Say Yes! Say Yes! Sayyyyyyyyy Yes! This is just one of the famous lines you will hear at a world renowned Tony Robbins event. When I first saw him in 2013, he helped me so much with his learning’s and completely turn my life around.

Since that day, I have been to other events where he has been present and consumed his content religiously to compound my results further. Last week, I was lucky enough to catch Tony at an event in Melbourne, Australia where he delivered a truly unique experience that I wasn’t expecting.

The event was supposed to be two hours of Tony but as always, he over-delivered with value, and it quickly became four hours. With me at the event was a good friend of mine who I never knew had also had his life change by Tony.

Amongst high achievers, Tony’s work (or similar work from figures such as Les, Brown, Brian Tracey, and Eric Thomas) is very common. My friend made a critical decision many years ago to leave his country and go to the Western World, but I never knew why.

On this day, at Tony’s event, he told me that it was because of some Tony Robbins cd’s he listened to at the time that sparked a change in him and led him on a new path.

By reading this post, I want you to get the same spark of inspiration and change in your life. I want to be a small catalyst for you to change something in your life that’s important to you.

Tony Robbins helped me, and turned my life around, by teaching me the following fourteen lessons:

1. Positive thinking is BS

Many people mistake Tony Robbins as a positive thinking kind of guy that exists to motivate people. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What Tony Robbins taught me is that positive thinking is BS, and when you force yourself only to think positive, all you end up doing is hiding from your fear.

Rather than telling yourself that you always have to be positive, focus on how your negative thoughts are directly related to things that you fear.

2. You don’t get a state of mind you do a state of mind

It’s easy to get pissed off at something that happens. I used to experience the same thing until Tony taught me that states of mind like “pissed of” are not things that we pick up from somewhere, they are states of mind that we physically do and act our in our lives.

If you want to get more love, then you have to do love more often. Act out the state of mind you want and you will get more of that state of mind or feeling in return.

3. Most of us are already financially rich

Gratitude is a lesson that Tony’s work has taught me many times, in lots of different ways. The statistic that Tony gives is that people that are in my country (Australia) who are considered to be poor are richer than 99% of the planet.

When you think you’ve got it bad you don’t. When you think your life is miserable, there is always someone doing it tougher. It’s how you think about what happens to you and how you think about money that determines your reality.

The other lesson worth mentioning is that just as quick as you can make lots of money you can lose it too. The scary fact is that 99% of people lose money in investing over the long term and all financial markets crash at some point.

So the point is to appreciate what you have right now and realise you are already rich both psychologically and financially.

4. Suffering is our own fault

Most suffering, according to Tony, is caused because we are obsessed with ourselves. We have this fear that we have less, or have lost something, or that we will never have something. Suffering is most apparent when we have high expectations that are not met.

The reality is everyone will lose a loved one at some point and experience a horrible tragedy. Whether you suffer from these events is 100% your own fault. The more you allow yourself to suffer, the more it will affect other areas of your life such as your health.

The cure for suffering is to begin to see the miracle in things again like you did as a child. We travel on commercial aeroplanes all the time and yet we forget how amazing this is. Be aware of the tragedy that is going to happen but don’t allow yourself to suffer.

5. Stress for achievers is fear in disguise

One distinction that Tony makes in his teachings is that achievers are often not fulfilled which is the ultimate failure in life. Achievers act as if they are invincible, and they are some rare breed that has this superhuman confidence.

These same achievers believe that they have no fear and just deal with varying amounts of stress. The reality is that the stress they experience is really just the same fear everyone has in disguise. Next time you experience stress dig a little deeper and see if it’s related to something that you might fear.

There is nothing wrong with fear, but if you want to be successful, you need to let fear be something that helps propel you forward. You need to tackle your fear head on and realise that all progress involves some level of fear conquering.

6. Consuming information must be done with emotion

If you have never been to a Tony Robbins event before then you could easily be convinced that it’s some type of cult when you look in from the outside without any context as to what the heck is going on (I promise you it’s not).

At Tony’s events, there is a lot of dancing, cheering, moving around the room, acting stuff out, and talking to complete strangers. The reason for all of this is that Tony says you will never learn anything if you consume the information in a static state.

To get new strategies and truly take action you need to be immersed in a set of positive feelings at the same time. Around every 30 minutes at a Tony event, there is a requirement to listen to music and follow what Tony is doing.

These musical moments create anchors for the human mind to change state subconsciously and create new neural pathways. Quite simply, Tony says that motion creates emotion and that emotion is critical for learning.

Emotion causes you to think differently and get out of your comfort zone. Emotion is the lifeblood of what all humans are really seeking – not money or possessions.

7. Anyone can achieve the impossible

An element to Tony’s teachings that has always kept me interested in his work and how it can change my life is his belief (and evidence) that all of us can achieve the impossible.

It’s not the circumstances of our childhood or our past experiences; it’s what we believe right now at this moment that determines if we have what it takes to achieve the impossible.

To turn my life around I used these three steps from Tony to achieve the impossible:

Step One – I became obsessed with one thing and was so hungry for it that I wouldn’t let it go.

