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 I interviewed Dr Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Professor of Leadership Development and Organizational Change at INSEAD, many years ago when I was still testing the RYD Hypothesis that it's only in the integration of Leadership Depth, Business Excellence and Craft Mastery that great leaders and great businesses would be birthed and nurtured. He is a thought leader in the space of Leadership Development who relies heavily on Psychology for developing business leaders and CEOs. He chose to be a psychoanalyst and integrate that into his work. I believe therapy and healing (which is about clearing the past) is directionless without coaching and coaching (which is about creating a bright new future in alignment with our impossible, unimaginable, crazy dreams and making a massive impact) is ineffective without therapy and healing. That is why, we have integrated psychotherapy for our coachees' ongoing inner work to go to dark places within that they don't want to go to and even to dark places within that they didn't even know existed to live in the expression of their undeniable greatness, their Inner Light and realize their highest potential. That is why Centre for Coaching Excellence, an RYD channel of impact for training and developing RYD Coaches, has psychotherapy as part of its Leadership Depth curriculum. In Gear 0, high performing leaders are either: 1) Rescuer Leaders creating dependent, ineffective team members 2) Avoider Leaders creating stressed-out, ineffective team members 3) Critical Fighter Leaders creating under-confident, ineffective team members 4) Victim Leaders creating directionless, ineffective team members Since a leader, a coach and a parent have the same 3 roles to play in order to support their people, coachees and kids to joyously realise their highest potential - nurturer, leader, coach; you can replace leaders with parents or coaches and team members with kids or coachees; the above 4 statements would be equally valid. Here's an interesting article on Rescuer Leaders by Dr Kets de Vries in HBR - The Dangers of Codependent Mentoring Are you a Gear 0 High Performing Leader; or a Peaceful Warrior Super Performing Leader on your Hero's journey from Gear 1 to Gear 5? Raising our consciousness is an endless journey but it is possible to raise one's consciousness all the way to at least Gear 3 before we step into conversations with our team members or kids, irrespective of which gear we may currently be at. That is what Conscious Leadership and Conscious Parenting is all about. Here are few Distinctions with respect to Communicating Powerfully in the World of Others (Gear 3 Leadership Muscle). A Distinction is a distinct point on the Ball of Perspective that give us Power to Create our Reality in alignment with our impossible, unimaginable, crazy dreams. 1. In Gear 1, we relate to our own self as extraordinary. In Gear 2, we relate to other people in our Space as extraordinary. It's only in Gear 3, other people begin to relate to us as extraordinary. All of us want to be in Gear 3 but to get there, one has to go through the fire of Gear 1 and Gear 2. Interestingly, by the time we reach Gear 3, other people admiring us doesn't even matter anymore because we have become an empty space for other people to discover themselves; a channel of impact for people to draw from the Universe through us what would most serve them. 2. Ego is nothing but a human being's self-defense mechanism to protect oneself from the pain of one's own Hole in the Soul: i. I am not good enough. ii. I am not important. iii. I am all alone. No one loves me. Let this understanding support us to be loving kindness to all people in all our conversations because we know the pain of the Hole in our Soul. 3. The 3 growth levers equally exercised supports us in our good to great journey to realize our highest potential - Leadership Depth, Business Excellence and Craft Mastery. As a leader, our job is to support our people to realize their highest potential. By being clear which growth lever is not fully strengthened for our people, we can help them understand the barrier in their growth and help them build their structure of success to maximise their growth and therefore, their happiness and fulfilment. 4. If people are not on their good (Gear 0) to great (Gear 5) journey, they would be operating from Gear 0, from the hole in their soul. Our highest contribution to them would be to raise our consciousness to Gear 4 (Delivering on Our Word leadership muscle) which helps them to step up to Gear 1 (I am extraordinary and I love myself) in our space, helps them to experience their own greatness in our space; supporting them to learn, grow and contribute much more effectively. Gear 4 is the domain of Integrity. Gear 4 is also the domain in which when I say - I believe in you, you will viscerally feel my belief in you. That creates the space for you to step up to Gear 1 in my space. But, if I have broken words in our relationship, it will come in the way for me to step up to Gear 4 in our relationship. So, restoring my broken word to you supports me to step up to Gear 4 in our relationship, which is when I can look straight into your eyes and say - I believe in you; and you will experience my belief in you and relate to your own self as extraordinary. 5. Happiness and Fulfilment is an experience of growth. If we are not growing, we are dying. The highest growth available to us is in realizing our highest potential. We define and, therefore, limit our highest potential by our dream. More impossible, unimaginable, crazy our dream; more growth we have gifted ourselves this lifetime; provided we play the game to realize our dreams. Help people discover their impossible, unimaginable, crazy dream that scares them a bit because if their dream doesn't scare them, then their dream is not big enough. Support them to build a structure of success for realizing their dreams and help them to identify the first tiny step to take from their structure of success. This is a foundation for communicating powerfully in the world of others. My dream is that RYD Circle of Love nurtures 60 Indian businesses to be Fortune Global 100, 300 Indian businesses to be Fortune Global 500 and 1000 Indian Businesses to be Forbes Global 2000 enabling India to be the world's most developed, beautiful, greenest nation; with her citizens happiest, healthiest and the most prosperous in the world. What is your impossible, unimaginable, crazy dream that scares you a bit and yet brings stars to your eyes, joy to your heart, dance to your feet, a song on your lips, peace in your mind, energy to your life and lights up your soul? Dream Big. Create Big. Impact Big 💜 Loving you, j.
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 Clarity is scary because then we can no longer blame Confusion for not taking actions that require courage to take. Confusion is our zone of safety because once there is Clarity, we would have to give up the comfort of being busy being busy as we can no longer hide behind Confusion. That is why we avoid reflecting, meditating, learning new ideas and anything else that will slow us down because then Clarity in all its Simplicity will emerge. Better be stressed out fire-fighting than having to face the fact that we don't really have the courage to take the 20% actions that would give us 80% outcomes that we are seeking. Safer and easier to keep running around doing the 80% that would only give us 20% outcomes. That is why developing ourselves as an 80 / 20 Thinker is so tough because the truth is we don't really want to look straight in the eyes of the 20% actions that we necessarily need to take. Better get lost in tactics of today than build the strategy for re-inventing the future. So much safer that way. And, so comforting to know we are working extremely hard. Clarity moves us forward to Joyous Inspiration and Effective Action. But, Joyous Inspiration is scary. Boredom is safer giving us the right to not take difficult, effective actions. Being centred and grounded is scary. Being stressed is way safer because Stress fights Clarity tooth and nail to keep it away. The fact is die we have to. Better die fast building a new future than die slowly surviving. The caterpillar has to die for the butterfly to emerge. What if the caterpillar was scared of dying? Then, it would lose the opportunity to transform into a beautiful butterfly, flying high in the sky of its limitless possibilities. Embrace your undeniable greatness to break free from the cocoon of your fears to let your inner Light shine to make our world a brighter, better, happier place. As you do that, feeling brighter, better, happier will become the place to come from; not a place to endlessly crave for and chase in the world outside. Certainty and Confusion are two sides of the same coin. Beware of both. Certainty will not allow you to see your own assumptions and will block you from travelling to other points on the Ball of Perspective to learn from others what you seek to create - massive impact and, therefore, wealth through building a great business; loving, harmonious, positive, uplifting relationships; happy, healthy, responsible kids with their genius joyously expressed; highest level of health, fitness and joyous well-being, Certainty is often a cover-up for Confusion. I am Right (corollary of that is: You are Wrong) is a usual way to protect ourselves from Confusion and the subsequent Overwhelm. Confusion will not allow you to learn, explore and experiment for you to arrive at the Clarity of 20% Actions that will give you 80% Outcomes that you are seeking. Choose Being Curious over Certainty as that will open you up to learn what you need to learn to step into Crystal Clear Clarity on the 20% Powerful Effective Precise Actions that will give you 80% Outcomes. The Light of Curiosity (Gear 3 Thrival Consciousness) will dissolve the the darkness of Certainty, Confusion and Overwhelm (Gear 0 Survival Consciousness). Keep being curious to learn, re-invent yourself and contribute, which will support you to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; experiencing beauty, balance and harmony within and all around; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way. Loving you, j.  Reuters documented at least 600 previously unreported workplace injuries at Musk’s rocket company: crushed limbs, amputations, electrocutions, head and eye wounds and one death. SpaceX employees say they’re paying the price for the billionaire’s push to colonize space at breakneck speed. (Reference: Reuters Investigates SpaceX Safety) A great leader (Gear 5 / Level 5) contributes, makes a difference and benefits communities that he / she is impacting directly (employees, customers) and indirectly (society). A mediocre leader (another name for good / Level 4 / Gear 0) causes harm to their people and the world. If our own people are being harmed, our customers can never be served nor the world. But the worst harm that a mediocre leader sadly causes is to their own self. It is the Law of the Universe. We are lucky that in India, this law runs in our blood because of centuries of learning about it. We call it Karma. What you give to others, comes back to you probably many times over. Even a tiny harm done to another - for example, shouting at someone. At the very instance of the shouting, there's anger and upset flowing in our own body which is harming our own self. Heaven and Hell is not beyond this Lifetime. Karma has us experience Heaven and Hell in that very instant in our body. A random act of kindness fills the body with so much joyous fulfilment and that is the experience of Heaven. Hurting someone is an outcome of bitterness / anger / resentment in the body which is the experience of Hell in that instant. A great Leader has the luxury of Having it All. Have It All is not available to a mediocre Leader because success is built at the cost of everything else and success is used to fill the Hole in the Soul. Unfortunately, no amount of success can fill the hole in the Soul because nothing on the outside can fill the hole as only we have access to our Soul. The worst misery in the world is to build vast amounts of success and wealth, and realising that one is still feeling lonely, inadequate, unimportant even as one is standing on top of that huge mountain of success and wealth. Who am I to judge Elon Musk when the whole world is raving about him? Though, I do send him love and blessings to find joy of Having It All. Keep learning, elevating your consciousness and growing to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; experiencing beauty, balance and harmony within and all around; while having lots of fun and adventure along the way. Loving you, j.  