Great Coaching
Inside Tony Robbins’s Dream Machine
- A Mini-Class On Asking Great Questions
Tom O'Connor
Even Tony Robbins haters will admit one thing:
He’s one of the best at helping other people overcome personal struggles.
And while fans, students and haters look on in wonder at how he does what he does -- few people realise what Tony does is a learnable skill.
An exceptionally useful skill that has its genesis in what Tony learned from NLP.
Let’s see Tony in action before unpacking some important distinctions about how he does it.
Context: In the following video Tony works with a man named Neil, whose marriage is on the rocks and turns it around in 8 minutes. Watch it through then we’ll unpack some of what he does below.
(If you have any problems playing the video, click here to watch.)
What did you notice?
What stood out for you in how Tony created this transformation?
Take a moment to capture your thoughts.
While we don’t have time to give you a blow-by-blow move of how Tony and Neil created this transformation (transformation is always a collaborative process), I want to highlight the 5 most salient points for you so you can begin to start to do more of this yourself.
Sound good?
Deconstruction:
- Notice how Tony, from start to finish, used questions expertly. Why?
Because asking great questions is the fastest way to influence someone. What happens when you ask great questions – people make NEW connections. Just like you saw Tony demonstrate.
Telling people is one thing. Questioning them is far more powerful.
Most people, if we’re honest, ‘tell’ too much and ask too little.
Here’s a secret few people know – influence and transformational change happens when you ask questions, not give answers…
2 How many questions did Tony ask?
Give a guess.
In total Tony asked 42 questions in ~8 minutes.
That’s roughly one question every 20 seconds!
As a percentage, when you are helping someone how much time do you spend asking questions vs telling them? What would happen if you asked more and spoke less?
3 How many people is Tony talking to?
Watch the video again and you’ll notice that Tony speaks to Neil and occasionally directly to the 2,000+ audience. While he’s using this Neil's situation as a training example for everyone else, he’s actually doing the change work (constructing ideas, rewiring the man’s narrative, creating comparisons etc.) that rewrite the frame of reference Neil is holding – such that he can no longer maintain the ‘problem’.
But it looks like he’s primarily talking to the audience. Sneaky…
This is the underground stuff most people don’t understand and know how to use. The seeming ‘side comments’ to the group are actually part of the intervention – it allows him to frame things in a NEW way and leads up to a new question which is how he cements the change…
Get it?
How much more powerful could your coaching, leadership or influence work be if you could do things with think kind of skill too?
4 Where does Tony direct Neil's attention?
We’re jumping ahead a bit here, but it is so important to get I want to begin to address it here.
One of the elements of truly great questions is they move attention and focus awareness.
Transforming people’s lives comes from disrupting how they represent the problem. That’s why Tony asks certain kinds of questions, in certain sequences – he starts with questions within Neil's model of the world, and quickly switches the lens to outside the frame of thinking he has been using.
Mmm, what effect do you think that has?
5 What kind of language does Tony use in his questions?
Are his questions full of complex ideas, stacked presuppositions that require some serious mental CPU power to comprehend?
Or are they mostly direct, simple questions that are easy to get?
Easy, right.
A lot of people trained in NLP think you need to stack complex presuppositions to ask great questions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Great questions, so called ‘killer questions’ are often made up of very simple language forms.
The magic in creating transformations is in the effects specific questions create.
I hope you are beginning to see how transformations can be created with ease by asking the right questions. How, you can use questions, to lead people anywhere you want…
…so long as you know where you want to lead them AND you ask the right questions!
We’ll talk more about this in a future email.
To your success,
Tom
P.S. What’s the biggest question you have about asking great questions? Tell me here so I can tailor the resources I send you.
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