I’m a Coach: Why I Shut Off Tony Robbins
Instead of relying on Tony Robbins’ advice, learn to tap within by becoming an active listener of your best teacher — you.
The other night, I watched the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix, “I Am Not Your Guru”, which follows the “nation’s top life and business strategist” over the course of a 6-day live audience event. During the first 30 minutes, I nodded along as Tony coached fiercely, guiding clients to dig within to uncover deep issues standing in the way of their goals. I was sold! At minute 36, however, things took an uncomfortable turn (more on that later), and I found myself shutting off the documentary. Tony Robbins, the greatest coach of all time, challenged one of the most important principles every good coach knows by telling someone what to do.
The answers to all questions lie within
A powerful principle that I have learned and applied as a coach and as a client is “The answers to all questions lie within”. With the right questioning and re-framing, it is only a matter of time until the answer to any decision point or challenge is revealed…by the client, NOT the coach!
I’ve taken very uncomfortable action recently to live more authentically: I left my city apartment and moved into an 84-sq foot camper…then left my six-figure corporate job to become a coach. I know I’m on the right path because I chose those actions, not someone else. And my coaches have empowered me to arrive at these actions, never telling me what to do, only raising my awareness so I could figure them out on my own. That has made all the difference in creating sustainable, welcome change that gets me out of bed excited every morning.
How to get the answers that lie within: become an ACTIVE listener of yourself
Passive listening is a one-way communication street where the receiving end isn’t providing feedback or acknowledging the sender’s message. As a corporate professional, I lived my life as a passive listener for many years, ignoring the subtle hints of anxiety, the missing puzzle piece visuals in my head, the heaviness that made getting out of bed sometimes the hardest task of the day.
It wasn’t until I started my coach training journey that I began to acquire tools that allowed me to become an active listener of my inner wisdom. Here are the three coaching tools that built my active self-listening skills:
- Silence
- Powerful questions
- Acknowledging and validating
The three coaching tools for active inner listening
Silence: Think about the last time you were speaking with someone that was fully engrossed in your message. The listener’s eyes were on you, the person nodded and most likely was silent while listening. This attention probably felt good! Silence is a powerful tool that we often gift to others, yet don’t often gift to ourselves, even though it can reveal so much when we do.
As I was contemplating my next life and career steps, I began taking daily morning walks, often in complete silence. Some mornings, I heard stressed-out chatter. Other times, I heard wisdom and inspiration. Sometimes I heard nothing but the motors of the cars passing by. Any form in which silence showed up for me was perfectly OK. Getting into a frequent practice of simply sitting, walking, praying, or meditating in silence opens up the space that our wisdom needs to break from its inner confines into your consciousness. And as you sit in silence and start to hear that wisdom, consider writing down what you hear to contemplate further.
Powerful questions: Going back to that recent conversation where you were the speaker, think about how genuinely curious questions from the listener brought out some of the best details of your story. Those questions likely inspired more than a “yes” or “no” answer. Open-ended, curiosity-led questions are powerful questions; those are the types of questions to ask yourself as you begin to listen to your inner wisdom.
Some of the questions that I asked myself, sometimes during those morning walks in silence included:
What about what I’m doing today is not fully meeting my needs?
What about being a full-time coach excites me?
How would I spend each day as an entrepreneur running a coaching business?
What is it going to cost me to not go for my dreams?
This was the most powerful question of all that came up during a coaching conversation. My answer to this question was, “The cost would be to not live a life of complete fulfillment. And this would also cost my family peace of mind knowing that I’m not doing what I love.” Answering this question led me to resign from my corporate job the very next day.
Acknowledging and validating: Going back to the recent conversation where you were speaking with an active listener, the conversation likely had natural pauses where the listener acknowledged and validated what was heard.
Acknowledging is the confirmation that lets someone know we have really listened to what was said. Validating is when we let someone know that they have every right to feel the way they do. Together, these tools create a powerful active listening experience that can also yield new insights for the speaker. To acknowledge and validate what you’re hearing within:
- Name the feeling you’re sensing (overwhelm, anxiety, sadness, joy, excitement).
- State out loud: “The feeling that is coming up for me right now is (insert your named feeling). It makes complete sense that I’m feeling (insert your named feeling), given that I (insert a plausible reason for why you’re feeling this way).”
For example, during those quiet morning walks, I would acknowledge and validate what I was hearing within me as follows: “I can sense frustration coming up when I open my work laptop in the mornings. It makes complete sense that I’m feeling frustrated given that I’m giving my time to other tasks other than my dream career.” Once this realization emerged, my emotion felt perfectly acceptable (so I was no longer fighting it), but it also generated a logical connection between my emotion and its source.
So, by now, you might be antsy to know what it was that Tony Robbins did that so unnerved me. Here it is: he told a woman (whom he was coaching on relationship matters) to break up with her boyfriend on the spot, over the phone, in front of a 2,500 person audience and a documentary camera crew. Perhaps a breakup was the right action for her and perhaps she needed that external jolt to do it. But I was disappointed that instead of allowing her the space to listen within and arrive at this massive step on her own, Tony commanded that she take out her phone and call the boyfriend immediately, changing the vibe of this inspiring event to an uncomfortable Jerry Springer segment.
You don’t need to follow commands from Tony Robbins and you certainly don’t need to follow them in front of 2,500 witnesses. Silence, powerful questions, and acknowledging/validating are three active listening tools that will help you find your path by listening to the wisdom already within you. You have a wise, experienced, and accessible teacher ready to guide you in the direction of your dreams: YOU.
