You've probably heard of Tony Robbins. He's been the world's most recognized peak performance coach for over four decades. And for good reason. The man has transformed millions of lives. His energy is infectious. His events are legendary. And his strategies have helped everyone from world leaders to professional athletes achieve extraordinary results. But here's what I've noticed. While Tony's teachings are incredibly powerful, many people struggle to integrate them into their daily lives. They get inspired at his events and but then struggle to maintain that transformation when they go back home. So in today's episode, I'm going to break down Tony's seven core principles and show you exactly how to implement them in a way that creates lasting change, not just temporary inspiration. I'm David Baer. I built a $40 million business by combining peak performance strategies with belief transformation. And I found that Tony's work becomes exponentially more powerful when you understand how to rewire the underlying belief systems that drive behavior. Let's dive in. Welcome to A Changed Mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth. To groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth, and relationships. To open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture, and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools, and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside. You're in the right place. Welcome to A Changed mind. All right, guys, today we're going to unpack the OG goat, Tony Robbins. Back in 2014, my wife and I attended an Unleash the power within event. 15,000 people jumping up and down in Dallas, Texas. And during that event, Tony opened up an invitation to join his high level Platinum Partner program. My wife and I didn't have the money. It was going to be almost $200,000 for us to participate in one year of the Platinum Partner program. But my wife, being the unstoppable force that she is, said, look, we need this. We're going to do this. So I frankly don't know how, but we scraped together a bunch of credit cards, then transferred what was left in our bank account to Robins Research Institute. And then we went down the rabbit hole with Tony Robbins for a year. And it was a transformative, immersive experience. 10 Tony Robbins events in one year. I'm going to give you a $200,000 education today on a guy who, like I said, is arguably the goat of personal growth. So we're going to go through Tony's seven core principles. Principle number one, the six human needs. So this is a core of Tony's curriculum. Every human being is driven by six core psychological needs. And what Tony means is that there are six things that drive us. How those show up in our lives are different for each and every one of us. And the amount of emphasis we put on each of these six core needs varies from person to person. But he says all people are driven by six things. The first thing is certainty. Having some form of certainty in your life. Certainty, insecurity. The second core human need is uncertainty or variety. So different people have a different balance of certainty and variety, but we all need both. The third is significance.

We like to be acknowledged. How we like to be acknowledged varies from person to person, or how much acknowledgement that we need varies from person to person. But it is one of the six core human needs. The fourth is love and connection. We all need to be loved and to be connected to others. This is an innate part of being a human being. Connection is important. It's a part of being a living organism on this planet. Everything is connected. How much connection you need and how you get connection may be different than somebody else's, but you desire connection, and it drives you. The fifth is growth. So some form of growth and expansion on an ongoing basis. And the sixth is contribution. Being able to actually make a contribution or make a difference in what that varies from person to person. How much that varies from person to person. But these are the six core needs. Now, the first four, certainty, uncertainty, significance, and love and connection, are what he describes as needs of the personality. They are survival needs. That makes sense. Those map a lot to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once you start looking at the third and fourth level of human needs, that's where you find love and connection and certain uncertainty and significance. The last two, growth and contribution, are what he calls needs of the spirit. These are fulfillment needs. And so he said that of these six needs, people will do almost anything to meet them, even if it's destructive. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story on how I used my addiction to meet my needs. But your top two needs, the two that are most important to you, he says, determine most of your behavior and personality patterns. And he says problems Arise when we try to meet these needs in negative ways. Now Tony talks about how if you really want to live an extraordinary life, then growth and contribution need to be your two most important needs. And so a lot of people leave a Tony Robbins event and they're like, okay, I'm just going to make growth and contribution my most important needs. In other words, people intellectually understand that contribution and growth should ideally be their two primary needs. But actually making that a reality for you is a very different thing. You can't just make these things your primary needs if you, if you have underlying programs and root cause belief systems that prevent you from making those two needs the most important for you. In other words, a lot of people require acknowledgment and get love and connection through serving or pleasing others. Many people are compulsive in this behavior. So you can't be a compulsive people pleaser, meaning you had an early life trauma that compels you to want to get acceptance from other people rather than love and acceptance for yourself. And all of a sudden migrate your focus over to, well, I'm just going to be driven by growth and contribution because that people pleasing behavior that may be driving significance or love and connection is a habit in your nervous system. It's a neurology. We could actually scan you and see that a big part of your nervous system has been wired over time into this behavior. And so you can't just come to an awareness that that doesn't serve you and that growth and contribution will allow you to live a more extraordinary life and just make the switch. And having been through all of Tony's work and still feeling like I hadn't been able to integrate all of it, my focus and obsession became around how do I transform the root cause belief systems that I have that are causing me to feel not enough and driving those four other behaviors. Certainty, uncertainty, significance, and love and connection. How do I pull those weeds out and create new fertile soil for this decision that I've made that I want to be driven by growth and contribution. So I used to, if you know my story, for many years, almost two decades, I was a drug addict, I was a sex addict, I was an alcoholic. And that served me in the context of Tony's six human needs Because I found certainty through numbing my pain with addiction. So I found certainty I was uncomfortable based on these early childhood traumas and limiting beliefs and programs that I was experiencing. And when I would smoke pot, I would relax and I would numb out and that would be A certain solution for me. And so I found certainty through the numbing of my pain and addiction. And I also found variety or uncertainty through my drug abuse. I would go out and I would party. I'd have random sex with different women. I'd engage in dangerous behaviors. It was a high, literally. And so I transformed both of these behaviors and was able to realign my human need structure to growth and contribution. But not just by making a decision that I was going to do it. Because growth and contribution were important. By actually looking at the underlying belief systems that were driving this pattern of behavior that was still meeting my human needs, but in an unhealthy way.

