FOCUS ON YOURSELF & SHOCK EVERYONE - Tony Robbins Morning Motivation - Start Your Day Right!

I don't care how good a person you are. I don't care how spiritual or religious you are. I don't care how smart you are, how rich you think you are. Every human being is going to go through extreme stress multiple times in their life. Everyone gets called on the journey. Most people try to resist it. But that journey, that's what the call is. It's a call to grow. So I'm big on change your story, change your life. And I'm big on understanding the narrative of where you are in the story of your life. Because if you understand where you are, it gives context, it gives meaning. I love human beings. I hate suffering and I love to see when somebody awakens to who they are. And we all are so much more than we ever perceive ourself to be. But many times you don't discover that until you have to. I like to try and show people how to do it so they don't have to wait till life hits them. Anything you can imagine, we're all going to go through extreme stress in our lives, but how do you use stress to distress you? I see it as a blessing. I always try to help people say, how can you turn your worst day into your best day? That's when life is really magical. But you don't experience life, experience the life you focus on. If you don't control your focus, you react. Is this the end of the beginning? Is this person dissing me? Are they challenging me? Are they coaching me? Are they loving me? And whatever meaning you give it produces emotion. And out of that emotion, you make the third decision. What am I going to do? I hate suffering. I have suffered myself, and so I hate to see anybody suffer. And so I'm unbelievably driven to end suffering where I can to help anyone do that, whether it be hunger or emotional hunger or depression or sadness or a relationship. When you get to the point where your old strategy doesn't work enough and you have enough pain, you will search for something new. Change is never a matter of ability. It's always a matter of strong enough reasons, of motive. If you've got strong enough reasons, you can do just about anything. But people got to find what that is for themselves because if you succeed and you're not fulfilled, what do you got? So my passion is to help people be fulfilled, not just achieve. You know, you're going to battle with internal things within you and external things. But if you keep going, you're going to eventually slay your dragons and you come out in the hero of your own life and you have something to share that isn't bullshit. It's not something you read somewhere. It's something you've lived. And everybody can feel you've lived it because it's a different level of ownership, you know? And then, by the way, as soon as you do that, it happens again. You're called on another journey. You have a new level of challenge that you need to go on. It just never ends, but it makes life really, really beautiful. How can people who are always very hard on themselves learn to build up their self-esteem a little bit more? I don't know if self-esteem is the answer. You know, I don't think it's bad to be hard on yourself as long as you also celebrate when the victories happen. But you know, so many people will tell you, I have poor self-esteem because when I was a kid, people said this to me and that to me. It's convenient that you remember those things and not the positive things that also occur, obviously. I think it's more important is to realize that self-esteem is earned. It's only earned by you with yourself. You're not gonna get self-esteem because everybody praises you. Someone can tell you your whole life that you're brilliant, you're a genius, you're beautiful, you're handsome, and you not believe it. Someone can tell you, you know, you're a piece of crap and you're never gonna become anything, and there's a part of you that can say, I'll show you, as many people have, and then they develop drive out of it, right? So it's really, self-esteem comes from doing incredibly difficult things where you know you pushed yourself. It's not virtue signaling. It's not telling people about it. It's what you know inside your soul is true. And the more you do things that are incredibly difficult, and especially things that are meaningful, meaning they're not just about yourself, the higher that esteem would be. I think the most important thing for self-esteem is to find something you care about more than yourself. If you find something you care about more than you, you won't be thinking about yourself all the time and all your bullshit self-esteem ---- just goes out the window. The real question is, what do you want? If you want an extraordinary life, my definition of that is life on your terms. Some people, it's three beautiful children, a white picket fence. Some people, it's building a multi-billion dollar business. Somebody else, it's writing poetry. Instead of looking for somebody else, it's like, okay, what do you really want from your life? And aligning yourself with moving forward towards what you really want. If you can do that in a way that also you feel is serving others simultaneously, there's a sense of meaning in life that can't be replaced by self-esteem or praise or compliments or being nice to yourself. And I don't think it's bad to be tough on yourself. I'm pretty tough on myself, I'll be honest with you. Being overly tough on yourself usually comes by making comparisons that don't make sense. You compare it to somebody else's life that has a totally different path, a totally different experience. We all develop in different stages and different things. We all