December 2014. I’m at Tony Robbins’ Date With Destiny in Florida. It’s the event where the documentary I Am Not Your Guru was filmed.
From the outside, I look successful. Inside, I’m not in a good place. I’ve come to this event for a reason. I know something in my life has to change.
A couple of days in, the penny drops. I make the decision to get sober.
I’ve been sober ever since. I had to do it for myself, but I couldn’t do it alone, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped. I share this part of my story because it might make it a little easier for the next person to speak up. If that’s you, don’t be afraid to ask for help.
So when I say Tony Robbins pretty much changed my life, I mean it.
More than the fire walk guy
People think of him as the jump up and down, fire walk, shout-and-motivate-you guy. He’s a larger than life character, no doubt. But what he really does is help you understand your own character.
Awaken the Giant Within is where a lot of that lives on paper. It’s a big book, and it covers a lot. The parts that stuck with me are about the questions you ask yourself, the decisions you make and the standards you set.
Take questions. Your brain answers whatever you ask it. Ask yourself why this always happens to you, and it’ll find you plenty of reasons. Ask what you can do about it, and you get a different list. Robbins shows how much of your life is steered by questions you didn’t even notice you were asking.
Next come standards. The non-negotiables. In Done Beats Perfect I wrote that the quality of your life is a reflection of the standards you set for yourself. Notice the last two words. Plenty of us are living by standards we inherited from someone else.
And decisions. This is the line from the book that sums it up for me:
“It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”
If you look at the history of the word decide, it originally meant “to cut off”. A real decision cuts off the other options. Most of us half decide. We dabble. Robbins is clear that the moment you truly decide, things start to move.
He also argues that your decisions shape your life more than your conditions do. That’s a tough one to hear when your conditions are hard. But it’s hopeful too. You can’t always change what’s happening around you. You can always decide what you do next.
I know that’s true, because I lived it in Florida. I once put it on LinkedIn as simply as I could: life changes when we decide to change.
Read it, then do something
According to my Goodreads, I’ve read this book five times. Each time I pick up something I missed, because I’m a different person from the one who read it last.
I’ll say one thing about the Robbins world, though. On our podcast Nigel and I have talked about seminar junkies. These are the people who go to a big event every year and leave fired up. Then nothing happens until the next one. The come-down is hard. The book is the antidote. You can read a chapter, put it down and go and use it.
You don’t need to fly to Florida to have your moment of decision. It can happen at the kitchen table or halfway through a chapter. Where you are matters far less than whether you mean it, and whether you cut off the way back.
Years after that event in Florida, I was part of the trainer team for Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins’ Project Next Level.
Read this book and you find out who you really are underneath it all. You get to see the version of you that life, circumstances and other people’s stories turned you into. You also get to choose who you want to be instead. You get to design yourself, and be yourself.
It’s the first book in the recovery chapter of my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me, for obvious reasons.
One decision in Florida, in 2014. Everything since has come from keeping it.
