Episode 300: The Role of the Mind in Hitting Goals with Vishen Lakhiani
In order to achieve success in business, it’s important to recognize that our mind is a crucial component in this journey. By constantly engaging in learning and self-improvement, we can not only refine our business skills but also enhance our mental capacity for innovation and problem-solving.
Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley, shares tips for entrepreneurs, including the importance of being able to represent your business, investing in skills like coding and presence, and building a network of people who like, trust, and respect you. Vishen’s success as an entrepreneur is a result of his commitment to investing in himself and his personal growth.
Vishen’s life changed when he saw an advertisement for a Western meditation protocol that he had used in his teenage years. He quickly realized the power of the mind in achieving goals and started to apply this knowledge to his work in sales. Within 18 months, Lakhiani went from being a nobody to the number one salesperson in his company. Vishen’s journey is a testament to the power of persistence and personal growth in achieving success.
Show Highlights:
- Vishen’s passion for martial arts and meditation growing up, and his dream to open a martial arts studio
- The challenges Vishen faced in the early years of his business, including being broke and having to do everything himself
- Importance of outsourcing low-value tasks and focusing on high-value tasks
- Advantage of learning to become more comfortable in front of the camera
- How the Pandemic has highlighted the need for personal growth and how Mindvalley is adapting to the changing world
- Having a clear mission and vision, taking action, and learning from failure
Links Mentioned:
Follow Vishen Lakhiani on Instagram: @vishen
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Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott:
Hey everybody, Adam Stott here. Thanks for checking out my podcast, Business Growth Secrets. You’re absolutely in the right place. This podcast is going to reveal to you all of the secrets that you’ve been looking to discover. They’re going to allow you to cure your cashflow problems, attain more clients, bring in more leads for your business, and create systems and processes that give you the growth that you want. You are going to discover the business growth secrets you have been looking for that I’ve used to sell over 50 million pounds worth of products and services on social media and help clients everywhere to grow their businesses on demand. So let’s get started on the Business Growth Secrets podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to a very, very special episode of Business Growth Secrets. I’m really pleased to have with me an amazing guest today. I think it’s going to add some massive, massive value. He is the CEO and founder of Mindvalley, the world’s biggest personal development platform online that really specializes in mind, body, spirit, and entrepreneurism. So welcome Vishen, really looking forward to getting to know more about your story, how you created this amazing community online, and we’re able to build this up. It’d be great to hear all about it. So why don’t we just start off getting to know you a little bit? Where are you now?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Firstly, thank you so much for giving me the honor of speaking to your audience. So, I mean, delighted to be here and I understand that most of the people who follow you are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. So that is my favorite crowd, my favorite audience.
Adam Stott:
Brilliant, brilliant. And look, I’m sure we’ve got some massive, massive value to add. So you built this amazing company in Mindvalley, which is spans of millions of followers online. And you’ve helped serve, you know, millions of people, no doubt. How did this all start? Where did it start from? And, you know, was it a passion project of yours? How did you actually get started in building Mindvalley?
