Tony Robbins Meets Internet Marketing

This is a video I remember watching a while back, but today, someone again recommended that I watch it so, as I wanted to have a short break from my writing, I made myself a cuppa and watched it just for a bit of fun. It is Frank Kern and John Reese talking with Tony Robbins about the effect of belief on personal motivation and the part it plays in drawing from the inner well of untapped human potential.

If you are not familiar with the world of internet marketing, you may not have heard of Tony’s guests, but all three of these guys are multi-millionaires. So it is an interesting conversation in some respects. All three of these people had the same experience of having to get themselves together mentally before they were able to go on and become successful in their respective businesses and, although I do think that is a valuable lesson, I also think it does not tell the whole of the story.

As you will see if you watch the video, the so-called problem identified by these internet marketers is a lack of the ability to take action. The setup is that Frank and John go to see Tony to get his expert advice on the subject of how to get people motivated. Of course, Tony responds by telling them he does not motivate people. But then goes on to describe a little cycle that is responsible for not only producing results, but also reinforcing beliefs (positive or negative) about our potential.

• Potential
• Belief
• Action
• Results

The suggestion seems to be that you just need to get yourself motivated to take enough action in order to succeed and that’s where I take issue because success is not a natural product of taking ‘massive action’. It is the result of taking the right action - and that is a different thing entirely.

Many of the people to whom this video alludes - those trying to achieve success in their online businesses - are not short of motivation and they are not people who sit around buying product after product and doing nothing. Sure, I would accept that some undoubtedly are, but many are not. The problem for many people is not motivation; it is knowing what action to take.

In fact, many of those people have been engaged in motivating themselves to, unknowingly, take the wrong actions and so eventually end up either giving up or blustering on, condemned to be continually searching for the elusive magic key. It is a problem that I have no doubt Tony and his friends must have also experienced at the beginning of their journey to success. In fact, when Tony mentions (echoing Hannibal, of course) that you must either ‘find a way or make one’ he acknowledges the truth that achieving outstanding success requires a different kind of thinking.

Perhaps, it is true that finding or making a way requires belief in your ability to do so; or perhaps it is just stubbornness that drives some people to break through and realise that the answers they need are generally not to be found in the thinking of other people. If it were possible to teach people how to make that kind of breakthrough and discover their own inner ability to think and reason their way forward to their own success, then that would be a program worth buying.

There is nothing wrong, in my opinion with the kind of stuff that Tony does. It is entertaining and, of course, some people may actually need to hear rags-to-riches stories from time to time because it keeps us believing that outstanding success is possible for us too; and I completely agree that belief (or faith) is one of the important keys to success. But it is only a part of the puzzle. Figuring out what action to take (right action) is much more important than blindly slogging on, doing the same things, trying to convince ourselves that one more push, one more product, one more site - the next one - will be the one.

So there is a dimension missing from Tony’s diagram. It is the one that represents the formulation of the actions to be taken (or tested, I prefer). Tony speaks about using the NLP principle of ‘modelling’ in relation to this, and it is certainly one way of accessing the right actions you need to identify. In fact, I understand that modelling was also effectively used by John Reese and I have, at least, heard Frank Kern refer to the principle of modelling in another of his videos. So perhaps that is how each of them were able to identify right action for their own businesses.

But, whilst modelling is undoubtedly a powerful tool, it is not the only way that right action can be identified. Introspection is also a very powerful tool for accessing the kind of thinking that can lead to the identification of right action. But it is something that is difficult to teach and we can really only begin to understand why it is such a powerful tool when we come to know that all of the answers we seek are already within.

If you take time to quieten your dialogue with the world and begin to listen to that still small voice within, you will come to understand that you are connected to the source of all inspiration and your own thinking is just as powerful as anyone else who has gone before you. When you understand that you are capable of identifying right action, you will be able to put it together with motivation to produce truly outstanding results; the kind of results you long to see; the kind of results that will shock you. You are capable. The knowledge is inside.