Having It All is a measure of Leadership Depth and is an infinite journey to Gear 5 Consciousness, as we raise our consciousness one Gear at a time and travel across multiples spirals of growth from Gear 1 to Gear 5. Having It All is winning the gold medal in the Olympics of Life. It's in Gear 5, happiness becomes a place to come from, instead of as a reaction to our ever-changing circumstances. Having It All is having i. Deeply fulfilling, successful, profitable business supporting us to live our purpose of life; gifting us with impact, contribution and financial freedom AND ii. Loving, harmonious, positive, uplifting relationships at work, at home and in the world AND iii. Happy, healthy, responsible, confident kids with their genius joyfully expressed AND iv. Nourishing, nurturing ourselves to the highest level of health, fitness and joyous well-being - physical, energy, emotional, mental, spiritual AND v. Making a massive difference through the work we do Not one at the cost of the other. Breakdowns will happen along the way because that is the design of Life. Our consciousness will strengthen and rise if we use every breakdown as an opportunity to learn and make a bigger difference as an outcome of the learning, supporting us to break through the barrier that caused the breakdown. The specific breakdown will point us in the direction of what we are meant to learn to break through. If business results are not coming, it's time to step back and reflect to learn what can create business results in alignment with our intentions. And, then apply the learnings to make a bigger difference and transform the area. If health is failing, it's time to step back and reflect to learn what can create better health in alignment with our intentions. And, then apply the learnings to make a bigger difference and transform the area. If relationships are failing, it's time to step back and reflect to learn what can create more loving, harmonious, positive, uplifting relationships in alignment with our intentions. And, then apply the learnings to make a bigger difference and transform the area. If kids are failing to live from our family values, it's time to step back and reflect to learn what do we need to do to create a space for happy, healthy, responsible, confident kids with their genius joyfully expressed in alignment with our intentions. And, then apply the learnings to make a bigger difference and transform the area. If work feels meaningless and directionless, it's time to step back and reflect to learn what is our Purpose and build our business in alignment with that to make a bigger difference and increase our impact through our work. A Helpless Victim in the face of a Breakdown will break down. A Dictatorial Fighter will use brute force to fight the Breakdown at the cost of his relationships, kids, health and well-being. In the beginning, it will feel like as if the Fighter is winning the battle against the Breakdown. But, ultimately the Fighter will break down after the Fight because no one is left to fight. An Over-functioning Super Hero Martyr will use all her hours to do all the work that everyone else is supposed to do. In the beginning, there will be a satisfaction of being busy being busy. But, ultimately the Over-functioning Super Hero Martyr will break down with mental, emotional and spiritual exhaustion. A Distracted Avoider will keep himself distracted to avoid looking at the breakdown, unconsciously hoping the problem will go away if it is not paid attention to. By not looking in the eye of the problem, the problem only becomes bigger and bigger as it goes deeper and deeper within till it breaks down the Avoider. Usually, we keep cycling between these 4 roles in our Emotional Body, which are an expression of our Hole in the Soul in our Spiritual Body and our small mind in the Mental Body. These roles result in low energy in our Energy Body and do not allow us to live our Purpose; or to re-architect our business, our relationships, our health because of the fear of the unknown. For our Survival Consciousness, Stressful Anxious Present replete with Breakdowns feels safer than the Unknown that lies hidden within the Darkness of our conscious, sub-conscious and unconscious Fears. That is why we have a resistance to growth habits and transformative practises, which shows up as a lack of consistency in following through. Our Survival Consciousness says - better be safe with the stressful, anxious present than discover the darkness which will come to the surface as we do more growth habits and transformative practices with consistency. The darkness coming to the surface is a gift of the growth habits and transformative practises because now we can put the darkness of our fears in the operation theatre of Raw Honesty and can use the surgical tools of Inquiry, Reflection and Exploration to see and accept what's within and dissolve it with the Light of our Loving Awareness. It takes Courage to break free from the Vicious Cycle perpetuated by the Hole in the Soul and create a New Future. It takes Humility to not dismiss any low energy emotion that arises and Raw Honesty to go deeper to uncover the Ugly Truth of a limiting thought that we don't want to own, which is at the source of the fleeting low energy emotion. And, without that Courage, Humility and Raw Honesty, all we have is a heart that has forgotten to sing, a mind which knows not where to find peace, lips that have forgotten to smile, feet that drag instead of dance to the music of life. In the vulnerable owning and embracing of our Ugly Truths, which we thought we had gone beyond, lies our growth. Beyond that owning and embracing lies Joyous Freedom to be who we truly are - Love, Gratitude, Reverence, Authenticity, Massive Positive Impact, Humility, Equanimity, Loving Kindness, Integrity, Joy, Abundance - whatever is the version of our Source, whatever is our Real Truth, whatever is the expression of our Whole Soul. We deny ourselves the experience of our Real Self by not owning our Darkness, by not owning our Fears, by not owning that we are not as yet fully Light, by not owning that we are not as yet fully Love. How will we know if we don't spend time looking within? The challenge is that we make progress on our good to great journey by dissolving bit of our Darkness and as an outcome of that, so much success on the outside gets created that we forget to continue to learn, grow and progress on our good to great journey. Let's continue our journey as Peaceful Warriors with inner quiet Confidence, gentle Courage and unwavering Commitment to together create a Brave New World for ourselves and our kids in the face of breakdowns, and specially, in the face of breakthroughs 💜 Loving you, j.  Key Insights from the HBR article: How Company Culture shapes Employee Motivation
1. Total Motivation of employees (a measure of stronger workplace culture) increases customer satisfaction, revenues and profitability. 2. Play, Purpose and Potential increase Total Motivation of employees. i. Play: When you are motivated by the work itself. You work because you enjoy it. Play is our learning instinct, and it’s tied to curiosity, experimentation, and exploring challenging problems. ii. Purpose: When you work because you value the impact you are creating through your work. iii. Potential: When the work you do enhances your potential. 3. Holding a Weekly Meeting with your team increases Total Motivation of employees when you include the below 3 questions directed at encouraging Play, Purpose and Potential: a. Play (working for the joy of working): What did I learn this week? b. Purpose (making a difference): What impact did I have this week? c. Potential (becoming the greatest version of myself): What do I want to learn next week? 4. Emotional pressure, economic pressure and inertia reduce employee motivation. i. Emotional pressure: Using fear, peer pressure and shame to get work done, working because of fear of negative impact of not getting the work done. When you do something to avoid disappointing yourself or others, you’re acting on emotional pressure. ii. Economic pressure: When an external force makes you work. You work to gain a reward (money) or avoid a punishment. iii. Inertia: When you ask someone why they are doing their work, and they say, “I don’t know; I’m doing it because I did it yesterday and the day before,” that signals inertia. You are doing all the tasks but you just can’t explain why. 5. A super-performing culture maximises the play, purpose, and potential felt by its people; and minimises the emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia. This is known as creating total motivation (ToMo). 6. A century of research has proven what many intuitively know: why you work determines how well you work. 7. Six Questions that help measure the Total Motivation of Employees on a scale between 1 (strongly disagree) and 7 (strongly agree): i. I continue to work at my current job because I believe the work has an important purpose. ii. I continue to work at my current job because this type of work will help me reach my personal goals. iii. There is no good reason why I continue to work at my current job. iv. I continue to work at my current job because the work itself is fun to do. v. I continue to work at my current job because without this job I would be worried I couldn't reach my financial objectives. vi. I continue to work at my current job because if I didn't, I would disappoint myself or people I care about. 8. What processes in an organisation affect culture? i. Role design ii. Organisation's Purpose and Core Values iii. Performance Systems where employees are stack-ranked or rated against each other will increase emotional and economic pressure, reducing total motivation and thus performance Leadership Depth would make you care about your people and have the courage to make changes in the organisational culture with the intention to contribute to your people than with the intention to make more money. With what intention you lead culture transformation in your organisation will determine how successful you would be in making it happen. Craft Mastery would bring the joy of learning in your organisation, one of the key contributors in increasing Total Motivation - yours and your people. Business Excellence through Rockefeller Habits would ensure you implement best-in-class proven processes that would support you to maximise the Total Motivation of your employees. Keep playing the Great Game of Business using the 3 Growth Levers (Leadership Depth, Craft Mastery, Business Excellence) to joyously lead yourself and your business from good to great, realize your dreams and have it all with ease and grace; while having lots of fun along the way 💜 Love and Light, j.  Our Destiny
I believe it is India’s destiny to become the world's most developed and prosperous nation in our lifetime, with her citizens happiest and healthiest in the world. It is India’s destiny to contribute massively to humanity, making a huge difference to our fellow human beings around the world, through the wisdom of our ancient heritage, creativity and innovation of our people, and authentic leadership in business and society. I believe you and I can make this dream a reality by becoming the greatest version of ourselves, personally and professionally, by leading ourselves and our work from good to great; and realising our greatest dreams in deepest communion with our highest selves. We are born in our country because we are meant to carry forward our country's legacy to the world and serve our country to make an even bigger difference to humanity. True joy lies in creating a Brave New World in our own country rather than celebrating and feeling proud of achievements of our fellow citizens who left their roots behind to adopt another country. Our degree of happiness is a function of how deeply we are connected to our roots, how much contribution we have made to the communities that we come from. We are tribal at heart and our tribes define us. It is only in coming home to our own village that we can find our way back to who we are as human beings. No tribe is better than the other, just that my tribe gives me a sense of belonging that no other tribe can; just as it is for you. I can only have deep respect for all tribes if I can reconnect to the deep respect within me for my own tribe. I can contribute to other tribes powerfully when I have contributed to my own first. “If I were to attribute any single reason to such success as I have achieved, I would say that success would not have been possible without a sustained belief that what I did or attempted to do would serve the needs and interests of our country and our people and that I was a trustee of such interests.” - JRD Tata. Under his leadership, the assets of his business assets grew from Rs 62 crore in 1939 to more than Rs 10,000 crore in 1990. He is a founder of many landmark Indian businesses - Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Motors, Titan Industries, Tata Salt, Voltas and Air India - contributing significantly to the economic prosperity of our country. In 2020-21, the turnover of the Tata Companies is Rs 7.7 lakh crore. No longer Politics or Religion It's no longer politics or religion that will lead us forward towards our destiny. The responsibility is now on the shoulders of Business Leaders. It's through strengthening authentic leadership in our country that India will move rapidly forward as the world's most developed nation. That requires CEOs, Business Owners, Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders to travel 3 journeys simultaneously to climb to the summit of their Mount Everest, personally and professionally; and lead their people along with them: 1. Leadership Depth: The inner journey of personal transformation from Evolutionary Fear to Transcendent Love for an integrated wheel of life to have it all and for greater impact in the world through living our Purpose of Life: i. Deeply fulfilling, successful career supporting us to live our purpose of life; gifting us with impact, contribution and financial freedom ii. Loving, harmonious, positive, uplifting relationships at work and at home iii. Happy, healthy, responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed iv. Nourishing, nurturing ourselves to the highest level of health, fitness and well-being (physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually) v. Making a massive difference through the work we do 2. Business Excellence: The outer journey of professional success by contributing to the communities that we serve through the work we do and leading our organisations / business functions from good to great. Leading our business from good to great, creating a legacy by making a massive difference to our employees, customer communities, business partners, investors and all other stakeholders. 