Don’t drop the mic | Bishop T.D. Jakes & Tony Robbins

[Music] welcome everybody to the podcast tony robbins here today i have the privilege to introduce to you or maybe reintroduce if you watch the podcast from last year that we did a dear friend of mine a man who's a great spiritual leader he's a man of inspiration he's a master communicator he's a man of god as a speaker of the gospel he's a voice of hope and love and warmth and and i think a voice of reason for tens of millions of people including myself and he's really unique uh bishop jakes is a bishop uh he's also a tv and film producer he's a grammy winning board meeting music producer he's a new york times number one best seller he's written 40 books she has 44-0 um and he started out you know being raised in west virginia and he starts his first church at 23 years old in west virginia and now he has his own church of course the potter house in dallas texas has 30 000 people that participate it's non-denominational and you're also you have this incredible gift that this ability to move people so much that time magazine back in 2001 say you're the best preacher in the united states and you're the preacher i think most preachers kind of model around the world today so i want to welcome my dear friend t.d jakes thanks for being here td thank you for having me i'm so delighted anytime i get to uh breathe the same air share the same space or be on the same zoom with you i always come out a little better and learn something that helps to broaden my perspective so i'm looking forward to the conversation well thank you you're here to broaden ours i'm here to listen and learn as i always do when i'm with you brother uh we're going to talk about his new book it's called don't drop the mic how the power of words can change the world there's 440 pages of pure magic in this and i'm not blowing smoke it's gorgeous you give stories strategies tools you even have a partner in crime so to speak who goes through and he's a brilliant scholar and shows where some of the organization comes from in your history like the shoulders you stand on just like i do and different shoulders but also he goes through it and takes one of your sermons and it kind of helps us break it down it's really it's an extraordinary book and i've read many of your books but this one is truly unique my first question is simple why this book why now why a book on communication to me is obvious why now seems somewhat obvious but tell me why for you now and maybe tell us a little bit dr frank thomas his role and perhaps just clarify most people think drop the mic you're saying don't drop them like a lot of people think that's the goal maybe you can clarify the metaphor well you know drop the bike is something that became very popular amongst the hip-hop at the end of a performance they would drop the bike and it became a cliche to represent that you had this powerful moment it was a threshold moment so i just reversed it and said don't drop the bike and initially to be honest with you tony i started out writing uh a kind of a legacy book to pass on to the next generation what i had experienced during my tenure of ministry over these past almost 45 years the diversity of platforms that i spoke on both faith uh platforms as well as secular uh platforms as well as business platforms and entertainment platforms i had such a panoramic view of articulation from so many perspectives that i started writing about that and then it evolved that the pandemic came and and the racial tensions arose and i thought wow while i'm talking about talking our nation is trying to have a conversation that we're talking over each other and add each other not to each other and i had to include some elements about that into it as well as your intimate most personal relationships uh don't drop the mic on talking to your children don't drop the mic on talking to your wife don't drop the mic on dealing with hard subjects and tough times to to believe in the power of communication to be the conciliatory agent that is necessary to bind up the wounds of broken-hearted people is uh the substratum of what made me write the book that's beautiful tell me uh you know maybe you can share with our audience you write about it in the book about the influence of one night watching your father watch the news when a very special man came on who became obviously a partial he's one of the role models in your life a very important one tell us a little about where this began and how that developed a belief in you that a person with a microphone can change the world well first of all i'm i'm i'm about six or seven years old my father is like a goliath giant to me a huge uh mammoth man both physically and my opinion of him was huge and uh this was one of the rare times that he wasn't working because he worked a lot and uh i was watching the news came on and uh there was a man of color speaking at that time that alone was a rarity to turn on your tv set and see somebody who looked like you speaking was very very rare and my father's expression i don't know i went back and forth between looking at the way my father looked at him and looking at amazement at how he handled the mic and how he tackled the problems that were pervasive during that time period i grew up in the area of the 60s with colored bathrooms and colored water fountains and the vietnam war and all of the chaos that was going on in our country back then kind of mirrors all the chaos that's going on right now and instead of grabbing up a gun like some people did during those times and are doing today uh dr king grabbed a mic and it and it taught me at a very early age it left an indelible impression upon me that a mic can often be more powerful than a gun and we live in a society today that anything we don't like we want to shoot it but but what we need to learn is the power of words the power of communication dr king exemplifies uh mahatma gandhi and uh gandhi identifies it uh in many ways nelson mandela uh exhibited it through the apartheid and i think if we're going to ever have a more perfect union then we have to become more involved in speaking and speaking to people outside of our sphere that means uh you can't just be ceos talking to ceos you really need to get down to grassroots and talk to people outside of your bubble we have created all of these bubbles but they're asphyxiating because we don't get doctors talk to doctors preachers talk to preachers unbelievers talk to unbelievers believers talk to believers and yet we're thrown into this homogenized uh society that asks us to live together and we can't live together if we don't learn each other's language and how to talk to each other well one of the things i was touched by in the book was the understanding that western history is usually taught in a written form but west african history and african history is usually taught in an oral form and then of course there were times obviously for africans who were slaves that they weren't able they weren't allowed to even read or do something that nature but it even goes earlier than that it was the tradition of learning and you are you've carried that tradition on and dr thomas i guess played a role in looking at some of that i mean obviously well dr thomas's expertise is in african-american preaching i mean that's what his doctorate is here that's what he teaches at the university and it's a substratum of what his passion is he not only is a preacher he's a professor and a theologian and a scholar and and he challenges me to explain to people how i do what i do uh which was very very challenging because uh you you know you do what you do you don't really often think in terms of passing it on to somebody in an explainable uh way that causes him to be able to benefit from the dynamics of what you do because what i do is such a mixture of uh the science of linguistics and the art of connectivity yes collaborate together in such a way that you can't distinguish the science of from the art of it to know it is one thing science to feel it it's the artistic part of it and there i am trying to explain something that is not always tangible it is not always kind of and great communication is isn't just tangibles it's not just the definitions of words it's all the inferences and implications that come from the words and whether you're having a discussion like we are or whether you're trying to talk to your wife we use the same words but they don't always mean the same thing right and understanding the distinctives can determine whether you end up in divorce court or having the second honeymoon yeah big difference the uh i've always said the things that affect us most are invisible forces right you know you look at little you look at physical things gravity too much you're dead too little we're gone right radiation without enough we're dead too much we're you know we're gone uh absolutely the most powerful force is human emotion and understanding that words are triggers for those emotions and that we're responsible for how we respond to them we certainly have that choice but different words have different potency and you've really been extraordinary that's why i've been such a fan of yours is both the quality of your intellect most importantly the quality of your heart but also your capacity to express that in a way that reaches the human heart that pushes through those limitations and your church is not all african-american your church is a mixture so um you know you've been able to reach people all over the earth so i'm curious what part of martin luther king come back to him for a second what part of him have you embodied or has become a part of you i'm curious from your perspective well i i would never be as presumptuous as to compare myself with him i think he was one of the most amazing orators of of my generation you know to paint such picturesque language and words uh the way his voice inflection his presentation his mannerisms all led to an unstoppable force that actually changed the world as we know it and uh and and so but i think it affected all of us uh in some way to be inspired that that there is hope in the in in talking to people in language and then you have to understand the underlying inference of faith in the black community means something different than it does in most white communities where a church is totally about faith for us it was where the civil rights movement was born it was where our first schools started it was the first platforms people like aretha franklin gladys knight many others sang on they started out in a faith platform because that was the only platform we have consequently today when you get ready to reach our community to bypass the faith element of it is to bypass the gateway that opens up all of the community to you and so uh understanding that uh preach when you say a preacher what you picture depends on what your experiences are and in our community that includes activism that includes social justice that includes business advice that includes looking over contracts before people buy houses we come to our pastors expecting a lot more from them than just elements of faith yes well his his faith much like gandhi was a model for him as well that peace could be the solution that unifying us was the answer not separating us uh one of the beautiful things your book did is it brought some of that history of the african-american experience in the midst of you teaching people how to communicate and bring their voice forward it's a beautiful