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Personal development through the energy of the crowd
I (Cathérine) recently attended a four-day seminar called ‘Unleash the Power within’ by Tony Robbins, who is perhaps the most famous coach in the world. Tony has been giving personal development seminars for over 40 years, bringing together huge numbers of people. In my case, there were over 13,000 people together in the Lanxess Arena in Cologne, plus thousands more who were connected virtually. On a somewhat smaller scale, I have previously attended Christian Bischoff‘s German-language seminars, which have helped me a lot.
There are many other coaches who offer smaller and larger events with different focuses (in person and/or digitally) and who, depending on your personal situation and preferences, can be helpful for personal development. I would like to say that this is not an explicit recommendation for the people mentioned. Rather, my reflection and analysis relates to the experience I have had with their offerings.
The advantage of (larger) personal development events compared to self-learning, individual coaching and small groups – all of which I also consider to be very valuable! – is that a large number of people can release an incredible amount of (positive) energy. The motivational boost of developing further together with many others and breaking new ground is special and can hardly be described if you haven’t experienced it yourself. When the whole room is filled with loving and grateful people, it has an incredible power and the energy field changes noticeably. That gives me hope for the world. The dynamic is perhaps most comparable to a good concert, except that it is not about (rather passive) music consumption, but about shaping one’s own life through reflection, exchange, learning and activities with the whole group.
Mutual support for personal development
In addition, personal development events make it easy to get to know other people directly in a profound way, who enrich your life beyond the event itself. I could write a small novel about that alone. These people help, among other things, to implement the clarity, motivation and resolutions gained at the event in the long term and not to fall straight back into old patterns after the ‘seminar rush’. They are people who understand what you experienced there, that you want to grow in life and who motivate you to realise your dreams.
Because if you embark on such an event for personal development, you will return home changed. Depending on your own environment, it is often not seen in an entirely positive light if you behave differently or look at the world in a new way. We also noticed this power of the group and the helpful support of like-minded people during and after our own CREATE Convention.
To give you a concrete example: You may have worked on your beliefs about self-worth, nutrition and health during the seminar and now want to stop smoking, drink less alcohol or eat more healthily, for example. Now your environment can make your resolution a little more difficult if it thinks you are a buzzkill and keeps asking you to go back to the cigarette, wine or cake. People don’t always like it when people they seem to know and who have previously acted in a similar way to them suddenly stop doing so.
In order to establish your new habit for health in a stable way, you must not let this stop you and, on the other hand, look for supportive voices who may feel the same way at home.
Selecting helpful tools for a new world
People like Tony Robbins and his circle are undoubtedly extremely successful and wealthy. They have mastered the rules of our current system and are top performers in it. In my opinion, they really care about making other people’s lives better. They want to contribute to this with their own insights and their work. They seem to me to have really good intentions. They haven’t had to work for money for a long time. Either way, I can’t see into anyone and I don’t want to judge any behaviour or characters. However, during the seminar I couldn’t help but compare the statements made with how I imagine a regenerative ‘new’ world.
As all coaches say, we look at the world differently depending on how we are influenced and on our attitudes – through which glasses we look, so to speak. None of these glasses show the only true truth, which means that no one person is universally right. Therefore, my idea is no more correct than that of the coaches or other people.
Before I go into the discrepancies between the content of the seminar and my own ideas and explain why I consider it important to question what I learned at the seminar, I would like to talk about the value of the event.
At this personal development event (as with others), I gathered a lot of energy and motivation to take a closer look at my life and see where I can do things better for the benefit of the community as well as for my own life – which is always interconnected. I have become more aware of my own greatness again and I don’t mean that in the ‘ego’ sense, but in the spiritual sense in relation to my higher self (it can also be called consciousness, awareness, all-encompassing energy or divine spark or similar).
I have recognised where I am still living below my potential to the detriment of everyone and where I am allowing myself to be limited by beliefs, values and rules. At the same time, I have realised again what amazing and wondrous things people are capable of. I have gained more understanding and appreciation for the people and circumstances in my life and have felt and taken with me a great sense of gratitude for the miracle of my life and for everything I have experienced so far. I am therefore full of gratitude for all the people who worked on this personal development event and for the experiences and insights I was able to take away from it.
When attending such events, it is important for me to bear in mind that the coaches and speakers also have their own perspective and give their suggestions according to their own world view. Against the background of our productivity-oriented society, I think it is important to differentiate precisely between approaches to personal development where they lead to (excessive) self-optimisation and where they are helpful for the good of the individual and the greater whole, for example by contributing to healing. In most cases, this line is rather fluid and it depends on the exact implementation. Therefore, we should by no means reject everything that is taught at such events. On the contrary: I think that we are not really making progress with the desired change to a ‘new’ world in part because we tend to find everything from the ‘old’ world, including successful people, bad. However, this fails to recognise that not everything is ‘bad’ and prevents us from using what is helpful for our impact.