3. Craft Mastery: Becoming a key person of influence in our industry through continual learning, unlearning, re-learning to become the master of our craft. Becoming a Thought Leader, being at the source of Transformation of our industry, a key person of influence globally, contributing to our industry and all of humanity inside of that, by being a Master of our Craft, the World’s best. The Journey to a New Model of Leadership in Business Here's how to travel these 3 journeys to create a huge impact in the world that will have us transform what it means to be India, what it means to be a Business, what it means to be a Leader and as an outcome of that, what it means to be a Human Being. The journey of transforming our organization from good to great begins with us transforming from good to great. Fortunately or unfortunately, the organization mirrors the leader at the helm of the organization. Fortunately because that means the power is in our hands to make this happen. Unfortunately, because it is easier to work on the outside than on the inside. For the organization to shift gears from good to great, there are actually 3 journeys that the CEO / business leader will have to undertake simultaneously: 1. Business Excellence 2. Leadership Depth 3. Craft Mastery Even before we begin to explore each in greater detail, let us define what is good and what is great to assess whether it is even worthwhile to be on this journey. A good organization makes profit but struggles to do so, is in the red ocean of bloody waters with competition nibbling at its toes, primary motive is financial survival, does not have any significant impact in the world, employees work half-heartedly and only for their salary. Employee engagement is a huge focus because disengagement is so rampant. Employees don't feel connected with their own selves or with each other or with their leaders. Its stressful to be working and everyone is waiting to hang-up their corporate boots some day to follow their heart, to come alive. There are offsites to discuss mission, strategy, future etc. and everyone uses these as a way to get a breather from the boring routine and nobody remembers anything once they are back at work. Nobody understands what love is or what's that got to do with work. Leadership is bottom-line and top-line focussed. Another word for good is mediocrity and the organization is only leading itself to a certain death sometime in the future. A great organization is purpose-driven; significantly and positively impacts human consciousness and evolution; passion, commitment, accountability, self-inspiration & purpose drive the employees who joyously work with their heart, mind & soul; is in the blue ocean, is a market leader running a monopoly with its nearest competitor miles away; is in an effortless self-sustaining cycle of creativity, innovation and profitability. No employee engagement programs are needed because employees are deeply engaged and connected with their work, with each other and with their leaders. Employees live their purpose of life through their work; leave the day at work feeling rejuvenated and refreshed. There's focus on value-based leadership with leaders creating a space of compassionate love through nurturing, coaching and leading authentically by themselves doing 10 times what they tell their people to do. This results in breakthrough performance, productivity and profitability. Well, isn't leading your organization from good to great then a worthy goal? If it is, then let's deep dive into what it takes to make that happen. There are three journeys that the CEO, the leader at the helm of the organization would need to undertake simultaneously: 1. Business Excellence This is a journey over 5 mountains: Mountain 1: Inquiring into his / her own Purpose, the CEO / Business Leader identifies a real experiential link between his / her purpose of life and what the organization is up to in the world. Without this, there will be mediocrity and death which is the only outcome available to a good organization. For the organization to be on the path of greatness; the CEO / Business Leader has to be on the path of greatness working with a mission to transform the world, committed to make a huge difference, driven to leave footprints in the sand of time. Mountain 2: Discovering your organization's Blue Ocean and a Compelling Value Proposition that has prospects chase you to become your customers instead of your business having to chase the customers. Till the time you don't have anything to offer that has customers chase you, you are playing a losing game. Mountain 3: Iterating to create a robust Repeatable, Scalable and Profitable Business Model, giving your business a solid foundation of long-term value-creation for your customers and for your organization. Here's how you test whether you are ready to cross this mountain - a. Profitability - Is the cost of customer creation and product / service development & delivery substantially less than what she is willing to pay for? b. Repeatability - Can you repeat the entire value creation cycle (from customer creation to post-sales service) following the same steps, with the same inputs and the same outputs, every time; delighting the customer the same extraordinary way each time? c. Scalability - Can the entire process run without you? Mountain 4: Scaling-up your business through Business Development, Operational Excellence and Extraordinary Service. a. Business Development: Your sales team is more committed to the well-being of the community that your organization serves (your customers) than to the commission that they will earn. b. Operational Excellence: Bottoms-up continuous process automation and innovation to reduce costs, reduce time to do any specific activity and increase quality. c. Extraordinary Service: Delighting customers with such amazing service, at levels that the customers have no right to expect. Mountain 5: Creating a Self-Sustaining Business. The fifth stage is when the organization no longer needs you and can function effectively without you, as you have not only created an organization with strong, robust fundamentals but also have created succeeding leaders to take the organization to its next level of evolution with even greater velocity. You are now free to contribute to the entire industry, leading the industry itself to transform through your thought leadership, impacting a lot more organizations simultaneously as you sit on multiple Boards of Directors and bring about social change, contributing to the evolution of the human race bringing people and countries together through who you have become as a human being as an outcome of leading your organization from good to great. 2. Leadership Depth You cannot lead your organization from good to great without deepening who you are as a human being, without being on your own journey of transformation and evolution from good to great. This is a journey over 5 Gears by dropping Limiting Habits and inculcating Growth Habits to create the highest level of fitness and well-being across all the 4 bodies (Physical, Emotional, Intellectual / Mental, Spiritual) of your Being. Each Gear is about elevating one’s consciousness by developing a specific leadership muscle, working at the level of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual habits. Gear 1: Discovering your destiny, your purpose this life-time. Strengthening Agility of Mind™ leadership muscle to experience unconditional love, gratitude and reverence for who you are as a human being. There is deep stillness within, with nowhere to go and nothing to prove. Gear 2: Making a difference through your work, playing your big game with peace in your heart and mind. Strengthening Being of Service™ leadership muscle to see the light in everyone and have the leadership depth to give your unconditional love, gratitude and reverence to each one in your space, irrespective of however they are and however they are not. Experiencing oneness with the Universe. Gear 3: Experiencing joy of effortless existence as the world around you experiences you as extraordinary. You receive unconditional love, gratitude and reverence from everyone as you strengthen your Communicating in the World of Others™ leadership muscle. Gear 4: Experiencing deep fulfilment as others in your space experience themselves as extraordinary and experience unconditional love, gratitude and reverence for themselves. The Authentic Leader in you is born as you get access to significant Power to Create™ by strengthening your Delivery on Your Word™ leadership muscle. Gear 5: People in your space experience each other as extraordinary and give their unconditional love, gratitude and reverence to each other. Your presence causes a shift in the space around you as you inspire a culture of trust, partnership and compassionate love; with each one supporting the other to be successful. The Master in you is born, as you strengthen your Excellence™ leadership muscle to have your Power to Create™ in full bloom. You become The Master Creator. You intend; it gets created effortlessly and almost instantaneously. 3. Craft Mastery For the organization to cut-over to greatness, there is no other option but to be the world's best in whatever the organization is upto. And, for that to happen, the employees need to be playing the game to be the world's best in whatever they are doing as part of the organized work. For the employees to be on the learning path to be masters of their domain, their craft; you absolutely guessed it - the CEO has to be playing the game to be the master of the domain the organization is in. This is also a journey over five stages. 1. Amateur: This is the stage of Passive Learning, when you learn on your own through reading works of masters in the field, training yourself through material available in the public domain. 2. Professional: This is the stage of Active Learning, when you implement whatever you are learning to make a difference to your chosen target community. 3. Expert: You become an Expert by learning through Apprenticeship, when you learn directly from an existing Master of your Craft. 4. Mentor: You become a mentor when you coach others to become Experts in your domain. 5. Master: You finally become a Master when you coach Experts to become Mentors in your domain. This is when you go inside your craft and become it. The best way to travel on this path is to synchronize each of the five stages of Business Excellence, Leadership Depth and Craft Mastery. A Journey Worthwhile to fulfil on our Destiny Yes, it is a long haul forward. Why should you make your life difficult to be on this path? Because this path supports you to have it all - deeply fulfilling successful career, joyful relationships, happy responsible kids and lots of nourishing me-time, while making a huge difference in the world through the work that you do. The old model of leadership only gives you a successful career but at the cost of everything else. In this new model of leadership, you have it all. I believe this new model of leadership will help us contribute massively to humanity, making a huge difference to our fellow beings around the world, through the wisdom of our ancient heritage, creativity and innovation of our people, and authentic leadership in business and society; leading us towards fulfilling on our destiny to be a world leader; being at the source of joy, harmony, peace, loving kindness and prosperity for all beings on our planet.  If you want to exponentially enhance the performance, productivity, creativity and effectiveness of your team, then inspire your people to bring their heart and soul to work along with their mind and body. Let me tell you a story that tells you what that means. A traveller meets 3 workers cutting stone by the roadside, where a lot of construction seemed to be underway. He asked the first one - What are you doing? The first stone-cutter looked tired and exhausted. He had a small pile of stones that he had cut so far. He said he was cutting stone. He asked the second stone-cutter the same question. He didn't look as fatigued. The pile of stones that he had cut was twice as much as that of the first stone-cutter. He said he was building a wall. The third stone-cutter looked happy and fulfilled; and was cutting the stone with a mesmerizing rhythm, flow and focus; almost like an artist. His pile of stones was ten times as big as that of the second stone-cutter. He said he was building a cathedral. Low performers cut stones and come to work to earn money; high performers build walls and do a good job so that they can get the next promotion, get higher than average salary increase and get an even better paying job with a higher designation than their current role; while super performers build cathedrals and work for a cause much bigger than who they are. They have the highest output, performance & productivity; and greatest energy, joy & fulfilment from their work. How does one create such a space where we transform our people to super performers who are building cathedrals instead of building walls or cutting stones. Here's the process: 1. You cannot create a powerful space to transform your people to super performers without deepening who you are as a human being, without being on your own journey of transformation and evolution from good to great. This is a journey over 5 Gears by dropping Limiting Habits and inculcating Growth Habits to create the highest level of fitness and well-being across all the 4 bodies (Physical, Emotional, Intellectual / Mental, Spiritual) of your Being. Each Gear is about elevating one’s consciousness by developing a specific leadership muscle, working at the level of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual habits. Gear 1: Discovering your destiny, your purpose this life-time. Strengthening Agility of Mind™ leadership muscle to experience unconditional love, gratitude and reverence for who you are as a human being. There is deep stillness within, with nowhere to go and nothing to prove. Gear 2: Making a difference through your work, playing your big game with peace in your heart and mind. Strengthening Being of Service™ leadership muscle to see the light in everyone and have the leadership depth to give your unconditional love, gratitude and reverence to each one in your space, irrespective of however they are and however they are not. Experiencing oneness with the Universe. Gear 3: Experiencing joy of effortless existence as the world around you experiences you as extraordinary. You receive unconditional love, gratitude and reverence from everyone as you strengthen your Communicating in the World of Others™ leadership muscle. Gear 4: Experiencing deep fulfilment as others in your space experience themselves as extraordinary and experience unconditional love, gratitude and reverence for themselves. The Authentic Leader in you is born as you get access to significant Power to Create™ by strengthening your Delivery on Your Word™ leadership muscle. Gear 5: People in your space experience each other as extraordinary and give their unconditional love, gratitude and reverence to each other. Your presence causes a shift in the space around you as you inspire a culture of trust, partnership and compassionate love; with each one supporting the other to be successful. The Master in you is born, as you strengthen your Excellence™ leadership muscle to have your Power to Create™ in full bloom. You become The Master Creator. You intend; it gets created effortlessly and almost instantaneously. 2. Check in with yourself - Who are you Being? Are you Being someone who is cutting stones, building walls or building a cathedral. First step is for you to discover your Purpose of Life, your cathedral, your WHY of why you are working that is so powerful that heart and soul connects with you. Without you having a Purpose that inspires you, you cannot help your people discover theirs. Create the space of vulnerability and authenticity by role modelling that. It is in that space, purpose has meaning. Outside of that space, we are resigned and cynical. 3. The next step is to have powerful one-on-one conversations with your team members from Gear 4 consciousness that touches, moves and inspires them by leading them with questions, coming from the space of Unconditional Love and Belief, supporting them to connect with their greatest dreams. A Leader has 3 roles to play - i. Leader - Do 10 times of what you tell your people to do. ii. Nurturer - Relate to your people as your own family. Be compassionate love for your people and have unconditional belief in their highest potential. iii. Coach - Support your people to realise their greatest dreams in deepest communion with their highest self. Check in with yourself if you are playing all the 3 roles for your team members with integrity and authenticity. You know that you are on the right path if you are playing these roles because you want to play these roles, not because you are seeking something else in return. 