#15 Firewalking With Tony Robbins

In her early 20’s, Kelly’s boss gave her a set of motivational cassette tapes by self-development guru, Brian Tracy, designed to reprogramme her mind to ‘think positive’.

Two decades later, her inner resources are put to the ultimate test at a Tony Robbins firewalking event. Will she and her husband cross the hot coals together?

This episode ends with an opportunity to reflect on the teachers or mentors who’ve shaped or influenced your life, and how you can share your own wisdom and talents with others.

Download this free PDF of journal prompts to go along with this episode if you'd like to take it deeper.

Amazing things happen when women come together to learn and grow from each other. Join Project WE here!

Get the free Project Me Life Wheel® to help you step out of auto-pilot and into higher levels of conscious living.

Read the Transcript for this Episode below:

Episode 15 of the project me podcast.  Hi guys. Welcome back. I am officially out of the box. I'm recording this from my swanky loft apartment in the center of London in the Fitzrovia area. This is the Airbnb I manifested just a week before we needed to move out of our house with our two cats. We are here until whenever the travel restrictions between the UK and Spain are lifted and we can officially move to Madrid.

This apartment is so cool. It's a former haystables and I'm imagining it in Bridgeton days with horse drawn carts pulling up outside. It's actually still got the original hoist attached to the building. It's got high ceilings and exposed brick walls across two floors. So my husband works downstairs and I'm upstairs.

And we got the Wi Fi issue fixed so we don't have to move again already, which I'm so grateful for. The only catch is that there's a big building site directly opposite. So finding a quiet time to record this episode hasn't been easy. It's 6. 55am and I'm hoping to get this recorded before it all kicks off.

The weirdest part is living right in the heart of London, but during lockdown, when everything is shut. I mean, the streets are empty. Oxford Street is a literal ghost town. All of the places that we used to come up here for are closed, like Cycle, our spinning studio, it's empty. literally right around the corner.

And we used to travel up into town and race to get into the changing room and get ready for our class in time. And I'm like, it's right there. And it's closed. Um, Ethos is this incredible vegetarian restaurant, which again, we used to come up into town to get there. They didn't take reservations and we'd have to kind of navigate our way up.

Now it is right around the corner and not only is it closed, it's closed down permanently. I look through the window and it's just empty. So many places are being emptied out and boarded up. It is just crazy. When this pandemic is over, like London will not be the same. I mean, life will not be the same anywhere, but in London, it's really obvious to me that, that it's just going to be really, really different.

Despite all of that, I'm staying focused on the present. I'm in the now and I'm feeling immense gratitude every day. The future is uncertain, but I'm choosing to view uncertainty as opportunity.  I get asked, how are you always so damn positive, Kelly? And it's true that my mental set point is one of positivity and I rarely get caught up in low vibe emotions anymore for very long.

I was reflecting on the teachers that I've had in my life that have taught me the power of my mind and how to stay positive in the midst of adversity. And I felt a new podcast episode coming on. So today, I'm heading back in time to share the story of how I came to have a soundtrack of positive self talk in my head.

I hope it amuses and inspires you. At the end, as usual, I'll give you an opportunity to reflect on how it relates to your own life. Here we go, episode 15.

It was 1991, and I was 24 years old, working for Capitol Records in Hollywood and living in Hermosa Beach, just south of LA.  My daily commute into work each morning during rush hour was ridiculously long, but I loved living by the beach, so I suffered the drive there and back every day. I actually came up with a lot of weird back routes through barren oil drilling land to avoid parts of the jam packed L.

A. freeways.  My roommate Dan was a quirky, funny guy. He wore his belted trousers up just a little too high, spoke in an overexcited voice, and always had the most hilarious stories. He's the last guy you'd ever expect to find at a party at the Playboy Mansion hobnobbing with Hugh Hefner and his Playboy bunnies.

But that's exactly the kind of situation Dan would find himself in. Dan, don't worry. What happened in the grotto stays in the grotto.  One of Dan's quirks was to play motivational cassette tapes in his bedroom. Like, the rest of us were listening to The Cure, U2, Morrissey, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but out of Dan's room would be some guy's voice shouting out positive, you can do it, messages.