You guys picking up what I'm laying down here? So that shift to growth and contribution is. Which is what's required if you want to have what I would call powerful living experience, came as a result of realizing that a lot of the pain that I had was around not feeling like I was good enough, not feeling like I was doing things the right way, not feeling like I was as far along as I should be and. Or that I was just inherently wrong as a human being. That's what was driving these behaviors to meet my six human needs. The drugs, the alcohol, and the sex to numb out my pain. And so addiction became the nucleus of my life. And the high that it gave me became a driver for variety. Instead, I transformed those negative behaviors into positive behaviors. I started working a 12 step program. I found certainty not in the numbing of my pain, but in my relationship that I was building with my higher power that created certainty for me. I created certainty in this new belief that I established through my recovery program that actually life was always working for my greatest prosperity, my greatest growth, and my greatest evolution. I started creating certainty by trusting through the recovery work that I did that I was actually here for a reason. Trusting things that had happened to me before, that they were part of the intelligent design of my life. And so as I moved into that trust and that certainty and a healthier level of certainty that was better for my mind and better for my spirit. And so I started becoming clear on actually why I was here. To help humanity move forward, to help other people end their personal suffering. So I created certainty around my reason for being. In certainty in my relationship with my higher power. I transferred my need for certainty from getting high to believing in my own self worth, the certainty in my relationship with God and the certainty in my reason for being. It wasn't just a decision to transfer my focus and attention towards healthy certainty. I had to do the underlying work. The variety which we're all looking for was achieved through the dynamic elements of my business. As I stepped into this trust that was more related to growth and contribution, this healthy certainty. I found variety in this new purpose driven vehicle that I had. Variety of my podcast episodes and sitting down and brainstorming and creating things as opposed to going out and engaging in dangerous addictive behaviors. The variety of speaking on stage, the variety of all the different coaching conversations I have with all kinds of different people. That's where I get the dopamine, the epinephrine, the adrenaline hits that I was getting before out of these unhealthy behaviors that were creating variety. I now got in a vehicle that was in alignment with the certainty of who I knew myself to be. So when you have that type of congruence and you start to align with yourself and align with your vision for the world and your mission in the world, the byproduct of that is joy, is significance, is all these other pieces. So through my own process, I discovered something powerful. People try to meet their baseline needs, certainty, variety, significance and love through a lot of different behaviors. But what I've learned is these lower level needs are actually fulfilled when you focus on the higher level needs of growth and contribution. That's an irony that I learned over time. I actually don't need to focus on these lower level needs as long as I focus on my spiritual vision and I continue to become the person who my spiritual vision is asking me to become. So Tony is right. And you can't just intellectually understand this. You have to shift your nervous system, you have to shift your neurology. You have to. And when you do that, then you could become reoriented to healthy human needs and eventually focusing yourself and your day to day activities on growth and contribution. That is a byproduct of doing the deep work, not just going to an event for three days, but as a result of an ongoing practice that produces an overhaul of your psychological and emotional habits, which changes your perspective on life and changes you as an identity. Tony Robbins Principle number two State management. So Tony says your state equals your experience. Your emotional and physical state determines the quality of your decisions and your life. He says most people are victims of their states instead of masters of their states. And you can change your state instantly. Tony does this a lot. Snap instantly through physiology, focus and language. Three things. You can change the way you move your body, you can change what you're focusing on, you can change the way that you're speaking and Tony really emphasizes and uses during his events, physiology a lot. I mean, you're there for 14 hours a day, three days, four days, seven days for his Date with Destiny event. Jumping up and down, screaming, shouting out, yes, shouting out, I can do this. You get to experience this at his events. This is why you go to an event and you have new ideas, you have more clarity, you have more belief in yourself because you've moved into a peak state, right? He says peak state is peak performance. He often says the quality of your life is determined by the quality of the emotion, emotions you live in. And he uses state to manage your emotions. Right. Now, if you were to stop listening to this episode and just jump up and down for a couple of minutes or start shouting or yelling, affirmations, you temporarily put yourself into a better state. But it's important to understand that managing your state on a sustained basis, using your physiology is a very difficult thing to do. It's important to manage because most people are victims of their state. They live in what I would call a primal state. But one of the challenges is that Tony talks about living in a peak state and uses state management as the way to manage state, meaning his physiology versus looking deeper at the underlying belief systems and thoughts that are actually producing the state itself. And this makes perfect sense because that's Tony's experience. Everybody teaches what their experience is. It just may not be the best way for everyone else to create the change that they're looking for. I mean, Tony was, he talks about being 5, 6 when he graduated high school and he found out he had a tumor on his pituitary gland. It started pumping extraordinary amounts of growth hormone into his body. He exploded into this 6 foot 7 Superman behemoth. I mean, you think about it, it's very much like the story of Spider man where Parker gets bit by a radioactive spider and all of a sudden turns into Spider Man. Tony Robbins got bit by a tumor on his pituitary gland, turned into Tony Robbins. And so he's like this combination of Spider man and the Incredible Hulk. So yes, of course, using his physiology to manage state is his method. But that's hard, if not impossible to maintain for us normal civilians. That's why we have to get underneath the state and work with the levers that determine state. Really work with the root cause. And again, that goes back to this idea of your thoughts, your beliefs and your emotions. The early age programs that are determining today whether you feel stressed or financially insecure, or whether you're self sabotaging or you're in procrastination or you feel like you're not good enough. So this is fundamental behavioral psychology. Behavioral psychology says that whatever it is you believed when you were a child, you're going to think in alignment with those beliefs today as an adult. I've asked this question before. Maybe you've heard other episodes. I want you to complete this sentence. When I was growing up, money was blank. You can put it in the comments if you're following on YouTube. When I was growing up, money was blank. Don't overthink it. What's the answer? 70% of people will use the word scarce. 90% of people will use a word that is synonymous with scarce. And usually the way money was is the way money is. And so if you believe that money, this vital resource for providing for ourselves, is scarce in the world, you're going to be living in financial insecurity and stress and overwhelm. So what you believed then, you think now, and what you think now, you feel. Beliefs create thoughts, thoughts create emotions. Emotions drive actions, and actions produce results. So this is how you go from a belief to a result.

