3 Things I Learnt By Being Tony Robbins’ Coach!
These peak performance coaching lessons came from three years inside a world most people only see from the outside – Tony Robbins events, and the clients who paid to be there.
Now it’s important I say one thing here:I was Tony Robbins peak performance coach for Asia Pacific for a three year period coaching his clients across 12 countries – I did not coach Tony himself!
You could say I crossed to the dark side for a few years, worked with the guy who is known for the big hair, big teeth and big hands, but I never did drink the coolade! All jokes aside, it was one of the great experiences of my career.
I stepped into uncertainty on a daily basis, I was a breakout speaker at his flagship event and smashed a company record for selling coaching off my keynote presentation, made fantastic friends from colleagues and clients alike and I learned to completely say ‘Bring It On’ to uncertainty.
So when I look back and reflect on all my awesome business, sales and CXO clients, what stands out?
What’s important, is to remind ourselves of those strong personal leadership skills and insights that must form the foundation of any work we do across our roles, our business and our lives. So some of those distinctions were, and are still relevant today, but it’s important to remember that if we’re not doing it, we don’t know it and we need to do both today to gain any type of competitive edge.
Don’t just take feedback, read between the lines
Imagine being in a role play at the front of a u-shaped training room where you were tagged to be the next coach to coach a client … and you hadn’t been ing hard enough so that you missed the segue as the incoming coach. You were coaching in front of both your peers and the directors and front line managers of Tony Robbins.
You finished the role play, stood up for feedback and they then canned you as being the worst example of a coaching session they had ever seen. Now imagine you standing there, motionless and pale, yet in a total state of empowerment you said just two words – Thank You!
Now add to the angst, that you were the only one not to be called out of the room over a 2 week period and were sure the flight home to Australia was going to be very long and lonely based on you being the only one who failed. However, it was the opposite; the reason you weren’t called out was because you had already demonstrated that you could take feedback, and gracefully, in front of your peers. Epic moment!
If you are going to stuff up (aka ‘make a huge mistake’ for non Australians), the secret is to stuff up with certainty! Imagine you are balled out, imagine you make a mistake and don’t hear something the way it was meant, imagine you are given feedback by a client or team mate or manager… take my word, the quickest way to move on, is to say ‘thank you’ and not put any attachment on it but read between the lines – then do something about it.
So how might you view things from here on in when someone questions you , comments or gives you their opinion on something you did or said?
Tasks minimise when you schedule them
You can spend all the money in the world on fancy time management tools or shortcuts but at the end of the day good old Parkinson’s Law kicks in – “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. The secret is to get real about how long something is REALLY going to take. Something that will only take 5 minutes can be imagined to take a lot longer if it is not scheduled. Delegate what you can but schedule the task directly into your calendar and watch the stress dissipate.
It’s about chunking your responsibilities into categories ie for a sales role it might be prospecting, reporting, social engagement, proposal writing and face to face meetings to begin with.
Everything that is a typical ‘to do’ list gets allocated against a category and from there it’s as simple as Pareto’s Law – pick the top 20% to work on, rinse and repeat. We can’t do everything at once, no matter what they say, so to make it easy when our head hits the pillow at least we know we are making progress across every area. And that is how momentum is created, but the minute you stop acknowledging momentum, you will stall, so always be grateful for what has been completed and what has worked.
What, then, might you do differently that will help you influence the way you spend your time and feel more fulfilled and less stressed at the end of the day?
The triggers of crisis and industry trends
For those of us in sales, we need to demonstrate our understanding of our buyers business and a couple of the ways to do that is by understanding trigger events or even industry trends. So it’s important that we can help our buyers or clients and we can do that by anticipating potential changes or crises that will impact them.
Some of those trigger events could be:
* a change in technology (think Blockbuster and Netflix) * a change in culture (think time spent on computers today vs watching TV and leveraging advertising dollar) * a change in economy (think the GFC) * a change in customers lives (think demographics and the average age of countries as an example, with USA’s average age being 48 years, Australia being 33years, India 26 years and how this will determine future growth) * a change in your life (think illness, retirement) * a change in competition (think big store comes into town and little stores now in uncertainty).
The important thing for us is to not wait for a problem to occur and then change things, but add value to our buyers based on where things are going, so keep your ear close to the ground and your wits about you.
Where might you be able to leverage trigger events or industry trends to discuss with your clients or potential buyers this week?
So there you have it. Three key things out of hundreds of different distinctions I was privy to, that shift the way so many people think.
Most of all, being a part of team of like minded and supportive people, allowed me to play a bigger game as a leader and realise my passion in bridging corporate goals with revenue potential so that salespeople, sales teams and sales environments win, and the profession of selling is elevated.
So a final question for you – What leader do you want to be and what would happen if that leader ran your show?
Oh, and a word from the big man himself just to demonstrate I wasn’t too shabby in the coaching/mentoring department 🙂 :
‘wonderful breakthrough for this client. thanks for sharing the impact of your intervention!’
‘There is no more powerful way to be an powerful and effective coach/force for good then to lead by example! people don’t to what they say, they feel and witness what you really do. Keep Rocking! Tony’
Applying These Peak Performance Coaching Lessons Yourself
You do not need a stage the size of Tony Robbins’ to use these peak performance coaching lessons. Read between the feedback you get instead of just taking it at face value. Schedule the tasks that matter instead of hoping you will find time. Notice the triggers before the crisis, not after.
If you want help turning these peak performance coaching lessons into something your sales team actually practises, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations are built around exactly this kind of high-performance thinking.
Peak performance coaching is not really about motivation – anyone can get someone fired up for an hour on a stage. Peak performance coaching is about what happens on the Tuesday after, when the room is empty and the old habits are waiting.
If there is one habit that separates good peak performance coaching from forgettable motivation, it is follow-through. The coaches who mattered in that world were not the loudest in the room – they were the ones who checked back in three weeks later to see if anything had actually changed.
That is the real test of peak performance coaching: not how the room feels in the moment, but what is still different a month on.
Good peak performance coaching also has a quiet side nobody puts on stage – the discipline of asking one more question instead of offering one more answer. That restraint is harder to teach than any technique, and it is usually what separates peak performance coaching from a pep talk with a good soundtrack.
Three years of peak performance coaching taught me more about what does not work than what does. Most of what fails is not lack of effort – it is effort aimed at the wrong thing, dressed up as commitment.
So if you take one thing from these peak performance coaching lessons, let it be this: check where your effort is actually going, not where you meant for it to go.
Three Peak Performance Coaching Questions Worth Stealing
If you want to borrow from this world of peak performance coaching without the stage, the confetti or the price tag, these three questions do most of the work.
- What did you actually do, not what did you plan to do? Peak performance coaching lives in the gap between intention and action – most people overestimate how much of that gap they have closed.
- What feedback have you been given that you have not actually used yet? Peak performance coaching treats unused feedback as wasted feedback, no matter how good the advice was.
- What would you do differently this week if someone was checking in with you on Friday? Peak performance coaching works because of that accountability, not despite it.
None of these questions require Tony Robbins-sized production values. Peak performance coaching, stripped down to its essentials, is really just consistent, honest follow-up – the unglamorous part nobody puts in the highlight reel.
Looking back, that stretch of peak performance coaching changed how I think about my own clients more than it changed anything about theirs. You cannot ask someone to do the work of peak performance coaching honestly if you have not done it on yourself first.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