synergy that you created here i'm grateful that you created it one of the biggest one of the things that that i would like to say particularly to your audience uh living in a bubble is expensive now you make statements that you have to spend millions of dollars to correct and damage control and public relations uh most ceos executives entrepreneurs are focused on diversity and inclusion and and equity and as you do that you don't hire people for decoration you also have to include them into your life you can't just include them into your office but to include them into your life so that you can circumvent bad choices maybe this means something in this community i have done it myself and in the book i talk about how i offended many kenyan people while i was trying to ingratiate them and i didn't understand that what a particular word meant in their society i quickly found out as they lit up my social media for about two and a half days with fire hell and brimstone i quickly retreated and said whoa i didn't know that so what you don't know can be expensive it can be detrimental and it can cause you to uh alienate an audience as we become more global and as the country waxes more brown if you're going to ingratiate and have a following of any kind you have to be diverse in your ability to communicate with them and understand sensitive tones whether it is for somebody with a learning distinction or whether it is for somebody who is smaller of stature getting the right language to communicate uh with that sensitivity i know it's laborious i know it's frustrating but it is it is the catalyst through which growth is attained you have to grow beyond that which is familiar to you because there's no expansion otherwise we just live in a box right right and right you know there's one thing that makes people happy is progress and growth right we grow so we have something to give and if we don't grow we don't have much more to give and then life becomes really empty it's just about the self and anybody who's focusing themself see so many people today that are extremely well off and they're angry all the time what are they angry about they're angry because they really aren't growing right you know you give it somebody everything you think that's enough doesn't matter what color their skin there has to be some form of growth if you you remind me of a funny example of one of my early days when i was in my 20s i went overseas so the first time i was talking in this country and i didn't understand what's going on said this is so so so important like i was doing this and that and also people get really riled up and then i started making the linkage because they took a lot it means the middle finger in their country i was like screw you screw it right so you got to understand customers for sure you know what's funny about that most of us when we go overseas will really study and get a briefing about the culture yes but we don't study people in our own country who are distinctive from us we don't we don't provide them with the dignity of the importance that says you are worth studying you are worth uh the focus of my intellect so that i don't inadvertently offend you and you have to uh you have to learn in the language of the people that you want to reach what is the most effective way to do that i think that gives us some room for expansion for development for inclusiveness for a more harmonious a more perfect union whether that union is in the marriage or in a workplace uh there's a different type of poor all poor people another saying there's a difference between being poor in the inner city and being poor in the in in the middle of america on a farm where you're barely able to make ends meet they're both poor but they have different dynamics and different enemies and different things to contend with they don't you're not stepping over needles you're not dealing with gang violence you're dealing with a different kind of poverty and so when we start respecting each other's story and listening and learning that story rather than allowing the media to tell us who other people are uh we do a lot better and so what we're doing and saying don't drop the mic is let's keep talking even when you get it wrong even when you get trolled even when you get corrected even when you get your feelings hurt don't draw back and stop talking we've got to keep talking because we've got to keep breathing the same air drinking the same water sharing the same space often sharing blood transfusions if we can share blood we can share conversation that's right we have so much more in common that we have a part is just ridiculous but it gets magnified you you i know you and i talked offline you've seen the social dilemma and those happen i hope they watch it you see how there's a certain class of people that now are treating you like you're a lab rat they know how to stimulate you by giving you what you already believe and then piss you off by making another extreme keep certain information from you and keep you online and it just makes them a trillion trillion dollars literally some of these companies are worth a trillion dollars now with a d yes but but one of the beautiful things that i think that you do and i think it's required if we're talking about quality communication you just said the first step in my mind which you've got to know your audience got to know what they need you got to know what their hurts are you know there's i think the language either you or maybe it was in the back of your book uh that dr thomas gave was this idea i used to talk about fear into power but you're talking about pain into power right you know moving pain into power how to shift that but you can't do that if you don't know someone's story what they're going through what they're experiencing including your wife or your children or someone else so i want to know for you to me communication is about connection and it's really about serving in some way i mean that's the whole purpose of it is we connect without it we have nothing but what what do you see is the purpose of communication and from your perspective and how do you know when you're effective what and what makes you so effective and i know i'm not blowing smoke your way you know who you are so what do you think it is well you know uh i mean there are many things but at the core first of all we are one of the few species that are able to communicate both verb verbally and in writing uh to change the meaning of something uh with a voice inflection with an uh uh a suffix or prefix changes in definition of a word and we're able to write that and we're able to read that we're able to speak that so you don't see uh ants writing books you know you know you don't see that sort of thing and i think that we don't want to lose that uh with 163 characters uh we would have never gotten the gettysburg address we would have never gotten uh henry wadsworth longfellow we would have never gotten edgar allan poe we wouldn't have gotten james weldon johnson all of those great writers and thinkers and orators of of all different cultures and kinds culminate when we respect language and i think respect is a substratum of communication you cannot communicate with something something or someone that you don't respect enough to study and and and i suggest in the book it's not enough to study your material you also have to study your audience you have to study who's coming in the room what is the demographic what is their story what are sensitive touch points for them in order to be a great orator you have to be able to use an illustration that connects with that crowd that audience that situation and putting that kind of time into it is respect because whatever we respect we give time to and whatever we don't respect we don't give time to and so subliminally when we don't really do the research we're saying you're not important and so we have to be retooled to think beyond the parameters of our sociological construct to embrace diverse types of people and i think for me uh i i was amazed that that people thought that i was a great orator i never thought that i was but what what is really striking to me is is to be able to to to add language to heart to to be able to express what a feeling feels like you know what what does pain feel like how do you what does love feel like what does hurt feel like what does what does depression feel like the more able the more adept we are at being able to take those words and use them as paint brushes to paint a picture that you can see of an abstract feeling that i am having the more congenial our relationship is going to be the more empathy we're going to have the more connectivity becomes possible because we we are hearing and in the book i talk about uh while the book is about speaking it is just as much about listening as it is about speaking because if i lose my hearing right now then eventually my speech is going to deteriorate though there's nothing wrong with my tongue the deterioration of my speech is coming from my inability to hear and we're living in a time right now that we've lost our hearing and it's showing up in the way that we speak to each other and about each other we have stopped listening so we have stopped speaking to each other correctly that kills a marriage that kills a business that kills a company that kills a company that doesn't have a way of listening to its consumer that kills a business anytime you don't have a way of listening to not just the person in the in the c-suites but the person who uh is pushing the broom knows something you need to hear and really smart people make everybody a teacher that's true and they become a student and that's what makes you smart is that you never stop learning you never stop learning and you can learn a little something from just about anybody including your children the greatest business people i know men or women they practice that they don't talk about it they've actually institutionalized it i have a dear friend that built half of las vegas and he got he's always told me the greatest breakthroughs he's gotten have been from the bellman from the people behind the counter because they know but you know you said you there's a quote in your book that i've used often as well and it's that the best form of communication is when you hear what's not being said in order to do that you have to invest at a different level not only in the history but also in this moment to see and feel and experience rather than predict in your mind what you think you're going to say i can't tell you how many times i've organized the talk and my number one thing is who's there what do they believe what do they want what are their wounds what are their hurts what are their desires what are they proud of like i will before every talk i have this battery of about 40 questions that i ask have my team ask it then i ask the people when i get there then i have to see some people there and then i'm able to customize it in a way that really makes sense but i also think you brought up something else which trust and respect i think those two qualities are the most important foundation for any quality relationship business personal intimate but you ask people a lot of times you know what does it take for you to trust somebody and the response most people give me as well you know it's just a feeling or i trust them because they've done what you know they said they do but i said have you ever had somebody who's done what they said to do and then they didn't