I remember seeing the book Awaken the giant within on my parents’ bookshelf when I was a teenager. It looked like a guide on how to give yourself Marfan syndrome because it was decorated with a full-page close-up of Tony Robbins’ cliff-like facial geometry.

He’s a big boy.

Who was this full-page cover-model and what in the world warranted such blunt self-promotion? Tony knew about clickbait before there were clicks to bait.

I had never before seen anything close to an instruction manual for life. That book was my first encounter with such a no-nonsense advice giving uncle figure. About 15 years later it all came full circle when a pop-up in an Instagram story alerted me to the fact that Tony was going to hold a seminar in London.

I wasn’t sold on it at first, but I have a long history of cynically opting out of good things, so I just decided to go for it. My boyfriend, Ben, also a fan of the toothy 90s’ juggernaut, joined me, and we set off for 4 of the most intense days of our lives (ok, 3 — more on that later).

The event was at the ExCel, an immense, hangar-like exhibition space in the Docklands area of London. In true Tony Robbins spirit, the space was enormous, and so was the guest list: 13.000 people from 67 countries. We met people from Brazil, Germany, India, Russia, Poland, Latvia and even my native Romania.

As we were just dipping our toes into the seminar game, we got the pleb tickets: Gold — and looking back, I feel that the return on buying the more exclusive tickets is low. But maybe I’m not thinking big enough.

The layers went through VIP, Ruby, Diamond all the way up to the stage-encircling £8.000 Solitaire seating that seemed to be a networking pool for Russian millionaires trying to become billionaires. Who knows, maybe chatting to, crying with and hugging Russian millionaires for 4 days straight can forge a bond of brotherhood that also makes business sense. I’m naive about these things.

Day 1

We breezed through registration, took a semi-ironic but enthusiastic picture with a cardboard Tony, and walked into the fortress that would be our windowless home for the next days.

It was 10 in the morning, and the party was kicking off.

A few of Tony’s trainers were doing some demure go-go dancing on stage, warming up the crowd to the choppy sounds of EDM. It was a strange sight to see middle-aged people getting amped up to Martin Garrix, but I guess that’s the point of getting out of your comfort zone — it’s not age restricted. Still, I couldn’t get the thought of watching water aerobics at an all-inclusive resort out of my mind.

We found some seats next to one of the secondary screens and started to clap tentatively and bounce around politely. This was the point when my skepticism hit its peak. “Yep, it’s a cult. I dragged my boyfriend into this, and our organs will soon be harvested.”

Then, the sound of engines revving (strangely).

More EDM.

Louder EDM.

And then — Tony.

Any feeling of awkwardness, pretence or falsity fell away in an instant. Tony carries a force field. He looks like a demigod that has descended upon man to deliver him from motivational constipation. Like Prometheus, but wielding a workbook and hella actionable steps.

His presence electrified all 13.000 people in a fraction of a second.

I’d scoff if I weren’t utterly entranced myself. There is something religious about a 6 foot 7 man with so much confidence he can suck the air out of a hangar.

In an age of anxiety, he looks like a beacon of intoxicating certainty.

Ok, on to the meat — the first day was all about frameworks. The three elements of practical psychology. The six human needs. The two basic fears. The three forms of communication.

It might sound like a timeshare pitch, but it’s great stuff. Tony has a way of boiling human psychology down to the schematic but keeping it relevant.

Most of day one was about fears and needs.What’s holding you back and what’s pushing you forward.

My favorite part of day one was the part about fears. It gives you a sense of deep connection to find out that we all, yes all 13.000 people and beyond, have the same two primary fears: That we’re not good enough and that we won’t be loved. It’s not just something that’s in the workbook. It’s a realization that everyone in the room has at the same time. If you strip the layers of your complicated, overwrought fears down to the essentials, it’s always these two.

For example, my most basic fear is that if I’m not unique and exciting, and if I’m not relentlessly, exhaustingly trying to prove it, I won’t be accepted. And that falls straight into the greatest hits of not enough / won’t be loved.

We’re all trying to prove something to solve the not enough dilemma, and it’s heartbreaking to realize that we’re all on the same hamster wheel.

