21 Tony Robbins Quotes on Asking Questions

Famous Quotes on Asking Good Questions From Tony Robbins

As Tony always says, “If you want to change your life, you’ve got to change your questions.”

I think many people downplay or underestimate the value in the power of questions we ask.

How can asking questions = better results or a better quality of life, it can’t be that simple, right?

A better question would be to ask what aren’t the benefits of asking good questions because there’s just so many positives. Let’s explore a few:

• Help conversations become more productive.
• Asking the right questions increases bonding between people and/or teams.
• Opens the door for information exchange, you can’t learn what’s inside other people without asking them. That’s a very valuable unlock. (Just imagine the years you would save by asking questions versus spending the time and learning everything on your own.)
• Asking the right questions makes you more likeable, shows interest, empathy, that you care.
• Asking relevant follow up questions (not just going down a list) shows you’re listening which once again shows you’re empathetic, personable, likeable. Here’s a tip – people on dates focus too much on themselves. They try to sell and explain what they can offer versus making the other person feel comfortable and understood.
• Getting to truths faster can save you time and headaches. If you position your questions right it can make it easier for the other person to answer. You ask a supplier, I need this on time, it will be on time, right? A lot of friction, forcing them to give you inaccurate info versus, I’m guessing you’ve got a lot going on and are going to be late, right? Framing this way makes the questions easy to answer.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Tony argues that the quality of your life will be determined based on the quality of questions you ask of others and you ask of yourself.

If you focus on $2.00 problems, you will get $2.00 answers.

If you’ve seen the other posts on this site, you’ll know I’ve gone through hours of his talks and lectures to organize nuggets of wisdom on a bunch of different topics.

These are not one-off Tony Robbin quotes you’ll forget in a week from now, but life-questions that hopefully you’ll ask yourself for a lifetime.

21 Quotes by Tony Robbins on Asking Better Questions:

“Most people live their life on the back of the motorcycle, and who’s driving the front of it is all the demands in their life.”

Are you letting all the demands in your life drive your life’s direction?

It’s time to examine why.

Allow yourself to be open to new ideas and possibilities. Don’t just accept the story or pattern of how things are, examine it.

“What’s your story? What do you believe in your life? Are those beliefs empowering you or preventing you from living a happy, fulfilled life?”

Tony continues:

“Sure, something bad may have happened.

Something bad happens to everyone on this planet.

I don’t care who you are.

Something bad has happened to you. But if you continue to tell that story to yourself that, that is who you are then it will continue to be true. That damage will stay for the rest of your life. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to spend years, and years and years in therapy.”

“Ask and you shall receive, but I’m sure it meant Ask intelligently. I’m sure that’s what God meant. I’m sure he didn’t mean Bitch and you will receive, Whine and you will receive. I don’t think that was the instruction. To ask intelligently you’d have to ask specifically. Clarity is power. The more clear you are about exactly what it is you want, the more your brain knows how to get there.

“Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”

“Quality questions create a quality life.”

“The ultimate resource is resourcefulness. That’s what makes someone successful.” – Tony Robbins

“And here’s what’s great about resourcefulness. Who has it within them? Who, who? Every human being. The question is whether you access it or not.”

When you look at the most powerful and effective people in history, resources were never the problem. They didn’t have the resources, but they got them. How do people get resources when they don’t have them? The answer is they’re resourceful.

It’s like the people that succeed are the people that didn’t just have a dream or goal. They had a dreamer goal that was so exciting to them, so obsessive to them that when nothing worked, they kept on going.”

“Questions provide the key to unlocking our unlimited potential.”

“Questions control what you focus on. What you focus on is what you feel. What you feel is your experience of life.”

This leads us into the next quote,

“Where focus goes, energy flows,”

“The bottom line is, if you go looking for Brown, you’re going to find it anywhere you look for, in others or yourself.”

