Tony Robbins has onstage charisma. Standing 6 feet 7 inches at 29 years old, he explodes with self-assurance and pure raw energy. Congressmen, Olympic athletes, lawyers and salespeople – professionals in need of a motivational boost – flock to his seven-hour seminar where they know Robbins will propel them into a superstate of self-described “absolute power over yourself.”

Robbins’ star began to shine early in this decade when he gained prominence for his firewalking seminars – half day affairs that so empowered participants that, at the close of business, they could – and did – follow their leader without injury across a bed of hot coals. Now that’s a faithful following.

Robbins himself seems to have emerged from a mysterious cloud. Background information on this newest whizz-bang purveyor of promise is sketchy. Born at the very beginning of the tumultuous 60s, this prodigy of the L.A. dream machine is larger than life, bursting onstage with hyper manic energy. Robbins embodies the California culture’s bigger, better, bolder, power-laden philosophy of plenty that has begotten such new waves as EST, The Beach Boys, and Silicon Valley. Whether Robbins’ star continues to shine or fizzles into fragments of light dust depends on how firm a foundation he builds. Sales executives who want to take advantage of Robbins’ techniques should seize the excitement while it lasts.

“Attitude is the essence of life,” claims the youngest mover and shaker on the motivation circuit. A wide grin sweeps across the chiseled handsome features of the young man who has been called boy wonder since he rocketed to sales promotion preeminence at the tender age of 19. “The only distinction I found,” he rattles off in the slam-bang extemporaneous staccato that flows nonstop, “is that a lot of people have great attitudes but they don’t have very good plans. And they become what I call perma-grinners. Somebody who goes around all the time always smiling, always up. But what do they do with it?”

The hands fly out in front of the brash face crowned by hair thick, dark and carefully cropped to fit the image of importance and power. “Attitude is too big a frame – too big a generalization,” he pronounces. “Attitude is a set of habitual ways of looking at the world. It’s a set of beliefs – a set of questions that you ask yourself on an ongoing basis. So just saying `have a great attitude,’ ” the hands fly into the air again as if molding thought and behavior into one solid mass of propellable energy while the words fade away into another direction – “that doesn’t really empower somebody.” The conclusion is a fade out to power.

At this point, will the real Tony Robbins please stand up? Where is he going? How will he get there? What Makes Sammy Run? Translates into What Makes Tony Tick? “Affirmation syndrome,” – he’s back at it, chopping the air, pacing, getting ready to go onstage, choosing his shirt, checking the time. “Be happy, be happy, be happy. That’s BS. That’s not enough. Not in my opinion. That’s old technology and I’m not saying that that’s not good, but that’s old technology.

“Why don’t I pump you up for a little while?” His rhetorical question leads you to the dynamics of positive reinforcement a la Robbins. “Those are habits. The traditional way is to listen to tapes and have somebody else put enough good in, so some good will come out and I still support that.” He’s been through all the courses, attended the seminars, listened to the tapes, studied the masters, learned NLP, hypnotism and firewalking. He’s written books, produced tapes and traveled these fifty states pounding the podium. He even has impressed such luminaries as Dr. Ken Blanchard (who wrote the foreword to his bestseller,Unlimited Power, Fawcett, 1986).

“Now what we need to do to create change is condition you to have new habits.” He’s on the stump again, rolling with the flow, an Elmer Gantry with a cause bigger than all outdoors – you. While admitting they work, Robbins decries the old ways – “They’re so slow,” he intones. Instead, he proposes to “…write down every emotion that you feel in a period of a week. Most people will maybe come up with a dozen, maybe two dozen, emotions maximum. Now there are hundreds of emotions you can experience at any one time. But we have certain habitual emotions and those emotions come from looking at the world in a consistent way. And I believe that the way to control our focus, which is what changes our whole life, is to change the questions that we ask ourselves.”

He’s off and running again – the bit’s between his teeth and we can’t slow him down for love or money. Attitude, consistency, congruence, empowerment… how much ammo can one human pistol pack into a one-day seminar?

