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Motivational guru Tony Robbins is known for many things. He provides life advice to Fortune 500 CEOs and U.s.a. presidents. He gives multi-solar day seminars where he speaks nonstop for ten hours at a stretch with the free energy of a wildebeest in heat. He has notoriously confronted a defender of the #metoo motility. However, of all his claims to fame, Tony Robbins is perhaps best known for his burn down-walks.

Robbins claims that the objective of his seminars is to pause downward his participants' mental patterns so they can sally as ultra-confident beings with the ability to reach their greatest dreams. It is in this spirit that his seminar participants strip off their shoes and socks and march barefoot over a track of burning hot coals.

If you ever get the opportunity to talk to a Tony Robbins fan who has attended one of these seminars, ask them about their burn-walking feel. I've done it and the descriptions I've received invariably sound similar something akin to a religious conversion. Yet every time I hear one of these testimonials, it always strikes me as odd that despite all the fervor, comparatively few of these converts get multimillionaire masters of the universe.

This discrepancy bothered me and so much that I investigated it. In doing and so, I happened upon an bookish newspaper by a cognitive scientist named Dimitris Xygalatas aptly called "Fire-walking and the Encephalon: The Physiology of High-Arousal Rituals."

The results of this obscure study are profound. Non only does information technology explain the existent reason Tony Robbins makes fire-walking a central part of his shtick, but it as well contains lessons for anyone who needs to build a following and get members of that following to buy from them.

The Science of the Trial-By-Fire

The primary subject field of Xygalatas's study is a community of Orthodox Christians in the Greek village of Agia Eleni called the Anestenaria. For hundreds of years, this group has held a festival of the two saints, which many in the mainstream church building have condemned every bit heretical.

During the festival, the Anestenaria engage in a calendar week of religious processions, music and ecstatic dancing. Then comes the main event. Devout participants clutch religious icons, strip off their shoes and walk over a track of burning hot dress-down—frequently scalding the soles of their anxiety in the process. Despite the pain and cost involved, the event's popularity has grown every year, with people from all over Greece descending on the host town to take part.

The outcome's foreign appeal has attracted the attention of researchers, and a number of them have interviewed participants over the years. Xygalatas reviewed this body of research. As a effect of doing so, he concluded that "many of [the participants] perform fire-walking without whatsoever specific reason, only later come upwards with an caption for it." Xygalatas categorizes burn-walking equally a loftier-arousal ritual, which he describes every bit an experience that "tin stimulate the production of endogenous substances in the human body…[and] can lead to increased release of endorphins. Endorphins tin can touch on emotion and motivation." High-arousal rituals likewise increase production of dopamine—the brain chemical associated with craving and habit.

What is interesting to note here is that by persuading someone to take part in a high-arousal ritual, a leader can quite literally stimulate the production of mind-altering chemicals. Furthermore, these brain chemicals benefit the leader to a higher place anyone else. As Xygalatas explains, "Endorphins can produce subjective rewards on a brain level, and dopamine can invest them with a feeling of significance…This in turn provides participants with sufficient motivation to maintain and transmit the ritual."

In other words, fire-walking makes people feel they are involved in something life irresolute, whether or not whatsoever modify always actually takes place. But its real significance is that it gets participants high on the idea of spreading the word nearly the feel to as many others every bit possible.

No wonder Tony Robbins is a multimillionaire.

Create Your Own High-Arousal Ritual

Fortunately you don't have to inflict actual physical distress on your own fans, followers and customers to tap into this powerful dynamic. Notice ways to create visceral experiences for those you lot want to attract and keep hooked. Apply whatever you take at your disposal. Lights. Music. Sounds. Repetitive phrases. The goal is to created a shared experience that feels profound.

Too many of us rely on rational appeals. Nosotros forget that our beau human beings—including our buyers—are flush full of chemicals that respond to unconscious triggers. If y'all can stimulate the production of the appropriate chemicals in those who thing nearly to your business, they will come upwards with all kinds of reasons why ownership from you is the rational choice.