It was weird and very funny.  Well, things took a surprise turn for me when one day my boss at Capitol Records handed me a series of cassette tapes labeled Brian Tracy, The Psychology of Achievement, He asked me to go down to the cassette duplicating machine and make an extra set to send to his brother who was having a hard time and needed a good pep talk.

He encouraged me to make an extra set of these tapes for myself too. What the heck? Uh, okay.  And on the way home from work that day, sitting in traffic, I began to listen to Tape 1, Side A. And on the way back in the next day, Tape 1, Side B. I think there were about six tapes in this series and I just flipped them back and forth over and over until Brian Tracy's words became my inner voice.

Never before had I heard anyone speak about success and how we're only limited by our own thinking. I hung on his every word and I began writing down my goals and creating action plans for making them happen.  These days we're bombarded with options of audio books and podcasts and YouTube channels and it can all get convoluted and very noisy.

Compare this to listening to one voice every day consistently. My daily commute into Hollywood back and forth became my personal growth me time.  Each day I soaked up every word Brian Tracy was saying.  Keeping a positive mind and being super self motivated remains one of my greatest strengths, thanks to those Brian Tracy cassette tapes.

My roommate, Dan, he went on to be a Hollywood producer and has since written a book called Soul School, The Purpose of Life Revealed. So there's something to be said about listening to these motivational recordings.  Now let's fast forward 12 years to 2005.  I got to know my five year old son's really cool teacher, Sannit Lombard.

She told me about a series of motivational CDs she was hooked on by Tony Robbins. You may know Tony as that really tall American motivational speaker with the big teeth who shouts on stage to huge audiences. He's written many best selling books like Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power. Sannit loaned me her entire Tony Robbins CD series and suddenly I had a new drive for driving.

I listened to these every day in the car and absolutely loved hearing his encouraging go get him words on days I was finding motherhood really hard.  These days there are far more suitable people for mothers to listen to, like the Mother Kind podcast with Zoe Blaski and Amy Taylor Kabatz of the Happy Mama Movement podcast,  but nothing like this existed for mothers back in 2005.

So Tony Robbins became my voice of encouragement. Reminding me that nobody can make me feel anything. I choose my thoughts and not to be a victim of my circumstances. If I don't like something, change it.  It was Tony Robbins who made personal growth such an important life area that it added that pedal to the project me life wheel when I was doing my monthly check ins.

In episode 10, I talked about making my first vision board back in 2012. Well, I put a picture of Tony Robbins on it, holding hands on stage with Oprah Winfrey. Be careful what you put on your vision board because I nearly fell out of my chair when my husband, out of the blue, asked if I'd like tickets to go to a live Tony Robbins event with him.

What?!  First of all, tickets to see Tony Robbins live are super expensive. So Second of all, he would go with me to this?  And thirdly, we were living in Madrid, and we'd need to travel to London without the kids for this super full on four day event.  Luca made it happen for us.  He said he felt it was something he needed to do too.

Some fresh motivation for work and life. I was excited and dumbfounded and just blown away, really. See what happens when you put things on your vision board, people? I honestly never imagined I'd see Tony Robbins live, and I never imagined my husband doing anything like this.  Well, as our big weekend in London drew closer, childcare arrangements were made and my excitement levels grew wilder, but Luca, very annoyingly, began to get cold feet.

So,  It had been his idea, and yet now, he was back to being not even remotely interested in his personal growth.  Okay, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the fire walk.  A big rite of passage at this Tony Robbins event is to walk barefoot across hot coals. I can't even tell you the number of times he repeated, okay, okay, I'll go, but I will not be walking on fire.

We arrived in London for our big four days and checked into the hotel directly adjacent to the venue. It was the Excel center in the East London Docklands. I'd read lots of advice about how to thrive and survive this very full on four day, unleash the power within event with like 5, 000 people, early morning starts, no breaks and ending late at night.

