Anthony Robbins: Guru or Fraud.

Great Debates
1

I have only seen the infomercials, but I would lean toward huckster. It screams of “oh, look at my unbelievable lifestyle; look at me in my opulent mansion.” “Let’s get all fired up into a frenzy so I can hawk more seminars and cassettes to fleece you with.”

I have met rich people, few are particularly opulent. How do you think they became rich, by wasting their money. The fact that he has to show that off to that degree waives a red flag. The walking on coals would be cool. No, it would be really hot. But Mr. Robbins is not so hot.

2

I’m going to go with fraud, but he is an excellent actor. I can’t imagine Silence of the Lambs being so chilling with anyone else in the part.

What? You don’t say. Hopkins, huh?

Well then who the fluddy buck is Robbins?

3

According to http://www.skepdic.com/neurolin.html , Tony Robbins was a “graduate” of Neuro-Linguistic Programming who decided he could do better by going after students of his own rather than working for N.L.P…

So, cooldude, have you Awakened the Giant Within? :wink:

4

Anthony Robbins is a phenomenon!

He is a Master of the pursuit of happiness and has an uncanny charisma. I don’t much care for his Doctrine of Empowerment and find his seminars plain silly, but if I had to choose between Guru or Fraud, I’d confidently choose guru. He is the Capitalist Jesus Christ!

Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.

5

Dave Barry wrote a pretty funny piece about attending one of his seminars:
http://www.herald.com/content/archive/living/barry/archive/successnew.htm

The only contact I’ve had was patiently explaining to a student why Robbins’ hash of pop psych platitudes did not constitute proper material for his research paper.

6

Thanks for posting that link, cher. That article’s hilarious.

Yet to be reconciled with the reality of the dark for a moment, I go on wandering from dream to dream.

7

…and John Gray is the capitalist Sigmund Freud!

8

FWIW, I’ve read a couple of his books, and while he has nothing earth shattering to say, he has a very easy-to-read style, and some of it I found pretty useful.

His message is basically to take action, not just dream. He has influenced a lot of people to this effect.

I think “Guru” is a bit extreme, but I also think “fraud” is way off base.

My $.02

The odds that the bread will fall butter side down are directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

9

Eggs in the carton: six or a half-dozen?

The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*

10

I’ve read one of his books, and listened to his tape set. And he’s neither guru nor fraud. He’s simply a motivational speaker. And he’s very, very good at it.

There is a smattering of NLP wackiness and holistic medicine stuff in his material, but very little. Most of his advice is more along the lines of, “Get off your ass and do something.”

For example, on one of his tapes he has a very inspirational story of a friend who was a quadripalegic, but managed to be highly successful and very happy. He contrasted it with stories of several beautiful or talented movie stars who had the world by the tail but were miserable and wound up self-destructing. His point was that happiness is a state of mind, and not necessarily a result of your condition. Whatever your current lot in life, you don’t HAVE to be unhappy. You have control over how you feel about things (chemical imbalances notwithstanding).

Then he gets into a bit of NLP stuff, but it’s along these lines -

"Let’s do an exercise. I want you to stand up. I want you to put a smile on your face. A big grin. Look up at the sky. Smile. Straighten your posture. Swing your arms out, and don’t forget to smile. Now, try to feel bad, but don’t change what you’re doing. Hard, isn’t it?

“Now, sit down. Hang your head. Slouch over. Frown. Now think about something bad. It’s a lot easier, isn’t it? Harder to think happy thoughts, isn’t it?”

His point is that when you’re sad, you send cues to you body to react in a certain way. Eventually, a link is created between the action and the emotion. They reinforce each other. Which implies that simple things like forcing yourself to smile when you feel bad may actually help you change the emotional state you are in.

I don’t know how much peer-reviewed literature is available to document this (hell, I’m not even sure how you would set up the experiment), but at least from a common-sense standpoint it seems reasonable enough.

11

Sam: I tried both of those “NLP-like” suggestions of Robbins’s you just posted.

I smiled, straightened up, looked to the sky, swung my arms, and thought, “This is soooooo fake! What’s the sky ever done for ME, huh?!” I might not have made myself SAD, but I did go a ways toward making myself depressed.

Then I bowed my head, frowned, sulked, and thought, “If my next job works out right, I could be a millionaire inside of four years.” It was a relaxed kind of happiness, but it was still happiness.

Maybe I ought to try it with appropriate music next time. :wink:

12

Obviously we’re not talking about a magic switch to happiness here, but perhaps a tool to use to help just a bit.

Be honest - if you intentionally crack a big grin, can’t you feel your mood being elevated, just a little? And how about slouching over and putting your head in your hands? Doesn’t that make it a little tougher to feel happiness?

Our brains do respond to cues from our body. Professional athletes go through all kinds of rituals to help trigger their brains. Read some sports psychology, and you’ll see NLP-like stuff all through it. Why do you think tennis players bounce the ball a couple of times before hitting it? Or basketball players set up the same way for the free throw? Partly, because the motions themselves cue the brain into falling into the ‘groove’. If you have ever done anything competitive that requires precision (shooting, billiards, whatever) the training is full of this kind of stuff. Robbins is just trying to apply it to emotional states in general.

I don’t know how much validity there is in all this, but even as placebo effect it has some value to the people who listen to his stuff.

