Film Review: "Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru" (2016).

"Our entire life changes in a moment." This is Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru. This documentary film directed by Joe Berlinger. Average people with extraordinary problems are hoping he can change their lives. And he'll do it in just six days. Tony Robbins' clients swear by his unorthodox life coaching methods.

For those not familiar with him, Robbins is an author, philanthropist, and life coach. Robbins is known for his infomercials, seminars, and self-help books including Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within. On February 29, 1960, Robbins was born as Anthony J. Mahavoric in North Hollywood, California. He is the eldest of three children. Whilst growing up in Glendora, California, he worked as a handyman to help provide for his siblings. He has said his home life was "chaotic" and "abusive". Whilst Robbins attended Glendora High School, he grew ten inches, a growth spurt later attributed to a pituitary tumor. By the age of seventeen, his parents divorced and he left home. Robbins later worked as a janitor, and did not attend college. 

Robbins began his career promoting seminars for motivational speaker and author Jim Rohn. In the early 1980s, soon after meeting Neurolinguistic Programming co-founder John Grinder, the two became partners. At this time Robbins taught NLP and Ericksonian Hypnosis. In 1988 Robbins released his first infomercial, Personal Power, produced by Guthy Renker, which helped to promote his services as a "peak performance coach". The infomercial helped Robbins gain wide exposure, selling his Personal Power self-help audiotapes. In 1997, Robbins began the Leadership Academy seminar. He is a speaker on the seminar circuit sponsored by Learning Annex. Robbins was a featured speaker at the 2007 Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference. Together with Cloé Madanes, Robbins founded the Robbins-Madanes Center for Intervention, an organization that trains life skills coaches to help families and individuals deal with addiction and other issues. He was named one of the "Top 50 Business Intellectuals" by Accenture and one of the "Top 200 Business Gurus" by the Harvard Business Press, and in 2007 was ranked on the Forbes Celebrity 100. In 2015 and 2016 Robbins was listed on the Worth Magazine Power 100 list. His seminars are organized through Robbins Research International.

Throughout his writings, seminars, and speeches, Robbins espouses viewpoints, techniques, and other practices he asserts can help adherents improve their lives. He speaks about various "human needs, influences that affect people, the power of making decisions" and the need to achieve "emotional mastery". Robbins holds multiple seminars annually, most of them with a "self help" and "positive thinking" theme, with a fire walk participation, massages, a lot of audience participation and physical exercises.

Though he insists that he is "not your guru", Robbins makes for a phenomenal guru. The film and Robbins shows how to cultivate empathy for one's self. Though it seems to present itself as a straightforward documentary where a man just tells people how to live better lives, it's more or less than that, depending on the point of time in your life.

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