Anthony Robbins has said, Passion is the genesis of genius. He is the living expression of both passion and genius. For the past three decades he has served as an advisor to top political, corporate and humanitarian leaders around the world. A recognized authority on the psychology of leadership, negotiations, organizational turnaround and peak performance, he has been honored consistently for his strategic intellect and humanitarian endeavors.

His nonprofit organization, The Anthony Robbins Foundation, provides assistance to inner-city youth, senior citizens and the homeless, and feeds more than two million people in 56 countries every year through its international holiday Basket Brigade. Robbins has directly impacted the lives of more than 50 million people from over 100 countries with his bestselling books, multimedia and health products, public speaking engagements and live events.

Tony has been honored by Accenture as one of the top 50 business intellectuals in the world; by Harvard Business Press as one of the top 200 business gurus; by American Express as one of the top six business leaders in the world; by Forbes as a top 100 celebrity; and by Justice Byron White as one of the world’s outstanding humanitarians.

Conducting Tony’s interview is Brendon Burchard, a bestselling author of Life’s Golden Ticket and a brilliant speaker. After a much-too-close brush with death, he dedicated his life to helping individuals, teams and organizations create a massive change. His clients have included Accenture, Alcoa, JCPenney, eBay, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Levi’s, Gateway, and Walgreens.

He’s appeared on ABC World News, CBS-New York Early Show, NPR stations, Oprah and Friends, and hundreds of other radio and TV programs. Brendon’s books, newsletters, products and appearances now inspire nearly two million people a month. His events for authors and speakers, Experts Academy, and partnership seminars have helped thousands of up-and-coming experts build their businesses and share their messages with the world. You can learn more about Brendon’s remarkable programs by going to www.ExpertsAcademy.com.

BRENDON BURCHARD: It’s like a dream come true. I’m pinching myself, asking, Who am I talking to tonight? Thank you for the honor. Tony, this is so great because I’ve been such a huge fan, as you know, and we get to do so many cool things together now.

You’ve had this incredible life and career for three decades that I know of, focused on studying what makes the difference in the quality of people’s lives and still training tens of millions of people how to find their personal power. I’ll bet there are some people, the Healthy Wealthy nWise listeners right now, who may not have heard your story and how you got your start. Would you mind sharing your story with us, about how you began and what you’re doing?

ANTHONY ROBBINS: I started as a young child, as they always say. First of all, Brendon, thank you for being on the line. You know how much I enjoy you and appreciate your heart and your work. My basic fundamental comes from what Janet’s work is about, and yours as well. I think we all share in common this understanding that passion is the genesis of genius, and that hunger is what gets somebody to maximize their human spirit, their true capabilities, and what they’re able to give.

I grew up in a very tough environment. What was interesting for me is that I wasn’t willing to settle for that. In the beginning, I was frustrated that my family was constantly trying to figure out how to survive. We literally had days when we had no food. There were times, like when I met my fourth father, when I said to my mother, I’m confused. What’s the problem here? I’m not exaggerating that situation. I had a lot of pain, and I wanted to know why people’s lives turned out so differently.

What was it that caused some people to have such an extraordinary happiness in their family and their life, and other people to be so frustrated, which we were on the side of? In the beginning, I thought all the things most people think: certain people are just born lucky, they have greater education, they’ve got more loving parents, or their parents love each other more. However, when you’re honest with yourself and you start to look around, you see the truth. You start to look around and see people who have been given everything.

They’ve had a loving family, they’ve been given tremendous education, they have economic opportunities, and they spend their whole lives going in and out of rehab. Then you see other people who’ve been through hell and back, who seem to be challenged by life at every level: physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually, you name it. They very often become the people who give the most back to society and inspire us the most, the Oprahs of the world, if you will.

I began becoming obsessed with wanting to know the answer to the question of what makes the difference in people’s lives. I was just a kid, but I decided, I don’t have any role models around me, so I used books. I got immersed in biographies, and I started to realize that people who have succeeded at the highest level have gone through the same hell, the same challenges. They just dealt with it in a different way.

Then I took a speed-reading class and I set a goal to read a book a day, which I didn’t do; but over seven years I read about 700 books in the area of human development, psychology, physiology and anything I thought could give me the ability to change my own life or to help somebody else. I got to the point where I was a little bit jaded, frankly, because everything seemed like a recap of everything else.

I found myself in a position where I first got excited. I applied what I learned, and I became very successful in what I thought success was at that stage. I grew up in a poor family. Trying to figure out what to do, I figured success was economic success. As we all know, you can have total economic success and be a massive failure. I always tell people that success without contribution, success without fulfillment, is really failure.

If you’ve succeeded in economic terms, but you don’t have a meaningful sense of your life, what your life is about, and that your life is about something more than yourself, then life is really dead inside. At that stage, I became successful financially in a very short period of time, and I got written up in these newspapers and magazines as this young entrepreneur, this young wonder boy. My ego exploded.