i said yeah i said well could you trust an enemy and i don't really believe in enemies but use the metaphor and they say well i don't know well yeah you can if your interests are aligned if we can find our interests aligned we can trust each other if i win and you win if i lose you lose if we're tied to the hip you can trust somebody but then respect what does it take to respect somebody and i think it's knowing the other person brings something to table you don't have and that requires honesty with yourself some ability but also just opening your eyes and there's no human that i've ever met that i'm not see i couldn't learn from that isn't superior to me in some way but i don't look at myself as inferior because i also know i have a unique life experience there are certain things no one's like me and so it allows me to see that person in an equal level but i think trust and respect without that human communication does not last it breaks off very very quickly but i'd like to know what about presence you know you know great communicators have presence martin luther king has presence i'm not saying you're martin luther king i know you're very humble but you have your own unique presence and that's by the way really important i see so many people try to copy you or my world copy me and it's usually entertaining right because they're missing their power would be to be themselves so right what is presence for you and how would you describe what it means to speak from the soul because i know that's the language that's in me and in you what do you how would you describe those two things i i i think that i am the most powerful where i am the most passionate yeah me too and that is to say i have i'm not a good liar i have to really care about point is yeah yeah i have to really care about it my heart has to be in agreement with my brain for my mouth to be potent and so understanding that about yourself may limit the subject matter that you embrace but it will impact the audience more powerfully because there's some synergism between what is impassioned in your heart and what comes out of your mouth i think that is very very important i wanted to say a comment about the word trust uh you you know in business to set up a trust you're going to invest in it and i think it's very difficult to trust people who want power without investment yes so uh regardless to what the nature of our relationship is the greater the investment the more likely i am to be able to trust you right and that investment can be the curiosity it can be what my favorite uh sentence is what did you what did you mean by that or we'll get through with the meeting and i'll say what did you think about that because it is through that that i make sure that what you said is what i heard that what we experienced we walked away with the same thing that maybe your perspective can broaden mind that's respect to ask questions is respect we never ask questions of people that we don't think have answers and anybody we don't ask questions we don't respect so so to invest with your curiosity to invest uh whether it's financially or study or research or to invest your gift to be able to reach a person it creates a trust because there is an investment there and i think that that is uh very very important and i will never care how much you know until i know how much you care and the more i know how much you care then what you know can become more beneficial and it can be banked in the warehouse and a trust evolves out of that and a building of a relationship evolves out of that and i think that's very important today because we we are allowing that which is artificial to replace that which is spiritual emotional you mentioned the word soul the engagement of my passions my purpose my pain my strengths my weaknesses my fears my my certainties and my insecurities make up the elixir that makes me who i am yeah it is not just the parts of me that are glamorous it's a part of some of me that are broken and shattered and sensitive and tattered and torn add to the whole elixir and the recipe of who i ultimately become when i walk out on stage and that that presence that presence is the composite of all of those experiences and might i dare add that sitting in this chair is also my grandmother and my grandfather and my great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather and all my ancestors are all sitting in this chair so so much so the chair ought to break because i didn't get here by myself i am the sum total of everybody who came before me so true i i have a simple rule i tell everybody i said i'm not a great speaker i don't really look at myself as a speaker i'm a communicator but i'm a source of influence i'm here to help someone make a shift that's really my goal my persuading my communication is to persuade someone what's possible for themselves and to move them forward as opposed to what's impossible i don't know about that i have had the terrible task of having to speak behind you so i don't know i don't know whether i can let you get away with that when we were in canada and you mesmerized 8 000 people in a stadium and then they put me up to speak and you sat back and watched i thought oh this is cool it's not back i got mesmerized and i'm not blowing smoke brother because we're different we're that's what's beautiful we're different in our approach you're so eloquent you're so your language is so amazing but i think what's true is we both i have a rule i won't speak but i think i'm not passionate about but i'm passionate i want to learn from somebody else who is because obviously i don't have enough value there i'm not here to just speak to speak right but i also i was touched in your book it's in a different part of the book about two-thirds way through the book you interview dr tom or you bring in dr thomas he writes several chapters and that's where i got some really beautiful pieces about the oral history we talked about i want to go there a little bit later but one thing that triggers me right now is this idea that in the african-american community soul has been so well developed because of so much pain meaning if you can go through so much injustice so much pain so much just insanity and you can find hope still that's the soul's depth that's the power of it and anyone i know no matter what color their skin who has something to deliver it's usually because they've been through hell and kept going and then they had an intention like i i i'm making the movie of man search your meaning i don't know if you ever did you ever read the book by chance no it's victor frankl it's a gentleman who was a jewish man who it's an extraordinary book when somebody is like in a really bad place i give it to him he witnessed his family being killed in front of him two of them thrown into gas chambers and he survived that experience because he created a reason to communicate in the future a reason to live in the future make sure this never happened again it's a pretty amazing story but again the people that can reach people have soul and so many of us are trying to avoid suffering and yet suffering can have a deep meaning i don't want suffering on any human being my whole goal is to end suffering from people as fast as i can but i also know the value of suffering can you address that where is suffering their lives is it is very part of it necessary where do you see it what makes life amazing is death yeah uh if life would not be valuable if the clock were not ticking yeah uh it is the fact that we lose people that makes us learn to value people uh you you can't have north without south it is it is the polarization of both experiences that causes you to fight in the middle so if you're going to be a balanced person no matter how much your net worth is you cannot escape suffering there is going to be hurt feelings hurt bodies hurt circumstances loss of loved ones and each one educates you in some way that none of us enjoy it and none of us seek it or want it but inevitably all of us experience it and it is what is common amongst all of us and none of us escape it we come here naked we die naked you can take nothing with you that you attain so all of these little toys that we're playing with uh in the dash between the two dates with us and if we do we still can't take them with us and what we do have is a collection of experiences and moments and memories that enrich us that engage us that cause us to gradually gradually very gradually become better people i don't think that you become a better person overnight i think you gradually become a better person through uh the the mixture of good and bad and sunshine and rain and pleasure and pain and finally you start to draw conclusions and uh when you start thinking about that i wanted to tell you this because when you were talking it made me think about something john lewis said they asked john lewis before he died what he thought about black lives matter as opposed to the civil rights movement and he said in many ways it has the same purpose and synergy and passion and he wanted the young people to go forward and then he said the strangest thing he said the only thing i wish they would do that they don't do he said is when they march they ought to sing that that changes the whole experience doesn't it yeah it's a whole because that brings the that brings the spirit into it doesn't it a higher consciousness to it exactly the unification of singing and so forth not just anger as unifier but like the higher spirit is going to fire anytime you can sing while dogs bite you and while water hoses are turned on you and while you're beating over the head with clubs there's a different sound to the song that comes from a soul who has had to climb their way up and has dirt in their fingernails than somebody who took voice lessons it's a beautiful tone but when you sing from your soul you sing from the wounds of life whether they be uh wounds that were inflicted through divorce or brokenness or stillborns or parents with alzheimer's it changes when he says to sing i just got chills all over me because i got chosen you just said it too it's just so beautiful that's what it's all it is the missing it is the missing ingredient for not just one particular movement it's the missing ingredient i think for so much of humanity that's living in this place of right and wrong good and bad and there's not the unification there's something about the human spirit but as you said the tone the pitch the feeling that comes from having experienced that is what penetrates it's the only universal experience i tell people a time but one thing you can count on is suffering but you don't have to stay there that's our choice whether you stay there now but everyone's going to have extreme stress you're going to let it destroy you or drive you right it's like who is not going to have an experience regardless of the color of their skin regardless of their economics regardless of their history of their background while so many people love them everyone's going to have extreme stress they're going to lose a loved one they're going to have somebody says you got cancer they're going to you're going to be in a position where you get robbed there's going to be a fire at your home there's going to be an economy that drops down you're going to lose your job how exciting is all that but there's no one who escapes it i've seen some of the wealthiest people in the world when their child is born with gigantic physical difficulties and i watch with the suffering