Interviews 1

11th November 2007


Interview with Tristan Loo of the Synergy Institute.
Life Coach, Author, Presenter

Tristan Loo is a prominent expert in the field of personal development and peak performance psychology. As a Life Coach, Author and Presenter, Tristan has changed the lives of thousands of clients, students and peers all over the world. His methods and techniques have been successful in helping people achieve their dreams and goals in life where traditional methods have failed. Tristan is the founder of the Synergy Institute, a personal development publishing and training company, based in San Diego, California.

Interview with Tristan Loo
by Gamy Rachel of Mind Think Success.com
Copyright © Gamy Rachel All Rights Reserved
This interview may not be copied.

1. Question:

Tristan, I understand you are a life coach, please tell us your background and why you like coaching as your profession?

Ans:

Hi Gamy. Thanks for interviewing me today. To answer your question, life coaching is a general term that I use for the purpose of having something identifiable to call myself, but in reality, I do much more than just personal development coaching.

I do a lot of talks and training workshops with companies interested in maximizing the productivity levels of their employees. I work one-on-one with new managers who need to build their communication and leadership skill sets. I work with athletes who are dealing with mental fatigue and burnout and need to regain a peak performance mindset.

I take on clients as a life coach with the focus on finding or redefining their life purpose and helping them set and achieve personal goals. I do training workshops for the general public on personal development topics such as goal setting, performance psychology, and interpersonal communication.

Last, but not least, I’m an author and writer and I write for business and self improvement magazines as well as my own books and courses and of course for SynergyInstituteOnline.com which hosts a huge personal development library of approximately 500 of my original articles and audio books that are 100% free for anyone to read or listen to.

Now why do I love what being a life coach? Well, in order to answer that, I’ll have to rewind my life back several years. A while back, I was suffering from extreme stress and depression, most of it caused by my career as a street cop at the time. I’ve always loved to help people, but the fighting, the violence, the murders and the unsavory characters I was dealing with on a daily basis was affecting my personal life in a very negative way.

On one particularly low point in my life, I realized one night that my breakfast, lunch and dinner consisted only of beer and hard alcohol and it suddenly hit me that if I didn’t clean up my act soon, I was going to die! I had accumulated a collection of negative habits in my life and I realized that in order to enact a positive change in my life, it would require massive action and to tell you the truth Gamy, I was scared to change.

But going through my old photos and journals, I realized that I had forgotten who I really was and I had forgotten the reoccurring theme throughout my life, which was PASSION for what I loved, DETERMINATION never to give up, and COURAGE to stand up against adversity.

I’ve always had high goals for myself and the difference between who I was back then and who I was at that low point in my life was that I had no more goals for myself and I was giving up on my own life. Goals give us a reason to live and since I had no goals for myself, I was choosing to die.

At that moment, I told myself, “Tristan. This is not you. You are not a quitter. You don’t ever give up without a fight. Get up off your ass and get your butt back into the ring.” So it was then that I decided to take massive action and do a “Control, Alt, Delete” on my life.
I quit my job and spent the next year of my life soul searching to rediscover my purpose in life from literally the ground up.

I worked in restaurant kitchens washing dishes. I worked as a laborer moving boxes. I worked as a janitor cleaning urinals. I never disclosed my background to anyone and I worked among the same type of people I used to put behind bars and I began to see life from a very different perspective. I began to step out of my paradigm and my mind expanded along with it. I stopped judging people for WHAT they were and began to know them for WHO they were.

Every person that I met contributed in helping me form the basis of what makes some people happy and other people unhappy in life. My journey eventually took me outside of the United States where I explored all over South America on my own and it was there that I discovered the power that family, friendship and unconditional love have towards life success. Most of all, I rediscovered my passion to help people while traveling through Brazil.

The end result of an entire year of soul searching was a powerful life purpose statement that I designed for myself, based upon my core values of love, courage, and determination.

My life purpose statement is:

“To create a positive and meaningful change in as many lives as I can, using the talents that I have been given.”

This life purpose statement has been the defining rule that I’ve lived by ever since and I’ve never been happier. I decided that my core talents consisted of coaching, publishing and teaching and the natural vehicle that I found to make efficient use of those talents towards my life purpose was by becoming a life coach.

This passion and purpose of mine eventually culminated into what is now the Synergy Institute which is a personal development coaching and training company that I founded.

