—By Mike Pietrzak
One year ago today I put myself through the gauntlet of Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery, and this is a perfect opportunity to share with you my top 24 lessons from that unparalleled 5-day experience.
This is Part One in the series, and the focus today is on his Top 6 BUSINESS MINDSET lessons.
Who is Tony Robbins?
In case you’ve been in a coma since the early ‘90s, Tony Robbins is the world’s foremost business strategist, life coach, and all-around superhuman volcano of a man. He’s a partner in 70+ companies with 1,200 employees grossing over $6 billion per year.
He’s a multiple bestselling author of a dozen books on mindset, money, health, and relationships. He’s coached titans like Bill Clinton, Venus Williams, Oprah, Nelson Mandela, and Conor McGregor.
As you can imagine, I was falling-off-my-chair excited to find out what he could do for my businesses.
What is Business Mastery?
My best description of Business Mastery is that it’s like getting an MBA through a firehose. It’s a 5-day experience that brings together some of the world’s foremost entrepreneurs, some billionaires, to give 2,500 entrepreneurs the mental upgrade and kick in the anterior to unleash their business success.
We heard from some of the world’s top self-made business successes like Sarah Blakely (Spanx), investor and author Peter Mallouk, the “Queen of Facebook” Mari Smith, Jay Abraham, Bill Gross, and many other titans of industry, and top experts in marketing, branding, accounting, and lead generation. Business Mastery has a record of growing businesses by 30 to 130 percent, and Tony guarantees at least $1 million of value after the first day. A bold claim.
So was what I learned worth the $10,000 price tag? Read on!
The Top 6 BUSINESS MINDSET Lessons from Tony Robbins Business Mastery
Lesson 1: START WITH WHY
The most valuable lesson I’ve ever gained from Tony is this: your “Why” drives your entire life. With a compelling Why (purpose), all objections fall away, your motivation peaks, and “hows” take care of themselves.
Tony’s opening two questions at Business Mastery were, “Why are you here?” and “Why did you get into this [your] business?” He walked us through an exercise that helped us reconnect to our emotional reasons for launching our businesses. Why? Because it’s easy to disconnect from your passion after months and years of the day-to-day, unsexy slog. This is dangerous.
How I applied this lesson
The day after Business Mastery I drove to Lake Erie and took a long, soul-searching walk on the beach with one question on my mind about my writer training business, SoYouWanttoWrite.org: “Why am I still doing this after five years?”
I remembered my own journey of finding my writer tribe, my literary mentor, improving my writing, and starting to publish in magazines. I finally felt in 2012 like I was where I was supposed to be, and somewhere along the beach I remembered that giving THAT feeling to other writers was exactly why I was doing this work.
Quick wins for you
Take a day away from your daily business routine—no phones, email, employees, or admin work, and ask your deepest self, “Why am I in this business?”
Each morning, write down your intentions for the day. How do you want to BE? How do you want to feel? What do you want to contribute to the world?
Before you get on call or enter a meeting, answer the question, “What’s my desired outcome for this conversation?”
Lesson 2: Focus on Serving
Tony believes that “business is a mission” and that entrepreneurs who care about doing good in the world will be far more successful than those in the get-rich-quick camp—and he’s walking the walk. His charity, Feeding America, feeds 4 million people per year in 56 countries. His foundation serves youth, seniors, the hungry, homeless and prisoners through an army of volunteers.
“If you care you will thrive,” he says. And he advises that you build a social mission into your work from day one rather than waiting for “someday” when profits are abundant.
How I applied this lesson
I’d been admiring from afar the work of NABU, a charity that works to improve child literacy in the developing world. After Business Mastery, I connected with their donor team and arranged to send them a portion of my company’s revenue each month.
We also created a deal with our clients that we’ll match their donations to NABU with a gift card of equal value. Kids get books, clients get free services, our reputation improves, and word of mouth traffic grows.
Plus, every time I get that email to let me know that our donation was processed I’m reminded that my entrepreneurial efforts are making an impact in the world—not just with my clients, but with kids around the world who would otherwise be struggling to read.
Quick wins for you
Get clear on your Why by making a list of 10 ways that your product or service benefits your clients.
Connect with your favourite charity to talk about donating a portion of company proceeds.
Consider matching your clients donations (up to a maximum) to your preferred charity.
Lesson 3: Success is 80% psychology
“The chokehold on the growth of any organization is its leader,” says Tony. “80% of success is psychology, 20% is strategy.”
My 21 years in business confirms this. When I was struggling with depression, panicked about money, afraid to be seen in public, and stressed out, business was terrible! There was a time I would actually argue with clients. I’d dread opening my email inbox or answering the phone. How can anyone build a successful business from that mental state?
I know now that the leader sets the tone for the entire company. When I decided to make mission and service my first priorities—when I adopted an attitude of appreciation instead of expectation; when I began to truly ENJOY interacting with clients with joy—business miraculously improved.