they go through no one escapes it so the question is what are you going to do with it and i think the other thing that those extreme stress things do is i've noticed they they remind you how strong you really are if you push through if you keep pushing through the whole thing if you're going through hell keep going and the other thing it does it shows you who your real friends are like who really cares about you right not your facebook friends and no disrespect but the people that actually care about you when the going is tough and everybody else goes after their stuff those are the people that matter you don't need a million of those people you need a few humans that you really love and are there for and love and are there for you and the other thing to do is i think it strengthens your your psychological immunity because i have a friend that was locked up you know in north vietnam for like 10 years beat on a slab or they make you pee in the acid from his pee would go in his back and burn him i remember he spoke for me years ago his name was captain coffee and cabin coffee you know he went through this piece where the irs came after him and like they're really being abusive in my opinion as his friend looking at him and he's like you know what he goes they can do nothing north vietnamese did me there's nothing that can make me stress now you know that's the immunity that comes if you can push through that suffering so i don't want it for anybody but the suffering i've gone through you've gone through the people you've gone through there's a purpose in it if we use it and don't let it use us it's like stress uses us or we use stress you know covet uses us or we use government to make better movements better decisions you know the situation that happened here a year ago we got to figure out how to use it not be used by it so i've i couldn't agree more tell me this you and i both made mistakes as speakers right you talked about that in your book i remember early on in my career i used to always do these free guest events so i could show people i could really deliver not a talk but a transformation and so i'd always have somebody who here's got something you can't change who's got an uncontrollable phobia who's got a problem you can't who's totally depressed and i that's that was my signature and it always seemed to work i found a way and there's one time this person three people are pointing and the person didn't volunteer and i used to do that anyway and i put that person up there and td i was there it was it was a free guesstimate supposed to be an hour and a half and three hours later with about 30 percent of the people were left in the room because i wasn't giving up but i finally cracked the case with almost nobody left in the building but i learned i got to get someone vested a little bit and wanting to change perhaps if i'm going to try and do something in front of an audience in 20 or 30 minutes but what's the situation where you fell flat and what did you learn from oh my gosh there have been many uh i i did a high school event with a bunch of high school kids of which i had nothing in common with and i walked in the room and i i just i felt like i flunked i don't know whether i did or didn't but i felt like i flunked number one you know high school kids they don't want to be there anyway and they're sitting there and they're kind of looking at me like yeah what what are you going to be talking about and and the combination in order to be effective i have to find uh there's a chapter in the book where i talk about finding the joy what is a bridge that connects us i could not find that bridge in that room uh in enough time and and i did a terrible job but i i learned from it that finding the joy that connects us and building out from there is how we are able to embrace new and different kinds of audiences if you find the joint what is common to us and right now what is being pumped into our veins is what's different about us constantly you constantly for ratings for for advertisement for hits on a on a site we are being pitted against each other continually until our houses are splitting it's not just our country we're splitting with our own relatives what's falling out at the thanksgiving dinner table yeah you know and uh because because think about it conflict is throughout humanity conflict sells we'll talk about this in a minute because you're really good at using drama in your speeches but what is drama it's conflict and so you think about it if there was a movie or a book and the movie starts out with we got a main character and they're happy and they're healthy and they have great relationships and they're doing great economically and they're connected to god and they have a beautiful mission and then halfway through they're happy and they're healthy and great relationships beautiful and beautiful mission and healthy in the end they wait who's going to go to that film nobody so unfortunately human beings are pulling by drama but drama is now used where it bleeds and leads in the media and now you don't have to go for the news it follows you in your pocket it travels through social media you know it's it's a different world you and i both have had the experience of recently finding ourselves speaking to empty rooms talking to cameras i i watch obviously uh maybe the pieces that you do the sermons you do and you've got about nine people in this giant auditorium that you've built and me too i'm talking about 195 countries i'm seeing them fortunately on the screen so i'm seeing them in the rooms but it's not the same so tell me something how have you had to adapt to be more effective without an audience there or have you had to or are you doing the same thing well it took me back to how i started you and me both brother my first event i thought it was going to be 500 people seven showed up they're all different parts of the room like come down here to the front row yeah that that is the advantage from starting from ground level zero all life can ever do is push you back to where you started so it pushed me back to where i started and and and where i started was preaching to the people that i imagined were listening oh that's very cool yeah yeah that's where i started i started with these with an imaginary audience yeah me too and an imaginary crowd and an imaginary need and an imaginary circumstance and from that i began to speak to those empty chairs as if there were people there and there's something about faith calls those things that are not as though they were there's something about if you can envision something that hasn't materialized yet then you have the power to make that thing become whatever you envision it to be and so when the room went empty i didn't i just envisioned it as if it were not and i kept on talking uh though i was in an empty room i look like a fool but people all over there were listening my audience all over the world has quadrupled in this year our numbers have gone up 300 in this year uh 52 different countries zooming into our service in this year and and in spite of the atrocity of of the the virus and and and the social justice issues and all of that it created a vortex where people all over the world are looking for something to hold on to while life is is is filled with boisterous winds and and gailing uh air all around us leaving us in a tempestuous situation for which there seems to be nothing solid to hold on to that's when faith becomes almost tangible uh in the absence of anything to hold on to other than the inner strength of your convictions it's like working out in the gym and they put you on a ball and tell you to lift weights and because in the process of everything being unstable you find your core so the core of who we are is strengthened when everything else is shaking around us that's when our core becomes more solidified and more profound i wanted to say this too i think when you talk about everybody suffers that's true but people who are trying to think analytically and lit in a linear fashion find it the most difficult when they are suffering because they have not uh allowed space yeah they're not emotionally fit they haven't been worked out before it's like if you've had a kid that's protected his whole life never breaks a bone he's scared to break his bones as an adult but if you broke all your bones it's like give it to me baby i'm gonna live this life right exactly and for them when i talk about don't drop the mic struggle with finding words to express abstract ideas and struggle with it and if it's better to write it write it if it's better to speak and speak it and don't start out talking on social media about sensitive issues the the reason we often alienate audiences is that we we're talking to the world about something that we should be talking to a friend about because if there is a trustworm relationship and i call you and i say hey i'm thinking about this idea does this sound crazy to you and you say hey man if i were you i wouldn't say that because somebody could take that this way or that way we try it out on millions of billions of people you know and then we're shocked when we get all of this blowback coming back at us because you cannot uh if your world does not reflect the world that you speak to on social media then you haven't developed the skills to speak to that audience yet until your audience your life becomes a microcosm of your following then you have no litmus group to test your ideas to see how they respond in different settings and that's absolutely true echo haven't you said and the aristotle also said to avoid criticism say nothing do nothing and be nothing which is not an option for anybody who really cares and we also live in a culture now where it used to be if you didn't like something i don't like that film you just didn't watch it now somebody wants to cancel it and do it like get rid of it and everything else it's it's a funny little phase we're going through funny is the nicest word that i could find for it yeah you know let me talk about fear for a second because you know if someone's going to pick up a book and says i want to be a greater communicator and i'm going to do it beyond one person even with one person it can happen depend upon the person you know one of the biggest fears people have dying it's rated up there in the top two or three is public speaking and i don't have that fear i remember in the beginning but at the beginning i was thinking about me and very quickly i learned there's zero fear if i'm not thinking about how i'm doing but i'm focused on serving you and i'm noticing what's working and if it doesn't not being attached to it just changing changing change until i find it because i'm here to serve it's like there's you always tell people if you're afraid it's because you're thinking about yourself right that's my approach what what is your approach to coaching someone who might be saying gosh i really have a voice i want i want to share but i'm just afraid especially in the world we're talking about you already giving some good advice about their audience what about just dealing with the fear of getting up and speaking in front of a group of people i think that uh you grow as a speaker and uh you're not gonna go from big silent all the time to being an orator that speaks in front of millions of people on the first trip let's start with three yeah let's start with ten yeah i think we we have you know the times we live in now everything is instant instant gratification you