one almighty mess. It was beginning to dawn on me just how lost we both were.
A Ray of Hope
One night, after visiting her in hospital, I came home and slumped down on the couch. I switched on late-night TV and surfed through the channels, hoping to find something to occupy my mind so I could drift off to sleep.
After a few moments I am glued to the TV screen, I'm feeling a tinge of hope. It was an infomercial by Tony Robbins, the American motivational guru. His message was clear: you can master your own destiny. I hear of his work with celebrities like Andre Agassi, but also ordinary people who have attended his events and had life-changing breakthroughs in their businesses and their private lives. People who had been stuck for years had seemingly magically transformed their circumstances. They seemed like genuine people, too – not weird or funky, but solid, dependable types.
I'm naturally sceptical as I call the freephone number.
‘Thank you for calling the Anthony Robbins Companies. Marshonda Henderson here, how may I assist you?’
Marshonda's incredible gift of the gab convinces me to enrol in the Mastery University programme, which is tens of thousands of dollars'-worth of investment.
‘What have I got to lose?’ I ask myself, and resolve – against all medical advice – to check her out of the Priory Hospital.
A few weeks later, if you had travelled with us, you would have flown to the Orange County Convention Centre in Florida. We had front row seats at Robbins' Unleash the Power Within event. It promised us major breakthroughs, and boy do we need something. I feel like it's my last throw of the dice.
Tony Robbins hits the stage and begins by telling all 5,000 of us that we have the power to change and that later that night we will be walking across hot coals as proof of our power. She is joining in, but I can see she is only going through the motions. I get a sense that her problems are too deeply ingrained for any lasting real change to occur.
‘I'm looking for someone who's depressed,’ Tony asks the audience. Instinctively, without thinking, I raise her arm. My heart is racing.
One of ‘Those’ Moments
As ‘luck’ would have it, out of those 5,000 people, Tony Robbins chose her to work with one on one. Now picture the scene: the auditorium is huge, with giant screens at the front of the room on either side. There are cameras onstage now, trained on both of us, to capture every nuance of this interaction.
I swallow hard and hope Robbins knows what he's doing.
‘So you're depressed? Why are you depressed? Tell me about it,’ Robbins commands.
Within a few moments she is tearful, rocking back and forth on her chair in the foetal position, and she's starting to become withdrawn and unresponsive.
‘What the hell? How's this going to help?’ I'm thinking.
Then he asks her something that totally surprised me. ‘Have you ever had an explosive orgasm?’
‘Huh?’ she asks, incredulously.
‘I'm just curious. Have you ever had an explosive orgasm?’ he asked again.
‘I can't tell you that!’ she said coyly. The audience laughs.
‘Well you just told 5,000 people about this depressing episode. Why not tell us about this joyful one?’
She's stumped, and looks confused. Robbins calls on help from the audience.
‘Ladies and gentleman, can she tell us about this experience – yes or no?’
Five thousand people respond as one with ‘Yes!’ and clap enthusiastically.
Robbins asks, ‘Can you think about that time now? Go back to that time and see what you saw, hear what you heard and feel what you felt.’
She closes her eyes and begins to associate back to the experience. It starts to resemble the scene from the movie When Harry Met Sally where Sally (played by Meg Ryan) has a full-blown orgasm in a café.
The crowd cheers her on and it starts to build up – and I mean really build up, if you know what I mean. She is flushed in the face and making quite a sound through the microphone she's holding. Now remember, there are cameras onstage looking at us, so the whole audience can see on the big screens what is taking place. You should have seen the look on my face. All I remember thinking was … ‘I haven't seen this before!’
This one seminar changed her life. She was totally stuck but came to realize through this intervention that she had the power to choose her emotions depending on what she focused on and the meaning she gave to what happened to her.
I remember thinking, ‘I'm so grateful, but what a shame we had to travel internationally to resolve this. And why, when I looked for answers, was I told that tablets were the answer?’
And then, as gentle as a whisper at the back of my mind, I thought, ‘Maybe that's why you're here, Andy? Maybe it's meant to be you up there on stage too?’
I was inspired. I wanted to do something similar to Tony Robbins. I wanted to know what he knew and inspire others to make changes in their lives too. But then another thought crept in my mind: ‘Don't be ridiculous, Andy. Who's going to listen to you?’
Have YOU ever had a dream, but it just seemed too big? It seems so far away from your starting point that you give up before you've even started?
I told myself to forget about it and stop dreaming. That is, until another Tony Robbins seminar a few months later.
A Date with Destiny
It's the final day of the Date with Destiny event in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. We are asked to pair up with a stranger and look directly into their eyes and become really present for them.
This is difficult for me, and I'm a bit slow in finding a partner. It soon becomes apparent everyone has a partner other than me. There are 5,000 people in the room, but I can only see one other person that doesn't have a partner…
Tony Robbins.
Now picture the scene. I'm in Row 16 of around 100 rows of seating. There are security guards all around the stage stopping idiots like me from getting too close to Tony. However, I'm on a mission, and when some guards are distracted I get Tony's attention and motion to him to be my partner. To my complete surprise, he agrees. I proceed to spend five minutes with Tony Robbins that changes the entire direction of my life.
Now I don't know if he remembered I was the partner of the person he had helped, but I looked at him and I was so grateful for what he had done – for all the skill he had, the knowledge he had and the marketing efforts that reached out to me through TV. Tears were pouring from my eyes and to my astonishment I noticed tears rolling down his cheeks, too.
In that moment, I made a life-changing decision. I resolved that even though I was not an expert in any field – not a speaker, an author or a coach – I would learn what I could and seek to help those who like us needed inspiration.
I also secretly dreamt that one day I might share the stage with Tony Robbins.
A Passion into Profit
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