want different things. But eventually you wake up and say, it's good to be strong with yourself, but beating yourself up just lowers your energy. And when your energy gets lower, you produce less. And you don't have the same level of joy. You don't have the impact that you wanna have, nor do you have the excitement that you really wanna have. So I look at it as something that it's worth earning your own self-esteem, but it's really not the secret. The secret is find something else you obsess about more than yourself, and you'll have a level of energy that will compel you over the long term. When I began, I began with a fuel, which was like, I'm gonna show them my, it was anger that drove me. You know, I'm just gonna show you type of thing. But that fuel doesn't last. And then the next fuel that people tend to use is I gotta succeed. But there's a little fear underneath that that's driving them, which is like, what if I don't? Versus a knowing, you know, it's like, if you give your all every day, your gifts will make room for you. And it's like having a knowingness that things are gonna be fine. And then there's the next level, which is you start to know who you are, and you're not trying to prove it to yourself or other people. And it's just, you just wanna help. It's the difference between what I would call push motivation and pull, right? Push is, I'm gonna make this happen, and it takes tremendous willpower. And I know you have plenty of willpower, I do as well, but there's a limit to willpower. But there's no limit to pull. Pull is when there's something magnificent that you wanna serve, something that you've got an obsession for to create or to do or make happen. And that doesn't, you know, you don't lose that energy, you don't lose those components, and you're able to laugh and enjoy along the way. I think it's important to realize wherever focus goes, energy flows. It's corny, but it's true, right? In fact, maybe an easier way of saying it is we don't experience life, none of us do. We experience the life we focus on. So in any moment, what's wrong is always available, so is what's right. So it's not about being positive, it's about being intelligent. You know, you gotta look at the impact of what you're believing, and you gotta look at it and say, you know, where's my focus going? I can always be upset about something. I can always find something to be joyous or at least grateful for, which leads to joy. And I think it's learning to discipline your disappointments, you know, not allow them to grow and to move on and to use whatever life has given you. You can make some simple patterns and change your whole life of focus. Minute you focus on something, your brain has to decide, what does it mean? And meaning is what creates emotion, and emotion is where your life is, right? And so the quality of your life is the quality of your emotions. We all have a pattern of focusing on what we have and at times on what's missing. Which one do you think most people spend more time focusing on what they have or what's missing? You can engineer your life to have more happiness, but I think the real challenge is thinking so hardly about being taken seriously, just represents your fears, right? It's like, I think spiritual development, when people talk about spiritual, not religious development, spiritual development is the level of comfort you can have with just being your real self. And I think that's not an easy task because we're all trying to be something, but we already are that something. That doesn't mean you can't be better, but it's like accepting and appreciating what you really are, and instead of projecting something else, takes a lot of pain out of your body, takes a lot of wasted energy out, and gets a lot of fears to just disappear. And I don't have an easy path for that, I think it's the hero's journey. I feel if I work my ass off, now I've done my part, okay, now come through me, let's do this, and it tends to flow. Life happens to me or I happen to life, but life happens for me. Yes, not to me. Yeah, is a wonderful reframe. Yeah, I really believe it. But you gotta dig for it, it's not easy. It's gotta be earned, right? Like wishing for confidence without competence is just delusion, you have no evidence to say that you can do this thing. If you want freedom, if you value freedom, you can't possibly have it as long as you played the victim role. None of that makes you who you are, none of that controls where you are in your life. It's like if you ever had something happen in your life that was horrible, I mean, it was painful, you'd never wanna go through it again in a million years, you wouldn't want anybody else to go through it that you care about. But after five or 10 years, you look back and you say, I never wanna go through it again, but now I see the wisdom in it. I'm glad I did. It's like it made me care so much more, it made me so much stronger, it made something in me more. I mean, I'm sure you can relate to that, can't you? Yeah, for sure, I mean, you don't really realize, it's just life. And then you learn a little bit more about yourself and you start to realize, well, look at all of the ways that I've had to compensate for that. Look at all of the ways that it's held me back. Look at all of the beliefs that I have about myself. And God, if only that hadn't happened, then I would be here or I would be there. And then you realize, well, the light side of all of that dark stuff is usually the stuff that I'm most proud of myself for. So the fact that you were maybe a little bit alone in childhood means that you're very self-sufficient when you're an adult. Or the fact