2. Question:

Can you share with us one story or stories of any of your clients whom you have coached, that you think can benefit and encourage our readers?

Ans:

Most definitely! I guess technically this is not an actual client of mine, but it’s a person who attended one of my informal talks and her story really did touch my heart more than most.

About a year ago, I was asked by a Psychologist friend of mine to give a motivational presentation to a support group of women divorcees to help warm their souls, so I gave a one hour talk on how they could turn adversity into opportunity.

The night before I gave the talk, I had a bit of inspiration and I drafted an inspirational speech, entitled, Achieve Your Dreams, that I thought would work well tagged to the end of my talk. Achieve Your Dreams had a very profound impact on the group because it brought most of them to tears. Thankfully, it wasn’t tears of sadness, but rather tears of inspiration and hope. I did a podcast that’s based off of this speech and it’s available on my website for free here.

Well, a week later, my Psychologist friend asked me to come back to her office at the request of one of her clients who had attended my presentation. Her client told me that things were very rough in her life and the stress was immense and she had made up her mind that she was going to end it all by killing herself.

At the request of one of her friends, she decided to attend the support group that I talked at the week before. She said that my presentation was so powerful and inspirational to her that it really touched the core of her heart and it was just the prescription that she needed to motivate herself to take massive action on her life to make the positive changes necessary to pick herself up from the ground and continue moving forward with her life.

She gave me a big hug and thanked me for saving her life, and Gamy, when someone says that to you and genuinely means it from the bottom of their heart, no amount of money—no price can ever buy the feeling that you get from that.

3. Question:

Would you like to tell us how the Law Of Attraction and the Power of our Sub-conscious mind can help a person to succeed in life?

Ans:

Well, basically the law of attraction states that you attract into your life the things that you think about the most. So if you harbor negative feelings and negative thoughts about yourself or your environment, then regardless whether you or your environment are good or bad, the reality that you will attract into your life will be a negative one.

Conversely, if you flood your mind with positive thoughts and good emotions, then you will inevitably attract positive things and positive people into your life as a result.

Now the law of attraction goes hand in hand with the subconscious mind because your subconscious mind is the activating mechanism that makes the law of attraction work for you.

Think of your subconscious mind as a radio tower and it sends out a certain frequency. Now we are all surrounded by radio frequencies everywhere we go and in order to find that specific radio frequency of our favorite radio station, we need to fine tune our radios to that specific frequency.

When you program your subconscious mind to emit a certain frequency, it will begin to attract all those things and people that are tuned in to your specific frequency, just as a radio picks up the signals from a radio tower.

The confusion that people have is that they believe that they need to activate the law of attraction to start working for them. What they don’t realize is that the law of attraction is already working for them, each and every day of their lives.

The law of attraction is simply a process and the problem is not with the process, but rather with the frequencies that we send out into the universe. I can guarantee that those people who are not satisfied with their lives have been emitting the frequencies of the very things that they don’t want in their lives.

Therefore, people need to learn how to properly program their subconscious mind to emit the right signals for the things and the people that are good for their lives.

Now your subconscious mind is extremely powerful, but it requires a certain format of instructions in order for it to emit the right frequency out into the universe.

Your subconscious mind can only act on visual pictures that evoke a lot of emotion. The stronger and more emotional the picture you create in your mind, the stronger the signal you emit will be and subsequently, the more powerful your attraction process will be as well.

Conversely, your subconscious mind can’t act on the positives or negatives preceding those visual words. This is where most people go wrong when trying to “think positively.” They try very hard to program themselves positively, but they inadvertently program themselves negatively instead.

Let me give you an example. If I tell a child, “Don’t slam the door.” What do you think pops up in their head? Yeah, an image of a door slamming. That’s because our subconscious minds can’t process the do’s or the don’ts in an affirmation.

It can only process the pictures that it can visualize. It’s the same for a girl who wishes for a relationship with a guy who doesn’t drink or smoke. By wording this affirmation in the negative, she is inadvertently sending out frequencies specific for a guy who drinks and smokes and therefore, that is what she attracts into her life.

A third example is a man who wants to get out of debt. When he repeat the affirmation, “I want to get out of debt,” all he is doing is focusing his attention on debt and subsequently attracting it into his life.