Vishen Lakhiani:
So the story is actually really, really interesting. When I was young, I was obsessed with two things: martial arts and meditation. See, I grew up in Malaysia. My first ever trip to the United States was to compete in the U.S. Open Taekwondo championships. I was a martial artist. I was 17 years old, but I’d also taken up meditation. Not Eastern meditation, but Western meditation. Protocols like the silver method, which are about visualizing your goals, accelerating healing in your body. Extremely useful for me as a martial artist. Now, I was a top student in school, and you know what I wanted to be when I grew up? A lot of people wanted to be engineers or doctors. I wanted to open a martial arts studio. That was it. I wanted to, maybe I watch way too much…
Adam Stott:
Bruce Lee.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Karate Kid movie, right? But I wanted to open up a martial arts studio. Like I dreamed of growing old and being like Mr. Miyagi in the Karate Kid. And I went to my teacher and he said that is a stupid idea. You will never make it as a martial artist. There is no money in a martial arts studio. And I didn’t understand it then, but today I would say my teacher was absolutely full of BS and he had no right to tell me that to crush a 17-year-old kid’s dreams. Now, because of that, because of the teacher, because of influences, I ended up doing what I didn’t like. I became an engineer. I did pretty well. I got accepted into Microsoft. Only 1% of American computer scientists graduates get accepted into Microsoft. And I worked at Microsoft for 11 weeks only to realize I hated my life. So I quit. I moved to, I did a bunch of like random jobs. And one day I found myself in Silicon Valley, this was years later, in technology sales. So I was never really doing what I loved. I was pretty much a telemarketer, like, I hate to say it, but that was what I was, a glorified telemarketer selling technology to law firms. The dot com bubblehead burst companies were not hiring even as a programmer where I couldn’t get a job, I was a telemarketer and I hated my life. I was depressed. I was sad. My dreams had all diminished. I hadn’t been practicing martial arts. I was putting on weight. And in that moment of misery, I saw an advertisement for the silver method, which was the class I’d taken way back when I was a teenager, which I used to help me become a world-class martial artist. And I decided, you know, it couldn’t hurt. Let me just go and see if there’s anything else. At this point, I was not practicing martial arts. I was not practicing meditation, but I go for this class and it blows my mind. And four months later, I’ve been promoted three times. You see, I started to understand the role of the mind in hitting goals, the role of the mind in completing a sale, the role of the mind in growing your income, the role of being able to tap into altered states of consciousness, the role of being able to master your emotions. And the results were showing up at work. In 18 months, I went from a nobody because I had no experience in sales, I was a fricking engineer to the number one salesperson in the company. And then I decided to quit and at that point, I had the courage to finally pursue my dream. Now, opening up a martial arts studio was out of the question at this point, you know, I wasn’t in shape anymore, but I was back in the zone in terms of meditation. So, looking at those two, I decided to open a little meditation website. I called it Mindvalley and it grew and grew and grew. And over the last close to two decades, Mindvalley has gone on to become a business that’s privately held. Never taken any bank loans, never taken any money, but last year we did well over 100M in sales. And so one of the things I’m most known for is being able to scale a private business to 100 million in sales, building a global brand. Mindvalley has close to 17 million fans on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all around the world and build a business profitably. So I could finally do what I love, teach what I love, and at the same time be extremely successful from a monetary perspective.
Adam Stott:
Well, I think, you know, it’s amazing. I love the fast forward and you built this business and it’s just grown and grown and grown and grown. During that process of building the business, do you know what I actually loved about that story, which is many people might not take this piece, but I love the fact that you’re in telly sales. Because I actually think as much as that, that’s a hard job, right? And being able to go out there and totally get rejected, actually builds a great resilience. I think it’s a really good grounding for a business owner.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Let me tell you, I had to sell software to lawyers in Texas. Like these guys, if you disturb a Texan lawyer in the middle of a work to pitch them software, they curse you in the most elegant, creative ways. I’ve been told to F off in so many, so many multidimensional creative ways. And so, yes, you really have to build resilience.
Adam Stott:
Which is awesome. So we built that and we went and started the business. What was it like at the beginning? So you had this small at the time.
Vishen Lakhiani:
I had no fricking idea what I was doing in the beginning. Five years into my business, and I want to be very real and honest here, five years into my business, I was more broke than if I just had never started the business and it just stayed at my day job.
Adam Stott:
Really? And what’s interesting is you mentioned you were in Silicon Valley and you didn’t take any funding, right? And it’s still been out to go cause that’s quite really quite unique.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Back then no one was investing in meditation.
Adam Stott:
Yeah. And now, obviously, it’s a great, great topic.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Now it’s huge.
Adam Stott:
So what were some of the challenges and how did you overcome those challenges? You remember, was there a specific challenge for you that was really tough?