And if we don't address the underlying habits of belief or thought, you can temporarily shift your state so that you can feel better and maybe have better thoughts temporarily. But it becomes exhaustive trying to use the body and our physiology to manage our state on an ongoing basis. And that's what drove me into developing the frameworks and the technologies that are now used by hundreds of thousands of people today in order to effectively manage their state at the psychological and emotional level, as opposed to the physical level. So that's more sustainable and accessible for most people. So Tony's absolutely right about the importance of state management. In our work, we teach there's only two states of being, powerful states and primal states. You're always in one state of being or the other, and you're never in two states of being at the same time. Powerful states are states of being that feel good, like joy, curiosity, excitement, calm, peace, harmony. That's when your parasympathetic nervous system is active. And then there's primal states, states of being that don't feel good. Stress, anxiety, overwhelm, jealousy, anger, boredom, depress. And it's important to be able to identify when you've moved into a primal state and move back into a powerful state of being, because that's where everything you want is. That's where success is. That's where wealth is. That's where health is. That's where intuition is. It's where Spiritual connection is. It's where love and harmony is. So if you were to talk about the game of happiness, the game of happiness is to notice when you've moved into a primal state and have the tools to move back into a powerful state. One tool is trying to do it using your body and your physiology. Another tool is taking a look at the beliefs and the thoughts that are driving which state of being that you're in and learning how to reprogram those beliefs and thoughts. How you manage your state is important, and managing it at a root cause level of thought and belief systems is the most effective and elegant way to do it for most people. Now, I had a client who I was working with one on one. He called me on a Saturday and he said, hey, I was at this event last night and I moved into a primal state. And I said, what were you feeling? He said, I was feeling like I didn't belong there. I said, what was that creating for you? He said, overwhelm, anxiety, stress. And I said, okay, so what'd you do? He said, well, I remember what you taught me, that my thoughts or my beliefs are what's determining what state of being that I'm in. And so I looked at my thoughts and my thought was, I don't belong here. And I said, well, why did you think that? And he said, well, it was a bunch of successful people. Super, super success. He's super successful, by the way. He was invited to this private dinner with like 20 of the most successful people in Miami, where he lives, owner of the local sports team, the number one DJ in Miami, the top real estate agent. He said, so I was sitting there and I realized I'm thinking like, I don't belong here. Like this is some joke, like they were just going to come out from behind the curtain and go, surprise. You're on the Biggest Loser show. You're the one guy who doesn't belong here. And so I was able to coach him because we've got a really powerful process called the decision matrix. I said, so what did you do when you discovered this thought that you had? He said, well, I remember what you told me, that if I'm thinking something that doesn't feel good, it's a limiting belief. It's not true, and some form of the opposite must be true. And I said, okay, so what did you determine as the opposite? He said, well, that I do belong here. And the last step in the process is for him to find evidence for the fact that this new belief or new decision is true. I Said, well, how did that go? He said, well, it didn't go well at all. I had no evidence for it. I just literally believed that I didn't belong here. And so I asked him a question because I had coached him for a while. I knew he was very religious, he was Muslim, he was devout in his relationship with his higher power, with God. And I said, hey, let me ask you a question. You believe in God, don't you? He said, yes. I said, well, is it the omnipotent, omniscient, all knowing kind of God? He said, yeah, it is. And I said, well then let me ask you a question. How did your God put you in a place where you don't belong last night? And there was this like pause and silence on the other end of the phone. And all of a sudden I heard him say, oh my God. And I said, what? He said, I just realized I belong everywhere I am. That revelation as a result of this brief coaching session shifted his neurology from being in a primal state to being in a powerful state. If you believe you don't belong amongst a group of people, you're going to be in a primal state. But when he was able to see that the belief he had wasn't true and he literally dissolved that belief and he created this new belief or this new decision that was actually more in alignment with what he believed, that he belongs everywhere that he is, he moved immediately back into a powerful state. But that's sustainable. He's literally transformed his perception of himself and his perception of reality with that revelation and that simple process that's very different than I'm going to jump up and down and beat my chest and scream powerful affirmations to temporarily feel better. So if you really want to create sustainable long term change, yes, you have to focus on your state and work with the root cause levers, which are your beliefs and your thoughts, so that you can shift your state in a more elegant, permanent way. Tony Robbins Principle number three, Focus equals feeling. So Tony says what you focus on determines how you feel. And his concept is that your focus determines your reality, not what happens to you, but what you focus on about what happens to you. Saying you can direct your focus, you can change the meaning of what you're focused on. And if you can do that, you can change your