For example, with ethically designed marketing – in which I learn from previously successful marketing measures and see which of them I consider to be more manipulative and which are justifiable – I can also bring people closer to my heart project for a more beautiful world. Marketing is not fundamentally bad; we humans will always want to pass on information about offers and motivate others to do something that is important to us. It’s the ‘how’ that matters. However, if we associate marketing with negative beliefs such as greed, we lose the opportunity to use sensible approaches to make a positive impact. In extreme cases, the unscrupulous always ‘win’ because they will use the tools anyway.
To describe how we can make the transition from the ‘old’ world of separateness to a ‘new’ world of connectedness in an integrative way, I like to recommend the texts of Charles Eisenstein (especially the book: ‘The more beautiful world our heart knows is possible’).
Healing instead of optimisation, community instead of hyper-individualism
Whilst I was recharging my batteries with motivation and energy at the seminar, I kept coming up against things that didn’t fit in with my idea of a better world and how to get there. For example, there was a speech by a woman whose achievements I admire. I agree with her that we should follow our inner knowledge more instead of being influenced by the opinion or rejection of the people around us. She has developed cosmetics for people with skin conditions, as conventional products are often not suitable – a realisation she gained from her own experience.
Cosmetics may help people to feel comfortable enough to leave the house when they have such types of disease. I know only too well from my own experience what it’s like to feel uncomfortable in your own skin. But it saddens me that we are focussing on remedying or covering up the symptoms instead of curing the cause (in this case, curing the causes of the disease) and that people (especially women*) think they need cosmetics at all because they often don’t dare to go out of the house naturally (beautifully), with or without a skin disease.
The optimisation of one’s own performance and personal well-being within the framework of a (hyper)individualistic world view can then also lead to statements such as poor people not understanding why rich people have a yacht. This is so that they can invite their friends round. I don’t see myself as poor (perhaps I would be in the eyes of the person who said that) and yet, with my value construct, I really don’t understand why friends can’t just as easily be invited home or to the park instead of on a large private boat. In addition, in my opinion, there is easily a great attachment to materialism, which disregards how many resources are needed for such a friendship meeting on the yacht. I’m not saying I’m right, just that I don’t understand it with my glasses on.
The earth is already crying loud enough because the (mainly Western) individualistic capitalist-patriarchal system creates so much division, exploitation and suffering (in addition to its positive effects). While I am not in favour of frantically minimising one’s own footprint, there is for me a certain proportionality to maintain. In the Global North, we have all been living more or less at the expense of the Global South and other oppressed groups for a long time, even if it is painful to admit and I do not yet know a comprehensive solution.
Recognising and healing this pain and more can create whole new levels of community action and connection. I am currently reading the wonderful book ‘Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change’ by Sherri Mitchell, which I recommend to everyone. In her own way, she describes exactly the points that make me pause and take distance at the Tony Robbins Co seminar and other performance-orientated coaching events. We should accept and heal our pain so that we don’t stay stuck in trauma forever and continue to hurt ourselves and each other, as Sherri explains. With Tony, the focus would be more on getting directly into a positive state, feeling good and dissolving negative beliefs.
I think that in a complex worldview – which manages to integrate dualities and overcome them through oneness – there is room for both. The acceptance and healing of pain can connect and liberate us. At the same time, we can use approaches such as those explained by Tony, among others, to avoid sinking into fear, sadness or anger at every little thing that doesn’t suit us or triggers us in life. Both the healing of pain and the active pursuit of a positive (emotional) state can release energy and help us to bring positive impact into the world. Nothing is just black or white. Different approaches are justified for different situations. That’s why we can learn from everyone, from Tony and co. as well as from Sherri and Charles. It’s up to us to decide what we look at and what we learn from each lesson – they all come from their own lens.
Finding your own abundance through personal development
We can all live in abundance or find solutions if we change our often deficiency- and problem-orientated attitude. Seminars can help with such changes and the corresponding personal development. For me, it is only important to question what we understand by abundance and how much money and material things are actually necessary for this. Money can give us the freedom to work on what we really want instead of just what we need to survive. It gives us the opportunity to have wonderful experiences. However, a lot of the things we want for a good life don’t always require a lot of money. For example, I can afford just as much healthy food through community gardening as I can by buying organic food from the shop. Meanwhile, there are many real-utopian practices for a regenerative lifestyle. In the end, we can never buy the most valuable thing in life with money anyway: the love for everything.
Every person can therefore see for themselves what abundance and a truly good life consist of for them. This can become clearer with personal development and, above all, with more awareness. Because only with awareness can we see beyond our ego limitations, fears and social conditioning, truly connect with others and recognise what really matters behind all the scenes. This is a constant learning process throughout life.