Maps of Meaning, Lesson 4: The Strongest Force In Your Personality

Lesson #4 – The Marriage of Tony Robbins and Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning

Today we take a detour away from Maps of Meaning to better understand the wisdom of Maps of Meaning!

In our first email, we described the world as a forum for action. In our second, we described the experience of novelty along the path toward your goal, and that the hero is the one who searches for its benevolence. In our third, we discussed the need to embody the archetype of the hero to master the many areas of our lives.

Now, we understand how to be the hero psychologically.

The Wisdom of Tony Robbins

Last year I become a certified Robbins-Madanes Life Coach to better serve my coaching clients. The experience was invaluable. Tony Robbins is the master at creating lasting and immediate change in people’s lives, and through this course, I learned some of the “technologies” by which he does this.

Today we will cover two of the frameworks I found most useful.

First, he has an axiom which has become a core principle in my coaching practice:

“The strongest force in the human personality is the need to be consistent with one’s identity.”

In the first 3 emails, we discussed the importance of understanding our goal-directed framework, embodying the archetype of the hero to respond to challenges in the most productive way, and how we must engage in this behavior in the many different domains of life.

The way to be the hero – to be a blackbelt – in your health, relationships, profession, passions, and anything else, is to repeatedly engage in the heroic (creative and exploratory) process so that it becomes your identity. Once you develop the identity of the hero – when you see yourself as someone capable of transmuting the unknown into the known and finding the benevolence it holds (regardless of the domain of life) – you become as psychologically bulletproof as one can be.

But how do we adopt this identity?

Constructing Empowering Beliefs

The second powerful tool from Tony Robbins to help us become the hero of our own lives is his understanding of the cultivation of empowering beliefs. You can adopt the beliefs that are most valuable, the ones most aligned with your soul, and you can strengthen them like a muscle to serve you.

The key is to find enough references to support this belief!

There are 3 stages of belief:

• Opinion – you possess some references for the validity of this idea.
• Belief – you possess more references for the validity of the idea. It’s more supported and therefore a stronger lifeline.
• Conviction – you possess nearly endless references for the validity of the idea. It’s even more supported than a belief, and this becomes a source of great personal power.

These references are like table legs which support the table, your belief. The more references we have, the stronger the idea will stand in our minds. Our responsibility to ourselves is to find as many references as possible which support the identity we wish to construct.

The key is to go from this:

To this:

How To Use This Knowledge

We must be lawyers on behalf of our soul and construct an argument that shows how we are the hero. We must search our life for references from the past and present which support this notion, cultivating so much supporting evidence that we have no choice but to adopt this identity consciously.

Once we have consciously identified ourselves as the hero, we hack our own personality which will fight – through our actions in this world – to maintain this identity.

That’s how we become the hero in the many areas of our lives, because the domains are all different mediums by which we act in accordance with our identity, the hero. The world becomes our gym, providing endless reps and opportunities to embody the hero, and through this, we achieve the wholeness which Carl Jung believed was our ultimate aim.

This is how we adopt the personal identity which is aligned with our goals. This is how we become the hero.