life. And he says most people focus on what's wrong or what's missing or what they can't control. Successful people focus on what they can control, what they can learn and what they're grateful for. And he Says questions oftentimes direct focus. Ask better questions and you can get better results. So that simply makes sense. On a practical level, we developed a habit of focusing on the negative, of complaining. That little voice in our head asks these questions that provide answers that don't feel good. And you can shift the way that you feel and you can shift the thoughts that you have, and you can shift your perspective of reality by changing your focus. Ask questions like, hey, what's working in my life? Where do I already have abundance in my life? How can I learn from this experience versus why aren't things working out for me? Why do other people have money and I don't? Why don't people appreciate me? There's a tendency to focus on the same thing over and over again. But if we change our focus, we change our thoughts, which changes our life. And so therefore, whatever we've been experiencing that's now showing up in our present moment does not have to equal the future unless you continue to live in that old story. Now this just makes sense. On a practical level, if you focus on what's wrong or what's missing or things that you can't control, you can't be successful in your life. If you focus on things you can control or what you can learn or what you're grateful for, you have a better experience and produce better results in your life. But I really want to unpack this idea of where focus goes, energy flows. Tony talks about this a lot. And I want to talk about how energy works through thought and emotion. And get into Neville Goddard's concept of the fourth dimension, or what people refer to as the quantum field. Because Tony's talking at a surface practical level of how what you focus on creates your reality. But what great mystics have said is that everything is energy. Einstein said everything is energy. And if you can align your frequency and your energy with the outcome you want, that outcome has to be produced. He says this is not woo woo. This is just an understanding of physics. And so great mystics like Neville Goddard have said there are actually two realities occurring at the same time. Your third dimensional and your fourth dimensional reality. And he says the third dimensional reality is this materialized reality that we seem to experience through our five senses on a day to day basis. It's usually what we think is the only reality. My life. And it comes as a past, a present and a future. It's a material reality, meaning it's matter, it's physical, it's particle, it's detectable by the five senses, and it's what is right here, right now, from our own experience. But he also says there's a fourth dimensional reality that's occurring simultaneously. And in this fourth dimensional reality, everything already exists. There is no past, present or future. Everything is just one whole. And so this is like a multidimensional fabric that weaves its way through the third dimensional space. And so the dream home that you want, but you don't yet live in is already right here, right now. It just hasn't materialized. It's an energetic form, it's vibrational still, it's making its way to the physical world, but it exists right here, right now, in the fourth dimension. You without your anxiety, or you without your chronic pain, or you in your soulmate relationship, or the version of you that's absolutely clear on your purpose and working towards it every single day, exists right here, right now. And the way that we transfer our current third dimensional reality into this fourth dimensional possibility is by aligning our thoughts, our emotions and our vibration with that fourth dimensional reality. I've done a lot of other episodes where I talk about being your future self now and acting, thinking, feeling the way you would feel if you had already achieved the result that you want is the fastest way to close the gap in this time space. Third dimensional reality. And so this fourth dimensional quantum field of all possibilities exists. And as you focus your energy, meaning your thoughts and your emotions on the future that you want, you begin to activate that future from the field and it makes its way into your third dimensional reality. Now. It makes its way in through thoughts, ideas, actions, coincidences, synchronicities. I'm not talking about some sort of like Eastern guru, mystic materialization, a bag of money just kind of materializes type of thing. We would look at it and say, no things happened in my third dimensional reality that led me to produce this result or become this person or have this outcome. But what Goddard says is that's because your third dimensional reality, thoughts, ideas, coincidences, synchronicities are being activated and making their way from the fourth dimensional field into the third dimensional space. So as you withdraw your attention from what's going on in your present reality that you don't like, it begins to disintegrate. It's a really cool word. Disintegrate is usually like to burn and just dissolve, but really what it is is it's unintegrating from your current reality. And what begins to integrate into your reality is that which you're focusing on. And this is where Neville talks about the power of imagination, the power of visualization Tony talks about it in the form of gratitude. Like what you focus on grows. If you aren't living in the kind of financial prosperity and abundance that you want, but you focus on the prosperity and abundance you have, then the fourth dimension will start to translate into your third dimensional space. With more prosperity and abundance. What you focus on grows. One of the things that I tell my clients is if you want a business you love, love the business you have. If you want a bank account you love, love the bank account you have. That's how you begin to disintegrate the problems in your life and integrate the solutions from the fourth dimensional space.

