- Whether your glass is half full or half empty
we have help.
Anthony Robbins is a peak performance coach
and motivational speaker whose helped millions of people
get through their own personal tough times.
Tony it's good to have you here.
Good morning.
- Thank you Matt.
- Let me talk about fear.
Right off the bat.
Fear of not being able to make ends meat,
provide for your family.
Fear you're gonna lose your job, or your home,
or a combination of the two.
How do you tell people to deal with the emotion of fear?
- I think people have to educate themselves as
to what's really happening right now.
We are going through transition.
It's a season, and every generation
has faced some pretty tough seasons at some stage.
Some do it a very young age.
Some do it at an older age.
And we talk about the great generation.
If you were born in 1910 by the time you're 20 years old
you were in a Great Depression.
When you were 30 you were in World War II.
So our generation has had it fairly easy.
We've all experienced pain.
I'm sure you've experienced it in your family.
I have in mine.
But we haven't experienced it at a cultural level
to the extreme that we're starting to experience right now.
- So you're saying we haven't been adversity tested.
We've lived through a period where mortgages seemed
to good to be true, so we bought bigger houses.
- That's right.
- Where gas seemed relatively cheap
so we bought more and bigger cars.
Where the stock market was booming
so we invested and invested.
Now we're finally seeing adversity?
- We're seeing it at a much deeper level
and we're gonna see more of it.
I mean we have 9 1/2 trillion dollars worth of debt
against the GDP that's 13 1/2 trillion.
So there are real challenges.
They're not gonna go away tomorrow.
But here's what we have to be able to do.
With every season there are challenges.
Just like nature seasons, and there are opportunities.
And right now while you're seeing huge deflation
that we're seeing right now in prices of real estate.
We're seeing people losing their homes
at 250,000 people a month.
We're putting ourselves in a position
we see this tremendous volatility in the stock market.
But at the same time right now
commodities: oil, gold, food stuffs, are exploding.
They're in a bull market.
Right now if you try to use the US dollar over in Europe,
you get to see it's dropped by 40%.
But if you took that same money
and you're investing in Vietnam,
even if you're just a little investor just getting going,
your money goes a long way.
And you're in an economy
that is growing at a different rate.
- I like your concept for looking for the bright side.
The opportunity as you put it.
But if the guys calling you at night
as you're sitting down to have dinner,
and he's trying to collect on the bills.
And you're worried about losing your benefits at work.
It's tough to look outside your immediate misery
and see opportunity.
How do you coach people to do that?
How do they get over that hump?
- You have to train yourself emotionally and mentally.
It's like anything else.
People have habit.
When 9/11 happened I was together with about 2500 people
from about 45 countries.
It hit.
We got the phone call at 3 in the morning.
We're actually in Hawaii.
And I had about 110 different people
from the financial district here.
Many people live there.
So 65 people plus had lost their entire business,
all their friends, all their family.
What happened that day is
you saw people's emotional fitness.
People that are angry, got angry.
They always get angry.
People that were fearful, got even more fearful.
It was the end times.
There were individuals their that were caretakers
and they were out there finding it.
So its a habit to find your emotions.
So what I say to people is
you have to discover what your emotional pattern is
and then you condition the emotion you do need.
In those situations what you need more than anything else
is creativity, determination.
You have to have some emotions that'll get you over it,
because the force that shapes the marketplace up and down
is the force that shapes your life.
It's emotion.
- Two quick things.
Phil Grahahm, former Senator, got in some trouble last week
when he said,
"We'd become a nation of whiners
when dealing with this economy."
Is there some truth to it in your opinion?
- Well I think we're emotionally unfit
as much as we could be.
I mean there's no question that many people.
I mean I've had a doctor come to me and say,
"You have a tumor in your brain."
"I want to operate."
So is Lance Armstrong.
The question is when those things happen,
what do you focus on?
What does it mean?
What do you do?
Do you focus on why did this happen to me?
Or what does it mean?
Is it over?
Or are you just beginning?
Is this a gift?
In Lance's case he found a way to take enough action.
After your cancer, deal with cancer,
you look over at somebody on a bicycle
and it's pretty easy.
He wins 7 V's in a row.
- So if we're supposed to get in this emotional good shape
earlier on in our lives,
is there an opportunity here Tony for parents?
Families are going through a hard time.
Parents of kids, and I'm talking about 10, 12, 14 year old,
not 3, 4 year old, to be honest and open with their kids,
and talk to them openly about what the family's facing,
and what people in this country are facing?
So that they don't go on thinking money grows on trees.
- Well I think here's what's really great.
We're going to become emotionally fit because we have to.
Necessity is there.
But the thing that give people hope is not positive thinking
its role models.
Sir John Templeton is one of my heroes.
I interviewed him not long ago and he just passed away,
as you probably know, about a week ago.
Here's a man who started with nothing in 1939.
Hitler is invading.
And he went out at that time
and said maximum pessimism is when you can do the best.
This is when you can grow.
He went out and he took stocks here in the US that were
on the floor and got them for a dollar each,
borrowed $10,000 and built the basis
of a multi-billion dollar empire.
Today even though he's passed, he has this foundation that
about a billion and a half dollar endowment.
It gives away $70 million dollars a year.
And it's all because this man, when Japan after the war,
that's where he went.
When Brazil and when South America's inflation
was going crazy that's where he went.
When no one went to China that's where he went.
If you go to a maximum pessimism is you can shift it.
But with your kids they're going to have to change.
They don't have a choice.
And that's what's going to make us stronger.
Necessity is gonna make it happen.
We can step up though by modeling.
And one last thing.
- Quickly if you can.
- Finding a way to get outside yourself.
When things are the worse for you
there's always somebody doing worse.
Two-thirds or almost a little more than half this planet
lives on $2 a day.
We're stronger than we think we are.
And we can train ourselves
to be able to take advantage of the tough times.
- So tough for us, but there for the grace of God,
there's someone else in a worse situation.
- And if you help them it changes you too.
- Tony Robbins. Tony thanks. Good to have you here.
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Here's Ann.