That knowledge has the potential to change my life and the lives of many others.  However, I am currently not applying that knowledge by taking consistent action on a daily basis to eat healthy foods and to avoid unhealthy ones.  Therefore, my nutritional knowledge gives me no more power to improve my health than someone who has no clue about nutrition, until I actually apply what I have learned.

The other big part of today’s lesson that Tony goes through is his “Ultimate Success Formula” and also talks about using role models to save time when applying that formula. 

Going through today’s lesson made me realize that even though I am a very strong believer in the Law of Attraction and our ability to attract and manifest the circumstances in our lives to be or have anything we could ever imagine, I also believe that we must take inspired action to fully activate the power of the Law of Attraction.

Law of Attraction can help you attract your perfect mate by putting you in the same room at the same time, but you still have to take inspired action to strike up a conversation.  I can use my intuition to sift through hundreds of real estate listings and pick the one that I feel is the perfect house for us, saving myself the hassle of having to drive around and look at dozens of houses, but I still need to take some inspired action to go see this perfect house, buy it, move into it and furnish it the way I like. 

Law of Attraction is the ultimate tool to help you DO LESS, ACHIEVE MORE.  However, what a lot of people try to do with it is DO NOTHING.  That’s a big mistake.  So, what I’m really going to enjoy out of this program is to apply Tony’s ability to help me to take all the inspired action that is needed to achieve the results I want to achieve.

I’ll keep you guys posted on how it goes.  For now I’ve got some homework to do.