I had my backpack loaded up with water bottles and healthy snacks and wore layers as apparently the venue could get cold at times, but then there were going to be activities that warmed you up. When we arrived for day one, it was a zoo of finding our registration table and standing in a long queue and waiting for the doors to open.

I've been advised to race for a seat closest to the front so when they opened the doors we made a bolt for it, but not fast enough. We ended up pretty far back and to the left.  Music kicked in and warm up dancers came out of the stage to hype the crowd up. There was music and lighting effects. Soon, the energy in this auditorium of thousands of excited people was electrifying.

Everyone was pumped up and jumping up and down and cheering. Yeah, tonight's gonna be a good night. I can feel it. Everyone was ready to rock. Except Luca, who kept his arms crossed and looked like he was being led to his execution.  I felt myself getting annoyed that he was dampening my fun. Then I reminded myself that nobody can make me feel anything, and I choose to enjoy myself.

Words I learned from Tony himself.  But I couldn't help but wish I'd come with a friend who actually wanted to be there.  When Tony Robbins arrived onto the stage, the crowd erupted. I could look to my right and make out his figure on the stage, but I could look directly up and I could see the big molars of his white teeth on this big screen that was in front of me.

His stage presence is incredible. I looked around and I saw how many people were wearing these special headsets. And then up at the very back, I saw these rows of language interpreters. They were all saying what Tony was saying into the headphones for all of those who didn't speak English. There was such a variety of people there, old and young, male and female, and not full of rich people either.

I actually wondered how some of them could afford these tickets.  I was also surprised at how deep it all went so quickly. We sat down and we used our workbooks to explore our emotional patterns, and I learned that of the six human needs, connection, significance, certainty, variety. Growth and contribution.

I really need variety in my life. I don't need certainty as much as I crave variety. It helped me to understand why I often took a variety of longer routes for the school run just to shake it up and not do the same one every single day. I always joke now that I need variety with everything except my man.

I'm happy to stick with one man.  So, speaking of my man, He is not used to doing any kind of personal growth work or exploring his emotions on paper, so he was barely writing a thing in his workbook. He refused to dance between the exercises, and it was all I could do to breathe through my disappointment and just try to stay focused on myself.

The rest of day one is kind of a blur, but I know it was already heading into evening and Tony brought the entire audience into a peak emotional state.  We were laying down on every square inch of the auditorium floor, and then my next memory is Tony asking us to pair up with someone. I absolutely did not want to pair up with my husband, so I remember I bolted blindly down the aisle, and I somehow locked eyes with a gorgeous young Indian goddess.

We just kind of grabbed each other and looked into each other's eyes. I found out her name was Suki, and we just felt this immediate connection. We And it was a good thing we did because it turns out whoever we just partnered with was about to be our firewalking partner. The firewalk was already happening on day one.

I thought we were building up to that as kind of a day four grand finale.  Tony got us into a further state and we were to imagine that as we stepped across the hot coals, we were actually walking on cool moss. We were told to take off our shoes and socks, roll up our trousers, leave all of our bags and belongings behind, and envision cool moss beneath our bare feet.

We began making our way outside into the cold, dark March night. And glowing in the distance was a parking lot filled with rows of fiery orange burning coal.  It sounds so crazy now, but it was absolutely exhilarating. I had no idea where my husband was, but Suki and I held hands as we chanted, Cool moss!

Cool moss! Cool moss! With the crowd slowly making our way closer to the hot coals.  If you listen to my podcast episode 5, you'll remember that in my hypnobirthing course, we've been shown a video of firewalkers, and I learned about the incredible power of the mind. When you don't believe you'll have pain, your brain just switches off the pain receptors.

I'd already experienced my greatest achievement in life by having that home birth with no pain relief, and I'd felt no pain whatsoever then, so I wasn't afraid of the firewalking at all.  When Suki and I were nearly there, it looked like about 12 feet to get across this fire. And just as we were about to cross, I watched a man pour a wheelbarrow of fresh hot coals onto the path before us.

