Anthony Robbins Pulls no Punches
Sometimes speakers who work in the fields of motivation and self-improvement are accused of being cheerleaders that just tell you what you want to hear. That it is true that speakers who tell you that everything will always turn out rosy and focus entirely on self esteem are sometimes guilty of pandering to their audiences and pulling punches when it gets down to the nitty gritty of what it takes to really go through life change for the better.
This is one area that the teachings of Anthony Robbins stand out. Robbins shoots from the hip. And because he is not afraid to tell us when we are making mistakes and where we need to grow up and face our fears or failings, his teachings have the kind of “teeth” that lead to success. That is why people keep coming back to Robbins’ seminars and books. He teaches from reality about how we can go from failure to success and do so in this world, not in some fantasy world of imaginary rewards.
One focus of the teachings of Anthony Robbins that holds the mirror up for us to see ourselves as we really are is in the area of blame and personal responsibility. Robbins shows us clearly that one of the most chronic problems of people who get stuck in a rut of failure is placing blame outside of ourselves. It is a natural instinct especially when it comes to areas of life that we cannot control. If we can assign blame for our lot in life on other people, on the government or even on God, then we absolve ourselves of blame. And when we determine that our unwanted circumstances are not our fault, we don’t feel so bad about being where we are in life.
One of the many problems with this kind of rationalization is that we also dont feel motivated to get out of our circumstances. Placing blame things that have gone wrong is another way of giving up. It is conceding that someone or something defeated us and that we are going to come to terms with being beaten.
Whether or not your assessment of blame is on target or not, assessing blame is self-defeating behavior. This is not news we want to hear but Robbins is a good enough teacher to make us face the truth of the uselessness of finding blame for disappointments in our lives. That is because the quicker we can put “blame placing” behind us and take personal responsibility for forging a path to success, the faster that past failures will stop haunting us and we will empower ourselves for future success.
Instead of viewing past failures and disappointments as a situation of blame, Robbins teaches us to view them as gold mines of lessons about how not to fail in the future. We need to have the courage to go back and look at those past failures and mine that good from them before they escape us. In fact, a proactive exercise would be to start a log and systematically step back through every “failure” situation and instead of identifying who was at fault for the disappointing outcome, catalog what can be learned from the episode that could be used for future success.
But there is even a bigger treasure that often goes down with the ship when we see a dream die with a failure in our past. That treasure is that ambition, that goal and that dream of success that was attached to that project. Even if the end of the quest is the result of a relatively small problem with the project, if you give up on your dream of success in that area of life, that is a tragedy.
But it is a tragedy that can be turned into victory. Just as you use your past failures to create a laundry list of lessons learned, go back and dig through the ruins of past projects. At the bottom of that pile, you will find a dream for greatness that may have gone out with the trash. Rescue that dream. Dust it off and recapture your zeal for ultimate victory even in that area of life. If you do that, you stop being a victim and you are taking control of every aspect of life. And that is how winners think and live.
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