Then I got into that jaded part where I felt everything was the same stuff. Brendon, I kind of outran my vision. I was doing better than I ever dreamed of, and I started to sabotage myself. I don’t know how many of your listeners have done this and can relate. For most people, when things get even better than you expect, sizably so, just like you get uncomfortable when things aren’t good enough, people get uncomfortable when things are better than that.

There used to be a VH1 TV show that was called Behind the Music. I don’t know if any of your listeners have ever watched it, but it’s always the same story: a band grows and becomes really successful, and then somebody drives too fast and one of the band members gets killed, or they get drug addicted or something. They get really messed up; it’s almost like a formula, and yet it’s kind of the history of what happens to people who succeed really quickly.

I didn’t do those things, but I found food as my drug. I was overwhelmed by all the things that were going on, and I started to eat. I gained 38 pounds in about two-and-half-months. I always tell people that’s not easy to do, that you have to eat tons of food and not move very much to pull that off, which I did do. In addition to that, I started getting stressed all the time, and I started being harsh with people.

I’m not a harsh person, so I’d feel badly about it, but then I’d go right back to the pattern. What was it? It was that I was completely outside my comfort zone. I got to the point where I lost everything financially. I had buried my little companies into the ground. I was in a place where I lost my place, and I moved into a little 400-square-foot bachelor apartment in a place called Venice, California-not Venice, Italy.

I was cooking on a little hotplate that was on top of my trashcan, and I was washing my dishes in my bathtub, literally. I was getting up each day feeling sorry for myself. Basically, I’d have goals like, What am I going to eat today, and What is going to happen to Luke and Laura? on a program called General Hospital. Yes, I was there. You’re too young to remember this, Brendon, and probably too bright to have ever watched such a show.

BRENDON BURCHARD: I know it’s bad if you’re parked in front of the TV and you’re Tony Robbins. That’s not where you’re supposed to be in the world.

ANTHONY ROBBINS: What happened was I had a gentleman who was a friend of mine-I had a series of events, frankly, that stacked within a few days, but one of them was a friend of mine-who I hadn’t seen in a while. He came to see me. What happened to you? I have this beer belly on me, 38 pounds heavier, I’ve grown this long beard, and it wasn’t because I thought it was cool; I was just drifting.

I was humiliated by that. I was humiliated by the fact that I couldn’t pay my bills. A combination of things made me hit bottom. I thought, Gosh! I read all these books. I’ve been to all these seminars and programs. What’s the problem? I realized that I knew what to do, but according to these friends, I wasn’t doing what I knew. I wasn’t doing the process; I wasn’t following through. I thought, I’ve got to condition myself to follow through. I’ve got to turn this around. This is ridiculous.

I began to realize the pattern of going beyond your expectations creates as much uncertainty and pain in people as not doing as much as you expect. I began to make the shift. I got exposed to a series of things. I went to work and said, What’s the best way to get people to do these things? We all know people who are lovers of personal growth and personal development. They’re positive thinkers, but they don’t do anything.

You’ve got to bring muscle to it along with the intention, as we all know, and you’ve got to strategically follow through. I got exposed to neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. Many of your listeners have probably been exposed to it. It was in the early days of it when it was really just for therapists. Businesspeople weren’t really involved in it at that stage. It was for marriage and family counselors, psychologists and people of that nature.

I got to watch the co-founder of NLP actually get up and do this presentation. His name was John Grinder, by the way, and he was a linguist and brilliant man. He took this person who had been in therapy for, I don’t remember how many years at that point, but four or five years, I think it was. He had a phobia, and he wiped out this phobia in front of the room in 15 or 20 minutes. You could see the change.

I snuck in there because I knew some people, and I was blown away. I thought, I want to master this. I went up to him afterwards and said, Look, Dr. Grinder, I really want to come learn this. He said, Are you a therapist? I looked very young; I was very young. I said, No, and he said, This is really for therapists. I said, No, these therapists are making it too complex.

I’m in the hall listening to them arguing that what you did is anecdotal, that it won’t last. They’re all trained and conditioned to think a certain way. I’m not like that. You guys are making this complex. I’m going to take this, learn it, and take it to hundreds of thousands of people. It wasn’t millions in those days; my goals was hundreds of thousands. I was very, very playful with him, and finally he said, Okay, let’s see what you can do. Come here and we’ll give you a shot.

I went through this course, and after the first four days we learned how to wipe out a phobia in less than an hour. Granted, for anybody listening who doesn’t know what a phobia is, it’s an uncontrollable response to some stimulus. It’s not just fear, which is what stops us from being great at anything: relationships, dealing with financial fears, dealing with any kind of challenge in your life.