Vishen Lakhiani:
So the first challenge was this. Now, I want to share just a couple of pieces of advice to entrepreneurs out there. What I do right now is, first and foremost, I’m a teacher. And I realized that once you become a great teacher, you can apply this teaching skill to not just meditation, which is what I got qualified to teach, but to health and fitness, to entrepreneurship. Today, I’m teaching entrepreneurship. I have entrepreneurship mastermind group. In July, I’m launching a new applied AI program where I’m teaching AI actually with a group of other teachers how to apply AI in life. But so teaching is my core skill, right? So you got to know what are you really, really, really good at. In my case, it’s teaching. I’m the son of Malaysia’s number one English school teacher. So I guess I picked it up somehow from my mom, but teaching is my core skill. So you’ve got to figure out what is it that you’re really, really, really good at? And with that seed, you can build any type of business around it. So for example, in the early years, what I was really good at was something called PHP programming, which is basically web programming. So when I built my little meditation website, which was nothing more than an e-commerce website, I instantly had an edge over everyone else because there was no Shopify at that time. Shopify didn’t exist. Heck, YouTube didn’t exist. Facebook didn’t exist. CRM tools that we use today and take for granted didn’t exist. So I coded everything myself. I had to write my own checkout, my own CRM, my own inventory management system. Cause we were selling physical CDs, but I have that core skill coding. I combined, I use that to launch the business. I wasn’t the initial teacher on the business. I was used, I was working with other people. Eventually, my skill changed. You keep going higher and higher and higher in terms of your skill level. So when I first started, I did everything. I did coding, but I also did customer support. So step number one, understand what your key skill is and use it as a launching pad. Okay? But step number two is this, everything else, outsource. One day, I remember I was still a business of one person, I was working from the local coffee bean cafe and I was frustrated that day. Because I had spent four hours doing customer support. And surely there were better things for me to do. And then I decided to go to Craigslist, which was the dominant job website at that time, and look up how much a customer support staffer actually got paid. And it was 15 bucks an hour. And I looked up how much a PHP programmer got paid. I was doing PHP programming close to 50 bucks an hour. So I thought, wow, well, I’m really stupid. I should be freeing up this four hours so I can spend it on the higher value task. So what I did next was I coded and wrote my own FAQ self-help system for customer support. I coded the entire system. It took me one week. I put it up and I slashed down my customer support hours from 4 hours to 2 hours. The next thing I did is I went to Craigslist and I hired a young lady to do customer support. Her name was Adele and she got paid 15 bucks an hour. But this freed up 4 hours of my time to build a business. Within a few months, the business doubled because I was no longer wasting my time on low-value work. I understood the power of upleveling to the highest value task and then outsourcing everything else. Whether you outsource the software and FAQ engine, or you outsource to a human being. So that was the second key step that accelerated the business.
Adam Stott:
Which is really understanding the high-value tasks versus the low-value tasks, which we can see had massive, massive value. So skills, which is what we’re really talking about here. You had the coding skills, which few people have, right? But there are lots of other skills that really…
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right, it doesn’t have to be coding skills. Naval Radhikant, who’s a brilliant philosopher in Silicon Valley says there are two skills that if we cultivate in the world today, they’re going to give us an edge in any business coding is one, but the second one is the skill I then chose to cultivate, and that is on camera presence and media. It’s what you’re doing. It’s the skill that allows you to host a podcast, build an audience on YouTube, create viral videos, create an Instagram following. So it’s the skill of building a following.
Adam Stott:
Absolutely. So let’s let’s dive into that because that is a skill that is actually accessible to people that are listening right now. In today’s world, having that ability to be able to go out and build a following. And you can take yourself from unknown to well known actually very, very quickly, right, which is something that’s unique for us now. And when you started, that probably wasn’t as available. You’ve obviously done this really, really well having millions of followers across multiple platforms. What would you say for you is was that a hard skill set to acquire? What were you like in the beginning?
