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This comes from Eric Robbie (whose signature is at the bottom) which parts of this confirmed by Jonathan Altfeld, John Grinder and others:
1. One of Tony Robbins's first jobs, at the age of 19, was to go out as an advance man for a motivational speaker called Jim Rohn, who traveled around the US, doing tent shows. One of Rohn's big things was to make his entrance by running dynamically down the aisle and leaping energetically up on to the stage while his staff led the clapping and the whooping and the hollering. Rohn did this to show that he was, well, dynamic.
When Tony Robbins started doing his shows in 1983-84, he not only copied the business model of sending out a bunch of advance men six weeks ahead - to fill the show or else (or else they didn't eat, 'cos they were working 100 per cent on commission) - he also made his entrance by running dynamically down the aisle to leap up on stage while his staff led the clapping and the whooping and the hollering - to show that he, too, was ... dynamic.
2. The year Tony Robbins did his Practitioner track - which was 1983, with Grinder, DeLozier, and Associates - he also went along to a seminar called "Spiritual Reality Training" given by an ex-stage magician turned new age speaker called Tolly Burkan. The big component of the seminar was that you wrote out your most limiting beliefs on a piece of paper, and then you went outside and threw it on a blazing log fire.
A few hours later, when the logs had settled down to glowing embers, and after you'd been given some exercises and words of preparation, you would go out again and walk across the hot coals, to prove that, if you could do that, you could do anything.
Within weeks, Tony Robbins was offering "Fear Into Power: the Firewalk Experience", where on a Friday night, and to the accompaniment of much loud music, dancing in their seats, and rah-rah, people wrote out a list of their biggest fears, and then went outside to throw it on the fire.
A few hours later, after (1) anchoring a memory of success to a clenched fist punched into the air, (2) being told to keep your eyes looking up (to notionally stay in visual and out of kinesthetic), and (3) chanting "cool moss, cool moss" (to jam up any scary, "I can't" internal dialog), participants went outside - to walk across the hot coals and prove that, if they could do that, why, "I can do anything!"
(Throughout the event there was also very heavy selling for the two-day class beginning the next morning, which class taught basic nlp and rapport, but was entitled "the Mind Revolution".)
3. When Tony Robbins decided he wanted a book out with his name on it, he gave US $5,000 to each of five leading nlp trainers of the mid-80s so that they would each write two or three chapters. Amongst those contributing were Wyatt Woodsmall, Tad James, and Cathy Modrial.
The resulting manuscript was then edited into unified shape, with the jargon smoothed out and the writing improved not by Tony Robbins, but by two desk editors - Peter Applebome and Henry Golden - with further editing by Jan Miller and Bob Asahina at Simon and Schuster. The title of the book is Unlimited Power (1986).
4. In 1987, Tony Robbins told Bruce Rowe, a writer working for the winter issue of the US magazine, Rapporter, of how he'd used nlp modeling to improve US Army training in pistol shooting, and how he, Robbins, "was able to qualify 100 per cent of the shooters in one day, and triple those qualifying at expert level."
In fact, as posted elsewhere on this forum, the people who did the bulk of the modeling of pistol shooting were LTC Robert Klaus, Wyatt Woodsmall, Richard Graves, Paul Tyler, John Alexander, and Dave Wilson. Tony Robbins was very much the junior, the intern.
It was Wyatt Woodsmall, who has made it a habit over the years to encourage young talent and to be generous to those in whom he sees promise - including both Marvin Oka and myself - who invited Robbins along, and he did so because he, Wyatt, admired Tony's chutzpah, or self-confidence. But on the day, Tony was not the one running the show, or making the key distinctions. What he was useful for was confidently instructing trainees, once he was given the pattern.
And as for those "in one day" statistics, the actual figures are that:
"The basic qualification at that time was ‘Marksman', with ‘Sharpshooter' and then 'Expert' coming above that - a Marksman being able to get 30 hits on target out of 45 rounds fired. Two groups of soldiers were taught side by side - one group getting the nlp-based training, the other group - the ‘control group'- getting the standard army training.
