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What is success? How do we realize a dream? Does realizing a dream bring us happiness? Tony Robbins puts our thoughts in order.
Based on Tony Robbins’ lecture: Your Mind is the Key to Your Success
The first article in the series
How often in life do we decide that … we’ll lose weight… change our career… stop smoking… start cleaning up our neglected garden…? Whatever the decision is, the simple fact remains that if we do nothing about it, we get left with frustration. And that means we’ve got a lot to learn about self-realization. “We reach a decision,” says Tony Robbins, internationally acclaimed American coach, “out of our passion, and not by just pondering in our armchair.”
Most of us move like cars on the road: we stick to a familiar route. The majority of our actions focus on stimulus and reaction to changing situations. If we continue the analogy further, we look out of our car windows in envy at people who’ve “realized themselves” and are “living the dream.
”But what if we say, “You hold the power to choose your preferred track and even stick to it, fully realizing yourselves?” Wouldn’t you quickly abandon the armchair and switch to the stage that comes after making the decision?
In the series of articles, we’ll post here, we present Robbins’ perception relative to realizing dreams or, alternately, adapting the dream to reality in a way that causes us to feel whole, gratified, and even happy with what we’ve achieved.
“People ask me, ‘What’s the meaning of being happy?’ says Robbins. “I tell them: growth, progress. Progress causes us happiness. Even if we haven’t realized our passion, the knowledge that we’re heading towards it, that we’re taking steps to realize our passion, causes us happiness. On the other hand, even if we’re at the peak of success, and we stop growing, we don’t have some passion that drives us, we begin to die inside.”
Basically, it means that a decision we’re working on realizing provides us with vitality, hope, and enervates us into doing. Robbins divides how aspirations are realized, no matter from which field, into three stages: reaching the decision, committing to it, and resolving it.
Reaching the decision is, in fact, a statement of intent: I want this to happen! But that’s obviously not enough for the decision to eventuate.
The next stage is committing to the decision. Commitment means that I’ll do whatever it takes to see this happen. It doesn’t mean moving mountains: sometimes it means having enough willpower to get up from that armchair after a tiring day of work and sketch out a business plan, instead of staring at the NBA on our big screens.
Once we’ve made the decision and committed to it, the next step is to find the solution. This isn’t the stage where you look back with pride and say, “Hey! I did it!” This is the stage where, even if you still haven’t taken any real action towards the change, inside yourself, you know you’re already there. At this point the obstacles you’ll encounter make no difference: you’ll find a way to resolve them. If you don’t succeed one way, you’ll find another. And if you can’t find a way to override the obstacle, you’ll figure a way to bypass it, climb over it, or even smash it to smithereens. You’ll do all you can so that what you want to happen will in fact happen. This is the stage of solutions.
Robbins’ model appears remarkably simple. If you’ve read the article up to this point, it would seem as though all you need to do is buckle down, knuckle down, and declare: “I’m going for self-realization!” But in actuality, that’s just a part of the picture. To fulfill the dream, to reach self-realization, gratification, and even happiness, we need to look our dream straight in the eye and ask ourselves: what stands behind it, and to what extent does it match the reality of our lives?
More on that in the next article.