know we click a button and it posts immediately greatness is not something it's not an app you download uh it's something that that has to grow like a rose bush it has to grow it has to evolve it has to bud and blossom and bring forth fruit that whole process is necessary because it informs itself as it develops as as it develops it increases itself it becomes more profound as it develops so i would say to them uh to to start out in a room you know before you go into a room you don't and to begin to build confidence and some dexterity a width and nimbleness of mind starts in small spaces and i'm going to say something that's really strange and this this may kill the whole interview talk to yourself that's great talk to yourself we don't engage ourselves we don't entertain ourselves we have so many things to entertain us that we don't use our brain anymore to entertain one of the great privileges of growing up poor i was poor but i didn't know it but one of the great things about being a poor kid who didn't get toys you had to create toys out of sticks and rocks and go down and play in creek beds and it made you creative and so sometimes you have to get there before you get there and you have to talk before you get in the room and and get the rehearsal of being able to verbalize what you are trying to happen to verbalize it is quite different when you when you take a couple in my business and you take a couple you bring them in for counseling and they have to verbalize what they're angry about a lot of times it's very difficult for them to put it in where they so they start insulting each other no no no no you don't get to insult her yeah i want you to verbalize what you are angry about and the more they begin to verbalize they have to calm down to do that they have to think to do that they have to get engaged to do that and in the process a little fairness creeps in and a little perspective creeps in and little by little but but if i just allow you to sling insults and rage and what we do now we call you names you're a race baiter you're this you're a that you're homophobic whatever we want to call you we call you a name to avoid listening yeah because once i can put you in a category i isolate you there and i don't give you credit for being a human being you're a white man you know you're a black man anytime people can put a label on you they can put you in a foul and discredit you and that's why i don't like labels even when people say that i'm a minister i said yes i'm a minister but don't put a period where god put a comma i'm a person you know i'm a thinker i'm a leader uh uh i'm a ceo i'm i'm a creator i'm a writer i'm a man i'm a father i'm a guy i'm a fool i'm crazy i'm funny i'm stupid i'm smart i'm all of that is sitting in this chair right now and to have the whole spectrum of yourself engaged in the process when you speak to people yeah they get to because i've heard you speak you you'll make them laugh you'll make them cry you'll have everybody jumping and then leaping through fire and and doing card wells and stuff like that you you can get them in but you bring all of tony robbins comes to the stage it's not just a piece of him it's all of him that comes to the stage and i think that in order for you to be a great orator you have to know who you are and bring all of yourself with you when you stand behind the mic and when i said don't drop the might that means that you the mic is attached to something it's influence it's power it's not just speaking it's a platform it's a stage it's social media it's technology it's arts it's drama it's film it's it's music it's song whatever god gave you to work with that is your microphone and you you cannot drop it yeah i i i love you personally i think you know that it loves a strong word for a lot of people but it's just the truth i also think that when you look at what makes you effective in my mind looking across the table at you it's all those parts of you that you describe that people don't want to take in because it's too hard most people are cognitive advisors it doesn't want to figure it out real quick also they don't want anything they have to be questioned so the fastest way to not be questioned or have to think or communicate or persuade or share or anything is just label somebody but the one thing that i think and you tell me if i'm wrong that is behind it all the one thing that will go through every shield is not judgment but love i mean you can't influence somebody while you're judging them right you poor so much love i i loved my audiences i really think and feel who they are i know they're different everywhere like you i've had to adapt as well and when i went from 2019 to typical year going to 116 117 cities and you know 17 or 18 countries some two or three times four five six seven day programs quarter million people to two and a half billion people this year and i've got to be home that's why i now have a little baby girl because like i don't have to be a nomad i'm still doing some live events but i love when i go to china i think what's different than when i'm in japan and then even amongst them who's there in that audience from that country and what's going on what is the culture what is the experience so most people don't want to do that but where is love in the magic of your power it's everything i think so too brother it's it's absolutely absolutely everything i mean i told my people i said if you love these people you got through them but if you're sitting here trying to do a presentation just go home you know you know it's everything and you know what's funny about it when somebody loves you you can feel it yes you can sense it you know it's it's it's great to say it but you can also sense it the legitimacy of it comes through in the way you engage with the person and not only can we feel our love toward each other the people who are listening at us can also feel that it's infectious it's contagious it spreads it spreads through the audience it spreads to the family expressed to the corporation expressed through everything that they i i took a tour several years ago i talked about in the book about going to nike and everybody from the gate to the ceo everybody was saying the same thing about the company how it started what was important to it that the message had permeated the entire staff of thousands and thousands of people they were all uh infectiously excited about nike and and i left that i was so inspired not only about nike but i thought i want that in my life i want that in my office i want that in my family the synergism where we have the same story and the same enthusiasm regardless of our status it means that the brand has gone in before it goes out sometimes we're trying to get the brand to go out but it hasn't gone in and you have to build the brand inwardly before you build it outwardly and that's true of our culture here you know nike they don't talk about the mistakes they've made which they've made plenty right right child the usage of peace over i mean you could go on and on if you want to tear nike down but you can also look at what they've created the number of people whose lives have been touched the jobs the people people going to school all those things and their focus i always tell people what's wrong is always available we need to look at it so we can fix it but if it's constant you've missed life what's right is always available and if we can't spend more time on what's right we can't unify we got to go hear what's wrong and address it and also feel what's right because otherwise there's no balance then it just becomes judgment and there's no love and i think the penetration the unifying factor that makes somebody a great leader is they create a culture you know average people follow the culture leaders create a culture if it's a culture of love everyone will feel it and like you said it's infectious it starts to touch everyone i think what happens i i want to say this because i think it's important yes anytime you start dealing with sensitive issues between a couple between races between cultures between countries yes what we often look for because we are solution oriented is who do i blame whose fault is this okay and if you enter into the stream from whose fault is this you can't resolve the problem i had this experience uh that that i shared uh i think people were really enjoying the book but i was driving down the road and i was a young man and i came over a hill in west virginia and when i came over the hill there was a car wreck and i pulled over to the side of the road i ran over to the man there was blood all over the windshield the windshield was cracked and he was bleeding and i said to him do you want me to call the police and he said no call an ambulance i never forgot it because calling the police means who was at phone yeah calling an ambulance means i just want to get better yeah we can figure out who gets the ticket later right now i need an ambulance i think we're calling the police on a society that needs an ambulance until we understand that it's that that telling the truth about our history isn't blaming you it's owning the reality without painting this facade of who we really are so that we can demystify why we are the way we are now we have to go all the way back to what happened then you can't come in at the last scene of a movie and figure out the movie from the last city you got to go all the way back to the beginning and find out why this character is enraged so when we we might shoot it out of sequence but when you when you air it you have to air it in sequence and what's wrong with us today is we can't have a conversation about then because all we hear when we talk about yesterday is that's not my fault that's the police talking i want the ambulance yeah i'm just telling you why i'm bleeding okay and so if we would stop being defensive which kills marriages which kills employees which kills harmony as a country the moment we stop being defensive we get greater on 9 11 for for a period of time we stopped being defensive and we got greater we weren't arguing we're unified we unified up under attack we immediately unified and all of a sudden the country stood in solidarity and nobody cared who was rich who was poor who was black who was white who was democrat who was republican we have been attacked and i'm saying it shouldn't take 3 000 people falling on fire out of a building to bring us together and remind us that we are better together than we are apart so well said so beautiful so beautiful listen i i think that we're living in a time in which unification is the power and we have to be able to go back and bring it forward we have to understand where things stand but we also just like in a relationship and those relationships you're talking about the question i want to know is not just with right what do you want what do you need more importantly than what you want you know that's the to me i used to these big mission statements when i was a kid growing up you know i'm gonna i'm gonna be an expression of god's greatest love and i'm gonna inspire millions of people dude it went on for like 45 minutes now my my mission's really simple how can i help you know and it feels so sincere and real and it shows up every way anybody how can i serve how can i help and i think when we come to that place it gets rid of a lot of those pieces because it shows this is what i'm here for i want this to be better for you and i think we have to show that to each other like you said whether