Tony Robbins Is A Major Jerk (And Other Reasons You Should Follow His Lead)
Over the last week we’ve had the Michelle Wolf comedy crisis, the Rudy Giuliani interview debacle, and the Kanye West apocalypse, so it’s understandable if you’ve already forgotten the hubbub Tony Robbins caused a little over a month ago. So here’s a recap.
A woman in the audience at one of Robbins’ events stood up and said she wanted to talk about how the #MeToo movement was addressing challenges to women’s safety. The response of the 6-foot-7, 265-pounds-of-solid-muscle life coach was to bound onto the floor of the arena, call the woman out for having a “victimhood” mentality, and shove her down the aisle to make his point.
Members of the press and the Twittersphere predictably ranted and argued about the episode. But then a rare thing happened. Maybe because he realized that he was, on this occasion, out of step with the tenor of the times, the man whose followers tend to place in the same category as the Buddha, Martin Luther King, and Elvis, apologized.
So the press moved on. As for Robbins, he was free to return to charging followers $400 to burn the skin off the soles of their feet.
In the midst of this mini-scandal, what few people talked about was that confronting audience members in this way was nothing new for Robbins. A brief gander on YouTube will uncover clips of him speaking the “truth” to his fans about all their negative qualities—the ones that keep them single, poor, and ordinary.
For anyone expecting Robbins to give up this practice any time soon, they have another thing coming. The one-time Guthy-Renker pitchman knows that publicly calling out those who look up to you is a tactic far too powerful to let go...
Read the full article here on Forbes.com.
Lorem Ipsum
5 年One of the things that is so interesting about this blamestorming behaviour is that these coaches seem to be deliberately taking the side of participants’ ‘inner critic‘. The perception of their comments‘ ‘truth‘ comes from the way they echo that voice which tells us “you are worthless; you will never be good enough“ (which, of course, is an internalised parental voice, and an early years coping mechanism).? Where Robbins and others earn their $400 is in coupling this confirmation that “you‘re worthless now“ with the promise “but if you follow my advice, you‘ll become really something!” And the accusation we could level at them is that they work this formula, keeping their fans stuck in a place of resonating with painful truths and believing there is a panacea to overcome them. $400 follows $400, but no real change takes place. Robbins and others don‘t want people to outgrow them, of course, and to fix themselves. And they know they won‘t anyway. The ‘inner critic‘ is the guardian of an impossible narcissistic fantasy image, a voice telling us we‘re not living up to that idealised version of ourselves which “will really show him/her/them I am worthwhile”. Into a psyche already full of anxious fears and hopes, the motivational guru pours liberal amounts of Snake Oil.