Robbins packs that and more. His aim from up there onstage is to give, give, give – as much of himself as it’s possible to expand out into the room – his room – the room he owns for seven hours. During that time he doesn’t eat, sleep or rest. He is so up the air is thin. The difference between Robbins and all the others is his total commitment to his presentation and his room. He won’t let go of you until you are wrung out – but ready for action.

Why Don’t Most People Win?

“If you think of life like a game, and you want to know why most people don’t win, it’s real simple.” Here’s Robbins at his richest – analyst, prognosticator and problem solver – holding court and raising Cain. “Number one: Most of them have no clue to the purpose of the game. How in the heck are you going to win when you have no idea what the purpose of the game is in the first place? It’s impossible. It’s frustrating. Plus it’s boring. Second problem: Some people, even though they don’t know the purpose of the game, they still have rules about how they should play. I don’t know why I’m doing this, I don’t know the purpose behind this, but I have strong rules. I shouldn’t do this and I shouldn’t do this. I must do that and I must do that. You should play too. And they feel very strongly about those rules. And if you violate them, boy they know how you should think. Third problem: They’ve got rules in conflict. They got these things like, at a basic level, beliefs as simple as, look before you leap. But they also were taught, he who hesitates is lost. Now try and figure that one out. Or they’ve got all these rules that are in massive contradiction with each other. If you do one, it destroys the other one. So it creates what I call incongruency and those conflicts create self-sabotage. Where your brain can’t work out, or at least won’t give all its power.” Power to solve the problem, face the issue, ask the right question, analyze the situation – it sounds like a mini course from business school 101. That’s where Robbins gets you.

He’s smart and quick and facile. He leaves it to you to figure out your own course but he takes you on one merry ride before he lets you off the car.

“On top of all of this stuff…” We’re not off yet. The car is still careening around and up another crest before the screeching ride downhill. “In order to succeed in this game, you’ve got to work with five million other people who have different rules…who also have no idea of the purpose of the game. In order to succeed you’ve got to work with them. And they believe just as strongly that their rules are the right rules and yours are wrong. Then on top of that, it’s a life or death game. So that’s pretty much pressure. But in spite of all this stuff, as bad as it all sounds, there are still people who seem to be winning the game.” And Robbins seems to be one of them, so listen up, people.

“Thinking is just asking questions.” He’s off and running again, thoughts flying by so fast it’s hard to pin a question onto the tail of any one revelation. “So if you are for example always feeling overwhelmed, it’s because you are asking yourself a habitual question. And invariably you’ll find out what it is. Maybe, `How come this always happens to me?’ Or maybe something like, `Why can’t I ever get this done right?’ And the question you’re asking has a presupposition built within it that causes you to feel overwhelmed.”

This translates to one of many Robbins’ rules of the road. Asking yourself better questions will get you to a better place and in less time. It’s a useful formula for sales professionals who often wonder what happened to that sure close.

“I used to achieve to be happy – now I happily achieve,” says Robbins as he moves forward in his chair, gesturing to make the point felt as well as heard. That’s another Robbins technique – reach the people on all levels, mental, physical, visual and auditory. His arms take on an airplane wing-like position, then slice his personal space as he exhales a great stream of breath – the swoosh pattern – something Robbins concocted to get his energy level “from 0 to 60 in a heartbeat.” It’s part of his preparation to meet the seminar challenge, seven hours of nonstop motivation with skills building techniques built in for the hordes who have come to be boosted out of first gear.

Why Change Your Beliefs?

“So what I teach people about attitude is specifically that your attitudes are the results of your beliefs and values. If you change your beliefs and values, everything in your life changes. That is the essence of your attitude. I want people to have their own power, to be in charge. So instead of just saying “Be Positive,” or “Be Up,” or just “Think Positive,” I believe that comes from being clear in what you really want out of your life. What is your purpose? Second, what are your values that are driving your life? Third, what are the questions you ask yourself habitually?

