We have to choose what to believe:
1) Life is either an endless slog through a neverending series of browbeating, soul-destroying humiliations, or
2) it is a battleground through which we can seize our ultimate potential, help others grasp theirs, and live each day as a spiritual, enlightening progress towards our ultimate purpose.
Guess which theory Anthony Robbins would choose?
For those not in the know, Anthony Robbins is America's premier motivational speaker, star of countless late-night infomercials, personal coach to hundreds of elite athletes, businessmen, politicians and statesmen, guru to anyone and everyone seeking to become better than they are at the present moment.
He is, depending on how you look at it, an inspirational role model or a complete and total crock.
(Or maybe a bit of both.)
Upon hearing even the name 'Anthony Robbins', a lot of you are either rolling your eyes. I want you to think about why.
A few years back there was an Esquire profile of the man titled 'Wouldn't YOU like to be Anthony Robbins?' It followed him around for a day or two, detailing how slightly larger than life, is-this-guy-for-real his existence seemed to be, requiring an energy level, a positivity level, that was not only inhuman, but somehow subhuman, too. (I'm not sure what that means, either, but it sounds good, so I'm going with it.)
A lot of people consider Robbins to be nothing more than a scam-artist out to con vulnerable, desperate people who need a little pick-me-up in their lives.
That's always a possibility. I happen to think there's a lot to what he says, what he represents, what he advocates.
Most of what Robbins preaches is not new; it's the packaging that sets him apart, the packaging of himself, and what he' s selling, which is positivity, planning ahead, modelling yourself after others who have succeeded in the same fields that you want to succeed in, and then going after what you want.
Take the firewalk.
At his seminars, Robbins has people walk on burning coals.
Why?
Because once you do something you did not think you would be able to do, it leads you to question what other limitations you have imposed upon yourself. And once you do that, you start to see that a lot of what society imposes on us seeks to limit ourselves and our place in the world. Robbins wants to cut through the cultural conditioning and allow the individual to emerge in all his or her proper glory.
Already, people are rolling their eyes. That's your right.
But I think that's also what western culture conditions us to do.
We're a very cynical, sarcastic culture. We celebrate David Letterman and Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien and Saturday Night Live and the cult of insincerity. (All very, very funny guys, by the way.) It's hip and cool to be glib. It's almost expected that you view the world with a cynical air by the age of, oh, fourteen. The world is a terrible place, and we are merely pawns, and the government is corrupt, and pass the remote because The Sopranos starts in five.
And as much as I like Michael Moore, the man and his movies, I still believe that there's a fundamental flaw in what he's preaching, which is this: it's not constructive. It's all about using humor and wit to point out flaws with the people in power, without ever, ever proposing another alternative. (Unless that alternative is the mere act of voting, getting the guys in power out, and oh then the world will be fine and dandy, and you will be satisfied, and your life will better.) Which is fine, in limited doses. But when that becomes your worldview, when your whole attention is focused on taking apart the people who are actually doing things without simultaneously focusing on what should be done by you and you alone, we're regressing as a people.
What does this have to do with Anthony Robbins? Good question. Give me a minute...
Okay.
It comes down to this: the education we receive throughout the first twenty-one years of our lives barely prepares us for any kind of job whatsoever, let alone for the emotional, physical, psychic toll that living itself does to our nervous systems. In our school systems, we don't get any, I mean any, advice on how to tackle the problems of life head-on, without fear; we don't get (or at least I didn't) any educational, I don't know, invigoration or preparation, are not indoctrinated with the sense that destiny is within our hands, with the belief that we can go out and do things in the world, invigorate the world, even change the world.
Anthony Robbins preaches change, and self-mastery, and even that latter term is something that many people right away would scoff at.
Why? Because, as Robbins himself has often pointed out, we celebrate the victim in our culture. If we're not feeling well, we get lots of attention around the water cooler. If we have emotional problems that are dragging us down, we can go on Oprah or Dr.Phil or Jerry Springer and become celebrities because of our misfortunes. We medicate ourselves with countless drugs to boost our self-esteem.
What Robbins talks about isn't necessarily enticing. He's talking about putting back in your own hands. He's speaking on the need to believing that you have to be a victim of yourself and whatever 'system' you're currently railing against. He simply highlights what all of our teachers should talk about -- the necessity of making goals, of believing in yourself, of seeking out those who have done fantastic things and finding out exactly how they did them, and how those rules could possibly apply to ourselves.
Did you get any of that kind of advice in high school or university? I sure as hell didn't.
In Japan, the year before you graduate, you go to countless job fairs and check out myriad companies and decide, a year in advance, which company you want to work for. When you do graduate, you know what you're doing and where you're going.
I used to tell my students in Japan that back home in Canada, when you graduate, you...graduate. You get a piece of paper. You get a handshake and a smile and a kick out the door into the real world. ("Good luck! Have fun! The Prozac's in the medicine cabinet, second shelf, next to the cough syrup!") There's rarely any systematic (or even haphazard) approach to life talked about.
(I'm not saying the Japanese way of doing things is necessarily better, or worse, because there's a lot of disadvantages to their hiring structures as well, but boy, at least they have something in place.)
I think it's sad, in a way, that even the name Anthony Robbins usually conjures up snickers and chuckles and rolls-of-the-eyes.
That says something about who we are, I think. It says that any open display of passion, of energy, of excitement, becomes a source of disdain. It says that we've given up on our true potential before we've begun.
We are what we think about all day long, somebody once said.
Can you imagine if we had somebody like Anthony Robbins teaching our kids, each day, every day? Can you imagine the amount of self-confidence they'd have?
This all comes spewing out simply because, as I approach thirty, I see a lot of sapped lives and cynical people. I see wallowing and self-pity (often from myself) and unnecessary misery.
I want to believe in the good stuff. I choose to believe in the good stuff, the Robbins stuff, the 'Just Do It' stuff, because the alternative, quite frankly, blows. I decide to believe that we are the masters of our own destiny, that we can be and dream and do great things, heroic things, however we define 'heroism' to ourselves. I want to believe that what Anthony Robbins says is the truth, because that's a better way to live, a more heightened way to live. I want to believe in the power of our individual selves. I want to believe.
Don't you?
(For a really long and interesting interview with Anthony Robbins from What is Enlightenment magazine, in which he talks about the relation between self-mastery and spirituality, click here:)
www.wie.org/j15/robbins.asp
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