it's in a relationship that is intimate or whether it's a business one or whether it's a racial situation or it's another country it's there absolutely and and we have to be patient yes the patient because sometimes if a doctor walks into the hospital room and asks the patient what do you need he may not have the absolute to be able to articulate what he needs but if he asks him how he feels yeah he can tell you how he feels it hurts right here i don't know i don't know what i need to fix it but it hurts right here and i think that that what while we develop the language it takes a while even in a marriage if my wife walks in there right now says what do you need you know it depends you know are we talking about dinner what do you want what do you mean yeah yeah how can i help how can i not you know but but if you will let me find my way into the conversation because i may not have the ability and when i don't have the ability uh dr king said that writing is the language of the oppressed when i don't have the ability to articulate what i need all i can do is be angry and i'm just angry and i want you to fix it but i don't know how to write the prescription so so what has to happen is when we know someone is injured we have to understand their limitations to articulate what is wrong and figure out what they need in a relationship sometimes i want my wife to fix something that i never even articulated was wrong and got angry with her because she didn't respond to something that i never even said or maybe if i walk in there and say what's wrong with you and she just starts crying i don't know i just i don't know i have to take the time to allow to be patient with the patient because they don't always have the ability to write the prescription because their their thoughts are blocked by their pain and i think america is hurting right now the people who are the most angry in this country are the people who are the most hurting whether it's middle america where the steel my meals have shut down and the farmers are not making money and the crops are not growing and there's an obsession there or whether it's the urban areas uh where there's uh issues where you're trapped by invisible walls of systemic uh uh racial perplexities that are difficult to articulate it's education it's it's housing it's so many things it's family it's generational problems family so understanding that we all have these needs we have to be patient with the patient and those of us who don't have those needs black white and brown and there are black white and brown who don't have those needs on the basis of the fact that we don't have those needs but we have other needs that's the brotherhood of humanity i might not need what tony needs but i need something and i can relate to your need because i know what it is to be successful and still have a need yeah because people often think that if they see you on tv you you don't need anything that if you if you've got a nice car you don't need anything and sometimes you don't even notice the car you're driving because of the pain you're feeling yeah you know and and sometimes we don't treat the successful because we buy into the myth that success cures personal pain and it doesn't always do that no it does not it rarely does that actually yeah um dr thomas was a big influence on this book and big influence on you and so many beautiful ways i know he wanted uh it appears to make sure that your place in history was there as well by articulating this unique way in which you've been able to communicate to hundreds of millions of people around the world through all these different tools that you have and the scalability of the technology brings us but you brought a message to it that went beyond scalability it went to the heart and one of the great ways he described or you together described what you did was use the metaphor of cooking and i learned by reading the book i didn't know that you really enjoy cooking but having this idea of a recipe this idea that you need the ingredients but you also need the directions and the combination is the essence of how you get something done even as a communicator and but i also found and i want to see if we could talk about three pieces he described that are part of your background you talked about how you always do things from scratch using meaning these fundamental ingredients that you use and that many of those come from the christian tradition some of those obviously come from the african-american tradition and the combination of the two uh he listed many examples but there's three that he pointed out that i really found interesting one was drama you know this idea that you can use drama effectively to capture the human spirit to awaken somebody to something and then the second we talked about was the will to adorn this idea that we have this desire all of us it comes from within this desire to have the beauty experience beauty surround yourself with beauty but he gave some really unique understandings to me the white america as to why let's say african-americans are pulled in a certain direction some people think uh exaggerated beauty or overdone beauty and he said there's there's never enough beauty and it's never overdone i just thought it was fascinating and it made total sense and then the third one was storytelling and folklore which you're magical at all three so can we start maybe with drama and and when when he described drama he gave these six elements i wrote them down here let's see where they are the freedom of bodily expression he's talking about drama and the african-american communication uh african-american churches that what was unique about it was you would use the freedom of full body expression the freedom of emotion to be expressed the tone that could vary the volume and the call-in response and then those pregnant silences and it's like i read that i was like you know quincy johnson just said to me one time just you know it's your dna tonight it's what's legal you're damn near african and if those are the criteria i certainly match a part of it but tell me a little bit about how important drama is for someone to be effective in the communicator whoever they're talking to and then let's take a second go look at this idea of adorn to beauty and a little bit of storytelling we'll do them one at a time if we can you know first of all let's take the drama uh christ spoke in parables yes those stories yes uh and and they were dramatic stories and he did them to describe the abstract kingdom that we couldn't see and it said the kingdom of heaven is lacking and so drama takes something that you can't touch and brings it down to something that you can relate to yeah okay drama connects us it connects us with abstract ideas and brings it center stage often through the dynamics of a story because it is easier to scrutinize a character than it is to admit that's me yeah okay so sometimes i can teach you something through a character a certain man had two sons i can teach you something to a character that that i couldn't say to you directly how are you treating your kids you don't spend enough time with your kids you're gonna get defensive oh yes i do i do so so but if i tell you a certain way i had two sons you're you're you're i don't have to fight through your defense story plus stories entrance you right they take you internal if i want you to think about your high school years i talk about mine if i want to talk about your mom i'll talk about my mom and you go there you can't help it right exactly and all of a sudden you are you are in that moment a perfect example of that was when george floyd cried out yeah for his mother yes white women black women brown women every mother on the planet said saw her child under that knee hold up you know you know he's calling for mama i'm coming baby you know uh there are certain things that are common to us and and drama creates that that's why the arts are so important because drama creates a platform to do that the second thing that i want to say about drama is important in in a in a remote control world where we click a button and we can cut you off we're not going to sit there long if you're standing there like a stick and the only thing's moving is your lips and you don't have any drama we're used to being sensory overload through all of the devices that we have and we're watching multiple screens simultaneously and now you want to bring me in for an hour and lecture me and hold and captivate my attention i think the the drama the the full engagement the whole cacophony of the orchestration of you what makes an orchestra beautiful is how we take all of these different instruments and orchestrate them to produce a song or tune that's the same thing that a speaker does when you take all of you and you it's not just bringing it and throwing it all on the table it is being able to orchestrate it in such a way that there is harmony to produce an expected end so we do that through the instrument of of dramatization when we started talking about adorning yes we had to adore uh poverty demands adornment you know poverty demands explain if you would mean by adornment if you if you would uh to to decorate to enhance to to take an abstract idea and make it visual uh to make it colorful to make it more palatable adornment is what we do with food when we season it you know what are we having for dinner tonight when the kids come in the house and say what are we having for dinner tonight you don't say well we're having uh uh coming and we're having cinnamon and we're having a little paprika and seasoned salt and a little bit of garlic powder sprinkled over chicken you don't give them the adornment you tell them we're having chicken but when they taste it the adornment is how you season it that make the chicken exceptional because if you actually just gave them the chicken without the adornment it would not be nearly as uh sensational so the ability for a speaker to be able to bring seasoning to the statement it causes it to be an experience and not something to be endured but something to be experienced and people walk out saying you should have been there i can't even i can't even tell it like he told him but you you should have been there what they're saying is i didn't have to come in and i didn't have the garlic powder and i didn't i didn't have the uh the crushed cloves but but there was something about that chicken that was exceptional and it's always not the chicken it's the adornment and so to adorn a message to adorn an address and sometimes it is the fact that you found out on your need to propose it is the fact that you had music in the background uh for the first kiss it is the fact that the tinkling of of of chablis glasses connecting together it makes them more memorable all of that enhances it adorns the moment it isn't the moment but it adorns a moment and so we come from a history that required a doorman because we didn't have money and we didn't have things so we had to adorn the moment through little things like jump in the broom when we got married which was african tradition you had to adorn the moment we couldn't go shopping for wedding gowns and and do all of that sort of thing but that does not mean that there is not a poetry even in poverty that there is that there is not class and beauty even in pain uh that there there is there there are certain things that adorn uh even the most unpalatable situations that cause them that you have to back up and look at it and say wow i never