Vishen Lakhiani:
So I move from coding. And at that point, I started hiring programmers because I was not the best programmer. I started hiring even better programmers. And then I started moving to the skills of being an entrepreneur, building a business, which is a different set of skills. And, you know, the three most important skills, I believe, for building a business, the first one is money. It’s understanding money and not only understanding money, but healing whatever bullshit beliefs you have about money. So many of us are born into cultures of families that tell us money is bad, to be rich is to be corrupted. That money, the only way to make money is through hard work. You got to heal all of those BS beliefs because they will put a cap on your entrepreneurial growth. A great book to read on this and a book that helped me heal those beliefs was Secrets of a Millionaire Mind by Harv Eker.
Adam Stott:
Yeah.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Now the second skill is building a team. So I became very competent at building a team. I was in Malaysia, but I built a company that became very rapidly one of the best places to work in Malaysia. We ended up, even our office made Inc. Magazine in 2012 and 2019 is one of the most beautiful offices in the world. And soon we have people from 60 different nationalities working in our office. So building a team. And the third skill that you need is something I learned pretty late. I only learned this in 2018 and that is presence and communication. So I was doing well building the business, but you put me in front of a camera and I was flat. Like, I couldn’t. I could teach, but I was like the boring professor that you would have at university. I was not using Instagram. I used Instagram pretty much to share pictures of my kid. I used it as a gratitude wall that it wasn’t really building a following. And one day I’m interviewing Jay Shetty, right at a Mindvalley event, and I’m sure you know Jay Shetty, right? He’s one of the stars on the internet. And I told Jay, listen Jay, like how do you do what you do? And he says, you can do it. And I’m like, no, I can’t. I’m too old. I’m 42 years old. I don’t have your great voice. I don’t have your great hair. I don’t know how to dress as cool as you. I don’t know how to tell a story. And Jay said, look, Vishen, you just got to stop. And every time you post something, every time you get a hit, you get a few extra likes, a few extra shares, you try to understand what did you do differently. And then you do more of that. And he said everything else you can train. Go get a proper hacker, hire a stylist, learn, take a class on storytelling, learn mastery of voice. And that’s what I started doing. And I only really got on social media in 2018. Now I have 3 million fans combined on Facebook and Instagram. And my social media generates maybe 10 million a year, which is huge. Because if you’re a business owner in today’s world, you have to be visible and people will decide the quality of your business by the quality of how you show up. So you got to look, you got to get trained on how to dress. You got to be, you got to radiate good energy and help. You got to know how to speak, how to tell a story, how to give an interview, how to communicate with the media, how to articulate your business. I go really far in this. I signed up for public speaking classes.
Adam Stott:
This is what I was going to say. And the key thing that you’re communicating there to me is that you worked hard on these skills.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right.
Adam Stott:
And I think that that is critical, right?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right.
Adam Stott:
So many people just don’t do that.
Vishen Lakhiani:
And you don’t stop. You hone these skills to the form of mastery. Last month, I took five days off my business to go to LA and study acting. Now my business now, I’m the CEO of a business with 400 employees, yet I took a week off to go to LA and study acting. Why? Because I understood that when you learn the art of acting, the way great actors do it, you become more nuanced. Every time I’m in front of the camera right now, I’m more nuanced. The way I use my hands, the way I blink, the way I communicate.
Adam Stott:
You know, eye contact as well, right? And it’s very clear that you’re very professional, right at this, you know.
Vishen Lakhiani:
A great actor raises his eyebrows and even blinks deliberately. Every single thing matters. Every single thing stresses a point, but anybody can learn that.
Adam Stott:
Where do we get? So this is the thing, so you’ve got an ordinary entrepreneur who has a drive wants to be successful. They’ve got to do the work, right? Which is what we’re talking about is doing the work on yourself essentially. Where does your commitment to improving yourself come from? Because sometimes that isn’t present in individuals, and that really does make a massive, massive difference, I believe, to an entrepreneur, you know. If you put the effort into yourself, you get rewarded for the more you grow yourself. Where does that come from for you?