Another insight about fear that I resonated with was: “Stress is what achievers call fear.” Yes, what an A-ha moment. I feel like stress is fear in a business suit. Panic in sheep’s clothing. Mundane and expected.

But fear is just one half of the equation — the push factor. The pull factor is need.

According to the gospel of Tony, the six basic needs are Significance, Certainty, Uncertainty, Love/Connection, Growth, and Contribution.

By having a sober look at how I’ve lived my life until now, I found that the core needs I’m guided by are certainty and significance — apparently the most common, and, as it always happens, the two that will screw you up the most. My priorities haven’t been helping me and that made me want to move towards making growth and contribution my central values.

Of course, we need to have all of these needs met in some way, but sometimes they’re contradictory. Like the need for certainty and the need for variety. It was a valuable insight to me that many of my mental hang-ups were the result of two or more of these needs being at odds.

I’ve often been in inner conflict and rarely in certainty, because I haven’t decided on my value hierarchy. I’ve been floating between force fields and whichever is strongest at any given time will pull me in its direction. You can’t prioritize all of your needs all of the time, even if they all sound important. The way to untangle them is to notice how you’re acting, to identify what your needs are and that you have a choice which needs to prioritize.

You can deliberately choose what’s most important to you, and that certainty will guide your actions.

After all that talk about frameworks, day one was topped off with the mother of all Tony Robbins’ clichés — the fire walk.

About an hour of guidance on how to walk on hot coals and we took off our shoes and marched into the vast parking lot of the ExCel to the hum of “Yes, Yes, Yes…”. It felt exciting, tribal, like we were going to throw a virgin into a volcano to save the harvest.

There were 40 fire pits, so there was an about 2.5% chance for us to end up doing the fire walk with Tony.

And we did.

He somehow appeared in our area, still larger than life and unphased after a twelve hour day. Then, he walked right in front of us, trampling confidently over the glowing embers, the routine of hundreds of times overlapping with the reality of walking in a real-life fire pit.

He gave every one of us a little pep talk before we walked. The most important thing when doing this is to hold on to that certainty. It’s hesitation that will get you. Thinking about it. Lingering. Backpedaling.

He grabbed me by the shoulder, held me for a few moments with his otherworldly hands and told me:

“You’re perfect. Now go!”

Day 2

This was a Tony free day.

You can’t have two consecutive Tony days because it’s not a sustainable use of Tony. A 12 hour day of jumping, clapping, profound presence and focus is like running a marathon. No Tony fan wants to burn out the source, so we made our peace with a medley of Joseph and old videos of the master.

Joseph is one of Tony’s veteran acolytes, and he’s steeped in that sweet, sweet Robbins wisdom. He’s not a substitute, though. While Tony has that otherworldly Dr. Manhattan quality, Joseph is more Mad Hatter — powered by sass.

On day two we got introduced to neuro-associative conditioning, which I think is just a different way of saying NLP (neuro-linguistic programming). In a stadium-sized room, where 13.000 people clap and hug on command, it’s probably good PR to steer clear of words like programming.

The core idea is that we are all jumbles of patterns and reactions that we’ve accumulated throughout our lives. These patterns are changeable. Your brain has slowly built superhighways for your most common thought and reaction patterns. Your task is to create new roads around them, through more pleasant scenery and condition yourself to use them until they become your future superhighways.

To change your pattern you just have to get ‘leverage’. Getting leverage means that you have to make your current situation, and so the old, limiting model, seem unbearable. On the other hand, you have to imagine your desired outcome as bright and vividly as possible. All four days are dedicated to uncovering these patterns and helping you divert the path into a future that you choose. What strikes me is that this seems to be very much in line with what Jordan Peterson means when he urges people to construct a heaven to run towards and a hell from which to run away.

Looking at this immense void between heaven and hell gives you the certainty to move forward, but it’s not enough.

Once you have this contrast set up, you need to interrupt your usual pattern. Humans are creatures of habit, and we’re on autopilot most of the time. Motivation will give you about three days of fire in your belly before you burn out and get back onto your usual rails.