“It’s like a couple of weeks ago I was doing the fire walk in Virginia Beach,” Robbins recalls searching for the meaning beyond a particular day’s message. He asks himself, “What else is great today? Well I’m getting the chance to meet with you again which I was excited about doing. What is also unique? What am I happy about? Well today I’m going to talk to a thousand people. I get to make a hundred thousand dollars today. That’s a kinda nice thing to do for one day’s work.

“Today I’m going to have some influence on some congressmen. Tomorrow night as a result of today, I’m going to have dinner with a lot of these people. And so I start thinking about all those things. What am I grateful for? What am I appreciative of? What’s unique about today? What am I going to contribute today? What am I going to be able to give? How am I going to feel at the end of the day? Asking those kinds of questions amps me out – I’m at my peak. And that process is what attitude is.” It’s called Robbins Gets High on His Day, subtitle, What’s Happening That’s Good? He doesn’t so much conclude the thought as segue into his Dickens pattern. Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol to Robbins becomes an ingenious and surprising motivational metaphor. Scrooge is complacent in his meanness until one night three ghosts scare him into a turnaround of mind and spirit. Pain and pleasure – the principles reverberate in everything Robbins preaches. Substitute one for the other and you get results – action with a capital “A.” To Robbins this is gospel – plausible, practical and totally useful.

“Suppose I want to be confident and self-assured and energetic and excited about cold calling on a prospect?” he’s asked. “How can you help me?”

Robbins, the teacher, explains, “I get in there and find out what you really mean. And I say so let me see if I understand and I feed it back to you. And I say so what you’re saying is that when you think about cold calling, you feel frustrated, fearful and what you want to feel is confident, self-assured and what else? And I use what I call my Dickens pattern. In other words if you want to change, anytime you’ve made a major change in your life, if we finally get fed up, if we finally get to where we say: That’s it! What we have to do is not just have a little pain, but enough pain that our brain says, I’ve had it! So that’s what I’m asking you to do is to really see the pain, because you may have disassociated yourself from it.” The first step in the Tony revamp is to feel the pain you’re in – but really feel it so later you can recreate the message to give yourself the same discomfort level at the snap of a finger. “I’ll guide you into it and I’ll say, you remember the story Christmas Carol, with Mr. Scrooge? Here’s a guy who didn’t want to change. He had no desire to change. Yet in one night he changed. How come? Because three ghosts…three Neuro-Associative Conditioning specialists…came along and in one night…and wow, how did they do that?”

Neuro-Associative what? Robbins slipped that one in so fast, there wasn’t time to examine or reject it. Oh, now I get it. He’s whizzing by so you don’t have time to build a defense system against the changes he’s wringing out of you.

How Do You Condition Your Brain?

“When I have gotten your brain and your nervous system to link massive pain to having fear and rejection – and I’ve gotten you to link incredible amounts of pleasure to making the change – now your nervous system has got a clear driving force about what to do.” Robbins has mesmerized thousands into facing fear and uncertainty and rejection. They flock to his seminars for more and that’s a kind of proof of the pudding. Whatever he’s doing, it looks good on paper. It helps people move from here to there.

And it’s moving some black ink up and down ledger sheets for Robbins as well. According to his accounts, he often pockets a cool hundred thou for a one-day stand, lives in a $3 million castle by the sea, is breaking all-time cable TV sales records for his audio cassette program (Personal Power – The 30-Day Program For Unlimited Success, Robbins Research International Inc., La Jolla, CA) and is in mid-negotiation on 2 new books. “There are dozens and dozens and dozens of ways to condition you. The simplest one I usually use is the swish pattern,” – and we’re off on another dizzying Robbins ride. “Do you know about the swish pattern?” he asks. He knows how to hook you in. “A swish pattern is a way to take your conscious thinking about something, like some pattern you have. I’ll give you an example. I used to bite my fingernails. OK? I tried putting stuff on them so when I bit them it tasted bad. That didn’t work. You know I used to bite them down to the quick. And I was biting them when I wasn’t aware of it. It wasn’t a conscious pattern, it was a subconscious pattern. So if I got nervous or if I was concerned or even just thinking, I used to do it. So what I finally did is I figured, OK, this has got to change. And the first thing I did is I got leverage. That’s what I just did in that whole process. I call that step one to change. You’ve got to get leverage. You want to change your attitude, you’ve got to get leverage. Cause there’s a zillion ways to change people. Every form of therapy, every form of attitude approach works. I don’t care whose program it is. From Gestalt therapy to cognitive therapy to rational emotive to Freudian…they all work. My question has always been, What makes them work when they work, because they don’t work all the time?” He seems to have flown off again, but wait. The talk returns to track A.