"The control group took 27 hours to get 73 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with only 10 per cent of the group making Expert. The nlp-based group took 12 hours to get 100 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with 25 per cent making Expert."
which means the figures given to Bruce Rowe were glossed up a bit, ad-man style, as well as the impression given that the project was all done by Tony.
5. As far as I know, Tony Robbins has never attended a Master Practitioner track as a student, nor has he ever done a formal Trainer Training. He did, however, send 15 of his people to take the Master track that I had the privilege of co-teaching with Richard Bandler, in August, 1989 - with the clear intention that they'd "bring back the latest".
(In those days, staff from the Robbins organization were sent round to other trainings - not to sit in the class and take the training, but just to pay a "courtesy" visit - and then ask if they could have a copy of all the hand-outs. On this occasion, however, those 15 were paid for, and took the whole course.)
Most of what I taught as part of that 12-day training - about language, about the effect of presuppositions, about solving the "problem of criteria" by separating them into both rules and values - appeared in the book, Awake the Giant Within, but without any crediting, while the five-stage chain I offered from values through rules and complex equivalents to reference experiences became "a Date with Destiny" - also without any crediting.
And it wasn't just my stuff which got purloined. Material by Leslie Cameron-Bandler and David Gordon on "the virtual question" and material by Charles Faulkner on metaphor also appeared in AtGW without any crediting. As did the whole bit about "associate massive pain with where you are, and associate massive pleasure with where you're going" which was a hardly-bothering-to-disguise-it steal of Richard Bandler's propulsion systems.
As to writing style and clarity, again, most of that is down to the desk editors, Jan Miller, Dick Snyder, Bob Asahina, and Sarah Bayliss at Simon and Schuster.
It's not that Mr Robbins could be more pretentious, and yet he isn't, it's that he already is pretending - pretending that he originated most of the ideas in those first two books, as well as pretending that their easy style is his, and not that of his ghost writers and editors.
ER
1. One of Tony Robbins's first jobs, at the age of 19, was to go out as an advance man for a motivational speaker called Jim Rohn, who traveled around the US, doing tent shows. One of Rohn's big things was to make his entrance by running dynamically down the aisle and leaping energetically up on to the stage while his staff led the clapping and the whooping and the hollering. Rohn did this to show that he was, well, dynamic.
When Tony Robbins started doing his shows in 1983-84, he not only copied the business model of sending out a bunch of advance men six weeks ahead - to fill the show or else (or else they didn't eat, 'cos they were working 100 per cent on commission) - he also made his entrance by running dynamically down the aisle to leap up on stage while his staff led the clapping and the whooping and the hollering - to show that he, too, was ... dynamic.
2. The year Tony Robbins did his Practitioner track - which was 1983, with Grinder, DeLozier, and Associates - he also went along to a seminar called "Spiritual Reality Training" given by an ex-stage magician turned new age speaker called Tolly Burkan. The big component of the seminar was that you wrote out your most limiting beliefs on a piece of paper, and then you went outside and threw it on a blazing log fire.
A few hours later, when the logs had settled down to glowing embers, and after you'd been given some exercises and words of preparation, you would go out again and walk across the hot coals, to prove that, if you could do that, you could do anything.
Within weeks, Tony Robbins was offering "Fear Into Power: the Firewalk Experience", where on a Friday night, and to the accompaniment of much loud music, dancing in their seats, and rah-rah, people wrote out a list of their biggest fears, and then went outside to throw it on the fire.
A few hours later, after (1) anchoring a memory of success to a clenched fist punched into the air, (2) being told to keep your eyes looking up (to notionally stay in visual and out of kinesthetic), and (3) chanting "cool moss, cool moss" (to jam up any scary, "I can't" internal dialog), participants went outside - to walk across the hot coals and prove that, if they could do that, why, "I can do anything!"