will forget being in soweto in alexandria in south africa then going into this very oppressed area and they had dirt floors and i noticed the floors were dirt no wood no tile no carpet nothing like that there were dirt floors but they were swept yes they swept them with rooms they kept it neat and it was beautiful and you could see the broom marks in the dirt they adorned what they had yeah so if you don't adorn a hut you want to adorn a mansion yeah and so the the art of great speaking is to adorn it until justice flows down like mighty streams of living water cascading down into the deepest parts and the dungeons of lower alabama until you know that's adorned man that's a tournament all right you know the mastery of linguistics to to adorn something that otherwise would be hard for the audience to hear yeah but but dr king was masterful at adorning the text i sure was and what makes somebody a great storyteller there's drama as a part of that what other component is there that makes a great storyteller because you know jesus as you said was a great storyteller i think part of it is he related to people with his stories he didn't go say go recruit christians he went to the fishermen and said become fishers of men right oh i understand the whole process put a little out they bite bring them in so but what do you think makes somebody a great storyteller or how can someone become a better storyteller when we don't leave spaces where words in to communicate ideas and that is to say i use a bible study because they're easy for me blind bartimaeus the bible says the son of jesus set by the heavenly side biggie and he heard that jesus was passing by it doesn't describe the palestinians when the sand that had cut into his bones the aches and pains and the disappointment of being set there every day it just says he sat by the highway side begging and then it doesn't dramatize the fact that though he was blind he could hear and how in spite of losing one thing he had not lost everything and he had learned how to use what he did have against what he did not have that's not written there but that's part of the story yes and he cries out to jesus at this high decibel pitch scream have mercy on me and but if if that's all you read but you didn't re read the intensity behind it that it was the desperation that provoked the scream and that his heartbeat was racing and his blood was pulsing to his veins and his neck was strained when he screamed above the crowd to catch the notice of a fleeting moment that if he lost this moment he may have lost his miracle and so desperation drives him beyond protocol and makes him become more rambunctious and demonstrative to get the attention of the only help available because it was in fact passing by so when i stopped you see that so so what i said it wasn't tracking i paused that's the pregnant pause yeah it it it allows the hero a moment to catch up to the dramatization of the moment or you just read the words right and how empty is that and why do you need a preacher if you're just going to read the words right yeah yeah yeah you you you when i read words i see pictures that's why i do movies that's why i do films i see pictures uh and then i describe the picture not just the word but i describe the picture that is created so that you have a sensory perception that goes beyond that which is intellectual and goes down to the soul and you can feel blind bartimaeus and his desperation and his groping pressing feet standing up and crawling to get to jesus in the hopes that he might leave just a wee better than how he came you step into the experience as if you're there and you breathe absolutely as i always say you can't move people if you're not moved you can't touch people if you're not touched and unless you're in the experience you can't bring someone to that experience and you are magnificent both in linguistics but your capacity to step into that moment and live it as if you were there yourself and share it with your audience allows them to experience it as well it's it's gorgeous you talked about you know having uh you know the ingredients and then having the instructions but you and i both go off the instructions in fact you talk about that in your book you said i forget the languages but something like you know what great communication is if we're doing exact language but it's it's the capacity to follow those directions until you don't like knowing when not when when do you know not to do i have my own version but when do you know not to get rid of what you thought you're gonna do so often i'll work with my team my creative team i'm crazy i over prepare i work for hours and hours days and days lay it out lay out i'm a syntactician i believe sequence matters the dog bit johnny johnny bit the dog very different if you're johnny right so i know sequence matters and i feel it and i lay it all out and then i go to the audience in 80 or 90 of the time i'll use some of those things but not in the sequence because i just feel something else is needed right now i can see it i can feel it i don't do it based on a presupposed element in most cases so how do you know when to go off script and give us an example of you going off script and why it was more effective if you don't mind let me answer you in a long roundabout way and i'll try to i'm i'm in uh johannesburg and i i was invited to go on a safari as a part of being a guest speaker there for uh these uh billionaires that they had over there they invited me to go on a safari and it was my first time going on the safari i took my son with me and so i'm i'm sitting beside on a jeep early that morning my wife wasn't here and going she stayed in the house with the dorks clothes peeking through the window and all the animals my son and i got up early and we got out there and we went and i'm sitting beside a zoologist who's driving the jeep and out on the end of the engine of the jeep is a metal chair place where as zulu is sitting there with a rifle and we're going through the jungle yes and the zoologist is explaining all of the various components of the of the zoo how the animals teeth are cut in such a way that when they bite the branch they prune it without destroying it and how nature is so designed or god if you please and so desire uh the the planet to be self-sustaining right down to the the hoof prints of the animals and what it does to the soil it's very interesting but the problem was we had been driving all day and we had not seen the elephants and he uh he explained the elephants but he couldn't find them yeah toward the end of the day the zulu stood up on the edge of the jeep and licked his fingers and put it up in the air and said the elephant is over there and all of a sudden my head exploded my head exploded because not because of the majesty of the elephant so that was incredible not because we found the elephant so i wanted to do that my head exploded because suddenly i realized i was sitting in between intellect he could explain it an instinct you have to engage both intellect and instinct intellect makes you able to remember a particular piece of content information data stats whatever it is and you're getting ready to deliver instead tells you how to find it how to deliver it how to convey it in a way that is most effective an instinct happens in the moment it doesn't happen on the paper it happens in the moment there's an instinct i i have gotten up to speak with things written down on a piece of paper and right before i got up to speak thought throw your notes away i say with me talk about that same with me have you ever done that of tons of most of the time actually and i'm not exaggerating it is most the time but i still value feeding my brain in advance it's kind of like making deposits in a bank account so when you go to cash and check it doesn't bounce if you've made so many deposits of experience in life and emotion and commitment to understanding who you're here to communicate with and what you're passionate about what you think can help them then there's plenty to pull from but it's part of like you know result i always tell people success in life as a result of good judgment right you make good decisions you're gonna have a great life good judgment comes from experience right that's where part of our instinct comes from and experience often comes from that judgment right it's like right right right right so but but i think trusting that instinct whether you have history or not you're still a human being and i think we all have it but people don't always trust it and that's one of the great gifts that you have that's why the spontaneity of what you do like you have the you've done your homework you know your core message the messenger that you described you know what is your message but you also can vary in the moment and embody it all all those pieces if you think about it intellect on the level that we're talking is unique to the human species yes but instinct is common to all forms of life that's right it's why turtles lay eggs on the beach and the moment that the the turtle eggs are hatched they instinctively turn toward the water and sea turtles will immediately flap their way down to the water without instruction it's instinct it's why birds fly south in the winter is instinct it's why whales mate in mexico in january and december to march because it's instinct to go where the waters are warm for the birthing and the raising of their babies instinct and we have both good god we have both we have intellect we've got the zoologists we have the intellect and we've got the zulu we've got the instinct and if we put them together because sometimes what what wins your sun if you're losing ground with him isn't your intellect your degrees your accomplishments or writing him a check it's the instinct to understand this is a big this is a be there moment be there moments do not come with warning labels it's in state and so the instinct is just as important as the intellect whether you're building a sermon whether you're pulling a cake out of the oven the instinct says that the recipe said leave it in there for an hour and 20 minutes my instinct says it's done at an hour and 10. my instinct overrides my intellect i pull it out then and it had i left it in the full time for a mile and it would have been dry but my instincts saved my intellect what we want to do and the reason i wrote the book is to adorn you with both both the intellect and the instinct to be able to be better at verbalizing since the sensitivity to know when and where and how to bring your best self to the stage whether the stage is a typewriter a laptop uh whether the stage is the company you own or whether the stage is the family you love we don't want to lose any stages and the thing that will cause you to lose the stage is if you don't recognize the value of the life yeah it's beautiful and you just did the best summary of your book that anybody could give of course you would it's your book i hope people pick it up i think instinct and intellect are harnessed when you have a purpose that's bigger than yourself right when there's when there's a purpose for what you're doing more than yourself there's something about life that supports something that's supporting more of life like you're doing it for yourself it's certainly life's going to show up for you but if you're trying to do it for your family you're supporting more of life like you're different inside a community humanity i'm not talking about virtual signaling i'm talking