FEATURE STORY

He explains, “What I’m committed to being is a source of love and strength for people. My whole belief is that love is action. If you want to know who I am, look at my lips, watch how my feet move. My heart is moved, my body is moved,” he says, adding, “I look at myself as kind of a Trojan horse. I am here to give you what you want so I can eventually get the right to give you what you need. People want to move up in business. They want to make more money. They want to lose weight. They want to have better relationships. They want to be fit. They want all these things that they feel are obstacles. So I developed a model, strategies for successful people. [During my seminars], when I’ve packed individuals in the audience to their capacity with models, tools and actions to take, then I usually have like a 30-minute call to action for their soul, so to speak, which is to remind them that the purpose of life is not about you, it’s not about me — it’s about we, and that’s when we’re most alive. That’s what makes people happy.”

And that — as simple as it sounds — is the key. Just happiness. “I think what it comes down to, really, is, what does it take to succeed? The answer is finding something that you want to serve more than yourself, and that’s just as true in business as it is in philanthropy, because you just try to meet your own needs,” he says, adding, “I hate the term self-esteem, but if you’re going to use it, mean esteem for yourself. People tell me I’m great all the time, and trust me, I appreciate the love that I receive immensely, but I know what the hell I am. I deliver. And I have a much higher standard for what I’m going to deliver than what [people] expect of me. That’s why I am who I am. And my self-esteem didn’t come because people told me I was great as a child. They didn’t. My mom would drink alcohol, she would take prescription drugs, and then she’d be a different person. It wasn’t her fault she was violent, but she would pour liquid soap down my throat until I threw up; she’d bang my head against the wall. It was rough, and I could have been angry at my mom my whole life. Instead I made it my job to understand. Much of who I am came from that, and it’s a choice. The only way unhappiness goes away is to find something more than yourself to serve. When you’re not in your head, you’re in your heart, and that’s where life changes, in my opinion.”

So what makes Robbins happy? That’s easy.

“Love is the greatest luxury. It’s priceless,” he declares, noting that his love for others has, in turn, helped him discover self-love. “I think I learned to love myself by loving so many other people and then feeling the love back. I think I felt like I earned it in some way. I love people so much, and I hate suffering. So to take people out of suffering and take them to a place that’s not just joy and happiness but empowerment, where they sustainably have a better quality of life, lights me up like a Christmas tree — and it gave me permission to love myself. I don’t think that’s necessarily the right way to do it, it’s just what finally worked for me. I was dense. It took me decades,” he admits.

It has taken him an equal amount of time to actually take time for himself. And he has the pandemic to thank for that. On average, he’d be jetting around the world, hitting between 12 and 16 countries and 115 cities annually — some of them, like Australia, multiple times a year — reaching a quarter of a million people through his words, his drive and his passion.

Last year, he was literally forced to slow down. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t appreciate it. For his 60th birthday in February 2020 (he was born on February 29, a magical leap year baby), he gave himself

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the gift that keeps on giving for a man who’s always on the move: a Boeing 737 Business Jet. He had every intention of using it as much as was humanly possible.

But just a few days post-celebration, he started receiving calls asking if he would be canceling upcoming seminars in San Francisco and San Jose. “It was like, ‘You must not know me,’” he recalls. “I had mercury poisoning and lost a third of my blood supply, went to the hospital, and they said, ‘You’re going to stay here for three days in the middle of the summer.’ They put me in a wheelchair, but I still finished the event. But then [last year], all of a sudden, live events were illegal in California. The governor says no more than 10 people, and I’ve got bookings for 12,500.”

Las Vegas, ditto. He was shut down as the world shut down. He tried a pivot: movie theaters, with the unique idea of buying out local theaters with only 10 attendees only at each event. Then came the movie theater closures. And then Texas — Texas couldn’t possibly follow suit. But alas, we all know how that story unfolded.

“It was like, what the hell do you do? Well, my plane’s worthless at this point. But I knew I had to find a way to serve the people who needed me the most,” Robbins says. He was inspired by seeing a webinar using two 52inch screens and recruited his team to come up with some innovative ideas. He purchased a building with 40-foot-high ceilings, bought some 20-foothigh LED screens and took a page out of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan’s playbook by going virtual. He aggressively hired six companies, who told him his vision could be executed in nine months, maybe. He wasn’t having it. Nine months? Try nine weeks.

“We were literally working in a storm the night before, trying to get this thing done, and when we opened up the first program, I did a free one because so many people were in trouble.” (Mind you, Robbins’ seminars cost between $650 and $2,995.) After he launched the 7-day Comeback Challenge last June, which was attended by a quarter of a million people in 99 countries, his digital footprint soared to new heights. Between March 2020 and March 2021, more than a million people attended one of his virtual events.

“All of a sudden, I found myself in a place where it’s like, ‘Holy shit. I can reach more people this way.’ It’s been unfreakin-believable!” he declares. “So I still have my plane, but I’m chartering it. I’m not using it as much.”

But this is Tony Robbins we’re talking about. He may have slowed down a bit and pivoted to a partially virtual platform, but he’s never going to give up these real, one-on-one, very human connections. For him, engaging is like breathing. He’s got a live event in Saudi Arabia this December, he will join the Power of Success panel in Dallas to a crowd of 5,000 on November 3, and, perhaps most importantly, he will host his first Unleash the Power Within event in two years in his hometown of Palm Beach from November 11 to 14. (The latter of which, in addition to his Date with Destiny events, are so powerful that Stanford University is now studying the effects on the psychological well-being of the interventions on participants of both. Researchers’ findings are currently being peer reviewed and are expected to be published in the coming months.)

But back to his birthday gift. “I think going forward you’re going to see I’ll probably use that plane less and less. I have a way to be home now,” he says, noting, “The greatest benefit I’ve got is I now have a studio where I can reach people all over the earth and do what I do best without having to give up so many things I gave up for most of my life. I’ve lived my entire life as a nomad, serving people. Now I don’t have to give up that impact when I could be home with my [wife of 20 years, Sage, and six-month-old daughter] the majority of time, and so I’ll do both. Family is the most important thing, after all. But I do think the greatest privilege is to be able to serve people from anywhere and be home with my family. I have the most beautiful life, family and friends. But I’m made to do this.”

It’s a calling. I’d say let the healing begin, but that’s not accurate. Let the healing continue is more apt. For as long as the world needs him, Tony Robbins is here to serve.