Step Two – I took massive action without knowing the answers or what would work.

Step Three – I kept changing my approach until I executed on the one thing I was chasing and I immersed myself in it as much as possible.

8. Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure

One of Tony’s messages that is repetitive in all of his work, which helped me, was to understand that just achieving success is not enough. You have to be able to achieve success and feel a sense of fulfilment at the same time.

Unless what you have achieved – by reaching a dream – makes you feel happy and satisfied, you won’t feel fulfilled and that is the ultimate failure. That’s why if you spent time in places like Hollywood you would quickly see that there is lots of money and lots of success, as well as lots of unhappy people.

These high achievers are unhappy because they have what a lot of us think is everything, but deep down these influential people are unfulfilled and numbing the pain of their life with plastic surgery and drugs.

Don’t just create your dreams, stand back and be happy when you’ve achieved them – you deserve it!

9. Happiness is a decision

We all want to be happy but what we forget is that happiness is a decision. The only way you will ever be happy is if you decide to be. Deciding is not enough, though: you must choose to be happy right now in this moment otherwise there is a high chance you will never be happy.

Saying to yourself you will be happy when something transpires in the future, or you achieve some fairytale goal, will see you become miserable and unhappy. Tony taught me that there are always going to be things that pop up from time to time that have the potential to rob you of your happiness.

When these events occur, Tony says he “kills the monster while it’s little.” He further adds that he tries not to let any negative event linger in his mind for more than ninety seconds, so the feeling never has the chance to grow into something huge.

In life, there is always something to worry about every day, but you can be happy by making the decision not to let these worries take over. Overcoming this battle requires persistence because Tony taught me that your brain is not designed to make you happy it’s designed to make you survive.

The only way to be happy is to go against your human programming and decide to be happy no matter what external forces occur. This one lesson has been a big part of my transformation, and it can do the same for you if you commit to it.

10. Life is about we

Entrepreneurs make one critical mistake all day long: they pitch ideas that are all about them instead of making them all about us. Tony’s entire life is an example of why we should make everything about us and not about ourselves.

When you only try and achieve things that help you, life can become very depressing. Have you ever had the feeling of experiencing something phenomenal and then the first thing you did afterwards was tell someone else?

We have all had this feeling and the reason we do this is because life is so much better when we do things together, and we work in an environment where we do things for others. Doing things for others is how we take life to the next level and make ourselves happy at the same time.

11. Don’t film it, experience it

Having seen Tony in lots of different environments, I have noticed one thing about him that always seems to be true; you never see him looking at a mobile phone. He taught me at one of his events that the reason he doesn’t have an obsession with electronic devices is because he would rather experience something in the moment than see it second hand through his phone, or worse still, film it to maybe never play it back later on.

If you want to live an amazing life you need to become more present and resist the temptation to film everything with your phone. Filming something will never feel the same as being there in real life, totally focused, and totally present in the experience.

I am going to contradict this point by posting a video below, but that’s only because I want you to see what Tony’s events are like and why he is able to turn my life, and the lives of everyone he touches, in a more positive direction.

12. People seek you out because they want what you know

The highest paid professionals in the world all know one truth; people seek you out because they want what you know. If you want to never have to market your services, then Tony teaches that you need to do more for anyone else than your competition.

You need to redefine your category or niche and concentrate on giving as much value as you can. Adding value to people’s lives is the best form of marketing that exists. Tony taught me this by the sheer power of his events.

When you attend any of Tony’s events not only does your life change, but you feel like you got way more value than you expected! When I saw him a few days ago, I expected two hours of value and I got four, plus a whole heap of new strategies that he didn’t mention at the beginning of the event.

13. Courage unused declines

All of us have had times in our life where we have felt courageous for extended periods. I was reminded recently by Tony’s teachings that these periods of courage decline if you don’t continue the practice.

Just like a muscle, you constantly have to find times to be courageous; otherwise, the muscle gets smaller over time, and you can’t use it when you really need it.

For me, this is true when I don’t go and pitch something to a stranger for a while. When I leave the skill idle for a while, I find that the courage needed to approach a stranger with a new idea wears off like a magic potion – practice courage daily.

14. Peak performance comes from peak states

To live a life at the elite level, you need to be able to operate at your peak consistently, and Tony teaches that this can only occur from a peak state. In the right state of mind, you will take the right action in the moment.

It’s impossible to take effective action in the wrong state of mind or an angry state. The secret that Tony teaches is to get into a new state, and this can be done in a matter of seconds. This why at his events there is so much movement because he wants to demonstrate just how quickly your state can change.

After you see your state change over and over again throughout the cause of his fifty-hour plus seminars, you would have to be an idiot not to see how easy it is to do. You don’t need an excuse to feel good you just need to change your state.

Changing your state is as easy as changing your body and your focus to create a new state. A simple hack that Tony has been sharing recently is that you can try one of Harvard Universities approved power poses.

The one I like is called “The Wonder Woman Pose.” You essentially stand like Wonder Woman for twenty seconds and then you will quickly witness a new state being created in your body.

What lessons have you learnt from Tony Robbins? Let me know in the comments section below or on my website timdenning.net and my Facebook.