A phobia, literally, is when you’re out of control. Traditionally, it can take five, six, seven years, but sometimes you never get cured from it. We learned how to do this, so I turned to the therapists in the room who had become some of my friends, and I said, Let’s go find some phobics and cure them! They all looked at me like I was crazy.

BRENDON BURCHARD: Let’s hit the streets and find these people!

ANTHONY ROBBINS: That’s what it is! They looked at me like I was nuts. I’ll never forget one of the guys who said, It’s obvious you’re not an educated man. I said, Maybe I’m not, but where I come from, I’m a businessperson. You don’t wait for someone to come to you. They said you have to go through a year of this, then you have to go through a certification process, and if you get certified then you can work with people.

I said, Look, where I come from, if you’ve got something of value you take it to people; you don’t wait for someone to certify you to check it out. I want to help somebody tonight. They’re all just shaking their heads and looking at me laughing, and I thought, It’s 11:00 at night. I was in Los Angeles, California. We were at the Holiday Inn that was by the airport there, and I thought, Where do you go at 11:00 at night to find somebody who needs help? I thought, Denny’s.

If you’re at Denny’s at 11:00 at night, you need help! If anyone is listening internationally, Denny’s is very dodgy 24- hour restaurant we have here in America. Sure enough, Denny’s is two blocks away, which is why I thought of it. I walked over to Denny’s, and I’m in this peak state. I’m a young kid. I just over-the-top want to help somebody. I walk up to this counter, and this old man is sitting over his food.

I come up and say, Hi! My name is Tony Robbins, and I’m smacking my chest. I said, I don’t know what your challenge is, but I’m here to help you tonight. I don’t care what it is; I’ve got the tools to make a difference. This guy started cowering down over his food and gave me this look that made me realize this was not the best approach. Long story short, I went up to Canada. I had done some work up there with people in the health field.

I used some of the relationships I had to get on the radio. When I got on the radio, I said, I want to talk to you about health; I want to talk to you about what controls the force of your whole life, what stops us from really making our dreams a reality, and that’s fear. I said, I don’t care what your fear is: failure, success, rejection, the unknown, pain.
This is really what stops us, even when we know what to do.

I said, I don’t care if you’ve got uncontrollable phobias. See me and I will handle it in less than an hour. I am the one-stop therapist. Big claim! The radio lit up and people called in and asked, Can you do this? Can you do that? Whatever they asked, I said, Of course, I can do it. Many of these things I’d never done before, but I believed I could. I knew if I committed to it, I’d have to find a way, so that’s kind of how I launched my career.

What made my career, Brendon, was with this one therapist on the phone, live on the radio show. He started attacking me. He said, Your interviewee, Mr. Robbins, doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’m a therapist, and I’ve been doing this for years. It can take five, six, seven years to get rid of these. He’s a liar. He’s a charlatan. He was very direct and very upset. What do you do when somebody attacks you? My first response was that fighting with him wasn’t going to work.

I needed to break his pattern and open him up, or at least open the audience up. The best way to do that, of course, is to ask somebody a good question, so I said, Sir, have you ever met me? He said, No. I said, Have you ever met any of my clients? He said, No. I said, You’ve never met me and you’ve never met my clients, but you’re calling me a liar and charlatan. He paused, and I could see it broke his state a little bit. I said, Are you a scientist?

He said, Of course; I’m a physician. I said, Great, because I know a scientist would never make an assumption, and I kind of emphasized the first part of that word. It really broke his state. I felt, You want to play hardball? I’ll play hardball. I’m here to make a difference, and you’ve got to do whatever it takes. He said, What are you saying? I’m saying if you never met me, never met my clients, and you’re telling me that I’m a charlatan and a liar on national radio, if you’re truly a scientist you’ve got to test your hypothesis.

If you haven’t met me, it’s a hypothesis. He said, Yes. I said, I guess the best way to test is this. I’m doing a free guest event tomorrow at the Holiday Inn-this was in Vancouver-so why don’t you come and prove I’m a charlatan in front of everybody? The easiest way, of course, would be to bring me one of your own patients. Bring me a patient you’ve never been able to cure. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of those. I figured if he was going to play hardball, I’d play hardball.

I was playful about it, but he wasn’t terribly happy. He said, We all have people who aren’t ready to change yet, and I said, That’s funny. I haven’t found any. Of course, at that time, Brendon, I had done maybe three therapies in my entire life, but I knew it was possible.

BRENDON BURCHARD: That’s part of passion sometimes; you just believe and you know you can do it.

ANTHONY ROBBINS: Do you know what? Truthfully, I look back at what I did in those days and I think, Oh, my gosh. These weren’t very intelligent things. However, they came out of a passionate young man and they opened the door. I was truly committed to helping people. Long story short-I’ll shorten it down, but I’m not good at short stories, obviously, but you asked for my story-really, my career was made by that call. He had nowhere to go and he didn’t agree, so I said, Great. Bring one of your patients.