How Can One Person Make It Happen?

“What makes them work when they do is that something has changed in their association. In other words, we’ve changed the meaning of something. Cold calling now means to you pleasure instead of meaning to you pain. That’s when your life changes. You know confidence is a level of pleasure, not ecstasy, but it’s a level of pleasure.” Now, honestly, when was the last time you heard words like ecstasy at a sales training seminar? “I’m interested in why some salespeople work for eight years to achieve peak performance and another gets similar results after a week.” The question is accompanied by a startlingly loud hand smack. “The difference is leverage. I’m successful because I created leverage on myself. I bought myself a three million dollar castle.” Yeah, that’s leverage all right.

“So what I would do to finish my example with you is that I’ve got all this leverage. What I do is I have you think about rejection, but while you’re doing it I have a way to make you feel good. Think about rejection, I make you feel good. Think about rejection, I make you feel good. I do this over and over and over again. And I condition you, until pretty soon when you think about rejection, you literally feel good.” He’s created a new neurological path to cold calling.

“By making sure it’s there, I teach you to condition yourself,” he makes sure to add this note. No dependent converts in this camp. “So you don’t make me the source of your changes.” Robbins claims to be “showing the technology of how our brain really works. You’ve got a computer in here and you get it to run properly and you can get any result you really want. It’s that process of conditioning if you and I want to be healthy…if we want to have a lot of energy. I don’t have a lot of energy just because I show up. I will have energy because I condition myself physically and mentally and emotionally to be in that vibrant state. I do it exercise wise. I don’t go to aerobics one time and say I’m going to be healthy for life. You go out and you do it each day and pretty soon it’s just part of your lifestyle. You condition your hair everyday. You don’t get up without showering, you know you shampoo, you style it. Most people in business wouldn’t go out without shaving each day. But…most people don’t condition themselves mentally, emotionally and physically. As a result they pay the price of not being in condition. Because they are not in condition they can’t provide peak results,” he ends the speech chopping the air with open palmed gestures.

How Do You Evaluate The World?

What does Robbins call this technique for getting you to give up while getting? “Neuro-Associative Conditioning,” he announces it as if he were Adler, Jung, Freud and Maltz rolled into one big-boned howitzer of help. “It’s how to condition yourself so that you associate those things in a way that empowers you in your gut instead of disempowering you. It’s like the salesperson who has to make cold calls. They think making cold calls will mean pleasure because eventually they’ll make sales and income. But simultaneously it’s going to mean pain. So they make a half-hearted attempt. They have two different neuro associations that are in conflict. What I teach people how to do is to condition yourself so you’re congruent. If everything we do is based on how we evaluate things. If I change the way you evaluate things, if we change your beliefs and values, you’re going to change how you feel, the decisions you make, what you do, the results you get and every result you get is building on the day before. It’s taking you in a direction. “There is an ultimate destination,” his voice grows fuller, more sure as if his own ideas power up an engine that’s already roaring its way through town.