(Throughout the event there was also very heavy selling for the two-day class beginning the next morning, which class taught basic nlp and rapport, but was entitled "the Mind Revolution".)
3. When Tony Robbins decided he wanted a book out with his name on it, he gave US $5,000 to each of five leading nlp trainers of the mid-80s so that they would each write two or three chapters. Amongst those contributing were Wyatt Woodsmall, Tad James, and Cathy Modrial.
The resulting manuscript was then edited into unified shape, with the jargon smoothed out and the writing improved not by Tony Robbins, but by two desk editors - Peter Applebome and Henry Golden - with further editing by Jan Miller and Bob Asahina at Simon and Schuster. The title of the book is Unlimited Power (1986).
4. In 1987, Tony Robbins told Bruce Rowe, a writer working for the winter issue of the US magazine, Rapporter, of how he'd used nlp modeling to improve US Army training in pistol shooting, and how he, Robbins, "was able to qualify 100 per cent of the shooters in one day, and triple those qualifying at expert level."
In fact, as posted elsewhere on this forum, the people who did the bulk of the modeling of pistol shooting were LTC Robert Klaus, Wyatt Woodsmall, Richard Graves, Paul Tyler, John Alexander, and Dave Wilson. Tony Robbins was very much the junior, the intern.
It was Wyatt Woodsmall, who has made it a habit over the years to encourage young talent and to be generous to those in whom he sees promise - including both Marvin Oka and myself - who invited Robbins along, and he did so because he, Wyatt, admired Tony's chutzpah, or self-confidence. But on the day, Tony was not the one running the show, or making the key distinctions. What he was useful for was confidently instructing trainees, once he was given the pattern.
And as for those "in one day" statistics, the actual figures are that:
"The basic qualification at that time was ‘Marksman', with ‘Sharpshooter' and then 'Expert' coming above that - a Marksman being able to get 30 hits on target out of 45 rounds fired. Two groups of soldiers were taught side by side - one group getting the nlp-based training, the other group - the ‘control group'- getting the standard army training.
"The control group took 27 hours to get 73 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with only 10 per cent of the group making Expert. The nlp-based group took 12 hours to get 100 per cent of the soldiers to Marksman level, with 25 per cent making Expert."
which means the figures given to Bruce Rowe were glossed up a bit, ad-man style, as well as the impression given that the project was all done by Tony.
5. As far as I know, Tony Robbins has never attended a Master Practitioner track as a student, nor has he ever done a formal Trainer Training. He did, however, send 15 of his people to take the Master track that I had the privilege of co-teaching with Richard Bandler, in August, 1989 - with the clear intention that they'd "bring back the latest".
(In those days, staff from the Robbins organization were sent round to other trainings - not to sit in the class and take the training, but just to pay a "courtesy" visit - and then ask if they could have a copy of all the hand-outs. On this occasion, however, those 15 were paid for, and took the whole course.)
Most of what I taught as part of that 12-day training - about language, about the effect of presuppositions, about solving the "problem of criteria" by separating them into both rules and values - appeared in the book, Awake the Giant Within, but without any crediting, while the five-stage chain I offered from values through rules and complex equivalents to reference experiences became "a Date with Destiny" - also without any crediting.
And it wasn't just my stuff which got purloined. Material by Leslie Cameron-Bandler and David Gordon on "the virtual question" and material by Charles Faulkner on metaphor also appeared in AtGW without any crediting. As did the whole bit about "associate massive pain with where you are, and associate massive pleasure with where you're going" which was a hardly-bothering-to-disguise-it steal of Richard Bandler's propulsion systems.
As to writing style and clarity, again, most of that is down to the desk editors, Jan Miller, Dick Snyder, Bob Asahina, and Sarah Bayliss at Simon and Schuster.
It's not that Mr Robbins could be more pretentious, and yet he isn't, it's that he already is pretending - pretending that he originated most of the ideas in those first two books, as well as pretending that their easy style is his, and not that of his ghost writers and editors.
ER