I felt a wave of nervous excitement. It was like, bring it on! Suki and I held hands and we firewalked together. And when we got to the other side, I felt such a whoop of empowerment that I completely forgot the instructions to stop at the end and have my feet I was grabbed by an assistant before I could go running off any further and he checked me over and then I was good to go.

Suki and I were high fiving all over the goddamn place jubilantly. We're making our way back to the auditorium with the crowd. It was the most incredible energy. And it feels miraculous to me that I found my shoes and my bag back. And that I was reunited with Luka. I was convinced he'd headed back to the hotel room, but there he was talking animatedly to another guy.

This kind of young, beefy, good-looking dude, and it turns out they had fire, walked together,  . So now I get why the firewalking happens on day one. Something seemed to switch on for Luca from that point.  The next morning he was up early, keen to grab some breakfast and line up to get good seats. He had a strategy for how we could both bolt down different aisles, grab the best two seats we could, then message each other to see who'd gotten closer.

It worked, and we got much closer for day two.  I know he will deny this now, but I swear he got up on his chair and danced that day and he poured notes into his workbook and he fully participated from that day onwards. I was like, who is this man? And what have they done with my husband?  So I didn't enjoy day two quite as much as the previous.

It was Tony's assistant, Joseph, who speaks on day two because Tony's voice can't do a whole four days nonstop anymore, but honestly, it was sweet relief from all the shouting to hear Joseph's more mild mannered approach to the content. But day two had this super long infomercial upsell for success business resource training that just seemed to go on and on.

And there had to be a Luca in who was now fully hook, line and sinker all in. And I was like, Hey, cool it. We don't need to book in for anything else right now.  Day three was amazing. Tony was back and we had to look at our self limiting beliefs and where they came from and what could happen in the future if we don't release them.

There was this powerful exercise and I just remember people were bawling their eyes out, like grown men howling. I even opened up one eye and saw a tear streaming down Luca's face.  I'd done a lot of work on myself like this before, but for many, this was the first time they were remembering and addressing crap their parents or teachers had said or done to them, and it was super emotional.

Tony had this way of transforming that pain into power, and by the end, people were hugging each other and jumping onto chairs, and the energy was just indescribable.  I was utterly exhausted when I woke up for day four, and I knew that this final day was all about nutrition and not run by Tony, and we had a flight to catch that afternoon and we weren't going to be able to stay for the whole thing anyway.

I was all for skipping that day and just having a good lie in, but Luca wasn't having any of it. He wanted to get us checked out of the hotel early in the morning, had them store our bags so we could get back in there for the final day of Unleash the Power Within.  I really didn't love the nutrition talk.

It all felt very outdated to me and it was all in our workbooks anyway. The workbooks seem to have been produced a decade earlier and never updated. And for the money that you pay for this seminar, I think they could at least afford to give the workbooks a makeover and completely update the content.

But hey ho, I was delighted Luke had come around to it all so wholeheartedly. He calculated right down to the minute when we would need to dash out of the auditorium, collect our bags, and get into a taxi to catch our flight back to Madrid. So, when the time came, we made our speedy exit, and as we were catching our breath in the taxi to get to the airport, Lucas suddenly realized he'd left his workbook on the floor in the auditorium.

I was surprised at how genuinely gutted he was. I contacted Lost and Found the next day to see if anyone had turned it in, but no.  Well, we'd both clearly drunk the Tony Robbins Kool Aid and told everyone we knew that this was a once in a lifetime event they had to go to. My friend Susie dragged her very reluctant hubby along the following year, and they loved it too, and it led to a real increase in closeness and communication in the months that followed.

My friend Natalie took her mother and they had an incredible bonding time together. Suki, my firewalking buddy and I remain in contact. She ended up going back to see Tony again and met her husband there and they now have a sweet baby together.  I'd say the Unleash the Power Within seminar can be summed up as a rock concert and an emotional boot camp all rolled into one.