Constructing and reinforcing a new pattern is what will keep you going. Better systems that you build up step by step and not pure willpower, that’s how people change. And that’s why this seminar is four days long.

You don’t just have to know what to do. You have to do it long enough to start to live it.

Day 3

It’s the third day and Tony’s back. And it’s a big one — the most intense and revealing of all the days so far.

Even though there was a lot more going on, the central event of the day was the “Dickens Process.” This technique gets its name from A Christmas Carol, where the wicked Scrooge is invited to visit two variants of his future: One where he hasn’t changed his evil ways and one where he’s chosen to live virtuously.

This day is all about creating your heaven and hell.

The process starts by asking you to list your most important limiting beliefs. These are ideas that drive you unconsciously and that have had negative or unwanted consequences in your life. For full disclosure — here are my central limiting beliefs:

I’m not able to relate to people or appreciate them, I’m too different from most people — and I need to be unique to be recognized by others

These two patterns are two sides of the same coin. I judge others by the same unforgiving standard I impose on myself — the need to continually be interesting, distinctive, flawless. I find it hard to relate to others because I can’t connect to this existing, imperfect, pesky version of myself that just won’t go away.

So how does the Dickens process work?

We’re invited to visualize a future that is one, then five, then ten, then twenty years away, where our limiting beliefs have run amok. In my case: What would my life look like if I was hateful and unforgiving towards myself and resented humanity for another 20 years?

The room got quiet and dark, and we were left there to imagine. I was visualizing how this way of thinking would affect my life — my love, my relationships, my work, my ambitions.

My vision of the future was apocalyptic.

Living with stunted self-compassion, understanding and connection to others felt like death by a thousand cuts. The most vivid moment was imagining passing on this cruel perspective to my children. Poisoning them with suspicion, insecurity, fear and robbing them of potentially valuable relationships and opportunities.

I was crying.

We were all crying. Some hysterically — which was at times endearing, at times scary, at times utterly distracting.

In the darkness, we were all one solid mass of damnation and disaster.

It was powerful because it gave me a tangible hell that I constructed merely by imagining 20 more years of business as usual. It made the future real and slowly started the process of turning my ‘shoulds’ into ‘musts.’

Then, we did the reverse. We imagined a heaven.

It was just as vivid as my hell, but it was the unbridled ideal. A vision of health, peace, and fulfillment. It was also an exercise filled with a great sense of gratitude for all the wonder and love I’ve been privileged to experience.

It gave me a sense of abundance.

It showed my imagination a precedent.

To those who have, more will be given.

The point of the exercise was to take the future from abstract to concrete, to teach the brain that a beautiful vision for the next 50 years isn’t a should — it’s a must.

Once you see your future in front of you and you know what it is and what it’s supposed to look like (and what it’s not), it’s so much easier to go for it.

Day 4

We went to the park and enjoyed an extraordinary sunny day in London. I also made a celebratory but wonky embroidery of my favorite quote:

If you want to take the island, burn the boats.

Yes, we decided to skip this day.

I know. We’re bad.

Even more so because some of the veterans said, it’s the best day, the most practically applicable: “It will change your life.”

Why did we skip it? Because it was a day dedicated to nutrition and fitness. And, by God, have I experimented with that. Ben and I are doing most of the things recommended already.

Also, some of the material seemed a bit out there and had a strikingly vegetarian bent. Calling my precious bacon “poison animal flesh,” won’t spark my curiosity. You could call it Satan’s Roadkill and I’d still sprinkle it on everything. I might be a lost cause for the full spectrum of Day 4 level enlightenment.

But as I don’t like to do the whole baby + bathwater disposal thing, I’m going to take some of the pointers in the workbook. I’ve gotten a lot of value from the first three days, and I’m not going to dismiss it entirely. The argument from authority still works for me, though I do feel very much secure with the experience of years of trying every foodstuff, exercise and biohacking trend known to man.

In conclusion, it was a once-in-a-lifetime, would-definitely-do-again kind of experience.

I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a look under the hood of their mind, stare at the mystical gears for a few days, and maybe do some fine tuning. And yes, you will experience a few moments of pure cringe, but suck it up because there’s a lot of gold too.