4. Connect to the Light in the team member you are coaching / mentoring by creating - I BELIEVE in you - by saying it. 'I believe in you' are the four most powerful words in the world that gives power to the person to whom you say it to realise their impossible, unimaginable dreams. What you are really saying is that I believe in the Light in you. I believe in the potential in you, I believe you will make a difference in this world through your work and through your life. I believe in your dreams. You become Unconditional Belief by making a CHOICE to be Unconditional Belief. 5. The next step is to let them know you are the wind beneath their wings by saying - I am here to support you to realise your dreams and be the greatest version of you. You become Unconditional Love by making a CHOICE to be Unconditional Love. 6. Once that deep, authentic human-to-human connection is established with the team member you are in a conversation with, here are some questions to play with - i. What do you really want? ii. What is your impossible, unimaginable dream that is so big that scares you a bit? iii. If there were no constraints, what would you be doing? 7. Have childlike trust and faith in the Universe, in the Process of LIfe and let the conversation flow. Support them to discover their purpose this Lifetime. Invite them to be in the self-inquiry of what is their Quest this Lifetime, what do they most want for themselves; and inside of that coach them to discover their Purpose this LIfetime. Remember, Newton's third law - Every action has equal and opposite reaction. Fulfilling on your Quest is the reaction from the Universe, something that you want to receive. Therefore, you have to start the cycle by giving to the Universe, to the people in the world exactly what you want to receive back. Giving to others what you want most for yourself is your Purpose this Lifetime. 8. Lead the conversation forward to support them to discover their Vision and Mission. 9. Vision is the future you want to create through your life and your work. Our real opportunity to live our purpose of life is through our work and how we live our life. If you are an entrepreneur, your purpose this lifetime will be the Vision of your organization. If you are a CEO, your and your leadership team's integrated purpose will be the Vision of your organization. If your purpose is not reflected in the Vision of your Business, the vision statement will essentially be empty lines plastered on walls with no meaning, connection or inspiration. If you are a corporate professional, find your purpose and find the connection between your purpose and the vision of your organization. Without that connection, you are likely to remain busy being busy without meaning or inspiration, waiting to retire to start living. It is possible to live your purpose through the role that you play, however tiny it may seem to you. Why is meaningfulness, authentic connection and inspiration important? It is because that is the doorway to productivity, performance, creativity and innovation; leading to profitability and market leadership. 10. Mission is what will you do now for which community to create the future you want to create, the Vision you want to realize. You don't have to leave your job to become an entrepreneur to live your purpose. A powerful efficient and fulfilling way to work in an organization is to consider yourself an entrepreneur with a captive client (the company that you work for). The work you do is the service that your client is consuming and paying for. 11. Once each one of your team members have clarity and deep connection with their purpose, vision and mission this lifetime, it is time to bring your whole team together to integrate everyone's vision and mission to arrive at a common vision and mission for the organization, which is your and your team's cathedral, that deeply heart and soul connects with each one in the team, holds the team together and inspires each one of the team to step up to be a super performer. Now, you are ready to play. Enjoy your journey as you lead your business from good to great. Love, Jyoti.  Is your business down and out because of the pandemic? Are you waiting for the pandemic to end to grow or start your business? I believe that there is no better time to start a new business or grow your existing business than now, even as Covid is raging around the world with a vengeance. I say so because a business is a construct for making a difference and you can make a much bigger difference when the situation is more challenging. Bigger the challenge, greater the opportunity to contribute and therefore, greater the velocity with which you can grow your business. In the last few months, my business has grown exponentially, and the members of Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence™ have either built a strong foundation for scaling their business or have experienced commendable business growth. Here's how to do it: 1. You now have time to step outside your business and look at it as a whole, instead of getting lost in the business. When you are a part of the painting, you have no clue how to make it better because you have no clue how it looks like as a whole. When you step out of the frame and turn around to look at the whole picture, you will begin to notice the colours that are missing and the lines that would be better erased. You will get creative ideas on how to make it into a beautiful work of art. That's what a business is - a beautiful work of art. And, as a business owner, you are the artist. You can view your business, you work of art as a whole through a simple one-page representation called the Business Model Canvas. Here's a blank Template for you to fill in for your business by answering the questions in each of the 9 boxes of the template. 
I once had a business owner, who had been in the business for over 15 years, reach out to me. His complaint was that - Even after 15 years, I am struggling. I am still doing Operations, still chasing customers, whatever I earn gets spent and not much gets left behind. I work so much and yet, I am making no progress. He was stuck in what I call the Plateau of Mediocrity. I dug below the surface and wasn't surprised to find that he had no articulated Business Model, even after being in business for more than 15 years. I had an opportunity to study another business, which started their venture with a clear Business Model which they tested to validate with real customers and ended up breaking more than 10 business models in their 1st year alone. At the end of their first year, they finally discovered a Business Model that they had tested for profitability, repeatability and scalability; and laughed all the way to the bank from Year 2 onwards. So, the first thing to do to grow your Business in the time of Corona is to step outside your Business and look at it as a whole, using the Business Model Canvas, to identify areas to innovate to create greater value and make a much bigger difference to your customer community from the ecosystem of your Business. Here's an article in Harvard Business Review from Steve Blank, the father of the Lean Startup Methodology, to understand more about the process of using Business Models, start-up assumptions, how to build experiments to validate the Business Model assumptions to discover your way to a deeply fulfilling, profitable, sustainable, successful Business: Why the Lean Start-up Changes Everything? Better would be to read his book written along with co-author, Bob Durf - The Startup Owner's Manual. 2. The second thing to do is to connect with your customers even more deeply and understand what are their challenges, what would contribute to them in this time, how has the pandemic impacted them and their business, listening from a place of 'Being of Service' to identify how you can innovate your Business Model to serve them even more powerfully, in ways you probably hadn't even considered before. The business of one of the entrepreneurs I was coaching is to bring together suppliers and consumers of a particular service for networking in a physical meeting space. The idea really worked well till Covid happened and she could no longer offer the service the way it was designed before. She was feeling apologetic about suggesting to her customers about getting them together online and looking at offering the online model at a discount till we had a business model review. Here are the highlights of our review: i. Her customers still have the need and are irritated at not being able to work at the velocity with which they could work before Covid and Lockdown. ii. Covid and Lockdown has given them exposure to and familiarity with the online channel. iii. The key benefit they received from her Business Model was an opportunity to make a new set of connections from their industry in a single place. iv. They were spending hours on the road from all over Delhi NCR to come for the meeting. v. One on one meetings were a critical component of the value being delivered in the earlier physical model. As an outcome of our review, she innovated her Business Model to launch a premium higher-priced version of her service through Zoom using Breakout Rooms in Zoom to enable one-on-one meetings. Before our review, she had hibernated her business in quiet frustration at the pandemic. After the review, she was grateful for the growth opportunity that the pandemic offered her. 3. Use the situation to breakfree from the 'Activity Trap' that most entrepreneurs get caught in. It is this 'busy being busy' that kills our creativity and productivity; and leads us on the path to Mediocrity. Use the current Corona times and the forced 'lock-in' to free yourself from the tyranny of 'busyness' and use the freed up time to learn, grow and evolve to be the world's best in your domain; be a master of your craft and become a key person of influence in industry globally. I not only completed a Certificate Program in Psychodrama and Expressive Arts Therapy; but also started a 2 years Post Graduate Diploma in Psychodrama (a type of therapy work done in groups) with Tata Institute of Social Sciences. I am a CEO Coach; and work with CEOs, aspiring CEOs, Business Owners, Start-up Founders and High Performers to support them to lead their business from good to great. How can such a theme of learning support my customer community for me to invest so much of my time training on a topic that seems so irrelevant at the first glance? You see my work is about coaching people to step into their zone of genius and that requires an inside-out approach. That means I have to work with my clients not only on their Business Excellence and Craft Mastery journeys on the outside but also on their Leadership Depth journey on the inside, which would include supporting them to be healthy and fit - physically, mentally, emotionally. psychologically and spiritually. Only then, would they get the courage and clarity to lead their business from good to great. 4. Strengthen your Leadership Depth to build momentum to lead your business from good to great. Without a strong foundation of Leadership Depth, Business Excellence is a house of cards that will fall down eventually. How do you measure Leadership Depth? You measure it by rating yourself on a scale of 0 to 10 in the 5 areas of your Wheel of Life. Your Leadership Depth is the lowest score you got across these 5 areas: i. Deeply fulfilling, successful, profitable business / profession supporting you to live your purpose of life; gifting you with impact, contribution and financial freedom ii. Loving, harmonious relationships at work and at home iii. Happy, healthy, responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed iv. Nourishing, nurturing yourself to the highest level of fitness and well-being (physically, emotionally, psychologically, mentally, spiritually) v. Making a massive difference through the work you do Wishing you the joy of the journey to learn to lead from inside out; which is when you get the courage, clarity and support (at work and at home) to lead your business from good to great. My daughter says that Mother Nature has grounded us for not listening to her. I am constantly awed by her wisdom. Let us use this time to reflect on where we are on our leadership journey and learn to lead from inside out. 5. As I work, meet and interact with entrepreneurs, I get present to why there's a Harvard statistic on 75% startups failing in their first year and Fortune statistic on 90% businesses failing in the first five years of their existence. The founders are passionate about their domain, they are experts and are technically very strong though where they miss is to learn the art and science of entrepreneurship. They miss that the 3 aspects of their personality needs to be in balance for the business to grow - The Entrepreneur, The Manager, The Technician - in the words of Michael Gerber of The EMyth fame. Now that Mother Nature has grounded us for not listening to her and being naughty, let us use this time to learn, understand and apply the science of Entrepreneurship. Just because you are a great technology expert, photographer, consultant, baker etc. does not mean you are a great entrepreneur or a great manager. You have to learn the entrepreneurial and managerial domains, as well, to be able to nurture and scale your business. Make a list of all that you now know you can do to lead your business from good to great, even in the time of Corona, and experience the joy of implementing wonderful ideas and watching your business grow. Love and gratitude for who you are as a human being; and reverence for your commitment to make a massive difference through your work, Jyoti.  