Back to Tony Robbins

Over the weekend I decided to put in a cassette tape of one of Anthony Robbins programs which 1/2 the session consists of his topic and half consists of an interview he conducts with a self-help type of person.  I'm only two tapes in and he has spoken with Ken Blanchard of One Minute Manager and Charles Givens, the late personal finance guru. OK, so Givens has a less than desirable reputation to some people, but I never really understood the Florida fraud case in which he was sued for, and ultimately settled.

Just to go of tangent a little, from what I understand, he was sued for fraud because he advocated dropping whole life insurance in favor of term life insurance - and the deceased had cancelled his whole life insurance and he died before enrolling in term life insurance.  And this is fraud?

It's just advice.  Whether it is Ken Blanchard talking about corporate management, Charles givens talking about money management, or Tony Robbins talking about being positive - it's all just advice.  It's up to the recipient to process that advice and act or not act on it, and the manner to which to act.

Anyway, back to the Tony Robbins talks.  When I was a teen-ager, I read Jose Silva's The Silva Mind Control Method, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and a bunch of other self-help books.  I jumped on the Anthony Robbins bandwagon in the early 1990's.

As I got further and further into my career, I continued to think positively and all, but I stopped reading and listening to these motivational speakers on a regular basis, and when i did, I would just do so on a shallow level.

In 2012, I came down with meningitis, which almost killed me, and left me a paraplegic for a few months.  I'm still recovering, and over the last 2 years, I've periodically re-read self help books such as Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and others, but with the same shallowness I had before my injury.

But last weekend, I put in the Tony Robbins tape, and something clicked.  As much as I try to maintain a positive outlook, I realized that being positive often needs tweaking, and listening to these tapes motivates me to tweak out the negatives that do build up and focus on the positives.

Sometimes they are referenced as coaches.  But they aren't, really.  You have to follow a coaches' order or get benched. These are just advisors, or consultants. You listen to them, and its up to you to take their advice, but their value is that they either bring a perspective that you hadn't thought of before, or they remind you  of a perspective you once had on a subject and move you towards re-considering that perspective.

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