Vishen Lakhiani:
So, the amount of effort you put in honing yourself, fine tuning yourself will directly change your business. The reason Mindvalley is so successful with the world’s biggest personal growth platform and on Mindvalley, you can learn public speaking, you can learn charisma, you can learn body language, all with the world’s greatest teachers. And the top two job titles on Mindvalley, are actually the top three of entrepreneur, CEO, and startup founder, right? It is this group of people that are using Mindvalley because, and I’m sure your audience has heard this before, your business will grow to the level in which you grow and so you must be investing in yourself.
Adam Stott:
Yeah.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Now, I had a friend who was an investor. And she came back one day, we were having dinner, she came to dinner and she was frustrated and I asked her what’s going on. And she says, so I went to meet this entrepreneur. We had valued his company at 30 million. And we were about to cut him a check for 20, 30% of this company at 30 million. And then I saw him. I saw how he showed up. I saw how he spoke. I saw how he dressed. And I turned to my business partner and we cut the valuation from 30 to 20 cause we didn’t have confidence that he, as a founder CEO could stand in front of the press and talk about his new startup. And that’s why I’m frustrated. So she literally went in with a number of 30 million. She went down to 20 million because of how this man showed up. And this is something that every entrepreneur has to learn. Look, you want to scale a business? At some point, you may have to go and ask for a bank loan. You may have to go and pitch to an investor. You may have to give a presentation at a recruiting event to get new hires. You may have to sit down for coffee with that lead programmer that’s going to build a product that’s going to change your life. You may have to get in front of Zoom or Instagram and share your work. If you can’t do that, you are at a huge freaking disadvantage. Even Tim Cook, who runs Apple, got in front of a million people yesterday. Apple’s new inventions and he’s the COO, but he still has, he understands the power of being able to represent your business. And this is why it’s so important for entrepreneurs to invest in these skills.
Adam Stott:
I mean, I had big shoes to fill, right? So actually stepping up and doing that is very courageous, really, because people are judging him based off of jobs, who’s obviously a master at that, right?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Exactly.
Adam Stott:
And he still went out and said, you know what, I’m going to do it anyway. And actually, I was watching it yesterday. I think he did a great job. Everything you’re saying is something that I wholeheartedly believe. And often it’s something that my clients will have here with repetition without any doubt because it’s something that’s so important. And I believe the more that you grow yourself, the more that your business is going to grow, of course. Now, the question I have. Why do you feel that people just don’t do it?
Vishen Lakhiani:
People don’t understand how important it is, right? And like I said, the two most important skills that you can learn coding and presence. These are meta-skills. They give you an, they elevate everything else that you do. And most business owners get so caught up in the grind and they, that hard work, working harder is going to get them out of their business. Turns out this is really horrible advice. The best way to scale your business is to literally block out the amount of work that you’re going to commit and then block out the amount of time per week you’re going to spend fine-tuning yourself. This could be picking up a new skill related to your business. It could be fine-tuning your presentation skills. It could be learning coding, but blocking that out and making that irrevocable, like you will never, ever, ever compromise on that time. No matter how busy you get, you will never compromise on your learning time. Now, the best entrepreneurs, they don’t mess with that learning time because they understand that the more they learn, the more their output every hour is going to go up and they get out of that hamster wheel. The most amazing entrepreneurs I know, billionaires, they actually have so much flexibility and free time. It’s astonishing. You would think that they are working 70, 80 hours a week because they have these massive empires. No, I was recently invited to go and spend time with one really major entrepreneur on his private island that he shares with Richard Branson. Spent a week there with the man. And we’d wake up every day and hike for an hour. Then before dinner, we would hike for an hour. He would have so much free time to just sit down, have coffee with me, advise me on his business. It felt like he didn’t have a job, but he was running a massive, massive, massive company.
Adam Stott:
He understands leverage, right?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Leverage, right. So, great, great entrepreneurs, the greatest of the great actually work in a very counterintuitive way. I was interviewing one of them. This was a guy in Dubai that’s taken seven companies public. And he took me out to his balcony and Princess Tower, which is this huge building in Dubai. And from his balcony, I saw the most amazing view I’d ever seen. It was the birch. It was the islands, you know, the Palm Islands?