I’ve known a few people who really seem to turn their lives around after listening to Robbins’ stuff. Unfortunately, it never seems to last. Some people have te ability to maintain a level of activity or an emotional state for extended periods of time. For others, it takes great effort to reach that level, and they soon drift back to their old ways. But perhaps each time you try it gets a little easier.

13

All I can say is Los Angeles Kings. He was their motivator and where the hell are they?

14

I listened to most of a series of his tapes. about 90% of it was aboout people he had changed.

One woman, who was mad at her husband, he “cured” by throwing a glass of water in her face.

He also described how he turned a D student into an A student. he found that the guy like surfing so he would start talking about math and then say “wow what a great wave!” then continue to talk about math. By adding positive comments to a negative subject, he transformed the student into an math genius. He called this neuro linguistic programing.

It was total self congratulatory bullshit. I have never heard so much tripe in my entire life.

The only entertaining part of the whole thing came when he described the entire opus of psychological work in 10 minutes. HE would say, " Freud would say that you are unhappy because your mother didn’t hug you enough, Which is plaink bunk." then move on. Wow, what genius.

He is a guru in the sense that I am for saying “stay positive, no one ever made money telling themselves that they couldn’t do something.” Welll Guuuhawww, Gawrsh golly gee, that thar’s some kinda geee-neeeee–us.
My vote is: annoying, plattitude spewing, egotistical motivational speaker.

15

I just had a mental image of a college student coming home from a party around 2 AM, realizing the term paper is due tomorrow and the library is closed. What does he do? Use infomercials as his source! Brilliant.

16

I did get to attend a free Robbins-sponsored presentation one night at California State University, Northridge. Tony Robbins wasn’t there in person, but they had a big projection-TV of one of his tapes and some trained Robbins-ites scattered through the audience to help him out.

Oddly, this presentation didn’t hawk any of Robbins’s goods or services. And most of it wasn’t about motivating yourself. It dealt instead with “The Five Personality Types” allegedly used by Madison Avenue in their advertising. They were: (1) “The Belonger”, the down-home meat-and-potatoes family guy, to whom brand-loyalty beer like Budweiser is targeted; (2) “The Emulator”, the usually-young wannabe, to whom drink-this-and-you’ll-get-laid beer like Michelob is targeted; (3) “The Achiever”, the one who has Made It In Life, to whom elite beer like Becks or Heineken is targeted; (4) “The Societaly Conscious”, the former hippie or ecofeminist or intellectualist, to whom all-natural beer like Coors is targeted; and (5) “The Need-Driven Individual”, the poor person, to whom Costco Bulk Discount beer is targeted.

Then he had us clap our hands in rhythm with each other and scream “YES!” each time we clapped, to try and bring our “State” up to a 10 on a 1-10 scale, of course.

The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.

17

Mojo–the student in question really did seem to have read some of Robbins’ books and thought that they were representative of motivational research.

The thing that cheeses me off about these types is that they pick up on some piece of psychological research, such as the one about facial expressions affecting mood (yes, there really was some peer-reviewed experimental research on this), blow it way out of proportion, and pretend they thought of it themselves.

What amazes me is how much time and money corporations are willing to put into consultants who provide motivational programs that anyone who had taken an intro psych course could come up with in about an hour. I guess it’s still cheaper than paying your employees more and giving them better benefits.

18

I have Tony Robbins’s Personal Power II tapes and actually went through the process a few years ago. I think it was actually pretty good for me. I don’t think he tells anything new under the sun - the positive thinking stuff/NLP stuff is really a motivational version of Cognitive Therapy, and honestly the best book on that is “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” by some guy who’s name I don’t remember. Psychology doesn’t really help people to be happy; it’s more about dealing with pain. Success “gurus” like Robbins go a step further and actually try to teach people how “successful people” think and act. Tony Robbins isn’t God, and you should take anything any so-called “guru” says with a grain of salt…BUT if you’re stuck in the habit of negativity and you’re ready to be happier, he certainly can’t hurt. As part of a whole process of self-discovery, Tony Robbins is one tool that can be used to change your life for the better. No, he won’t appeal to everyone, but I’m sure he’s helped a lot of people and why this bothers people is beyond me. Good for him and them, I say. Whatever works for YOU.

19

Read that article and it was funny (love Dave Barry) but . . . say it ain’t so !

Some of our nations political giants have nothing better to do than spout pop psychology at some over priced song and dance BS session ? I mean come on, Liz Dole ?? I respect her . . . or I guess I did. Do they need the money that badly ?

I’m not sure if I would go so far as to call Tony Robbins a fraud - I think the word connates a malicious attempt to take money from someone, and I think Robbins actually believes this crap. Hell, if I was making as much money doing this idiotic stuff as he is, I’d belive in it too. Perhaps some small parts of his rhetoric are useful to people. Overall though I have to say most of the wind blowing through his larynx is simple common sense stuff. “You have to have a positive attide to be successful.” Really ? You mean I am not gonna make CEO as a depressed nay-sayer ? The hell you say !

BTW anyone ever seen Ben Stiller spoof Robbins (I think it was on the old “Ben Stiller Show”) “You will now be hypnotized by my teeth, you cannot help but look at my amazing large white teeth.” Hysterical.

“A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject.” - Seneca

20

oh, and welcome gidget