about you know what's in your heart in my experience the instinct and the intellect come together for a higher purpose and you don't have to think about it it just comes through you and then it's your job as you said to recognize and use it but when you're already focused on serving it tends to happen in my experience so let's get the older you get the closer you get to to valuing uh selfless giving of toward purpose and destiny and legacy i think when you're younger you're trying to prove to yourself do i have anything yeah and once you answer that initial question do i have something then the question becomes how can i use it to better serve something bigger than myself because suddenly in the middle of my life i realized that i am uh i i am not living with you i am dying with you yeah your own mortality without a doubt without it yeah the moment i know that i am not living with you that i am dying with you did our conversation become so rich i mean talking to you right now i lose sight of the fact that anybody will hear our conversation let me tell you our conversation becomes so rich because we we were chosen not only to live together but to die together and we're having this conversation entire wow while the clock is ticking yes while the clock is ticking and we will never if we do this again tomorrow at the same time in the same place in the same clothes we could not recreate this moment to save our lives this moment stands in a category all by itself to be savored to be enjoyed and then it dissipates it goes to live in our memory bank until our memories are gone yes you make it so rich because you said my wife i would call her doctor death because she always compares everything to death in this area but death being a counselor not a jailer that's the difference some people think of it as a jailer and it becomes fear and i think yeah you you quoted somebody in the book here um uh or you're talking about when we fear something we either either worship it or or we don't understand something we worship that it was alice walker if we either worship it or we fear it right yeah learning learning how to utilize debt as a counselor so that you find a more deep meaning in your life is so powerful so i want to ask you in a world that's so divided if we're not going to drop the mic and we use our intellect not just spew things and our instinct what are the most important things that those of us who have a voice and we all have one when the world were in today everybody has a voice the question is will you be heard right and it doesn't even matter what the scale of it's a scale of depth of reach right it's not reached like i can get to this many people it's how deep can i go what would you say are some things maybe some principles that you would say would guide someone to not drop the mic in that moment and to not push people away or bringing ways to make sure we find ways to appreciate and unify rather than separate because you talked about in the book if i remember correctly the language i think you use with something like those that communicate in a way that separates or builds a bridge how do we in those moments not screw it up by just our own emotion or own desires but use it to build a bridge instead of distancing or pushing people away from us let's let kovid 19 become our teacher uh there are eight billion people on the planet but it infected us one at a time um the real change happens one at a time yeah uh it didn't affect every country at the same rate or the same pace but little by little one at a time it spread and at first we called it an epidemic and then it kept spreading and spreading and then they said no it's a pandemic and then it became a matter it was almost unstoppable when it happens one at a time and that's something everybody listening at us can do one at a time we can change the world if we delegate that responsibility to congress or presidents or senators or governors then we will misappropriate our own human responsibilities because the changing of the world begins with every inhabitant in the world and so to the degree that you have influence you start to change where you are whether you're an entrepreneur you've got three people on staff and all of them look like you act like you dress like you think like you then you have the challenge to integrate your team and have an experience that not only creates uh diversity but inclusive diversity invites me to the party inclusion asked me to dance so so so you start one by one by one that's a great distinction when you say that again i want everybody to hear that that's beautiful diversity invites me to the party inclusion asked me to dance that's gorgeous that's cool i think we have been doing a lot of diversity we've invited people to the party yeah but but they're never asked to dance they don't go to the after hours happy hour they don't go to the event at the golf course they don't they're not really in our life their decoration for our books and so when you include people and make them a part of the family then then our distinctions begin to change and so it's it starts with who you invite to dinner it starts with you coming to my house not just me coming to yours uh it's an amazing experience when you come out of areas that you control how much more you learn about people when you don't control what time dinner starts and what we're gonna have for dinner and what's gonna be on the menu and what kind of music is going to be played as long as you are in control you you may invite me into your control but it's still i'm still supporting it give up the power of always being in control and sit down on the floor with with the japanese and have a meal even though you're not good with chopsticks have the experience where you don't control all the variables it starts on that level walk through go through a neighborhood you drive past the highways allow you to bypass it and so does your heart because anything you can drive past you can live past talking about having the experience yeah i've always said that a belief is a poor substitute for an experience absolutely you can have a belief about white black brown and purple you have a belief about china until you go to china and not a sanitized version of it right right described because we call it american experience is more of a sanitized one if you go be there with real people and real experience then you start seeing the universals and you also see the differences and then they don't just you don't learn them many of them become a part of you my final question for you dear brother and thank you for going for so long and gone forever with you i just looked at the time gone way over but thank you uh and before i ask you that i want to just say remind everybody you got to go pick up this book if you're not convinced by now you never will be but go pick it up you know just don't drop the mic right this is your opportunity um my last question is simple what's the purpose of your life at this stage it's 63 years old you know like when i say purpose like i said everybody expresses it differently there are many purposes and what are you most passionate about today i have always been somebody one of those crazy nut case individuals who thought he could change the world and i remain optimistic that i can change the world yes and with the degree of strength and days and win and breadth that i have left i want to do things that that that leave the world better than when i found it uh so when i look at real estate i'm looking at housing i'm looking at creating workforce housing and creating better community options for people who are first responders uh because now we're living in cities where the people who serve the city can't afford to live in the city they serve so i have this lofty notion that i can change the world that i can uh get inner city kids pointed towards science technology uh engineering and math that i that i can make inroads here by exposing them to uh summer classes on stem and and after school classes that help to subsidize what they're not getting in school i still think i can change the world out of the 30 000 formerly incarcerated inmates that have gone through our texas offenders reentry initiative on one hand we're training the inmate for a job and on the other hand i'm meeting with ceos saying will you give them a chance yes and so i'm trying to supply uh need and supply because sometimes there are ceos who really want to make a difference yeah but you putting an ad in the wall street journal won't reach the guy you're trying to touch and so i want to be a bridge that connects supply and demand so that the best of us can go forward with the country rather than to sit around the pool waiting on those that we have elected to to change the world because they are encumbered by politics when it comes to changing the policies that create a better more holistic country and a better and safer world sometimes they have to obey the rules and it will take 10 years to do something that you and i can get together and do in 10 minutes if we don't relegate all all the change to their plate certainly a degree of change belongs to them and only they can do it but dr king wasn't a senator you know he wasn't he wasn't a mayor or a governor or a president he was dead at 39 yeah and and yet there's not hardly a country you can go into that doesn't know who he was and he did all of it before he was 40. we have we are the people we have been waiting on and it starts with we speak up not when they speak up it is when we speak up and and i still think i write toward that end i live toward that end that i could leave a legacy behind me that i change if i didn't change the world i changed somebody's world yeah if i could change somebody's world then to them i changed the world that's true that's beautiful well thank you for uh not only sharing with people how to be more effective communicators professionally personally but for the spiritual and soulful nourishment that you always bring because of who you are as a man and as a soul take in what you've heard today from this man sold to yours and decide what can you do what can you do today because so many times people say i don't know how dr king didn't know how you know what and why you know what needed to happen you knew why it needed to happen and then you know how we'll show up the tyranny of how is what keeps people from stopping and starting i should say it's what stops people so you're not one of those individuals and i hope today people have been inspired on multiple levels uh to live a deeper richer and a more integrated life so blessings to my brother and thank you for your time once again thank you for your time and the for the interview and most of all sincerely on a personal note i thank you for your friendship it has often been a blanket that kept my heart warm thank you you're better and more articulate than i am but i i think you can feel from my soul to yours how much i love and appreciate you and i know people will be touched because of people touched by what's real and what's raw and uh there's so much fake in the world even even reality television is fake as you will right it's nice a couple brothers can get together and talk truthfully so thank you for that great privilege and i'll look forward to seeing you soon thank you take care [Music] you

Channel: Tony Robbins

Views: 26,629

Keywords: tony robbins, motivation, inspiration

Id: JrzuEGCZlf4

Length: 96min 7sec (5767 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021