Tony Robbins-life coaches

Paid 1000s of dollars for giving people advice on improving their lives? I am doing all this all the time _for free_ in several different areas. Maybe I need to make a career out of it! All I need is a catchy title for my packet of advice - and a way to turn about 200 words into 20,000 while essentially saying the same thing as before.

MUCH later maybe

I remember a discussion with James Randi about charlatans selling nonsense of various kinds. He said many of them are transparently charlatans. But he also suggests that many of them really do believe their own bull****. He had many people come and try to do his "Million Dollar Challenge" who left genuinely baffled as to their inability to pass it. Often because they had convinced themselves of their powers - or worse people around them contrived for whatever reasons to validate those beliefs.

A great example is Yanagi Ryuken who thought he could defeat multiple attackers - without touching them - using merely the power of his "chi" - and we have videos of him doing just that where the students are clearly complicit in the fantasy. But when the "master" went up against an actual assailant the result is - I warn you not pretty - an old man getting punched repeatedly in the face.

I wonder if a similar divide exists in the world of "self help" con artists. Sure some of them know they are selling "non-speech" to people the likes of which a "generator" like the link above can produce - the Deepak Chopra types.

But how many of them shared their "advice" with people who then genuinely went on to do really well? It must be very easy to fall into the concept of "Hang on - I really must have something here".

I myself have coached and guided people with some simple advice that I found helped me - and then it went on to REALLY help them. I have turned lives around completely - while improving other good lives to be better - using what I sometimes call the "incremental life change method". (See I have a catchy name already).

It would be _so_ easy to fall into a line of thinking of "Wow - this stuff works - if everyone did what I said they would all be SO much better". But I realise that is a bad intellectual path to follow - and the kind of life advice I have given to people may work for them - but it would completely fail on others. I have just been lucky - and so have they.

I would certainly offer my advice to anyone who asked for it - under the caveat that they try it and see if it works but not to expect miracles. I turned myself around from a single - lonely - lay about unhappy lazy college slob into a healthy - active - happy individual with a wonderful family and relationship and circle of friends. And the "advice" I have given people has done the same _for them_ at times. So for some my life advice "works". But I would never be so cynical as to go out and sell it to people or make a career out of it.

During the boards.ie outage I got into listening to the interviews of Jocko Willink. The interviews were great. His own podcast though is getting a bit preachy however - and the more "advice" he tries to fill the airwaves with the more general - presumptive - preachy - and in some cases outright unscientific nonsense - it is getting. Like other "self help" or "management" gurus he has some good core ideas and advice - but as soon as they try to add enough filler to get a book - podcast - or career out of it - they are just forced to populate it with complete guff.

But that is the nature of the market. The core "advice" in self help - nutrition - management - and so forth is short and concise enough. You can't sell that. So it has to be fleshed out with new "product" to distinguish it and make it marketable. And everything from Robbins, to Deepak, to Jocko, to the Cayenne Pepper Diet, to things like Alcoholics Anonymous - and so forth - are essentially a result of that.

Jeremias Bumpy Turtle wrote: »

At the end of the day you could watch Eastenders for 30mins per day...

...or alternatively listen to Robbins/Covey/Silva/Proctor/Tracy/Bandler etc for 30mins per day.
(Worth mentioning most of these established folks pre-date the current 'mindfulness' fad/trend by around 20yrs).

Try each method for a month, then evaluate for yourself which has the most beneficial effect.

Is that really the either/or?

I'd do neither, I wouldn't watch some soap that's a load of crap or some fellows peddling a load of motivational crap. Could one not read a good book, go for a run or whatever?

Have to say hadn't heard of Pat Divilly until this thread. Googled him, laughed at the "vision boards" and "goal realisation". When did this hogwash escape the confines of the Oprah fan club, a group hardly known for critical appraisal and analysis?