A way to look at this is, and a very powerful distinction. However you're feeling right now like the state of being that you're in. Stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, joyful, excited, calm, peaceful, exhilarated. However you're feeling right now is what you're creating in the future. So however you feel in the present moment, you're creating future experiences that are going to invoke that same emotional reaction from you. Because however you're feeling in the present moment is based on thoughts that you're having. And those thoughts and emotions are energy. They're impressing themselves into the fourth dimensional space and they're activating thoughts, circumstances, situations that you will eventually meet as future experiences that will invoke that same emotional response from you. So the more you're living in a powerful state right now, the more you're creating future experiences that you want, the more you're living in a primal state or suffering right now, the more you're actually producing in the future things that you don't want. So what you're feeling right now is predicting your future, which is why, going back to the previous principles, state management is so important. And knowing that anything is possible because everything exists right here, right now. But what becomes possible, what becomes your reality, is determined by what you focus your energy, your emotions and your thoughts on. I think about our business, for example, and for the last five years since the pandemic, it's been different for a lot of different people. We were able to grow our business through Covid and we grew, we went from zero to $40 million in the last eight years. Why? Is it because I'm smarter? Is it because I'm luckier? Is it because I'm ordained to have success while other people really struggled? Well, I'm certainly grateful for it. And by the way, I do attribute all of my success to my higher power, my relationship with God, but on a more metaphysical or Practical level, it's because I've been focused on the certainty of the goodness of the future. I say this on almost all my podcast episodes. Hey, it's David Baer. Welcome to a Changed Mind, a sanctuary for your spirit. A place where each and every episode I remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. Because if you believe in the goodness of the future, the future will be good for you. And so the future has been good to me. My focus has not been on, obviously, I've had to make adjustments. Are basically a live event model business. We do our big event every year. We do all kinds of additional fulfillment events as of course, I had the podcast and I have some online marketing that we do. But we had to make a big adjustment. Nobody was doing anything in the physical world, but we were able to thrive because my focus was not on, oh, my God, what are we going to do? And it's the end of the world. My focus remained on helping people, growing my mind continuing to become a leader for my family and my movement. But that requires a mental vigilance. It requires mental mastery because the mind will easily go back into old habits of fear, of financial insecurity. And what if this doesn't work out for me and the media will propagate all types of fear towards you? You have to have an invincible mind or at least build towards that. And that's one of the reasons why, despite what's happened to a lot of other people over the last eight years, a lot of businesses going out of business, I was able to produce results because of my focus. So the question is, what are you focusing on right now? There's so much doom and gloom and fear and division out there. Are you focused on your own promised land and the vision that you desire that's in the field right here, right now? Are you focused on that more than the vision that you think the present moment is predicting? All the chaos and the fear and the doom and gloom? Hey, as I get into this next principle, which may be Tony's most powerful principle, I do just want to take a second to say that Tony's strategies are powerful and they work exponentially better when you address the underlying belief systems that drive behavior. That's what we're talking about today. So I want to give you the opportunity to go deeper with me in both our mind hack and whole human framework programs. So the mind hack is an incredible framework. It's the foundation of everything I teach to help you become deeply aware of the subconscious program holding you back. And it Gives you the technologies to dramatically transform those belief systems and rewire your brain. It's a seven day self paced program. You do it at your own pace. We also have our 12 week course, the Whole Human Framework. And we've got both of them right now bundled in a special offer. For those of you who want to go big, want to go fast and understand that you don't want to put off another day of your full potential or holding onto unnecessary stress or anxiety or suffering, but want to be liberated from these habits of thinking and have a powerful living experience. So you can check out the link in the show notes below. How on over to the website. It's got all the details. Check it out and if you're Inspired, join over 5,000 people who've enrolled in our programs with us and changed their lives and changed their minds. Now Tony Robbins principle number four. Tony talks about the power of decision. He says it's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. And his idea is, is that your decisions shape your life, not your conditions. Tony's got a lot of these really great one liners. Decisions, not conditions. Decisions determine your destiny. Most people make decisions based on their current circumstances rather than their ultimate vision. So most people are only willing to decide within their current situation. So if you don't have enough time, you won't make decisions that would require you to have more time. If you don't have enough money, you won't make decisions that are beyond the current amount of money that you have. We're restricted by our current circumstances, he said, but real decisions ignore those problems to create new possibilities. He references the idea that the word decision, the Latin root decidere means to cut off, to cut off all else other than the thing that you've decided, to ignore all the limitations and the restrictions. And so you must decide what you're going to focus on, what things mean and what you're going to do. Now I was able to spend time with Tony in the Platinum Partner program. I do have. You may not know this a half an inch on Tony Robbins. His head is three times the size of my head, but I am a little bit taller. So every time during one of the breaks I was able to go up and ask him a question. Everybody would kind of pay attention because it was two giant guys having a conversation in front of the room. And one of the times that I asked Tony a question, I said, hey, what's the number one key to your success? If you were to boil it down to one thing, what is it? And he told me, he said, it's the speed at which I make decisions. He said, I don't make the best decisions, but I make decisions so quickly that if I make a decision wrong, I'll correct it with a new decision. And what I got there is Tony is very much focused, which makes a lot of sense on, like, decisions to do. He's got this gladiator energy. He uses his physiology to manage his state, and he's making lots of decisions and doing lots of things. But what I want to bring up is a distinction between decisions to do and decisions about. Okay? This is very, very important because Tony talks about how the right decisions determine destiny. What most people miss is that it's not really decisions to do things or set goals or make decisions. It's about decisions about life. So I'm gonna give you an example here, okay? Because decisions to do are goals. Think of them as seeds. I'm gonna make a decision to do something. I'm gonna make a million dollars. That's the seed. But decisions about are the soil that you plant the seed in. Your decisions about money determine whether that decision to do money actually ever sprouts from a seed into an oak tree. Because if you believe about money that money is scarce or hard to make or that you don't deserve money, it doesn't matter what you do or how many seeds you plant in the soil, the soil is