The Greatest Gift Tony Robbins Ever Gave Me

Tony Robbins would occasionally give me advice. He gave me something bigger than advice, and it changed the direction of my entire life.

I want to tell you what that gift was. But first, I have to take you back to the night everything changed.

The Night of January 15, 2009

A few hours after US Airways Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River, Tony Robbins called me as I was recovering at Palisades Medical Center in New Jersey. My company didn’t call me, but Tony did, and he recorded a video about our conversation from that night. It was around 11 pm Eastern. I was still processing what had happened. He was already thinking about what came next for me.

He asked me to call him when I got to Los Angeles for some media events.

I did not know it yet, but that phone call was the beginning of a mentorship that would reshape how I saw myself and what I believed I was capable of.

The Masterclass before Bonnie Hunt and Ellen

A couple of weeks after the Miracle, I was booked on The Bonnie Hunt Show and scheduled to appear on The Dr. Phil and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. (There is also a story about this for another time.) I flew to Los Angeles and called Tony as he asked.

What followed was a masterclass. He walked me through what to expect, how the media cycle would move, how people would project their own meaning onto my story, and what was coming for me in the months ahead. He was not just preparing me for three TV appearances. He was preparing me for a life I did not know I was about to step into.

New Jersey, CBS, and a Mentor Who Understood the Weight

Not long after the Miracle on the Hudson, I supported Tony at his first UPW and firewalk event in New Jersey in 2009. CBS in New York City found out I was going to be close to the city with Tony, and they followed me there to keep documenting my story.

Most people around me saw a headline and the media attention. Tony saw a man carrying something heavy. He understood the gravity of what I was going through in a way almost no one else did, and he made space for that. During our pre-event “power walk”, he asked me how things were going, and I told him OK, but he is a master of reading people. He knew something was going on, and he asked me again, and I told him I was overwhelmed. He never once asked me to perform normalcy. He just kept showing up for me the way he expected me to show up for him.

The Question Tony Asked Me Every Single Time

For years, I worked as Tony’s Director of Security while also holding down my career at Oracle. Every time I picked him up for an event, he asked me the same question.

“Why are you still working for Oracle and Ellison’s mission, not yours?”

The first few times, I brushed it off. But he kept asking. Year after year, pickup after pickup, the same question. He was not making conversation. He was planting something.

Scottsdale, Date with Destiny, and Sharing the Stage

While I was supporting his Date With Destiny event in Scottsdale, Arizona, later in 2009, the media started asking me for interviews. The local Red Cross asked me to speak at their breakfast. My story was starting to move on its own, outside of Tony’s world, and he noticed.

Instead of keeping the spotlight on himself, he had Joe Williams share my story from the stage. He wanted the room to hear it. He wanted me to see what I could not yet see in myself, that people needed what I had to say.

Chicago, and the Day He Let Me Go

The last event I ever supported Tony on was a UPW in Chicago. That was the day he told me he was going to find another security director.

He said it was time for me to do what my true destiny was calling me to do, to build my own business around speaking and helping people build resilience. He told me straight out that as long as I kept being his security director, I would always have a crutch. He said it was time to burn the boats.

I will be honest. I was not ready to hear it. I had more faith in the safety of staying close to him than I had in myself out on my own.

But Tony had more faith in me than I had in myself.

The Gift

That is the lesson, and it is the greatest gift Tony Robbins ever gave me. Not a strategy. Not a stage. Not a masterclass, even though I got all three.

The gift was his faith in who I could become, offered to me before I could see it myself.

There are people in your life right now who see more in you than you see in yourself. They are not flattering you. They are not being polite. They see something real, and they are waiting for you to catch up to it.

I had a mentor named Bill who first saw something in me, as I detail in my book “From Turmoil to Triumph.” And after traveling the world and supporting Tony and his mission, he saw that it was time for me to realize my mission.

The question is whether you will let their faith carry you until your own faith is strong enough to stand on.

Tony asked me one question, over and over, until I finally had to answer it. Who is asking you that question right now? And what are you going to do about it?