I don’t watch much TV, but if there were a channel that played Tony Robbins seminars non-stop, I’d watch it like teenage girl glued to an America’s Next Top Model marathon. Say what you want about Robbins (criticisms range from him being a complete hack and fraud, to him being the second coming of Jesus Christ; my opinion is somewhere in the middle), but his seminars are never dull. The guy knows how to market helping people.
For the uninitiated, Robbins’ seminars have some informal portions where people in the (massive) audience are able to stand up and address their personal issues with Tony one-on-one, in a kind of private counseling session… in front of 2,000 other people. Tony manhandles their emotional worlds, reshaping their realities in front of your eyes, all to thunderous applause. Whether it’s genuine or not, it’s never boring and usually educational.
(A good friend of mine who is a psychologist and therapist refers to Robbins as the Batman of Psychology — sometimes he has to break the rules and do some unethical things, but it’s always for the greater good.)
In one seminar, a middle-aged man in the audience stood up and confessed that he was suicidal. He then shared his story: he was a finance guy, a very good finance guy. He made a fortune and not only that, but his friends and family members gave them their savings to manage and he made them fortunes as well. His entire life he had been successful and made himself and people close to him a lot of money.
And then one day he lost it all.
When prodded by Robbins, his reasoning for wanting to kill himself was that his life insurance policy would pay enough to support his wife and children after he was gone, whereas if he stayed alive, his family would be saddled by debt and left broke. When Robbins threw out the obvious point that while his kids would grow up with financial stability, they wouldn’t have a father, the man calmly asserted, “Yes, exactly. That’s the idea.”
What immediately strikes you is this man’s dumbfounding belief that his kids need financial stability more than a living father. And it’d be easy to discount him as loony for that and be on our merry way.
But if we take a moment and empathize with him and dig a bit deeper into his motivation, we discover something important about his self-perception: This man perceives the value of his own life to be nothing more than financial.
He has no sense of value in himself as a father, husband, friend, companion, not to mention any other skills or hobbies. It’s not just that he thinks his kids would be better off with money than with him, it’s that he believes his only value as a person is his ability to make money.
Superhero Robbins quickly pounced on the nub of the issue: this man had never emotionally invested himself or identified with his roles as a father, a husband, a friend, a colleague — he had invested all of his identity (and time and effort) in making money and becoming rich. Then once his wealth vanished, so did his entire sense of self.
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