not fertile. Back when I met my wife, you may have heard this story, but people tell me they love hearing the story because I applied to so many different points. I'd been single for 10 years. I had believed that there were no good women left out there, and I had evidence for it. I'd been on date after date after date after date after date. Never found anybody that I really connected with. But when I got into this work and I realized that my decisions about life are shaping my destiny, I made a decision at the end of 2012. I think it was that I didn't know how, I didn't know when, but I was going to meet a beautiful Colombian woman and make her my wife. I had to also make a decision that there were still great women out there. I had to make a decision that I was worthy of being in a beautiful soulmate relationship. Relationship with another human being. And so I aligned all of my decisions about life with this decision that I was going to meet a beautiful Colombian woman and make her my wife. Two weeks later, through a series of insane coincidences and circumstances, I'm in a city where I don't even live with someone I usually don't even hang out with, who picks a restaurant? I walk into that restaurant, we're waiting for the table, I walk on over to the bar. Not to get a drink, by the way, just for purposes of clarity. And standing there at the bar is this beautiful Colombian woman, Carol Gutierrez Bear, who is now my wife. And that came out of new decisions that I made. Not to do something, but about life. And that was a breakthrough for me because I realized this super powerful distinction, which is that beliefs are decisions. Beliefs are just decisions. I'd been believing lots of things for a long time. I'd been believing that I wasn't good enough. I had believing that money was hard to make, that I wasn't worthy of success. And I had all this evidence. But then I realized, like, of course I have all this evidence, because that's how they brain works. That's how the human being operating system works. It looks for evidence to support your beliefs, whether they're empowering beliefs or limiting beliefs. So I was living in this hallucination. I was living in this one potential reality, but that I could change my reality and possibility in an instant by just making new decisions. These beliefs that I had were formed when I was a kid. I saw my parents working hard for money, so money was hard to make. People made me believe I wasn't good enough, but none of those things were inherently true. So I started making new decisions. One of the biggest breakthroughs in my personal growth journey was realizing that beliefs are decisions. This was a game changer for me. I didn't know how to shift my beliefs because they felt invisible. It was like trying to get my arms around a cloud. But I knew how to make a new decision. And I realized that my beliefs were just my decisions about life, about myself, about money, about success. And so when you understand that beliefs are just decisions and you give yourself permission to make new decisions, whenever you identify a limiting belief, it opens up this space for you to shift any belief by simply making a new decision. This is exactly the process I shared with you a moment ago when I was coaching my client who went from a limiting belief of I don't belong to a new decision of I belong everywhere I am. That's the decision matrix. Most people make decisions based on their current reality. But when you realize that beliefs are decisions, you can decide who you're going to become regardless of your current situation, and life will accommodate again.

We'll look back on it and go, well, something happened. You met someone or you had some thought or you had some idea, there was some good fortune. But all of those things are a byproduct of making a new decision. So the speed of transformation comes from the speed of making new decisions, but not necessarily new decisions to do stuff. Those are byproducts of new decisions about who you are, about how life is going to work and how it's going to be for you. Tony Robbins principle number five, modeling excellence. He says success leaves clues. Now, Tony's concept is that you just follow other people who are successful. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Find someone who's getting the results. You want to model what they do. Success is not an accident and follow specific patterns, and you should just model someone else's actions and strategies and you can produce the results. He says, in this way, you can compress decades into days by learning from those who've already succeeded. Excellence can be duplicated if you model the right elements. And so I think all this is absolutely true. But I also think it's important to not just model what someone does, but really take a look at the root cause behind their success, which is model the way they think. That's why I wrote a whole book called A Changed Mind. What Napoleon Hill discovered in Think and Grow Rich, which is the number one best selling success and wealth book of all time, is that there were 13 principles that allowed the most successful people in the world to be successful, and they all had to do with the way that they thought. And so I want to go deeper here on two points, because it is good to model people's plans. But number one, we must model not just behaviors, but beliefs. Remember, beliefs are root cause. So while it's helpful to get someone else's game plan, the root cause game plan is someone's mindset. Study how great people think. That's why I liked reading the autobiography of Gandhi. That's why I liked reading the biography of Steve Jobs. Now, in the case of Steve Jobs, you have to watch out for hustle culture. I mean, this is a guy that died at 50 to 60 years old, had a lot of emotional challenges, which probably contributed to his health challenges. So I don't want to model that, but I do want to model some of the success principles. And you study how great people think. Like, if it were just strategies to model, then everybody would be rich and skinny, right? I mean, the strategies are there. Why isn't everyone succeeding? Well, it's because you have to have both the how strategy and you also have to have an aligned mindset. The Second thing here is you need to have discretion around what we view as excellence or success. Who do you actually model and why? Because there is this hustle culture that's out there that says you have to work really hard, you have to burn yourself out. You have to take your health and your relationships to the sacrificial altar of success. You can't have it all. And you can fall into that trap of modeling that. Can you produce results that way? Maybe. Is it sustainable or good for you? Hell, no. A lot of times when we haven't done the healing work, our ego is still driving the prefrontal cortex, and we're viewing life through a distorted lens. We're still being driven by those four lower level human needs. The significance, the certainty, the uncertainty, the craving for love and connection. So we end up modeling other people who haven't healed themselves yet either, and then setting inauthentic goals or objectives or ways of achieving those goals. And so we end up creating a version of ourselves and a life that many people realize in their 40s, 50s, 60s, that, hey, this is not what I wanted to do. This is not who I want to be, and this is not sustainable. I'm not happy. This isn't what I wanted. What they modeled was not actually authentic. And I know this from a lived experience. My 40s was about realigning with who I was and figuring out who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. And so we need to be conscious of that. And that's why the rest of this work is so important, because our values, as we cherish them, become defined as we become whole people. So the healing work is the root cause work. If you're looking for more clarity, you don't find clarity. You get healed, and clarity is right there. As a whole human. A lot of times, you know, our values change from when we're 20 years old to when we're 30 or 40. I know my values have changed. I thought one day I'd want to be a billionaire. That was an egoic goal or aim at that time. And I could have modeled other people who became billionaires. I could have gone down that path and ended up in that place where I've modeled financial