What is the single-most important reason why entrepreneurial ventures die? What is the single-most important reason why dreams never get realized? What is the single-most important reason why most of us never live our destiny to make a dent in the Universe? What is the single-most important reason why we never achieve what we most desire, professionally and personally? Interestingly, the answer to all these questions is the same - Self-doubt. If there was only one enemy that I could shoot down for all my clients, it would be self-doubt. It is a great equalizer. It doesn't matter how successful, how wealthy, how accomplished someone is or isn't, self-doubt has sneaked its way and hid itself very cunningly beneath layers in the mind. It is the legacy of our evolutionary process of survival and is a vestigial emotion found in all human beings; except those who have consciously worked on themselves to go beyond the clutches of this demon by inculcating daily growth habits. If we stop practising those growth habits, the demon raises its ugly head all over again by getting its nourishment from our default limiting habits. Let's explore the relationship between self-doubt and business success. Building a successful business is about iteratively discovering a profitable, repeatable, scalable business model much before your passion and resources run out. That means having the inner strength to keep listening to a 100 NOs before that one YES. If you feed your self-doubt, you will give-up after the first few NOs. I echo what Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz say in their book, 'Go for No' - 'Yes is the destination. No is how you get there.' Learnings about your business model really happen in the failures you have. Without the failures, you have no chance of learning and moving forward to discovering your profitable, repeatable and scalable business model. The whole process from a start-up to a Unicorn is an iterative process, with falling down, learning from the fall, integrating the learnings to decide the next action, moving forward, falling down again, and repeating this cycle again and again till you find profitability on Mountain 2 of Building a Great Business; continuing the iteration to climb to the peak of Mountain 3 to discover the formula for Repeatability and Scalability; learning by continuing to fail and discovering the way forward to Scale on Mountain 4; and finally learning how to Corporatize on Mountain 5, again through failing. So, there's no getting away from failure, rejection, NOs if you are upto building a great business that is an expression of your purpose this lifetime. If self-doubt is one of your best friends that won't leave you, then the journey to building a great business cannot be completed because you will give up along the way, lose your motivation, your inspiration, passion, commitment, energy, enthusiasm, self-belief, confidence to keep getting up every time you fall. Let's understand Self-Doubt for what it really is to get an access to find freedom from it. Self-doubt is really the emotional expression of what I call the 'small mind'. Our 'small mind' is our default limiting experience of ourselves, of others and of life itself. If we don't make a conscious effort, our 'small mind' runs the show in our life, creating limiting circumstances and limiting / no results in our lives. Our brain, by default, is hard-wired with negativity. And, our generic purpose in this lifetime is to learn, grow and evolve to our highest potential by rewiring our brain to be positive and growth-oriented to shift to what I call the 'Big Mind' by working at the level of growth habits across all the 4 bodies of our Being - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. The 'small mind' is a reaction to the 3 fundamental fears that we humans have: i. I am not good enough ii. I am all alone. No one loves me. iii. I am not important. Self-awareness is about being aware of our default core fears and the limiting thought pattern that is a reaction to those fears. Without this self-awareness, we will unconsciously continue to be a prisoner of our own fears and limiting thought patterns; and continue to bang our head against the wall of circumstances without being able to fulfil our intentions or realise our dreams to grow to our highest potential. My core fears are a combination of 'I am not good enough' and 'I am all alone. No one loves me.'. My small mind is - 'I don't deserve the best. I am not worthy. No one loves, appreciates and respects me. Life is a struggle.', which is a reaction to my core fears. My default limiting personality is a reaction to my small mind - 'I work incredibly hard in my life but without rewarding outcomes in relation to the enormous hard work I put in. I don't experience love, appreciation and respect. Infact, I keep experiencing the opposite of that and the result is I am unable to unconditionally love, appreciate and respect; which keeps the vicious cycle going. I keep working hard playing to get the best but the best continues to be beyond my reach, without my realising how I am at the source of all this melodrama or Maya as we say in our culture.' How does one get out of this vicious cycle? There are many ways though I have chosen to integrate the many ways after studying, interviewing or getting coached from the master entrepreneurs, the super successful leaders, the masters of their craft, the giants of their field. Not surprisingly, they all share similar growth habits that they inculcate in their daily lives to protect themselves from the ferocious grip of the 'small mind'. The first step is to be aware of your core fears, your small mind. The second step is to make a commitment to live from your Big Mind and feed that. Our Big Mind is our creation, that we will create consciously; while our small mind is our default limiting way of Being which will continue to run our lives till we choose to consciously feed our Big Mind to win over our small mind by stopping to feed the small mind. Here's my Big Mind, it's my commitment to myself, my promise to myself how I choose to relate to myself, others and to life - 'I am love, gratitude and reverence. I am success and prosperity. I love, respect and appreciate myself and all beings. Therefore, I experience people's love, respect and appreciation for me. Life is fun and easy.' When I feel people walking all over me, I feel the grip of my small mind and then I remind myself of what my Big Mind is and I know how to respond. When I feel unappreciated, unloved and disrespected, I feel the clutch of the small mind and then I remind myself of what my Big Mind is and I know how to respond. When life throws challenges that throw me on the ground, my small mind wants to push me deeper into the deep ditch of dreariness and then I remind myself of what my Big Mind is and I use my creativity to use the trying circumstances and people who have betrayed and cheated me as opportunities of tremendous growth. If my business hasn't extinguished as yet, it is because I chose to be Big Mind though to chose small mind was tantalizingly easier at numerous occasions. Each time, my business seems to be near its death-bed, my Big Mind helps me to keep the small mind and it's best friend, self-doubt, at bay and brings back my childlike trust and faith in myself, in my impossible unimaginable dreams, in my mission to make a dent in the Universe, in the Universe to help me transform the impossible into possible, the unimaginable into the imaginable. So, the next important question is how to stop feeding our small mind and start feeding our Big Mind to nourish and nurture it to become strong and healthy. It is through the practise of growth habits. The below habits are your 1st stage habits. I call them Gear 1 Starter RYD (Realize Your Dreams) Habits. By practising these habits, you will awaken the Big Mind in yourself; and de-fang and weaken the small mind. When that happens, self-doubt no longer befriends you and walks out on you, leaving you free and in the joyous experience of - I am me and that's enough. No longer anything to prove, no longer caught in the anxiety of what will others say, nothing to hide, nowhere to go to prove a point, nothing to be embarrassed about. Just a blessed feeling of having arrived on the inside to make a difference through your work on the outside. You will observe success and wealth coming your way as by-products of your having arrived on the inside and having found authentic happiness not linked to any cause. Inside of this transformation, the journey to build a great business truly begins. The members of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Excellence™, Centre for Transformational Leadership™, Mums At Work™, Centre for Personal Excellence™ and Centre for Coaching Excellence™ can click on the link below to access the online curriculum for the detailed note on these habits. Gear 1 Starter RYD Habits 1. The Dream 2. Mirror Work 3. Acknowledgements 4. Gratitudes 5. Meditation 6. Read Your Book 7. Daily Inspiration 8. Buddy Call 9. Physical Exercise 10. Restoring your Word 11. Intention Creation and Scheduling 12. Keep a Journal These habits are designed to strengthen you in the first leadership muscle - Agility of Mind™. Wishing you the joy of living your purpose this lifetime through the work you do, the business you run and having the fulfilment of not dying with your Light intact inside of you. Love, Jyoti.  Do you remember how you felt when you last carried out a random act of kindness? And, how you felt when somebody did something kind for you? Did you not feel gentle waves of uplifting warmth, joyous energy and soothing restfulness wash all over your body? At the beginning of our journey, when I ask a client - How are you feeling?; the usual response is - I think good. That tells me how disconnected he is from his emotional body because you cannot think feelings, you can only feel them in your physical body. If you are in touch with your emotions, you will know exactly in which part of the body is the emotion arising, and how exactly is it arising. It may be a tightening of the stomach or heaviness in the shoulders or stiffness in the neck or discomfort in the upper back or stinging in the eyes or a catch in the throat or various other expressions of feelings in the physical body. As you exercise your emotional body to make it fit, you get reconnected with your authentic self, your Source. At that point, you may feel an expansiveness as vast as the sky above, as deep as the ocean below, spaciousness all around, a sweet homecoming; as the feeling spreads from inside to outside to everywhere. And, your productivity, performance, creativity and innovativeness rises to be at the peak. One of the the simplest ways to reconnect with your authentic self is to do a random act of kindness and then keep doing them daily like a must-do just as you brush your teeth daily. The idea is to make it an automatic habit. Though in the beginning, it will feel ritualistic and forced, to mandatorily do an act of kindness to tick it off from your list but after a point, it will begin to feel genuine and something you cannot do without. This act is one of the ways you exercise your emotional body. Just as you have to force yourself to exercise your physical body daily in the beginning but after the lowest point of wanting to give up, you experience an energy that has you wanting to exercise your physical body daily that you can no longer stop. It is interesting that the energy graph of inculcating any growth habit is similar to the shape of a hockey stick. Your mental, emotional and physical energy continue to drop till the lowest point but if you continue beyond that point using your spiritual energy of higher purpose and deep connection with your own self; your mental, emotional and physical energy suddenly turn around exponentially to support you to stick to the habit forever. Based on experiments conducted by University College London, we now have proof that it takes 66 days to hold on to a habit daily for it to become automatic. So, play the Kindness Habit game daily for 66 days even as your energy dips to reap the benefit of a healthy and fit emotional body. Of course, there are many other exercises to keep your emotional body fit. Let’s take those up in subsequent articles for discussion. Coming back to Kindness, how do you define it? It is an act coming from a place of compassionate love and empathy for the good of others with no expectation of a reward in return. If the act is done for appreciation, acknowledgement or some other intrinsic or extrinsic reward, the act serves you no purpose and you stay disconnected from your authentic self. The next logical question is why do we even care that the emotional body is fit and healthy. It is because the Being of the Human Being that we are is like a car with 4 wheels on a journey to reach its destination of fulfilment of its purpose of having been born. The 4 wheels are our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. If any of these bodies is weak, then the car is unable to drive forward with velocity towards its purpose and we feel a lack, a longing, an incompletion, something missing, a void in our hearts and souls that no material wealth or a loved one can complete or fill. Interestingly, if we work on our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies to become intimately connected with our authentic self, we will find ourselves becoming loving, compassionate and empathetic. The reverse is also true, if we work on practising feeling love, compassion and empathy viscerally not just playing around the idea in our head; we will automatically find ourselves becoming intimately connected with our authentic self. That is the true purpose of our life - to find and reconnect with our authentic self, our inner Wisdom, our inner Light and live in the expression of our undeniable greatness. Not to undertake this journey leads us to an experience of pain from which we find no recourse till the time Pain has forced us to choose the path to our Highest Self. At that point, Pain has served its purpose and we no longer find ourselves in the grip of it. Each experience, painful or not, is a nudge from the Universe to drop our masks of being a Victim or a Fighter and step forward as Peaceful Warriors that we truly are, to fight the battles inside rather than their reflections outside to allow our inner Light to shine through to make our world brighter than we found it. That is why Kindness matters in Business. Because it gives us access to our authentic self and an opportunity to step into the Light of our inner Wisdom for us to operate at the highest levels of productivity, performance, creativity and innovation. That has definite economic outcome higher than available without highest levels of productivity, performance, creativity and innovation in people engaged in making the business work. There is a direct correlation between Kindness embodied in the culture of a Business and Profitability generated by the Business. Interestingly, you cannot tell or mandate people to be kind. Leaving you with a question - How do you create a culture of kindness at work and at home? Your fellow traveller in this Journey towards Purpose, Abundance and Contribution through the work we do, communities that we are a part of and families we are blessed to belong to, Jyoti.  Photo Credit: www.thehansindia.com