In order to program your mind for success and to activate the law of attraction to work for you, you must word your affirmations in the positive with visually powerful words and pictures.
If I wanted to lose weight, I would not tell myself, “I want to lose weight” because my subconscious mind would only process the word “weight” and that would be counterproductive towards my success. I would instead tell myself, “I love my TRIM, MUSCULAR BODY at 175 pounds.” I would reinforce this subconscious program by repeating this affirmation daily as well as making a vision board
of my goal and planning out how I can make this goal possible using the S.M.A.R.T. goal-setting formula.

The final step in the process, once you have programmed yourself for success is to take action. This is a crucial step that’s unfortunately missed in the movie, The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne.

The law of attraction has no power unless you charge it with the power of action. Let’s go back to the radio tower analogy. That radio tower might be set to a specific frequency, but it won’t be able to emit that signal very far and attract those radios tuned into that specific frequency without a fair amount of energy to carry that signal across many miles.

Likewise, the law of attraction won’t do you much good without powering it up by having the courage to take action on that specific goal that you want to attract into your life. The amazing part of taking action Gamy is that it builds momentum.

Initially, your frequency will be weak because there’s not much power behind it, but the more action you keep putting into your goal, the more power you put behind the law of attraction and the more good things you begin to attract into your life.

4. Question:

Do you have any encounters with regard to question 3, and please share with us what happened.

Ans:

Sure Gamy. I’ll use myself for this example. When I first started the Synergy Institute, I was seriously struggling to make ends meet. Cash flow was non-existent and debt was piling up.

At one point, it was so bad that I was actually eating peanut butter and crackers for lunch and dinner just to get enough calories to get me through the day.

There were a lot of people who were telling me to give it up—that my dream were impossible and instead of listening to them, I simply cut those people out of my life because it wasn’t helping my purpose.

The amazing part of it was that even though I had a fair amount of stuff to worry about, I had also found my purpose in life and I was living my purpose, so even though I barely had enough food to feed myself, I woke up each morning excited that by the end of that day, I would have put myself that much closer towards the completion of my goal.

Each and every day, I recited my life purpose statement and I maintained a very positive attitude. I never let any obstacles pull me down. I simply found a way to either break through that barrier or I found a way to go around it and keep moving forward.

On one particular day, I was at the bookstore doing some research, mainly because I was too poor to buy any books, and I noticed a woman who was holding a book by Stephen Covey.

Since I was a fan of Covey’s work and had read every book he published, I ended up striking up a conversation with her. It turned out that she was a senior executive manager for a large corporation and she was having difficulty motivating her employees, which was why she was browsing for leadership books at the bookstore that day.

Having done extensive research and writing on leadership, I gave her some leadership pointers on how to motivate and empower her team and she was very impressed with my level of knowledge on the subject. She then asked if I would come in to her company to talk to her employees and tell them exactly what I had told her.

Now, I had never taken on a corporate client and I was deathly afraid of public speaking, but I was also broke and starving, so all my bridges were burned behind me and so I agreed to do the talk and I ended up doing an hour and a half presentation for her employees entitled, “Love What You Do, Do What You Love.”

To my surprise, I got a standing ovation from the 150+ employees there and not only did I get a decent check from doing that presentation, I also got rave reviews from the management team because of the increase in productivity and morale in the employees that resulted after the presentation.

In the weeks following that talk, I began to get a lot of referral business from that one talk in the form of speaking, writing, and coaching gigs, which really kick-started my company. So I guess one could say that I was lucky running into that senior manager at the bookstore that afternoon, but I say that I enacted the law of attraction, using the very steps I outlined above to attract that opportunity into my life.

5. Question:

Do you believe in Luck?

Ans:

Sure I believe in luck. The fact that my house survived the recent fires here in San Diego is a testament to that. However, I don’t believe in relying on luck itself to make things happen in my life and that’s the main difference between those people who are successful and those who are not.

I see a lot of people pour their money into gambling or lotto games, hoping that they will win so that they can use the winnings to change their lives. It doesn’t have to be money related either.

The same holds true for the girl who is desperately hoping for Mr. Right to come along or the working man who hopes that another better opportunity will pass his way.

While there is nothing wrong with hoping for a little luck to come your way, a co-dependent relationship with luck as a salvation to all your problems is a quick way to give up your own personal power and instead you become the helpless victim at the mercy of uncontrollable events.