How I applied this lesson
After Business Mastery I doubled down on my own personal development: morning meditation, gratitude, therapy, online workshops, catching negative thoughts. It all combined to turn ME into a better human, and the transformation was reflected in my business performance. I even noticed my freelancers’ attitudes shifting and their work improving.
Quick wins for you
Yes, it’s time to look inside. Meditation, journaling, stillness, solitude, and therapy can all turn you into a better leader. We can only improve the world to the level that we’ve been healed.
Ask yourself how your unhelpful beliefs and actions are acting as a chokehold on your business. Be honest but compassionate with yourself.
Stop working on your business 100% of the time. To illustrate: if you take a leisurely stroll before you respond to that batch of emails, the outcome will be much better.
Want to upgrade your mindset so your business can thrive? Book a free 30-minute coaching deep dive with me.
Lesson 4: Be a Business Owner, not a Business Operator
Many entrepreneurs start a business because they have a special talent, say baking. They love to make smiley-face cupcakes but quickly find themselves spending MOST of their time sweeping floors, ordering supplies, or doing bookkeeping. Making cookies day in and out seemed like a good idea at the time, but now is torture.
The solution? Work ON your business, not IN your business. A business operator (bad) is behind the counter from dawn until midnight, whereas a business owner (good) might not need to be physically present at all. The only solution to this problem is to start delegating as soon as possible.
As Tony says, “Business operators are always stressed. Business owners are abundant.”
How I applied this lesson
I was burnt out from five years of being a business operator, so the week after Business Mastery, I hired a second freelancer, one of my former college students. In a few short months she built me a more effective website, and set up a lead management system that allowed me to hire a sales team.
I also started truly leveraging my existing freelancer. I no longer write copy, set up email marketing, source or edit blog posts, or schedule client meetings. It’s all... delegated! This frees up my time and emotional energy to actually build the business.
Quick wins for you
Make a list of business activities that you are not good at, or don’t enjoy. Accounting? Social media? Graphic design? Do it for now if you have to, but outsource it as soon as you can.
Lesson 5: Be Mission Obsessed
A Business Mastery highlight for me was hearing from Payal Kadakia, the founder of ClassPass, the billion dollar fitness app. Her advice for fledgling entrepreneurs struck me:
“Be mission obsessed, not product obsessed.”
In other words, focus on how you can serve your clients (see Lesson #2) and not any one specific solution. Too many entrepreneurs fall in love with their product or service—the app, the supplement, the webinars—but your customers don’t care HOW you solve their problem as long as you solve it.
How I applied this lesson
I personally interviewed 10 of our best clients and peppered them with questions about their needs, fears, hopes, desires, dreams, and challenges. What I learned helped me create a new program with a $2,500 price tag, which filled up quickly.
Then I sent out a survey to our mailing list to ask five questions. The answers helped us completely reposition our marketing copy, and it’s creating better traction than before, when we guessed at what clients wanted.
We launched several new product offerings to respond to the demands we learned about by simply listening to clients.
Quick wins for you
Be agnostic about your product; be willing to let it go, pivot, and find the solution that works for your ideal clients.
Go talk to your clients. Ask them specifically what pain point they want healed, then find a way to give them what they want.
Lesson 6: Failure is Only a Data Point
Silicon Valley loves to talk about data points: average order value, time on page, new monthly users. Payal Kadakia broke my brain again when she said,
“Failure is only a data point.”
Until then I hadn’t considered that my failures might not need to have emotional connotations, or relate in any way to my self-worth at all. Instead I could see that failure is simply a message from the market. If you launch a product and nobody buys it, this is not a statement on your intelligence or worth as a human.
It’s simply a valuable piece of evidence that you need to tweak your offer, or try something entirely different.
“If you want success you will experience failure,” Payal said. This is a much saner way to look at failure, one that won’t smash your hope or confidence to bits. Success is also only a data point about a moment in time, by the way, so avoid undue elation.
How I applied this lesson
I’m still working on this one every day. An email with a low click rate, a social media post with low engagement, a program that we can’t fill, despite best efforts—it’s hard not to take this personally, because Western society tells us that our work equals our worth. But that’s a lie.
When we equate our worth with our outcomes, we combine two things that don’t belong together. And with regular reminders from my therapist, this is the belief that I’m working to install.
Quick wins for you
Make a list of all of the “failures” in your life that really hit you hard. For each one, balance the scales by writing the lesson(s) you learned from those experiences, and the silver linings.
Decide now that you will work to remove the emotion from so-called failures, and see these unexpected outcomes as data that you can use to refine your next effort. The master has failed more times than the novice has ever tried.
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My constant refrain as a business coach to conscious entrepreneurs is that success is 80% mindset, and only 20% habits. That’s why I started with these six most important MINDSET lessons from Tony Robbins Business Mastery.
All of these struck to my core when I heard them. Which one did you need to hear most today? Let me know in the comments below.
Want to upgrade your mindset so your business can thrive? Book a free 30-minute coaching deep dive with me.