excellence. But it's not financial excellence that I came here to live. And so I realized over the course of going down the wrong direction and feeling the friction that what I value and what's important to me is family, my relationship with God, the contribution that I'm making in the world, my community, the journey of who I'M becoming over the course of my life. And the irony is that the byproduct of aligning with that, if I look ahead, is that this is probably going to lead to me being worth a billion dollars or even making more than a billion dollars. But in my journey now, I'm looking to model different levels of excellence. So I join communities of other fathers. I study spiritual teachings. I look for spiritual communities and spiritual mentors. I surround myself with other people who are the kind of people that I want to be around because the byproduct of that is successful. So that's people who are growing in themselves. And so you have to be conscious of what you're modeling as excellence if you want to be successful in any area of your life. But again, my encouragement for you is if Tony talks about growth and contribution being the two biggest drivers for having what I would call powerful living experience. Model people who are doing that, not just financial success. Tony Robbins principle number six, progress equals happiness. He says it is the secret to living is giving. Okay, I like that one. The secret to living is giving. Tony says human beings are happiest when they're growing and contributing. Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure. And you can have everything you want and still be miserable if you're not growing. I see this to be true among some of the high performers that I coach. Contribution creates the deepest sense of meaning and purpose. And the secret to living is giving. It's a great Tonyism. When you contribute beyond yourself, you tap into fulfillment. And so I want to elaborate on what I just talked about in principle number five, around the desire to make more money, to how can I serve at a higher level? Because that's what Tony's talking about here. And I want to tell you a quick personal story. I was in Miami years ago, a decade plus ago, and I was looking up at the penthouses and thinking I was never going to be able to afford it. And there were all these rich people and they were all like Eastern European and Latin American. They were in the import export business. They were driving around in these fast cars. And I was like, there's just something I don't get here and I'm never going to be rich. People wearing a watch that had 10 times more than what I had in my bank account. And at that time, it sort of drove me to try to be successful in my previous life. But like I said, it wasn't sustainable. I ended up starting my own business, raising a bunch of venture capital, pursuing success, nice cars, beautiful women. It really was Just part of my life, becoming unmanageable with my drug addiction and my alcoholism. And it was only when I shifted to serve at a higher level, meaning wanting to help people who had gone through the painful experience of suffering that I did in my own life, that money actually started to flow in a very natural way. It was from my desire to be of service in the world that my bank account started to grow. And this is a really valuable concept, and we teach it. It's called the spiritual vision. And what this means is that everyone is here for a reason. Everyone is here for a purpose, a contribution in the world, and you have natural skills and talents. If I were to ask someone about you and say, hey, tell me about John, tell me about Cindy, what makes them unique, they would tell me something. The way you think, the way you are, the way you feel, some of the natural ways you do, you know, for I get the feedback from people. It's my vulnerability and authenticity that's number one. Like my wife says, I'm like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or whoever it was that chopped down the cherry tree and couldn't tell a lie. I can't keep track anymore. Oh, Honest Abe. I'm like Honest Abe. And the second thing is my ability to take complex concepts and distill them down into ways that people can understand and actually integrate into their life. That's one of my natural gifts. So I'm meant to use that in the work that I'm doing today when I'm fully aligned. And you can see that here in this conversation. The second thing is that you have a lived experience. You've overcome challenges, and the challenges are actually the reason why you are destined for greatness. Your challenges are not a reason for why you cannot be great. My alcoholism, my drug addiction, my pornography addiction, my recovery, my failed experience as an entrepreneur, my growing up in a family where there was a decent level of psychological and emotional dysfunction, all of those things have helped shape me into who I'd become as I've transformed them. They were the shadow side of my greatness. And so you're here for a great reason too. We call it your spiritual vision. How do you take your lived experience and who you naturally are, as designed by our creator and put that into something you're doing on a day to day basis, that you scale out into the world, whether you're working in a business or you're an entrepreneur. And so when you align with your spiritual vision, you can progress in alignment. And so here you don't have the hustle or the grind. And here, money and health and joy and impact become a natural byproduct of that alignment. And so it's important to be in that alignment. And when do you become in that alignment? Well, in your 20s, you don't even really know what you're doing. You're just kind of getting your feet on the ground. In your 30s, you're experimenting. And what I see is that in your 40s, things start to settle in and become clear. And no matter what age you're at right now, if you're like man, I would like to know what my spiritual vision is. David is clear that his spiritual vision is to end all human suffering. His spiritual vision is to help re engineer civilization and help humanity advance, first by working on ourselves and then by creating businesses that support new systems in the world. That's my spiritual vision. I want to have a clarity like David does. Great. The way you do that is you just ask, just decide. Decide that you're here for a reason. Decide that every day you're going to gain clarity. Pray and ask for clarity. And the clarity will come through the experiences that you have in your life. I have a daily prayer which is thy will, not mine be done. I'm basically saying to God, hey, whatever your will is, it's your will. Tell me what you want me to do, show me what you want me to do. And if you ask for that, my experience is the path will open, but your ego will close that path. Your commitment to your spiritual vision, that's what's going to open it. Tony Robbins principle number seven. Massive action. The path to power. So Tony's concept is knowledge is not power. Knowledge in action is power. So most people know what to do, but they don't do what they know they should do. And he says, you must take massive, consistent, intelligent action towards your goals. Action creates momentum, momentum creates results. Results create confidence. And the difference between successful and unsuccessful people is the amount and quality of action they take. He says, fail fast, learn faster, adjust quickly. Again, all of this is right, but it is a hustle culture attitude. It is a gladiator attitude. And it is the natural perspective that a guy like Tony Robbins would have. He talks about massive action, and I 100% think action is required. But I want to talk to you for a moment about how you produce massive action in a way that doesn't feel tremendously effortful or like a hustle or grind that produces burnout. And this is like the hottest topic in today's success market, because hustle culture has become so dominant. And again, going back to the idea that people try to model themselves after Tony Robbins, if you think about modeling excellence, but it's not sustainable because not everybody has the amount of human growth hormone that Tony Robbins has or models David Goggins or Gary Vaynerchuk. Especially in business and success right now, it's dominated by men. It's sort of a Navy SEAL alpha male energy.