Here’s a fun exercise Tony has everyone in the audience do. Tony asks,

“I want you to look for red, look around the room, look for red, look for red. Now close your eyes and tells me everything in the room you saw that was brown. How many of you struggled to do this? Now open, your eyes and look for brown, look for brown, look for brown. Now Stop. How many saw beige and called it brown to make yourself feel good?”

The idea of this – Whatever you focus, you’ll find.

This metaphor applies to life, you focus on being a victim you could find many reasons, and some may be justified. You just want to be careful on where your focus goes because what you “what you focus on is what you’ll feel”.

“If you want to change your life, you’ve got to change your questions.”

Here’s another famous quote, some people see things that were done and they ask why. I look at things that were never done and ask, why not?

“If you want to change your life, you’ve got to change your questions. And if you want to change the experience of planning, you got to stop asking that silly question everybody asks when they’re going to plan something.

I used to do this all the time. What is the question we all ask? We’re going to plan something. What do I need to do?

That is the wrong question. So why is that a lousy question? Why do we not want to start out? When we’re trying to plan our day, week, month, or our life by saying, what do I need to do? Because you don’t know the answer of what you need to do until you decide what it is you want? What is it you’re looking for in your life?”

This year, try starting every day by asking yourself these 3 questions:

1. What is something I can do for someone else today?
2. What is something I can do to add value to the world today?
3. What is something that I can offer to other people?

“If you want to get curious, just ask yourself, what do I like about this person? Wonder what’s going on with this person that would make them feel this way. How could I help this person? As you ask these kinds of questions, you may learn something.”

Tony says by doing this you’ll learn,

“About how human beings operate, about their motivations, maybe even some things about how to support yourself as you try to support others.

Remember, get curious instead of judgmental.

Find something to appreciate from any seemingly negative person or situation and develop the habit of giving compliments. See if you really want to have some more positive feelings in your life. You got to keep focusing on what’s right. You’ve got to get curious. And most importantly, you’ve got to find something to appreciate, even in the tough times, because in reality, as we’ve talked about so often before, the toughest times in your life sometimes provide you with real resources to change your life.”

“Seeing what you don’t have is sometimes useful to. Sometimes just being positive, keeping a stiff upper lip isn’t enough.”

“Sometimes you got to stop and say, I am positive I’m going to approach this from a positive way. I’m going to stay in a positive state. But I may ask some questions some people may think of as negative, wonder what isn’t working. If you’re not willing to look at what isn’t working, you can get yourself in trouble.

So appreciate what isn’t working, appreciate it enough that maybe it creates enough pain for you to want to make a change. Being purely positive all the time is not the ultimate solution. Being purely positive 98% percent of the time to me is the solution.”

—

Tony continues with the story of his daughter who is upset that she misses family time at home. The situation he describes is she just won this childhood fantasy dream to be a dancer at electric parade at Disneyland. Her time then was split between the commute to Disneyland, being a student getting straight A’s, missing time with her boyfriend and also her family. She found herself maxing out and really had a problem of abundance.

Tony goes on to say:

“She had everything going for her yet focused on the negativity in each scenario. Tony came to her and said, “Let’s not just be positive, let’s look at it. The whole thing is positive let’s know that no matter what you choose, you’ve won. You have what most people dream about. But for a moment, let’s be a little bit critical.

What do you love about Disneyland?
What’s great about it?
What is it giving you?

And let’s ask the question that maybe we don’t ask when we’re being purely positive. What isn’t it giving you?

What are you afraid about?
What are you missing by being there?
What’s great about being at home or what’s great about those things?
What’s not great about that?
Be honest. If you were there, what might happen that’s not good?
What might you miss out on?

And you know what, by getting her to use both positive and negative thinking or to be more accurate, positive thinking and some critical thinking, looking at what isn’t there for the moment, what she is missing out on and allowing that pain to motivate her, she was able to clarify what’s most important in her life and what’s the best way to do that.”