A son of a coffee planter to a Billionaire Founder and Owner of India’s biggest coffee chain, Cafe Coffee Day, committed suicide earlier this week. His tragic end is a huge wake-up call for the Global Business Community and has learnings for all of us that we must pause to reflect and ruminate upon. And, hopefully, this helpless act of a powerful business magnate will trigger a transformation in the way we work and who we are as human beings. 1. His death is a reminder that a Business Model is not only made robust, profitable and sustainable by the business elements that define it; but also by the human depth of the founder and the leadership team, displayed by the fitness levels of their physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies. A business model’s effectiveness needs to be measured not only by the outer business elements, but also by the inner human elements of the people engaged in that business. We mostly get carried away by what is visible - number of outlets, number of employees, turnover, number of cities, national vs global presence etc. - that we miss the foundation on which all of this is standing. The foundation is the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health of the person at the helm of the business, who is leading from the front. The business really ends up being a mirror of who she or he really is, what his / her personal, leadership and business habits are. 2. In the light of the above point, it is important that the leadership team at the helm including the CEO / Founder / Business Owner have a mentoring / coaching structure so that they are building themselves to be the world’s best physical, emotional, mental and spiritual athletes; without which a great business cannot be built. 3. The reason that the leaders don’t create a support structure for themselves is because as a society we tend to idolise those who have created ‘success’. So, the idols fail to realise that they too need to continuously learn, grow and evolve with the support of others. Sooner, as a society, we realise, encourage and walk towards a relationship of equals between all, irrespective of all labels; the sooner will we all experience freedom to be and less pressure for all to put up a brave face to hide a sad reality within. 4. Don’t replace ‘building a sustainable business’ with ‘raising money’. Let the money in the business ecosystem be because the customers are crazy about your product / service, not your investors. 5. Just as highest levels of fitness across the 4 bodies of the Being of the Founder / CEO is the real foundation of the business model, so is Integrity. Without integrity, the business will fall sooner or later. Sooner is better because then there is less damage. Though unfortunately, mostly it is later where both direct and collateral damage is massive. 6. Create, own and enjoy wealth but don’t be owned by it. At the end of it all, you can take none of it with you. If you can’t take it with you, then all you really are is the custodian of all the wealth that you create. So, why be perturbed when you have less of it or somebody takes it away from you or become jubilant when you have more of it. It is this emotional instability that causes so much of the stress and heartburn we have. Yes, it is a lot of hard work to reach that balance. Yet, the struggle to reach there is totally worth it allowing you to experience ‘happiness without a cause or reason’, which is when happiness can truly be yours. 7. We are part of an energy system and every action we take has an impact. We cannot act as if what we do only has an impact on us. Imagine what Siddhartha’s 2 sons, one in college and the other as yet in school) and his wife must be going through. Of course, the net worth of Cafe Coffee Day fell. Probably worse than the fall of the net worth, which is easier to re-build, is the widespread discouragement and disillusionment experienced by his employees and aspiring entrepreneurs. 8. You don’t need fancy foreign degrees to build big business. A local school and college is just as good. All that matters is the size of your dream. 9. One really doesn’t know what anyone around us is really going through on the inside. Choosing to act and speak from a place of loving kindness is probably the biggest difference we can make to people in our lives, known and unknown. 10. Being a Fighter is exhausting. What would serve us is embracing the way of the Peaceful Warrior, who knows that the real battles are really on the inside and, therefore, all battles on the outside are merely reflections of the chaos inside. You can’t kill the reflections by shooting them. Shooting the attachment and being ok with owning nothing after building an empire ground up may be a lesson one is meant to learn and having learnt that, it is likely that no pressure on the outside can cause the balance to disrupt on the inside. That is what stress really is - disruption of the inner emotional balance. 11. What has spirituality got to do with all of this? Everything because a spiritual perspective gives us a higher meaning and purpose to all that we do from moment to moment. It strengthens in us childlike trust and faith, giving us the ability to see the gift in all challenges along the journey of life and to receive them gratefully. Loved the story of a doctor that I read in Mother Teresa’s Biography sometime back. His pregnant wife and unborn child were battling death. On being asked what he was praying for; he replied he was praying for the strength and faith to accept God’s will, whatever that maybe. This spiritual perspective is the only way to access emotional balance, which is necessary to create anything masterful, genius-level and extraordinary on a sustainable basis. Siddhartha’s soul will rest in peace if we can learn and live the above lessons from his life and death because then, how he lived and how he died would not be in vain. Love, Jyoti.  The first stage of stepping into authentic leadership is building your Agility of Mind leadership muscle. As I work with leaders to step into discovering what is authentic leadership and making that a way of life to lead their lives, professionally and personally, from good to great; I find that from good to great is a 5-stage journey. Each stage is about elevating one’s consciousness by developing a specific leadership muscle. Each subsequent muscle requires the preceding muscles to be at the highest level of fitness. Here are the 5 muscles in the order in which they need to be strengthened. Actually, the right word really is ‘can’ be strengthened and not ‘need’ because human consciousness can only be elevated in that order as below: Gear 0 - Good Life. Good Business. A vague sense of emptiness; and disconnect with oneself and others. Living life as a Victim or a Fighter. Stress and not being at the highest level of fitness is an accepted part of life. Evolve to Gear 1 by strengthening A. Agility of Mind™ leadership muscle Evolve to Gear 2 by strengthening B. Being of Service™ leadership muscle Evolve to Gear 3 by strengthening C. Communicating in the world of others™ leadership muscle Evolve to Gear 4 by strengthening D. Delivery on your word™ leadership muscle Evolve to Gear 5 by strengthening E. Excellence™ leadership muscle. Great Life. Deeply Fulfilling Successful Profitable Business. Loving Harmonious Relationships at Work and at Home. Happy Responsible Kids with their Genius Joyfully Expressed. Nourishing Nurturing Me-time. Highest level of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual fitness. Making a Difference. Creating an Impact. Making a Dent in the Universe. Peaceful Warrior. The above is the journey from being a Victim or a Fighter, both limiting ways of Being, to being a Peaceful Warrior, a Gear 5 Leader. The way to evolve is to work at the level of habits across the 4 bodies of our Being - physical, emotional, intellectual / mental, spiritual. Bit by bit working at the level of habits across the 4 bodies of our Being, we grow from inside out, get connected to our own authentic self experiencing coming home to ourself. Our consciousness evolves when we go beyond understanding a concept intellectually to experiencing it viscerally and living from there. Before moving forward, let me explain what is a Distinction. Imagine an Object inside a ball. How many points are there on the ball to view at the Object? Numerous, isn’t it? At each point on the ball to view the Object from, won’t the Object look different. At two points on the ball, the views will even be contradictory. Then, which view is the Truth? What if I tell you that the Object inside the ball is Reality. View from which Point, alternatively which Point of View of that Reality is the Truth? The point that you choose you stand at determines what you see. What you see determines your actions and therefore your outcome. How do you decide which point to stand at? The point from where you can access your inner power (Power to Create™) to fulfil your highest intentions and realise your greatest dreams is the point to stand at to view the Object called Reality. That Point of View is called a Distinction. My job as a coach is for you to discover the Distinctions on your own as your own Truths so that you become them instead of you learning them by heart because I tell them to you. Though I will still tell you the Distinctions so that you know what you are looking for. You know you have discovered a Distinction when you get an INSIGHT (sight turned inwards instead of outwards), an AHA or a Eureka moment when you discover something about yourself that you hadn’t known before and that gives you the missing key to unlock part of your inner power. The discovery may be as quiet as a ‘Hmmm’ and silence afterwards. Coaching is a skill for you to access insights, uncover Blind Spots and discover Distinctions to live from a place of power. A leadership muscle is a state of consciousness defined by a level of physical, emotional, intellectual / mental and spiritual fitness achieved through letting go of limiting habits and taking on growth habits across the 4 bodies of our Being. By consistently working on habits on a daily basis, Distinctions associated with that leadership muscle begin to become a way of life. Today, lets discuss what is Agility of Mind™ and its relationship to Leadership Development. This is the first stage of leadership development. Your Agility of Mind™ leadership muscle is fully developed if you can live moment by moment the below 5 Distinctions, or 5 Distinct Ways of perceiving reality: a. I am responsible for all that happens in my space. b. Being able to experience one’s own self as whole, complete and perfect with nothing to fix or change. Living in the authentic experience of - I am extraordinary and I love myself. Being able to make the choice to be happy and fulfilled, irrespective of situations and people. c. Being able to see 360 degree view of any reality. Being able to stand in a place where you can see that your deepest beliefs are really your points of view; and that contradictory beliefs are just as valid. To live in the joyous experience of - Your point of view is just as valid as my point of view. d. Being able to recognise your own upsets and have the agility of mind to drop them by recognising that the source of your upsets is not out there but in here, that you are not upset because of how people are and how they are not or because of adverse circumstances. You get upset because your expectation didn’t get fulfilled, what you want to communicate you could not, your intention didn’t get realised. When you can understand that your expectations, communications, intentions belong to you, not to others; then you can laugh loudly when Upset tries to take you in its grip. Being able to recognise your Small Mind™ hiding behind every upset and strengthening your Agility of Mind™ to shift it to your Big Mind™. e. Recognising all your complaints as your Small Mind™ in disguise and being able to use your Agility of Mind™ to see positive aspects instead of giving in to complaining. There are 3 levels of competencies in strengthening your leadership muscles. Before we start our journey of inner leadership development, we are unconsciously incompetent. a. Starter: This is when we live from the Distinctions of the Leadership Muscle or Gear of Evolution only 20% of the time. The reason you progress is that 80% of the time when you are not living the Distinctions, you are aware that you have fallen off your path and get back every time. You fall off and yet you make the choice to come back to the path. This level of competency is also called Conscious Incompetence. b. Champion: At this level of expertise, you are living from the Distinctions of the Leadership Muscle or Gear of Evolution 80% of the time. The 20% of the time you fall off, you make the choice to come back to the path of living from the Distinctions. This level of competency is also called Conscious Competence. c. Mastery - At this level, you are living from the Distinctions of the Leadership Muscle or Gear of Evolution 100% of the time, without even being in conscious awareness of it. You become the Distinctions. This level of competency is also called Unconscious Competence. Inner Leadership Development can only happen at the level of habits across the 4 bodies of our Being. Let's explore few daily habits that will support us to strengthen Agility of Mind™ leadership muscle to elevate our consciousness to Gear 1 of Evolution: i. Exercising - Yoga, Martial Arts, Functional Training ii. Meditation iii. Journaling iv. Acknowledgements - Viscerally experiencing your wins v. Gratitudes - Viscerally experiencing your blessings vi. Buddy Conversation - Experiencing being listened to by a committed listener vii. Reading Books if you don’t read books and stopping to read for some time, if you are an avid reader. viii. Identifying what you resist, fear, hate to do, get embarrassed doing, don’t want to do, makes you uneasy and uncomfortable; and then doing exactly that. ix. Reflection The journey to your highest self, to the highest expression of your inner genius is a journey which is both deeply fulfilling and joyous. Wishing you the strength to choose that path. May you choose this gift of Life. That is my intention for you. That is my prayer for you. Love, Jyoti. Further Recommended Reading: 1. How to use Gratitude as a Leadership Tool for Business Growth? 2. How Reverence for all of Life Supports you to Lead your Business from Good to Great? 3. Without Integrity, nothing works; not even your business. Why, and What to do about it? 4. Why Must You Deepen Yourself in Mastery Consciousness to Lead your Business to Market Leadership?  