that you didn't have anybody to support you means that you have no concern about working on your own and continuing to take a bet on yourself, so on and so forth. So you end up having this really strange loop where you go from unconscious incompetence in that you've somehow been through something that you really hate, to this sort of awareness of how it's held you back, to this awareness of how it's propelled you. And then you have to get to this really difficult place, which is, okay, so this is a thing that I kind of wish hadn't happened, and yet I'm grateful that it did. And it's like a psychological superposition that you need to hold in your head at the same time. You can't collapse it down into one. You need to hold both of these things. It's like, yeah, that shouldn't have happened. I really wish that that, and had you have been able to see you, had you at 36 have been able to see you at 12, you'd have picked them up and given them a hug and said, I believe in you and you don't deserve this, but it needs to happen to you. It was meant to be. Now, I don't believe everything's meant to be. I think situations are meant to be, and then it's our job to choose how we're gonna use them or be used by them, right? I think that's the difference. But I think we get easy times and tough times. Why is that important? It is incredibly peaceful if you've done the job in the beginning because you know who you are. Now you have an amazing life. And so think of it this way. Zero to 21 is springtime. Things are easy to grow in springtime. You don't have to do that much. Growing as a kid happens naturally, but overall, life is supporting you. It's sending you, teaching you, sharing with you. Now, when you get from 21 to 41 or 22 to 42, whatever range you want to talk about, you now are in the real world. And now you go test what you learned in your springtime. So you start to learn, test, figure out what's real, and it's an important stage of life. 42, 43 to 62, 63 is the power of your life. If you worked hard in the spring and the summer and you put yourself out there and you planted, it's a reaping time. It's a time when you really become a leader. And then if you're lucky, you go from 63 to 83 and maybe 83 to 103, and you have an extended final season of your life where you get to be the mentor. You get to share. You get to make a difference. And maybe towards the end of your life, people look out for you again if you looked out for everybody else. That's kind of the cycle of life. What if you're born in 1910? World War I ends. The world looks like it's a great place. New technology, cars, radio. And then what happens? An explosion of abundance, the Roaring Twenties. And so you're a kid, you're 14, 15 years old, and you're like, I can't wait to get a car to go. But what happened when that person hit the next stage of life, 19, 20, 21 years old? As they came of age, it's 1929. And suddenly, people are jumping out of buildings, total depression, Dust Bowl, nobody's got jobs. It looks horrific, and it was horrific. But did they get a break? No, when they turned 29, it's 1939. It looked like the whole world was gonna end. Hitler was sweeping across Europe, bombing London. It literally looked like the world as we know it was over. This is what gives me great optimism for everyone watching here. Winter's not forever, no pandemic lives forever. Everything changes, and everything ends. And the good news about winter is it's always followed by springtime. What follows the night? The daytime, what a cool way to set it up if you were God or the universe. The first thing I do every single morning is I go and freeze in cold water. And when you jump in, it never feels good to go in, but getting out, you feel incredible. But I do it for a different reason. I do it to train my brain to say, when I say now, it means now. When I say go, we go. I don't stand there because it's cold and go maybe in a minute when I'm ready. But I always do it because I've trained my brain, this is how we work. And if you train your brain to do that every single day, then it'll do it on the more difficult and important things in life. But the essence of it is I change my body radically, and I do three things to make sure that my brain is primed. And what I mean by primed is most people think their thoughts are their thoughts, Louis. And you and I know better. Most people just don't understand that you are being primed all the time. And unless you prime yourself, you're gonna be primed by the environment. So I wanna take control of my brain. So I do three quick things. One, I take three minutes of those 10 minutes after I've changed my body, and I focus on three different events in my life that I'm grateful for. I usually pick two big ones and one small one. It could be as simple as the smile on my daughter's face, and it changes your biochemistry. Then real fast, I do this three-minute process. It's kind of like a blessing. And then three minutes, the last three minutes are called three to thrive, where I focus on three things I wanna accomplish. But instead of thinking I wanna accomplish, I see, feel, and experience it as done. I feel grateful. I celebrate it. And it trains your brain. So in 10 minutes, I'm done. Third thing that I'll do, I immediately send a message or a text or an audio message to somebody as a sincere compliment. And I don't go, dude, great job, or wow, you're cool. I say, listen, I saw you on Tuesday with those kids, and I saw you take that extra 20 minutes. No one else did. I just want you to know I saw that. I thought that was incredible. So I'm always very specific so they know it's not just some positive thinking bullshit call. It's sincerely doing it. It makes me constantly look for the good in the people I work with. Fourth thing I do is whatever I don't wanna do, the most challenging part of the day. What's a story we all love? It's the comeback story. It's the comeback. It's the Rocky. It's that music where all of a sudden you step back up and you take control and rock. Good times create weak people. Weak people create bad times. Bad times create strong people. Strong people create good times. Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. Like success is getting what you want. Fulfillment is living what you're made for. Fulfillment and success, they're not even the same universe. People ask me all the time, what does it take to be happy? And I always tell them it's really simple. One word, progress. Progress equals happiness. If you keep growing, you're gonna feel alive. And if you keep growing, you're gonna have more to give. It doesn't matter how many statues, Oscars they give you or Emmys or how much money you have in the bank. We've all seen people have all those things and I get the phone call because they're depressed or somebody commits suicide in that area. It's really an inner game and I think that's what's missing for us today. Everybody's focusing on the outside world and hell, there's a lot of things in the outside world you'll never be able to control. You can influence, but you can't control it. This, your mind, your emotions, your body, you have 100% control over what you do with these things and that's where the game is won. Win the inner game, then you win the outer game. But a lot of people spent their life trying to win the outer game, they won and they're miserable. Someone can tell you your whole life, you're a piece of crap, but you can say, screw you, read between the lines and make your life work. Someone tell you your whole life, you're beautiful, you're intelligent, you're the smartest person in the world and you don't believe it. Because self-esteem doesn't come from what people say about you. Self-esteem is earned within yourself. It's esteem for yourself, which only comes by doing things that are incredibly difficult and then your brain goes, this is who I am. You really gotta figure out what you're made for and nobody knows in the beginning. So you start where you are and you do what's in front of you, do what's next and you keep growing until you start to discover, hey, this is my real passion. So identity is the number one thing I work to change with people, to expand it. Expand your own sense of who you really are and what you're capable of and the mindset has to be destroy any limitation and move forward, move forward, move forward. I think passion is the genesis of genius. If you've got enough passion, you're gonna find answers nobody else does but most people run out of fuel, meaning they get tired, they get exhausted, they get burnt out, they get the law of familiarity. They're around something so much they take it a little bit for granted and I've managed to see something in myself that I found in every great leader that I've ever respected and that is, I value intelligence immensely but I know really smart people can't fight their way out of a paper bag pragmatically. What I see as the one common denominator of people that are successful over a lifetime is the sustained hunger. Hunger is the number one factor. You need to be good at pattern recognition and that's what gets somebody strong at anything. I mean, look at why is Amazon doing so well? You realize one pattern was valued over anything else, convenience, right? If you look at Tom Brady, a friend of mine, he's got pattern recognition like nobody else at 43 years old. He's able to do things no one dreamed could be done. He's got more Super Bowl rings than any team. See, what do they see that none of us see? What's the pattern? Then you gotta learn pattern utilization. It's one thing to see it, it's another thing to use it and then if you're good after a while you get to pattern creation. It's like if you learn to play the piano most people play other people's music and there's a point you've learned so much that you're able to create. Really comes down to anyone can learn anything if it's important enough to you. So it's like my drive is not just for me. That wouldn't be enough because it's easy to meet your own needs. It's not that difficult. But if you can find something that you care about more than yourself, your daughter, your son, your family, your business, your mission, your community, whatever it is, that's really the secret to energy and vitality and strength and really learning. One of the things I want to do with people during this challenge is take things that seem so complex and make them so simple so you do it. Get it really simple, things you can do right now to change your life. You can go to experience it that day and then you get momentum. Day one, day two, day three, day four, and all of a sudden now what used to be hard to do is easy to do. And I think for anyone, you got to understand anyone can learn anything if you can just break it down to its simple core. That's what I try to do most. And I'm just not willing to settle for a life without passion and aliveness. That's just like, there's so much to learn. There's so much to grow. There's so much to give. And I'm wired to grow and give. And I think anybody gets wired to grow and give is going to have a really fulfilling life. It doesn't matter what you choose to do. You're going to be alive. A year ago, people thought we were coming out of, you know, we've got vaccines now and we're coming out of COVID and