It's hard to measure exactly how much the staffers' creativity was increased by this exercise, but they did come up with some new ideas for reducing the deficit, such as putting advertising on postage stamps and selling rich people the right to have their faces on $3 bills.Īctually, none of this is particularly new, except in style. Hall blasted the old Sam the Sham song "Wooly Bully" in the committee room while the staffers shot at one another with Nerf guns. In fact, a stranger thing did happen 10 days after the president's hush-hush self-help parley at Camp David: House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) summoned Doug Hall, author of Jump Start Your Brain ("A Proven Method of Increasing Creativity Up to 500%"), to lead a seminar for committee staffers. "Why don't you stop right now and try this." Did Bill Clinton stop and try it? Who knows? Stranger things have happened. "You want to create impact on yourself, a lot of crazy, intense humor that will break your pattern of negative, disempowering emotions," Robbins explains in the Awaken tape. You score the cartoon with some goofy music and you run it backward and forward a dozen times in your mind. You give Boss/Newt a rainbow-colored face, Mickey Mouse ears, a Pinocchio nose. Then you run it in fast-forward, so that Boss/Newt moves in comic double time. Then you turn that movie into a cartoon and you run it backward so that your boss (or Newt) is eating his words. Robbins uses the example of your boss yelling at you, but it would no doubt also apply to other unpleasant experiences, such as having Newt Gingrich call you a "countercultural McGovernik." You sit down and take a deep breath and visualize that painful scene again. Which means we'll probably never know if Clinton has tried another Robbins trick: "Next time you start to feel depressed," he says in his Awaken the Giant Within tape, "jump up, look at the sky and yell in your most idiotic tone of voice, Hallelujah! My feet don't stink today!' A stupid, silly move like this will definitely shift your attention and change your state."Īnd we'll probably never find out whether the president practices Robbins's technique for altering your attitude toward life's rotten moments. "All I can say is Tony does not discuss any of the portions of the meetings with his clients and his friends." She won't confirm or deny any Camp David fire-walking. Automatically, a Tony Robbins motivational speech comes on: "We create a new level of reality by starting with our thoughts. She gets another call, puts this one on hold. "Tony is not conducting any interviews in relation to the question of what happened at Camp David," says Carolyn Rangel, Robbins's assistant. It seems unlikely, but we don't know for sure because the White House won't discuss what went on that day, and neither will Robbins. So Robbins still puts on an occasional fire walk.ĭid he put one on at Camp David? Did Bill Clinton walk barefoot across hot coals, just to prove to himself that he could handle Bosnia and Newt Gingrich? Did Hillary take the hike too? It was good for their souls, if not their soles. "If you can make yourselves walk through fire," he'd tell his audience, "what can't you do?" He'd get his fans all stoked up with his high-energy pep talk and then he'd lead them outside, where they'd doff their shoes and socks and walk across a bed of hot coals while Tony took their mind off the heat by saying, "Cool moss, cool moss." He called it the Mind Revolution. Robbins achieved fame back in the '80s by leading fire walks. And there was Anthony Robbins, author of Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within, a 6-foot, 7-inch "peak performance coach" with size 16 feet and a head that looks like something found on Easter Island. There was Marianne Williamson, the so-called "guru to the glitterati," a self-styled lay minister who officiated at Elizabeth Taylor's eighth wedding. Covey, the bald Mormon professor who wrote the huge bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's the day Clinton huddled at the presidential retreat with three of America's most famous self-help gurus. It's one of the great unanswered questions of our age: Did Bill Clinton walk barefoot across hot coals at C1amp David on December 30?
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