My Biggest Learning from Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within

So, over the weekend I attended Tony Robbins’ inaugural Virtual Unleash the Power Within (UPW). Four days of listening to the master that is Tony, whilst also jumping around fist pumping from 4pm to 4am. I won’t lie it was pretty exhausting, and at times I wondered if I was on a bootcamp or UPW but that was all part of Tony’s mad plan — break the pattern, repetition and link learnings with movement and emotion.

The core content from the weekend was beautifully simple and as Tony says, “complexity is the enemy of execution.” It was a message totally aligned with my philosophy to life — Live by design, not by default.

There was too much content to share in one blog post but I wanted to share with you my biggest takeaway from the event. A simple message that can have a huge impact on anyone’s life:

Create a peak state no matter what.

The quality of our life is determined by the quality of our emotions.

We all tend to have what Tony calls an Emotional Home; a dominate emotion which we go to most often. Be it passion, gratitude, joy, love, or even anxiety, depression, anger or jealousy.

Our emotions are the ultimate resource and control everything in our lives such as, our mood, our decisions and our actions. So you can quickly see how important our Emotional Home is on the quality of our life, and by simply changing our dominant emotion we can change everything. So how can we do that?

Our emotions are driven by our state and the meaning we give things but we cannot create a positive meaning from things from a place of low energy. The most effective way to move our emotions is to dominate our energy and make being in a ‘peak state’ a habit.

This was one powerful revelation and in Tony’s words,

Something I wholeheartedly agree with. We have to work our hardest when things get tough to live in a peak state, to design the life we want to live, to create the routines and rituals that bring the best out in us.

Achieving a peak state requires letting go of the past, adopting a mindset of excellence and mastering the three forces that control your emotions — your physiology, your focus and your language.

Let’s walk through each…

1. Physiology

Emotion is created by motion.

This idea is closely aligned to the ‘As If’ principle. Want more confidence? Act ‘as-if’ you are confident, stand tall, shoulders back, chest up, deep breaths and head high. Want more joy… dance. Want more happiness… smile. This isn’t just some nice ‘woowoo’, head in the clouds theory, it’s backed by research. Amy Cuddy, a researcher at Harvard, found that by simply standing in a high power pose for two minutes increased testosterone by 20 percent and decreased cortisol levels by 25 percent. Simply WOW.

This is something I am introducing to my morning routine and before any important meeting. Standing in a power stance for two minutes with my eyes closed, visioning a successful day or meeting ahead. Sounds corny, but I am all about sweating the small stuff.

This concept also applies to the importance of looking after ourselves and as mentioned above, we cannot create positive meaning from things from a place of low energy. Therefore, creating energy through good nutrition, quality sleep and regular exercise are keys to mastering our emotions.

2. Focus

“Where focus goes, energy flows”

I love this quote! It holds so much power, as by simply shifting our focus we can completely shift the meaning we give something and as a result our emotion. So rather than focus on the past or things you don’t have control over, focus on the present or the future — gratitude for the things you do have and what you can control.

Starting and ending every day with gratitude and visioning your perfect day and future is the perfect way to do this.

This is something I introduced into my routine at the start of lockdown — as I knew it was when I needed it the most — and the quality of my outlook, emotions, work, confidence and creativity has sky rocketed. It’s now a daily non-negotiable, and something I strongly encourage all my coaching clients to introduce from the outset of working with me.

If you want some guidance, Tony’s priming exercise is simple beautiful — you can access it here.

3. Language

The third component from the triad is language. Many people underestimate the power of our words. How we talk to ourselves internally and externally determines how we operate in the world.

If you ask questions like, “why do bad things always happen to me?” or “I’ll never be able to start a business,” you’ll likely feel powerless in your life. Flipping it to, “what can I can learn from this and improve upon?” and “I can do anything I put my mind to,” is going to provide you with far more power and a means to figure it out.

Awareness is key here, so try catching yourself when any negative words come out of your mouth or into your thoughts. One of the beauties of having a coach is that they catch the language you use, so you can start to alter your words to a more posItive frame. Once you start doing that you’ll be able to alter your pattern of speech and in turn change your focus and the meaning you give to things.

By mastering and putting into action this triad, you’ll be able to shift your emotional home to one that empowers you with positivity, resourcefulness and gratitude. Improving your relationships, productivity, success and ultimately quality of your life.

Don’t be the result of your circumstances, you are the creator of your life — not the manager. Get ahead and live by design. So please take this blog and action it. Commit to carving out just 10–15 minutes of every morning to get yourself in a peak state — breath, gratitude, visioning, incantations, movement and power pose. Try it for just 14 days and watch absolutely everything in your life change. It’s changed my life in the last four months and I know it can change yours.

Enjoy! I’m excited to hear how you get on!

Big love,

Joel