He finally agreed to bring me a woman he’d worked on who had a phobia. It was a snake phobia. I asked, How does it manifest? He said, She goes to sleep at night, and this woman has a dream where a snake comes and bites her on the face. The dream is so real. I don’t know if you’ve ever had one of those where your heart starts beating. It wakes you up, obviously. I said, How often does this happen? He said, Four to seven times a week.

I said, Bring her down. How long have you been treating her? and, of course, he said, Seven years, which was average at the time. I said, Bring her down. It should take me 15 or 20 minutes. Now the guy is going crazy. The radio guy cuts him off and says, See you tomorrow night at the Holiday Inn.

BRENDON BURCHARD: The gauntlet’s been passed.

ANTHONY ROBBINS: I get to the Holiday Institution. I don’t know how many of your listeners do what I do, but I’m obviously a crazy, passionate guy, and I’m very visual. When I talk to somebody on the phone, like the first time I meet somebody on the phone, I can’t help it; I hear their voice and I make a picture of what I think they look like. What kind of picture would you make if you heard this tough voice saying, I’ll be there? I pictured this giant guy with this scared woman on his arm coming into the seminar.

Nobody matched that description, so I get up and start the seminar. Sure enough, a guy comes in with this woman. He’s not very nice, but I bring the woman on stage. I demonstrate her phobia by saying, I understand you have certain feelings about certain kinds of animals. How do you feel about snakes? I get really intense and she starts shaking. If people have seen a phobic, you know I’m not exaggerating. It’s very, very intense; it’s an uncontrollable response.

I broke her pattern. I did this work. At the end I wrapped the snake around her. When that happened, the whole crowd erupted. That became my signature. That’s how I started to build, thankfully, my brand and show people what I did. I called it coaching. No one was really doing coaching 30 years ago. I didn’t want to be a motivator. Unfortunately, some people still think about me as that, or as a guru.

However, think of coaches in sports. They might not always have been people who were better as an athlete than I was, but they could show me insight. I launched my coaching career, and that led to all the things you know about. All of a sudden, I started working with sports stars. I turned around a guy, Mike O’Brien, back in the Olympics in ’84. He was one of the first guys I did. He made the team; he won the Gold. He gave me enormous credit. I went with Andre Agassi. I got to work with Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and then President Clinton and Princess Diana.

It just grew and grew. I developed seminars because in the early days I was just doing individual work, and I wanted to reach more people. I started creating a format for seminars and that grew all the different enterprises I’m now a part of.

BRENDON BURCHARD: I know when people are hearing your story that they recognize the name and they recognize the passion. I know if they’re hearing you for the first time, they’re saying, Oh, my gosh! This guy is crazy! He’s so impassioned, which is great because this is a series called Passions of Real Life Legends. How did you find what your passion is and how you live in it?

I don’t know if everybody on the line knows, but Tony has a mantra. At the end of everything he always says, Live with passion! How do you find that passion, and how do you live in that each day?

ANTHONY ROBBINS: Some will cross it sooner than others. At an early stage in my life, as corny as it may sound, I had visions about what I was here to do. I don’t tell people what to believe religiously in any way, shape or form, and I don’t preach to anybody spiritually because I see myself more as a Trojan Horse, frankly. My job is to get people to meet their needs, what they’re after. Then what I try to do is open them up to what I think everyone’s ultimate passion is, which I believe is to make a difference.

In anybody’s life, I believe you can achieve all the goals you’ve ever wanted in your life; but if it’s all about you, you, you, the ‘Me, Me, Me’ song is a very lonely song. I always tell people that life is not about ‘me’; it’s about ‘we’. Part of what helped me find my passion was this. When I was eleven years old, we had a situation where my father had a difficult situation at work. He’d lost his job. We’re at Thanksgiving, and we’ve got no food and no money. Frankly, we wouldn’t have starved.

We were always resourceful. We would have found a way, but we certainly wouldn’t have had a Thanksgiving meal. What really shifted my life, frankly, I think more than anything in my entire life, was that there was a knock at the door. I’m the oldest of three, and my mom and my dad were saying, yelling, things at each other that once you say are hard to forget. I’m trying to get my brother and sister not to hear this, and then this knock happens.

I go answer the door, and this tall guy is standing there. He’s got a big box of food. On the ground right beside him he had a big pot with an uncooked turkey in it. He said, Is your father here? I said, Just one moment. I was out of my mind; it was like a total gift from God. I go to tell my dad, and I thought, I won’t tell him there’s some guy at the door. I kind of cajoled him to go because he wanted me to do it so I could see his face. It wasn’t a pleasant moment, frankly. My father was offended even though we were in a really tough spot.

He just looked at the man and said…

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For more information about Anthony Robbins and his work, please go to http://www.tonyrobbins.com/Home/Home.aspx .

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