Met an ex-colleague after 10 years. He looked younger than he had then. He retired few years ago after contributing massively to one of the largest multinational IT companies. Originally from India, now an Australian citizen, living for most times in Singapore, he keeps coming back to India. Though, he is on multiple boards, is a serial entrepreneur successfully and profitably running several businesses of his own, is a mentor to numerous start-ups; he is most passionate about a give-back project he is doing in Udaipur (his place of birth, his home town) of bringing world-class technology education to a local college. I love having joyous, real, authentic conversations - as much with the drivers of the electric rickshaws, drivers of Ubers / Olas as with my client community from around the world, with the people from the various communities that I have the privilege to be a part of, with anyone with whom I have the fortune to share a bit of a journey this lifetime, whichever the context. And, from all these conversations, I uncovered a secret that I will share with you today. You will find it hidden in the brief story I told you about my ex-colleague above. Our degree of happiness is a function of how deeply we are connected to our roots, how much contribution we have made to the communities that we come from. We are tribal at heart and our tribes define us. It is only in coming home to our own village that we can find our way back to who we are as human beings. No tribe is better than the other, just that my tribe gives me a sense of belonging that no other tribe can; just as it is for you. I can only have deep respect for all tribes if I can reconnect to the deep respect within me for my own tribe. I can contribute to other tribes powerfully when I have contributed to my own first. Just like, only in finding a deep connection with my mom and dad can I find the deep connection with my own self; and then only can I uncover a deep connection with all beings in the world. The reason the programs I run create massive outcomes for my clients is because apart from coaching them to create business success; among other things, I also work with them on their relationship with their parents if I smell a disconnect. There always is a little bit of disconnect, that is part of our coming into adulthood. Unfortunately, this disconnect is part of our human design. Even as a coach with all my deep understanding of human behaviour, psychology and the rest of it; I will still end up creating disconnect in my kids’ hearts. Though the story should not end there. The story must continue with me working on myself and creating an environment for the kids to work on themselves to remove the disconnect. It is important to remove the disconnect because it comes in the way of our experiencing ourself and other people in our lives as whole, complete and perfect; which is the source of troubled relationships at work and at home. This is also a hidden source of stress which messes up our health, well-being, productivity, performance, creativity, innovation and impact. It doesn’t matter whether our parents are with us or have transitioned to another realm, it is always possible to reconnect powerfully with them with love, gratitude and reverence; not from a sense of obligation but from a deep visceral sense of joyous embrace of the source from where we sprang forth. A deep connection is only the first step to come home to ourselves. The next step is to contribute to our mom and dad. In doing that, we will find the energy and strength to contribute to our own self by nourishing and nurturing our physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual bodies. That will get us reconnected to the primal need to contribute to our tribe, the communities that we are a part of, our country’s consciousness that flows through our blood. In that contribution will we experience being whole and stand tall to let our inner Sun shine brightly to light up the world. In our doing so, our children will learn to do the same, the people who are entrusted to our care at work will learn to do the same. From there will spring forth unimaginable levels of health and fitness, performance, productivity, creativity, innovation and the massive impact that we are meant to make through our lifetime. I highly recommend to all coaches, leaders and parents to understand this part of the jigsaw puzzle called leadership development. Before moving forward, let me tell you that another phrase for leadership development is “elevating human consciousness”; in people entrusted to our care at home and at work, by elevating our own first. And, yet, beyond physical tribes, we belong to intellectual, emotional and spiritual tribes that may as well be globally dispersed. We can only find higher connection by laddering up from physical (our roots), intellectual, emotional to finally, spiritual tribes. We are meant to belong to each other, though first we must belong to our own self. When we evolve to experiencing ourselves as whole, complete and perfect, we will find every relationship whole, complete and perfect. The problem is we are seeking relationships, external success, wealth, fame, creative hobbies, sports and everything on the outside to make us experience wholeness, completeness and perfection on the inside. That’s what we are really seeking. The only way to get there is not by trying to create something outside of ourselves, it is by going within to do the deep inner work to evolve from the stressful forceful ’survival consciousness’ to the restful, joyous, soothing, tranquil, equanimous, lyrical, poetical, melodious, gently flowing ’abundance consciousness’. That transformation within shifts you from good to great, professionally and personally. May you choose this gift of transformation. That is my intention for you. That is my prayer for you. Love, Jyoti.  Have you ever experienced that you have so many ideas to solve a problem and yet when you give them all to your people, nothing happens. Nothing gets implemented. The problem remains just as unsolved as before, even growing bigger. You end up being frustrated and irritated because you did tell the solution and you know that your solution will fix the problem in its bud and create amazing results. But, the people to whom you give your ideas to continue to resist you and resist doing what you tell them to do. And, then, you begin to face the same problem with your kids. They have so many more opportunities than you had. And, yet, they are floundering these opportunities and the resources that you are working hard to provide to them. Leave alone being grateful, they don’t even listen to you. You know exactly what they need to do. If they did exactly that, their lives will begin to shine. And, yet, they continue to resist you, resist doing what you tell them to do. What’s happening here? So far, while you were an Individual Contributor at the workplace or your kids were not pre-teens as yet, your brilliant ideas supported you to create success because you were implementing them. Now, that your role has changed. Instead of an Individual Contributor, you are a Leader at work and at home. Your success is a function of other people (your team or your kids) implementing your ideas, your old model of Being will not only not support you to create the success that you dream of, it actually will hinder you from moving forward as you will come face to face with a wall of resistance from those who you are privileged to lead, both at work and at home. You may use the brute force of your charisma, the power of your personality and conviction to get people to follow your lead but that’ll take you only that far. You may end up leading your organization to climb the tree but flying to the moon will escape you. If you are committed to creating impact, making a massive difference, making a dent in the Universe by leading your business from good to great, have loving harmonious relationships at work and at home, raise happy responsible kids with their genius joyfully expressed, nourish and nurture yourself to connect with your highest self; then listen. Yes, LISTEN and not tell. Yes, LISTEN and not TELL. Don’t tell them what to do. I know your ideas will make them fly so high, but they cannot fly with your ideas. Just as a baby bird can only fly with her own wings. They can only fly with ideas that are their own. They can’t see with your Light. They can only see and walk with their own inner Light. Giving them all the knowledge and information to convince them to do what you are telling them to do is making zero difference to them because they are not listening. They are not listening because they haven’t become leaders as yet and don’t know how to listen. The constant chatter in their head about the limiting view of themselves, of you and of life itself are 3 big walls that does not allow anything to enter. You are privileged to be a Leader. It is your privilege to grow beyond the default design of a human being, become aware of your own chatter in your head and STILL it, so that you can LISTEN. It is your privilege to drop your 3 walls so that you create a space for them to drop their 3 walls. Then you can really step into their world and communicate in their world so that they really understand what you are saying. Till that time, you will say, they will resist because they haven’t as yet learnt to LISTEN. It’s your privilege to grow your inner leadership, to increase your leadership depth to listen, understand and lead your people at work and kids at home to their own ideas, to their own solutions so that they can implement them. Your job as a leader is no longer to be a star performer, it is to create a space for star performers to grow to their highest potential. Next time, someone comes to you with a problem, create a space of listening by asking questions. Not questions to make them wrong but genuine questions, sourced in deep love and care for who they are as human beings. As you ask questions which uplift and expand them, their inner wisdom will trigger and yes, they will come up with solutions that are much better than yours. That is our privilege as leaders and as parents, to raise our people and our kids to become better than us by letting them find their own answers and solutions rather than creating fixed structures for them to follow based on our own knowledge and information. As leaders and parents, it is our privilege to do 10 times of what we ask our people and our kids to do. As leaders, it our privilege to unconditionally give our love, acceptance and care to our people as we would give to our kids because just as we are custodians of our children, we are custodians of our people. They have been placed in our care and it is our privilege to provide them a space of loving kindness, total acceptance and gentle caring for them to throw the lampshade off their inner Light to fearlessly shine brightly. As leaders and parents, it is our privilege to coach our people and children to fulfil their highest intentions and realise their greatest dreams; not by telling them what to do but by leading them with questions and guiding them to uncover their inner wisdom to find their own answers, their own solutions. To be such a leader, it is our privilege to be on an inner journey to come home to who we authentically are. Wishing you the self-awareness, courage and strength to be on such a journey. Love, Jyoti. Further Recommended Reading: 1. How to use Gratitude as a Leadership Tool for Business Growth? 2. How Reverence for all of Life Supports you to Lead your Business from Good to Great? 3. Without Integrity, nothing works; not even your business. Why, and What to do about it? 4. Why Must You Deepen Yourself in Mastery Consciousness to Lead your Business to Market Leadership?  I went to watch the final day of the top golfing event of the country yesterday - Hero Indian Open. I followed the leader of the first 3 days. After a dissatisfactory tee-off at one of the holes in the back 9 of the golf course, he beat the ground with his club. At that moment, I had an inner knowing that he will not win the tournament. After almost being an easy winner based on first 3 days performance, he ended up 4th earning only USD 80,850 instead of USD 291,660. My 10-year old son was volunteering at the event and had the fortune to be with the 3-ball that the tournament winner was a part of on one of the 4 days of the event. I asked him to describe his experience and he described the tournament champion as having so much humility, being kind and cool even after a particularly bad shot. I heard other stories of other players cursing or throwing their club down or at the caddy, when a shot didn’t go their way. I have seen this as much in Business, as in Sports and in all other areas. Your craft mastery only takes you forward that much. Beyond a point, how much of an expert you are no longer counts. Of course, it is what gives you entry to the top league in the first place but to be the leader of the top league and to stay there; you need something more. After you have worked your way up the pyramid, everyone is now working just as hard with almost similar resources. Let’s call Craft Mastery (being a master of your domain, a super expert) the first lever in the game of Life. You have to put in the 10,000 hours of purposeful, persistent, deliberate practise (made famous by Ericsson) for you to reach at the top of your industry. Once you are top 100 of your field, what then gives you the leverage to be number 1? It is no longer Craft Mastery. What got you to Top 100 or Top 1000 league will no longer take you forward. What, then, is the second lever? Compare the 2 players above, the one who could have been number 1 and the one who did become number 1. Notice the difference between the two players’ response to an adverse situation and their way of Being. Observe the stupendous difference between their earnings. That is what the second lever does - push you to Top 10. I call the 2nd Lever - Leadership Depth which is who you really are on the inside. Humility, kindness, still calmness in the face of chaos are all characteristics of people who have worked hard at growing on the inside. Their success and prosperity on the outside becomes a mere reflection of the shine inside. You can beat the ground, people around you, yourself but all that will not get you to win the tournament of life. Lets say, you made it to Top 10. The 2nd Lever will no longer take you forward. You need a 3rd Lever. What could that be? For fans of Bollywood and Indian History, what made 21 soldiers fight a heroic battle at Saragarhi against 10,000 to 12,000 Afghans? What made the Indian Women underdog hockey team win in Chak De, one of my favourite Hindi movies? Let's take an example from Business. Under JRD Tata’s leadership, the assets of his business assets grew from Rs 62 crore in 1939 to more than Rs 10,000 crore in 1990. He is a founder of many landmark Indian businesses - Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Motors, Titan Industries, Tata Salt, Voltas and Air India - contributing significantly to the economic prosperity of our country. What is common between the 21 Sikh soldiers of Saragarhi, the Chak De team and JRD Tata that had them be so successful in their own domains? Each one of them were not playing their game for personal wins, they were instead standing up for a cause so much bigger than who they were. There are JRD Tata’s words - If I were to attribute any single reason to such success as I have achieved, I would say that success would not have been possible without a sustained belief that what I did or attempted to do would serve the needs and interests of our country and our people and that I was a trustee of such interests. The Chak De Team weren’t playing for themselves. They weren’t playing to earn money. They were playing for the freedom of the spirit of womanhood, which they experienced being denied to them. They were playing for their country, for the sense of belongingness to their country beyond the region, state or religion they belonged to. The Saragarhi bravehearts were fighting for the honour of their community, for the honour of their country. That is the 3rd Lever. I call that lever Business Excellence or Sports Excellence, depending on the domain. As long as you are running your business or playing professional sports to earn money for yourself and your family, so much of your inner power is denied to you. When you can evolve to be a stand for a cause, have your work be a way for you to live your purpose to make a difference in the world; you have unlocked the 3rd lever. Wishing you 'all the 3 unlockings' to experience deep joyous fulfilment and abundance at levels unimaginable before. Love, Jyoti.  