Adam Stott:
Yeah. Yeah.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right. And so you could see all of that from his balcony. And obviously, he was impressing me with the view. And then he turned to me and he went, you want a view like this? Got to be a billionaire, but you want to know the secret of being a billionaire? And I go, yeah, tell me. I’d love to know the secret. Work 21 hours a week. Like what? And he goes, trust me, work 21 hours a week. This is how you got to run your life. Work 7 hours on a Tuesday, 7 hours on a Wednesday, 7 hours on a Thursday. Monday and Friday, you keep those free. Free for opportunity. You see? By working 7 hours Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I give myself constraints. So I have to be so productive with my time. There is no time to waste time. And by keeping Monday and Friday free, if somebody calls me up and says, Hey, you’ve got to fly to London to check out this new deal. I can say, no problem. I can leave. I can leave Thursday evening to London. Arrive Friday. Spend Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday morning in London, fly back to Dubai Monday afternoon in time for work on Tuesday. And I am open to possibility. He says, so you want to be a billionaire? You don’t start one company. You’re going to start multiple. I took seven public, but the way I did it is through only working 21 hours a week.
Adam Stott:
Love it. You know, really being super productive on your time is something that people just need to understand more. And I think it is that lack of understanding a lot of the time, which is why the results don’t necessarily follow. And in the beginning, it’s ironic, isn’t it? Because when you start a business in the beginning, all you have is time. And I often say to people that you know, the thing that you should be spending your time on in that time is relationships. Building the relationships. And again, as you’re talking about exactly that opportunities and creating those opportunities. So in building Mindavalley and building this great business that you’ve built and taking it to nine figures, a hundred million in revenue, what were the kind of things you first broke through and you broke through your seven-figure mark that says, was that around the meditation, when did you start to expand it? And how did you go from seven to eight figures? What was the process like? Was that for you? You know, what was it?
Vishen Lakhiani:
So, you find, so what I did was I figured out one model that worked. Okay? We had this one website. So back then Mindvalley wasn’t a brand. We were a web development company. We developed companies for teachers in mindfulness, spirituality, many best-selling authors, we would develop their websites for them and then sell and manage their CDs, do the marketing, build the email list. And we develop one model to get a website to a million in revenue and then we replicated that. So, after we develop one, we replicated it. And later on we put everything together and we created a subscription service, rather like Netflix with the world’s best programs and mind, body, spirit, but also relationship, career growth, entrepreneurship. And it’s 499 a year and that’s mindvalley.com. And that’s how the business scale, because we have such a huge fan base.
Adam Stott:
And it’s great offer, right?
Vishen Lakhiani:
[25:35.97].
Adam Stott:
So can we touch on that? The importance of a great offer. Because it’s something I think that, you know, business owners miss in a big way, right? So can you explain the concepts of that offer? Because clearly there is massive value.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Yeah. So, a great offer has to be something that the customer can say no to. And I think, there are many ways to create a great offer. But one of the ways which I think is really valuable is from the book Hundred Million Dollar Offers by Alex Hormozi, right? So remember what Alex says. He says there are two things that you got to add and there are two things you’ve got to subtract. So the two things you’ve got to add is number one, you’ve got to sell the dream. So in our case, what is the dream? The dream is become the best human being you can be in every aspect of life by getting access to all of the greatest mentors. And the second thing you want to add in addition to the dream is why are you uniquely qualified. Well, we’re uniquely qualified because we are education experts. You’re not just going through a boring course. Our courses are the best in the world. And we bring in five principles of learning design that actually make the content stick to you. So you, in just 20 minutes a day, you get transformed. And [26:49.8] the best in the world, right?