Such a fun time, and I'm so glad we went.  But here's what's interesting. That was, what, seven years ago now? And I slowly, slowly went off Tony over the years, to the point that I don't feel energetically aligned to him at all anymore. It was like I needed all that powerful kicking up the backside back then to shake me out of autopilot.

But all of that hard work, hustle, and strive energy just isn't how I live my life now.  I've opened myself up to higher levels of conscious living beyond the first two levels of life happens to me, which is that victim mentality, or life happens by me, that striving and reaching targets and goals mentality.

When we think it's only one or the other, we just vacillate between those two low levels, working hard until we get exhausted, and then beating ourselves up or blaming others for our circumstances. It's an endless loop, and I know because I used to live like that for so many years, until I discovered the magic that unfolds when we surrender and trust that life is always happening for us when we let go of trying to control everything.

I just talked about this in episode 14, the surrender experiment, if you didn't catch that one.  Man, I know how hard it is to let go of control and drop perfection. I am a Virgo and it's in my nature to be picky on the details and fussy on how things should be done.  But the more I've relaxed and allowed my life to flow, the more I feel guided and supported.

People and opportunities land in my lap and nothing feels like hard work anymore.  When I click onto the Tony Robbins videos now, his shouty commanding voice just doesn't resonate. It feels like an old outdated energy. That's not in alignment with the collective consciousness. That's gathering momentum right now.

I'm tapping into this new energy and it's feeling very light and right.  Life doesn't need to feel like an upstream paddle to get to where we want to be. I teach this in my high vibe journey program that the more we get into alignment before taking action, the more downstream it all feels.  Different teachers come into our lives when we need them for our growth, and I'm forever grateful that Brian Tracy gave me those daily pep talks in my 20s, and that Tony Robbins got me out of an emotional rut when I was heading into my 40s.

I have new teachers on my ongoing path now, and I'm excited to share those with you in upcoming episodes. And I have to pinch myself now to think that I am in the position now of helping others with their lives by my own book, talks, workshops, and programs. When I was on the stage at Project Me Live, looking out at the audience, it was completely surreal to have this live audience listening to me speak.

I could have never imagined that 10 years ago.  We live in an incredible time where we can connect with one another from every part of the world. When we pull our gifts and talents together, we have immense power to lift each other higher. I think we're moving away from kind of product based society and we're moving more into the information age where we're just sharing our knowledge with each other.

When we step out of comfort zones and we step into our own personal power, We are capable of amazing things, and if you don't feel it about yourself yet, stick around. I'd love to share how I finally found my voice and inspire you with what's possible for you too.

Dear listener, relax your forehead.  Take a long, slow, deep breath in,  And let it out with a sigh.  I'll read you some prompts, and you don't need to write them down, as I'll put these and more into a PDF of journal prompts for you.  Think back on the different teachers and mentors you've had in your life, maybe an actual school teacher, or some other positive influencers who've helped to guide you, either in real life, or via their books, courses, or programs.

Hold just one of them in your heart right now.  As you recall something important you learned from them,

is this someone you could speak to or write to to thank them for their guidance?  Or say a silent thank you to them right now.

Do you have a mentor in your life now or anyone you follow who inspires or motivates you to live your best life?

What about you? Are you a mentor to anyone?  Are you in a position to share your wisdom or experiences with others to help them?

What gifts, talents, and contributions can you be sharing more freely with others?

What stops you from sharing your gifts with others more freely?  What can you do about that?

Thanks for listening to the Project Me podcast. Get the free PDF of journal prompts that goes with this episode in the show notes or head to the podcast section at myprojectme.  com.  Want to work on your Project Me with me as your mentor and with an opportunity for you to share your knowledge with others?

Join my membership club, Project We. Amazing things happen when women come together to learn and grow from each other. Together, we will lift each other higher.  Our February online meetup is our vision board workshop. So come and join in for that.  Myprojectme. com forward slash project. We  please subscribe to the project me podcast.

And if you like it, I really appreciate your wonderful five star reviews  until next time, open your mind, open your heart and stay curious. We all need some space in our lives for the magical and unknown.