When we look at massive action, though, I believe that action is a byproduct of something more powerful, which is non resistance. So when you're clear on your spiritual vision and you're not living in your limiting beliefs or in a primal state, kind of building upon everything we've talked about today, you naturally take action. Why wouldn't I take action? I feel pretty non resistant. I have a vision, I'm excited about it, and I get up every day and I work on it. But I don't believe that if I'm not working on it, someone somewhere is and when I meet them, they will beat me. That's an idea that's out there in hustle culture. I believe everybody has an opportunity and there's plenty for everybody. So with that attitude, I take inspired action. I sit down, I scope out my podcast episodes, I record them, I do the things that are necessary. Sometimes I forget about it and I move back into my limiting beliefs and my ego and I move back into hustling and grinding, but a lot more than I used to. I'm like, I'm going to stop now. I'm going to take care of myself. I'm going to go in the cold plunge, I'm going to spend time with my kid, I'm going to take my wife out to dinner, I'm going to do it all. And I'm able to produce even more results because I'm energized. I'm not cutting off parts of my life so that others can grow. So when you're not living in your limiting beliefs, you're in a primal state, you naturally take action. You don't have to force it or hustle or grind or push it. The action comes from a place of flow. You're actually literally getting pulled into your future by your future because you've cleared the Runway of resistance. And so, yeah, we'll look backwards after you've attained a goal or an objective and clearly see that you had done certain things because this isn't some sort of woo woo law of attraction. You just align your state and focus your energy and consequently success appears. You have to take action, but we want to take action from a place of wholeness, from a place of alignment, because there are plenty of people out there that are taking massive action and sacrificing everything else in their life. In many ways, Tony Robbins has done exactly that. I'm not taking anything away from the the contribution that he's made, but having followed Tony for the last decade, this is a guy who's had insane health challenges as a result of burning out his entire life. And you have to step back and wonder, well, what if he had done it from a more congruent place? Sure, he's achieved a lot, but compared to what? We only get to see one version of Tony Robbins. What if he had done it from a place of not needing to serve so many people in order to justify his own self worth, which if you've been in Tony's community, would know. He's even articulated early on that this is what was driving him. Again, not a criticism, but just acknowledgement that even the greatest teachers have work to do. If you're taking massive action from a place of resistance, needing to achieve or justify your self worth, rather than first accepting yourself unconditionally and trusting in your relationship with your higher power, then massive action becomes something that strips you down versus massive action becoming a natural byproduct of your wholeness. So when we're whole, which is why I love this so much, there's only one thing to work on, which is you becoming you, then we have the ability to achieve all things. When we are not whole, we have to hustle and grind our way into massive action. And so really the power that Tony talks about is allowing the power that resides within you to express itself.

In other words, surrendering yourself and tying yourself to a relationship with God, to wholeness, and a stripping away of all the unconscious programs that we came here with and adopted as a result of the people who we learn from, mostly our parents, being able to alleviate ourselves of those things so that we become truly a force of power, a true force of nature, that we allow nature itself, or life itself, or power itself, to flow through us. One of the things I've come to believe is that Christ, for example, became the Christ and allowed the power to flow through him, through the relinquishing of Jesus. The man Jesus was the man Christ was the phenomenon. And so Jesus's work over 33 years was to completely strip away the the individual Jesus so the Christ could emerge. And only then was he able to create not only miracles, but to create a movement to billions of people that sustained over 2000 years because of his wholeness and what he represented. So if you look at that, that's an expression of power that was not achieved by Christ hustling or grinding. He was able to take action in an elegant, efficient way and as a result of being a fully integrated human being, accomplish amazing things. And so this is a fundamental equation that we teach in our work, which is desire plus non resistance equals desired result. And it complements Tony's massive action principle in the sense that yes, we need to take action to produce results, but we need to be taking action from a place of non resistance and wholeness. Otherwise we're doing it from hustle and grind. So quick recap here. Tony Robbins has impacted millions of lives with his teachings, and rightfully so. His strategies work when you apply them consistently. But what I've learned Sustainable transformation happens when you combine Tony's peak performance strategies with deep belief work. And when you change who you are at the identity level, taking massive action becomes natural, managing your state becomes effortless, and focusing on what serves you becomes automatic. So the goal isn't just to be inspired, it's to be transformed. And transformation happens when you do the inner work alongside the outer work. Now, if you want to go deeper into beliefs transformation, as I mentioned, jump over to davidbear.com, check the show Notes. We've got our Mind Hack program, our bundle with the whole human framework. You can join our newsletter and become a part of this amazing community of high performers committed to becoming whole humans. Subscribe to the channel if you have not yet so that you get updates on new episodes. And if you love this episode, share it with someone you love. I love you so much and I love being on this journey with you and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released, along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies, and the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.