“Neuro-Associative Conditioning,” he slows down long enough to explain the finer points, “is the operating system like inside a computer. Then we have all these different programs, if you will, to make a change. And that way we can use all of these and we’re never shut off. We never say, `Well, gosh, NLP is the whole answer.’ Or, `Hypnosis is the whole answer.’ Nothing is the whole answer. Gestalt therapy is great, if you use enough leverage. If you don’t use enough leverage, you’re not going to get the change. The whole focus now – the reason I call it Neuro-Associative Conditioning systems – is for the change to happen, we have got to change the association. We change that association, we change that person’s life.” Here’s the conclusion, swung on and connected. It’s out of the park, high and fast and straight over the bleachers.

Robbins has also taken some falls – big ones. So what else is new? “I achieved the level of success which at the time I thought, $10,000 a month, boy that would be something. And I got all of the things I thought I wanted, but I still wasn’t happy. I still had challenges. I still was frustrated. They called me Wonder Boy and my ego was exploding. But I began to sabotage myself by not showing up for key meetings, or treating customers harshly that didn’t deserve to be treated harshly, or sleeping in, you know. I got to the point where I fired most of my people. I never got into drugs or alcohol but I used food like it was a drug. I’d get fed up and eat and eat and eat, and I gained 38 pounds in two and a half months. It’s not easy to do. You have to eat tons of food and not move very much to pull that off. So I did that and I crashed and burned and lost everything financially. I moved into a little 400 square foot bachelor apartment in Venice, California, a place you wouldn’t want to live. You know, no kitchen, I washed my dishes in the bathtub, waking up each morning with goals like, “What am I going to eat today? What’s going to happen to Luke and Laura, on a soap opera? That’s what my life had deteriorated to. I had to learn to persuade myself to get myself to absolutely follow through again.”

Robbins has even taken that flop and flipped it into a mythological success experiment – his own downfall recreated to fuel your engine up to fly over the wall of complacency. “I personally interviewed over 100 salespeople who make over $200,000 per year and I expected they were going to tell me the difference between success and failure was in something technical like closing. That wasn’t it. It all came down to managing their emotions and specifically, besides managing their emotions, getting themselves to follow through on their beliefs on a consistent basis. I found 80 percent of the difference in performance was self-management. If you ask me what’s the difference between success and failure in life, it is state management,” Robbins relays the thought with conviction. “People buy emotional states,” he announces. His fist bounces triumphantly off his chest with a self-energizing thump.

What Questions Do You Ask?

“I show people how to literally condition themselves so that every time they go out, talk about their product, whatever it is, they really feel inside all the intensity of the deepest emotional level. Not just the intellectual level – I know we have the best product in the world. But at the emotional level. So you can transfer that to something. We find out what are you like when you’re at your best. And then we model you. You don’t have to model anybody. You don’t have to be like me. You can be like you at your best,” claims the master.

Built into Robbins’ technology of omnipotence – unlimited power, unlimited belief, the power within – are such tough self-teasing questions as, “How do you align your values and beliefs so you’re not being pulled in opposite directions? How do winners get it? My belief is, one, they’ve decided what the purpose of the game is for them, at least right now.

“In other words, what’s the purpose to a game? How can I win? How can I make this thing really work in my life? Two, they’ve gotten a little more flexible in their risks. They’ve adjusted their rules. They’ve taken the rules that were a conflict…first of all, they’ve been soft on the rules of other people so they’ve got a lot more rapport. They say, `These are my rules. They may not be right for this person. They may not be right for people who don’t want to do it, but I’ve got to communicate them. And I can’t expect people to live by my rules without communication.’ The most anger and upset comes from people who don’t get the rules. The third thing is, they find the conflicts there in the rules and they iron them out. They begin to say, `Okay, this doesn’t make sense. This does.’ And they begin to balance it out. They begin to get themselves in a position where they live by what they believe is right, they live by what they really know is right.

“In other words, if they live by their values and rules, even if the environment doesn’t reward them, they reward themselves. So that now they can guarantee they won’t be disappointed. So I find a way to reward myself no matter what. And that creates power. Because then you’re not dependent upon the outside environment to get your juice and you don’t have to get people’s acknowledgement. And as long as that’s true, you’re going to spend most of your life in process. You better get used to enjoying the process and not just the result.”

It works, too.