I’ve been obsessed with a question for most of my life.

And the question really is what makes the difference in people’s lives?

Why do some people perform so poorly consistently, even though they have every advantage?

And why are there some people that perform at the highest level have every disadvantage?

And why are there some people that achieve everything they dreamed of and they’re miserable?

How many know somebody that has every reason to be grateful for their life? And they’re not.

They’re frustrated. They’re pissed off. They’re worried.

“The most powerful way to control your focus is through the use of questions”

“Because focus is controlled by questions.

If you ask a different question continuously, not once continuously, you will get a different answer.

If you ask a lousy question, you get a lousy answer in a lousy state.

So why does this always happen to me? It doesn’t always happen to you. But the brain’s like a computer ask it a question. It’ll have to come up with an answer, it may say, “because you deserve it, you idiot.”

Some one will say, how come I can never lose weight?

You can lose weight, but if you keep saying how come I can’t ever lose weight, then we’ve got to come with an answer and it goes, because you’re a pig.

Lousy questions, create lousy answers.

Ask a better question, get a better answer.”

“Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be in love?”

This story is about how Tony in one of his business was used and scammed by his business partner. Here’s what he said about the situation:

“And it’s because I had a feeling of loss, the money was part of it. The ability to not have to think about money was another part of it. An equally big part of it was I cared about this person. They took advantage of me. I felt the lost of trust, the loss of love, loss of connection. All that got stacked into this anger. The truth of the matter is, do I have every right to be able to point and show that this guy is wrong? Sure. Will that make my life better. No, what I do say, how can I use this and move on, not make him right. Not make him wrong. Just go, okay. Instead I ask, what would make a person do that?

You know when I finally start asking what would make a person do that? I created my entire destiny technologies. Probably is the most powerful set of distinctions I made in my lifetime. Because I figured out how I could use it, what I could learn from it, instead of how could this happen to me? And I turned my finances around like 100 fold. My little company, doing four million dollars a year to 50 million dollars a year.”

“Richard Branson is this giant risk taker, right? But he questions, he’s got one question. He questions within himself and everyone else. How are we going to protect the downside? It’s his number one question.”

“instead of self-doubt, I would say questioning. I think it’s critical to question. But at certain stages, if you’re questioning all the time, you have nothing but fear and doubt.”

“Without gratitude and appreciation for what you already have, you’ll never know true fulfillment.”

In his morning priming ritual, Tony spends 10 minutes (minimum) every morning.

In this ritual he spends at least 3-5 minutes asking three things to be grateful for.

It can be big things to simple small things like the wind on my face. When you feel gratitude it’s impossible to simultaneously feel fear or harbor anger or hatred towards someone or something.

Here are the morning power questions from Tony’s book, Awaken the Giant Within:

1. What am I happy about in my life now?
What about that makes me happy?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not so happy right now, then what *could* make you happy? How would that make you feel?

2. What am I excited about in my life now?
What about that makes me excited?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not so excited about anything in your life right now, what *could* make you excited? How would that make you feel?

3. What am I proud about in my life now?
What about that makes me proud?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not so proud about anything in your life right now, what *could* make you proud? How would that make you feel?

4. What am I grateful about in my life now?
What about that makes me grateful?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not so grateful about anything in your life right now, what *could* make you grateful? How would that make you feel?

5. What am I enjoying in my life right now?
What about that do I enjoy?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not enjoying anything in your life right now, what *could* you enjoy? How would that make you feel?

6. What am I committed to in my life right now?
What about that makes me committed?
How does that make me feel?

If you’re not so committed to anything in your life right now, what *could* you be committed to? How would that make you feel?

7. Who do I love? Who loves me?
What about that makes me loving?
How does that make me feel?

If you don’t love anyone in your life right now, who *could* you love? How would that make you feel?

Obviously, you’ll get out of it what you put into it.
If you’re not feeling your feelings, you’re doing it wrong.