it's going to be all over now. People were excited. But now after going through two years of this, there's a lot of people now that no longer have a compelling future. Like, you know, people talking about New Year's resolutions. Most people don't even have one. Because it's like, they never followed through anyway. But at least they had something to look forward to. They're starting to get into learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when something is so bad over and over again, you start thinking the problem's permanent. No problem is permanent. Or you start thinking the problem's pervasive because I haven't handled my finances and my whole world's over. Or because my relationship's bad and the whole world's over. Your life is bigger than that. My goal right now is to shake that up for people. People need a new perspective and you can't do it by just sitting and thinking. You've got to move your body. You've got to change your energy and your focus. But if I get you into a higher state of being, mentally, emotionally, physically, then all of a sudden you start remembering who you are and you start coming up with answers that you never even thought were possible before. The idea of remembering who you are is something incredibly powerful. There was a Batman cartoon where he gets amnesia and he gets put in a camp, basically, a work camp, and he can't get out. And he feels stuck and weak and afraid. And then something happens, I don't remember what, triggers his memory. And he remembers that he's Batman. Just in remembering that he's Batman, he then takes the actions to fight his way out. And look, I know it's a cartoon, but that has always resonated with me. And whenever I'm feeling anxious about something, I always tell myself, remember who you are. But you're really talking about the most important concept in lasting change, identity. We all define ourselves in certain ways. So you start where you are and you do what's in front of you, do what's next. Then you keep growing until you start to discover, hey, this is my real passion. And it can change. People go for five, six, seven years, and then they usually question their business, their career, their body, their relationships. And then one of two things happens. They change direction and feel renewed, or they go, no, I got a great deal here. What the hell's wrong with me? And they recommit and they get stronger. But that's life. And if you don't grow, I don't give a damn how much you got going for you, you're gonna be miserable. I think it was early on I realized that one of the things you have to understand about life is everything changes and everything ends. And that kind of sounds heavy on the front end, but it's a truth. If everything changes and everything ends, number one, it should make you appreciate what you have right now. And then my view is what's next is always better. If I make it so, it's my job to make it so. And I think that's how we have to navigate. But most of us, most of us have been conditioned not to take a risk. People ask me all the time, what does it take to be happy? And I always tell them, it's really simple. One word, progress. Where's my focus going? I can always be upset about something. Where do you tend to focus more, your past, your present, your future? We all spend all three, but where do you spend more of your time? Most of us who are achievers tend to focus on the future, but all the joy is in the present. The majority of people spend a lot of time on the past, and the problem is you can't change it. You're constantly focused on what's missing versus what you have. You're focused on what you can't control. And there's two worlds, right? The external world, the internal world. We can't control the external world, we can influence it. The part we can control is what's going on inside of us. And that, we can control what we focus on. We can control the meaning, we can decide the meaning. We're the meaning makers, and we can decide what to do. And when we can make those three decisions, we're in control of our life. And all the anxiety and bullshit tends to go away, especially if we're trying to do that to serve something more than ourselves. Because you can't serve something more than yourself and not benefit. When you want some self-esteem, do something worthwhile beyond just yourself. We all know the two emotions that destroy your relationship, your business, your life, it's fear and anger. Those are two extremes. You can't be grateful and fearful simultaneously. You can't be angry and grateful simultaneously. But you look at somebody like Steph Curry, and you see this guy shoot the ball from almost half court. He doesn't even look, he turns around and just waves because he knows it's in already. And there's swish, and the crowd goes crazy. And people look at that and go, he's unbelievable. It's unbelievable, he's the greatest three-point shooter in history, there's no one like him. But what they don't pay attention to is, that isn't like a little gift. He shoots 500 shots every single day, never less than that, seven days a week, for more than 15 years, his 15-year professional career. He's been doing it since before he was in college, his dad really trained him. So think of that, 3,500 shots a week, 168,000 shots in a year, two million shots in his 15-year NBA career, so he can make 3,600 shots, not even one-tenth of 1%. I tell people, you get rewarded in public for what you practice in private. I think everything happens for a reason. I think there's a higher purpose. I think it's my job to find it. I think that life happens for us, not to us, but it's our job to figure it out.