Personally, I’m grateful when luck happens in my life, but I move forward regardless of whether I’m lucky or unlucky. I wrote a pretty in-depth article on my website entitled
How to Create Your Own Luck.

6. Question:

Why are some people doing better than others, is it because they are luckier, or is it something to do with what is inside that person?

Ans:

Luck has a tendency of finding some people and completely ignoring others, but in my opinion, it’s never luck alone that determines a person’s success in life.

What determines a person’s success in any area of their life is their daily habits and their goals in life. Think of luck as an amplification device that merely enhances those qualities which already exist in your life right now.

If your daily habits revolve around debt or broken relationships, then winning the lotto or getting a date with your “dream person” will only enhance those negative qualities that are already present within you. The person that has debt habits will still lose all their winnings from the lotto and the person who has poor relationship habits will lose their dream mate.

On the other hand, luck that happens to someone who possesses positive habits that are conducive towards their goals in life will gain the advantage of amplifying those good qualities that they already possess. We see this a lot with entrepreneurs where someone who has toiled for a long time trying to build their business suddenly gets a lucky break and they capitalize on that opportunity and become very successful because of it, just as in the example I gave of myself.

Let me give you a prime example that I use in my workshops of why lucky people are not always successful people. In 1985, a woman named Evelyn Adams won the New Jersey state lottery for 2.4 million dollars. Now that’s pretty lucky in my opinion. However, Adam’s luck didn’t stop there because the following year in 1986, she won the New Jersey state lottery again for another 3 million dollars. Now if you ask any statistician at the sheer statistical impossibilities of that ever occurring, they’ll probably tell you that you’re more likely to get struck down by lighting multiple times during the year than win a state lotto two times in consecutive years.

So what happened to the luckiest person in the world? Well, after her combined winnings of 5.4 million dollars, Adams eventually ended up broke, bankrupt and living out of a small trailer.
Her gambling additions along with having greedy friends and family made her blow through that lotto money faster than it took her to win it. So what does that tell us about luck?

This story tells us that someone can be the luckiest person on the planet and yet still live an unhappy and unfulfilled life because it’s our success mindset, not the luck we get, which determines success and happiness in life.

You see, success in life is developed with the daily habits that we practice each and every day. So someone might win the lottery and become a millionaire, but if that person smokes everyday, then millionaire or not, they’re still going to die of cancer or another smoking-related disease.

The people who consider themselves to be unlucky in life are the ones who never took responsibility for their own lives. They instead rather play the part of the victim, always blaming and complaining and throwing all their power away.

Sure they gain some sympathy points, but they end up losing control over their own lives and that’s why they go no where and any of those dreams that they have in life starts to slowing slip away and remain a fantasy forever.

7. Question:
Is there any burning suggestions you would like to share with the readers for them to take home with?

Ans:

Yeah I do have a message for your readers Gamy.…

I believe that everyone has something of value to contribute to the world using their unique blend of passions and talents that all of us have been given. I believe that everyone possesses the unlimited power to achieve anything that their hearts believe.

I believe that if you listen to your heart and if you find your purpose in life, then you will unlock a magnificent energy within you and you become more powerful than anything imaginable in the universe.

This power makes you become an unstoppable force and there’s no obstacle, no challenge, no barrier that can ever block you from your path towards your ultimate legacy in life.

The key to this unlimited power that all of us have comes with the simple realization that every thought, every feeling, every action that we make right now will become our future just as all of our past thoughts and intentions have produced everything that’s in our lives right now.

So if you want success in any area of your life, then it’s imperative that you take responsibility for your life RIGHT NOW and make the necessary changes needed in your life to design the future that you want for yourself.

Any amount of change in your life requires a certain amount of pain, but that’s the price you need to pay for the success you’ll realize in the future. So start paying that price today and you’ll reach your success faster than you ever thought was possible.

Thank you Tristan, it's been my pleasure and privilege to have this interview with you. Very honored to know you.

To learn more about Tristan Loo visit:
website: http://www.synergyinstituteonline.com

Also Check out Synergy Institute Audios
http://www.synergyinstituteonline.com/audiobooks.php

My Best To You

Gamy Rachel

http://www.mindthinksuccess.com

http://inspireyou-success.makehomeprofits.com