inches, he looks a hundred feet tall on the Megatron screen. Heâs movie-star handsome, with a head of thick brown hair, a Pepsodent smile, and impossibly defined cheekbones. EXPERIENCE TONY ROBBINS LIVE! the seminar advertisement had promised, and now here he is, dancing with the euphoric crowd.
Itâs about fifty degrees in the hall, but Tony is wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt and shorts. Many in the audience have brought blankets with them, having somehow known that the auditorium would be kept refrigerator-cold, presumably to accommodate Tonyâs high-octane metabolism. It would take another Ice Age to cool this man off. Heâs leaping and beaming and managing, somehow, to make eye contact with all 3,800 of us. The greeters jump rapturously in the aisles. Tony opens his arms wide, embracing us all. If Jesus returned to Earth and made his first stop at the Atlanta Convention Center, it would be hard to imagine a more jubilant reception.
This is true even in the back row where Iâm sitting with others who spent only $895 for âgeneral admission,â as opposed to $2,500 for a âDiamond Premiere Membership,â which gets you a seat up front, as close to Tony as possible. When I bought my ticket over the phone, the account rep advised me that the people in the front rowsâwhere âyouâre looking directly at Tony for sureâ instead of relying on the Megatronâare generally âmore successful in life.â âThose are the people who have more energy,â she advised. âThose are the people who are screaming.â I have no way of judging how successful the people next to me are, but they certainly seem thrilled to be here. At the sight of Tony, exquisitely stage-lit to set off his expressive face, they cry out and pour into the aisles rock-concert style.
Soon enough, I join them. Iâve always loved to dance, and I have toadmit that gyrating en masse to Top 40 classics is an excellent way to pass the time. Unleashed power comes from high energy, according to Tony, and I can see his point. No wonder people travel from far and wide to see him in person (thereâs a lovely young woman from Ukraine sittingâno, leapingânext to me with a delighted smile). I really must start doing aerobics again when I get back to New York, I decide.
When the music finally stops, Tony addresses us in a raspy voice, half Muppet, half bedroom-sexy, introducing his theory of âPractical Psychology.â The gist of it is that knowledge is useless until itâs coupled with action. He has a seductive, fast-talking delivery that Willy Loman would have sighed over. Demonstrating practical psychology in action, Tony instructs us to find a partner and to greet each other as if we feel inferior and scared of social rejection. I team up with a construction worker from downtown Atlanta, and we extend tentative handshakes, looking bashfully at the ground as the song âI Want You to Want Meâ plays in the background.
Then Tony calls out a series of artfully phrased questions:
âWas your breath full or shallow?â
âSHALLOW!â yells the audience in unison.
âDid you hesitate or go straight toward them?â
âHESITATE!â
âWas there tension in your body or were you relaxed?â
âTENSION!â
Tony asks us to repeat the exercise, but this time to greet our partners as if the impression we make in the first three to five seconds determines whether theyâll do business with us. If they donât, âeveryone you care about will die like pigs in hell.â
Iâm startled by Tonyâs emphasis on business successâthis is a seminar about personal power, not sales. Then I remember that Tony is not only a life coach but also a businessman extraordinaire; he started his career in sales and today serves aschairman of seven privately held companies.
BusinessWeek
once estimated his income at $80 million a
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