Adam Stott:
Yeah, absolutely.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Now, there are two things you’ve got to take away from a great offer. And the two things is you got to take away time commitment. So that’s why we say you don’t have to spend hours going through every course. It’s 20 minutes a day. Look, you can do this while you’re having lunch, even if you have like a super fast lunch, 20 minutes a day and every day you up level. And the second thing is ease of results. And what we say there is that we make it so easy because we’re not just lecturing to you. We’re giving you exact tools, templates, PDFs, even neuro training audios that you can listen to that actually retrain your subconscious mind to automatically give you the confidence you need to automatically help you with things such as productivity or reading speed or entrepreneurship or belief in yourself. And these meditations, these neuro trainings at 20 minutes so it’s so easy. You get fast results and you get them with ease. Okay? So you’re adding the dream. You’re adding why are you uniquely qualified. And then you’re taking away time to results and you’re taking away difficulty.
Adam Stott:
Yeah. And you know, what’s amazing, obviously the ability to apply that, right? Because what I’ve seen from obviously, we’ve applied this very much so to the things that we do, and I’ve trained it to entrepreneurs in the masses. But many times people struggle to apply that. But I’ve got another question that I wanted to ask you, which relates to what we were discussing earlier, which I think is really important. You mentioned that your core skill is being a great teacher.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right.
Adam Stott:
And clearly, you know, being a great teacher is about getting somebody to understand and then apply the concept in order to get the results.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Right.
Adam Stott:
Now what’s your philosophy around being a great teacher? And how do you approach that? Do you have a philosophy? Is it something that’s in built? Have you ever reflected on it? And I just think you’re really important question to ask you.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Exactly, so if you are designing a curriculum or any type of teaching to transform a life, there are five ingredients that you want to bring in. The first is you must make sure that you’re teaching the right subject, right? Geography and history have their place, but they are not the subjects which are going to deliver the greatest amount of usefulness to you. Where else? Help learning how to extend your lifespan, learning the power of your mind, learning meditation, learning entrepreneurship skills. So you must make sure you have the right subject. The second thing is critical reflection. As you are teaching, you must get the person to reflect on what are they doing that’s off right now. Because if you don’t reflect on what you’re doing wrong, you can’t correct it. Right? So you must create the critical reflection. Journaling is so effective because it’s a form of critical reflection. The third thing is called social discourse, and this means being able to share your learnings with other students. This is why Mindvalley, our platform, is so rooted in community. We have thousands of meetups happening like all around the world from our members who come together to share what they are learning with each other. The fourth is altered states. This is where within the teaching you bring in breathwork, neuro training, meditation or hypnotherapy to shift the subconscious. I can lecture you on confidence, right? And it may not make a dent. But we have a confidence hypnotherapy by Paul McKenna, the great British hypnotherapist.
Adam Stott:
I love them. Yeah.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Five days listening to this 23-minute audio for five days and your confidence is through the roof and you’re ready to crush it on your next stage appearance.
Adam Stott:
Yeah.
Vishen Lakhiani:
The final one is rate of application. As soon as you learn, you apply. Right? So we encourage you to apply as soon as you learn. You don’t wait, you apply immediately. And when you bring these five things together, you have incredible results in terms of transformation. So, in our case, our results were so good. We actually have a website called stories.mindvalley.com. Anybody can go to the website and you will see we have 19, 000 case studies just freely submitted from my students, 19,000. And my goal is to hit a million before I die.
Adam Stott:
I think it’s absolutely amazing and I love the fact that you do have that philosophy and you’re building that together. When you go out and build a training then, do you really look at how you implement those five things in the training? Is that your consideration?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Exactly.
Adam Stott:
Bringing a trainer in to work with you. You’re really looking at can they deliver on these deliverables, right?
Vishen Lakhiani:
Absolutely. So we bring in many world-class, world-class teachers, philosophers. People to be a Mindvalley teacher, you’ve got to be highly accomplished. Maybe you’re on Oprah. Maybe your book hit the New York Times. You’ve got to be highly accomplished, but then we bring in learning experience directors to work with the teacher to help create that curriculum alongside these five principles.
Adam Stott:
Love it. Look, I really enjoyed the conversation. I think it’s an amazing thing and certainly, if you are listening right now, go and check out Mindvalley, you know. Vishen has been able to create something truly exceptional. Before we wrap up Vishen, I really love three tips to a business owner right now. Because some of the principles you’re talking about actually go quite high level, right? You know, and I think that that’s where that’s the destination. A lot of people want to get to that destination so they can grow and go on and create the returns. But there’s sometimes a lot of self-doubt, and a lot of fear, and a lot of struggle that people face when they’re starting out. And maybe you had a little bit of that at the beginning. You said your first few years were difficult. What tips could you give somebody, you know, and it might even be some repetition here and that’s fine if it is, but what tips could you give somebody that is in that stage? They want to go and they want to get their dreams like you did when you were in that karate teacher and he crushed it. What would you say to somebody like that in the moment to encourage them to take the action necessary to go out and create the results that they want? Just maybe three tips.
Vishen Lakhiani:
So, we spoke about the importance of presence. We spoke about having a core skill like coding, but keep in mind that today you don’t have to learn coding. If you can prompt engineering, right, and use that GPT to speed up your work. But there are a couple of other things that you want to have. You want to have a growth mindset. So growth mindset is supremely important. That’s what we spoke about blocking off time in your week where you can focus on growing yourself. And not be obsessed with the processes of your business. Now, the final one that we didn’t get to talk about, but it’s extremely important is networking. Is understanding how to build a network. How to be, so you asked for three tips. Let me say this. You must learn how to build a network. And how you build a network is people must like you, people must trust you, but most importantly, people must respect you. You can like and trust someone, but it doesn’t mean you respect that person. Respect means they respect your skills, they respect who you are, they respect what you’re able to do in the world. And when you can build these things into your network, people like you, people trust you and people respect you. Now, you expand your ability to seize opportunity in the world. Because you know the right people.
Adam Stott:
And I’m really glad that you added that in because I think that it’s critical. Because you can add all those other skills in, but if you’re not likable and you can’t build relationships, it’s going to be a challenge, right? It really is, you know. So, I absolutely love that advice, you know. And you know what? And you probably find this, having done, you’ve done lots of interviews yourself, right? I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people from, you know, A list stars to dragons to, you know, to business owners like yourself doing hundreds of millions in revenue. And the principles are actually pretty much the same, right? And I think that, you know, they can be worded different, they can be communicated in a different way. And then there’s sort of the missing pieces sometimes, which we just got out, which was the respect piece. Principles are the same. If a business owner takes these principles that we’ve discussed today and maybe re listens to this, actually, and I would recommend that you maybe listen to this 2 or 3 times because the principles are there. And if you apply those, you can go out and you can really start to drive very recently. And in this moment, go and check out Vishen. Are you on Instagram yourself? You’ve got massive following.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Yes, @vishen. VISHEN.
Adam Stott:
Yeah, go and connect with Vishen. I think it’s been absolutely amazing. I’ve really loved having you on and check out Mindvalley. I’m certainly going to go and check that out. It sounds like there’s some really cool stuff there as well with a great offer. So thank you so much for coming on. And I really enjoyed the chat. I think I’ve added lots and lots of aid to our audience. I look forward to catching up with you soon in the future.
Vishen Lakhiani:
Yes. Thank you, Adam.
Adam Stott:
Pleasure. Hi everybody, Adam here, and I hope you love today’s episode. Hope you thought it was fabulous. And if you did, I’d like to ask you a small favor. Could you jump over and go and give the podcast a review? Of course, I’ll be super grateful if that is a five-star review. We’re putting our all into this podcast for you, delivering you the content, and giving you the secrets. And if you’ve enjoyed it, please go and give us a review and talk about what your favorite episode is perhaps. Every single month, I select someone from that review list to come to one of my exclusive Academy days and have lunch with me on the day meeting hundreds of my clients. So if you want that to be you, then you’re going to be in with a shout if you go and give us a review on iTunes. Please, of course, do remember to subscribe so you can get all the up-to-date episodes. Peace and love and I’ll see you very, very soon. Thank you.