Infact, the real question is - How to stay inspired to continue building your Business with passion and joyous energy inspite of the ups and downs in Life? There is no escaping from the trials and tribulations that Life invariably throws up to test one’s commitment to realise one’s impossible, unimaginable dreams. How does one then continue walking the path with unbridled and unstoppable energy? All of us have the seed of genius in us. Only those of us are able to nurture it to fully blossom, who keep walking on the path towards our highest self; irrespective of chaos inside or outside. Chaos is the Universe’ way of supporting our growth. Therefore, expect chaos, confusion, self-doubt to be your constant companions as you build your business. If that be the case, then it would be more effective to befriend chaos, confusion, self-doubt and their various other avatars than to resist or struggle against them. Imagine pushing a wall with all your might. Can you feel the wall pushing you back? Can you see you are still standing where you were before? You see, half your mind is struggling against the wall, resisting the wall and you are only left with half your mind’s capacity to creatively figure out a solution to go to the other side of the wall. What if instead of pushing the wall, struggling against it. resisting it; you simply stood still and accepted it the way it is and the way it is not. You may get a brilliant idea to take support from the wall by resting your back against it. In that moment of mental and physical restfulness with your mind’s energy fully available to you since half of it is not struggling against what is, how likely would it be for stroke of creativity to unfold a solution for you to gracefully and effortlessly walk to the other side of the wall. Therefore, in the moments of chaos, confusion, self-doubt, criticism, illness, lack of support from those who really matter, loss of energy, scarcity, financial ruin or any other limiting experience; drop your armour and embrace what is. Fully own it and accept it. Receive it with gratitude as a gift from the Universe to support you to be bigger than who you are at this moment so that you can create much bigger outcomes than you have ever created. I call this leadership ability - Childlike Trust and Faith. Childlike trust and faith in the Universe, childlike trust and faith in the process of Life, childlike trust and faith in Life as it unfolds. It requires leadership depth to live in the experience of this childlike trust and faith. Without this ability, nothing of life may make sense; sucking away energy from the onward march on the path that we feel most connected to. Once we stop struggling in the ocean of Life, we realize we already know how to float and that more we struggle to not drown, greater our chances of drowning. Its when we trust the Universe (which includes all of Life, all Beings and ourselves) and become still, we will find ourselves floating. Why is it a leadership ability? What has childlike trust and faith got to do with Leadership or Business? Everything because the mind is then fully available to finding creative solutions. There is unleashing of undiscovered creativity, locked-in productivity and high level of performance. All of this put together creates effortless customer creation, operational excellence and extraordinary service delighting customers; resulting in greater profitability in a Business ecosystem. The next question is how to build this childlike trust and faith in ourselves and our team members. Leadership development is inner work, requires growth on the inside instead of something that can be hammered in from the outside. Therefore, you cannot train people to become leaders. You can only coach them to be on the inner journey of personal transformation to grow in leadership depth. And, that journey begins 2 stages before: Stage 1 of Leadership - Gear 1 - Coaching your people to discover what their fears are, what they resist the most and supporting them to step outside their comfort zone to fully experience themselves as whole, complete and perfect. Stage 2 of Leadership - Gear 2 - Coaching your people to relate to others as whole, complete and perfect. Coaching them to viscerally experience what it means to be grateful and stay immersed in that experience. Stage 3 of Leadership - Gear 3 - Coaching your people to step up from Gratitude to Childlike Trust and Faith in the Universe, in Grace, in Life or any other word you want to use. All these shifts require shifts across all the 4 bodies of the Being - physical, mental, emotional and spiritual; dropping of limiting habits and taking on Growth Habits at each of the 4 bodies. Before you can coach others, you have to model it yourself. That is why coaching is effective because it is not about Telling, it is about Being. The above journey is a strategic long-term growth path to be the kind of person who remains motivated through the ups and downs of building a business, through the inevitable vicissitudes of Life. More tactically, here’s what you can do to deepen yourself in the Leadership ability of Childlike Trust and Faith: 1. Be a part of a mastermind group of positive people on their journey to their inner genius. We become who we most spend our time with. 2. Build a structure for yourself to be continually growing, to be continuously on the Leadership path to your highest self - from Gear 1 to 2 to 3 and onwards. Having your own coach is a critical component of this structure. 3. This should have been the first, actually because the above 2 make sense only if you have this - a purpose, a dream, a personal inner commitment to be so much bigger than who you are right now to create so much more than you are creating right now. 4. The ritual of daily prayer, which I am finding slowly eroding, is a powerful way to immerse yourself in childlike trust and faith. The process of a heartfelt prayer allows us to unmask to commune authentically with our own self through the Universe. A prayer is not when you beg the creator for something, it is when you seek nothing and open yourself to the Grace of God. The true meaning of prayer became alive for me when I read about a doctor whose wife was delivering a baby with both the mother and baby at high risk. He didn’t pray for the well-being of his loved ones. Instead, he prayed to God to give him strength to accept with Grace whatever He decided as the outcome. 5. Praying before eating is another ritual that is powerful in shifting the Being. The act of praying before eating helps us to become more mindful, connects us to our inner self which not only increases the nutritional value of what we are eating but also helps to still our mind and empty us of limiting emotions and thoughts, if the prayer is heartfully offered; resulting in better decision making ability, greater creativity in problem solving and better communication. This way, every meal is an opportunity to get in touch with our Source of productivity, performance, creativity and innovation. Here’s a variation that I did on St Francis of Assisi’s prayer that powerfully reminds me every meal of what my personal inner commitment is, what my values are, what my promise is to be, the place I want to come back to every time I fall off my path. I end the prayer with Gayatri mantra, which is a prayer in Sanskrit for strength to transform the mind from darkness to light. Create your own version of the mealtime prayer and include your whole family in the process to support your children to start their leadership journey to their highest self as early as possible. Grace, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me be love. Where there is injury, let me be forgiveness. Where there is doubt, let me be childlike trust and faith. Where there is despair, let me be optimism. Where there is darkness, let me be light. Where there is sadness, let me be joy. Where there is negativity, let me be soothing joyful positivity. Where there is chaos, let me be peaceful order. Where there is confusion, let me be clarity. Where there is struggle, let me be joyful effortless creation. Where there is lack, scarcity, yearning; let me be abundance and prosperity. Where there is lethargy, boredom, inaction; let me be enthusiasm, passion and powerful, effective action. Where there is judgement, let me be deep understanding and reverence for all points of view. Where there is anger and hurt, let me be loving tenderness. Where there is arrogance, let be me grateful humility. Where there is treachery and betrayal; let me be childlike trust & faith, integrity, unconditional love & acceptance. Where there is bitterness and resentment; let me be forgiveness, gratitude and joy. Where there is indifference, let me be love. Where there is fear, let me be loving embrace of all of my fears and joyous effective action. Where there is humiliation and rejection; let me be love and grace. Oh, Divine Grace, grant that I seek to console than to be consoled. I seek to understand that to be understood. I seek to love than to be loved. For, it is in giving that we receive. It is in forgiving that we are forgiven. It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life. Gayatri Mantra is a sanskrit prayer to transform one’s default small limiting mind sourced in fear and darkness to our Big Mind sourced in Love and Light. ओम भूर्भुवः॒ स्वः । तत्स॑वि॒तुर्वरेण्यं॒ भर्गो॑ दे॒वस्य॑ धीमहि । धियो॒ यो नः॑ प्रचो॒दया॑त् ॥ om bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ tát savitúr váreṇ(i)yaṃ bhárgo devásya dhīmahi dhíyo yó naḥ prachodáyāt Wishing that you break free from your inner and outer shackles to come home to yourself to create success, fulfilment and joy on the inside and the outside. Love, Jyoti.  Here’s how you build Great Teams with the Right Talent: 1. Have a cause so powerful that it brings tears to your eyes because your passion for what you stand for and how you live that through your business is the glue that holds a Great Team together. It’s been proven time and again, it is not the money that draws people to an organization and makes them stay. 2. Know what your team member’s dreams are and make them your own that supporting them to realize their greatest dreams becomes more important to you than your own dreams. Be your team member’s coach, not their boss. 3. Have a relationship of equals with each of your team member that you are comfortable with them holding the mirror to you, creating the space for you to be their Leader not by authority or external power but by your inner power to inspire them to choose you as their Leader with their mind, heart and soul. 4. Choose to hire those as your team members who love learning and are passionate about their domain over those who are from top-notch colleges. 5. Check during the interview if they do household chores. If they do, you have found a valuable team member who understands what responsibility is, owns it fully and is not afraid to roll-up their sleeves to do what has to be done. 6. Assess before deciding to hire what their values are. Hire only if there’s a match between your values and theirs. Teams usually are ineffective and unproductive more often because of values mismatch than for any other reason. Therefore, ask yourself what are your values before stepping out to build a team 7. Know what your cause is, making what dent in the Universe would touch, move and inspire you. Hire those who are touched, moved and inspired by your cause. That is the super glue that holds the team together. 8. Bring those people in as your team members who want to join you not because they can earn a salary but because what you and your business are upto creating in the world inspires them and gives them an opportunity to make a difference. 9. Right Talent are people who are committed to be the best in their domain and yet have an endearing humility of a beginner. 10. Great Teams are formed around great leaders. Ask yourself the question - "How can I become an even better leader than I am today to inspire the formation of Great Teams with the Right Talent?" Wishing you a joyous and a deeply fulfilling ride as you build a great team with the right talent to lead your business from good to great. Love, Jyoti.  Want to build a massive business empire, create great amount of wealth, be wildly successful? Live the laws explained in this book - The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann. It is truly a little story about a powerful business idea, just as the tagline says. Bob Burg is a former top sales professional, now a highly sought-after conference speaker world-wide and an author. He was named by the American Management Association as one of the Top 30 Most Influential Thought Leaders in Business for 2014. John David Mann is a successful entrepreneur and award-winning co-author. His ‘Take the Lead’ (with Betsy Myers) was named by Tom Peters and the Washington Post as Best Leadership Book of 2011. Wealth creation is the outcome of being a giving person, according to the authors, inspired from their own business experience. The book weaves a beautiful, unputdownable story to elucidate what they call “The 5 Laws of Stratospheric Success”. My own experience bears out the truth of these laws. If you are looking to transform your organization's culture to create the foundation for exponential growth and success, gift this book to every employee. Here are few excerpts from the book to inspire you to read the book end-to-end. It is a few hours read, not only because the book is 122 pages short but also because it is written in a very engaging style. Read it and it may as well become the turning point in your life. 1. … be a giving person, period: one who gives thought, gives attention, gives care, gives focus, gives time and energy - gives value to others. Not as a quid pro quo, not as a strategy to get ahead, but because it is, in and of itself, a satisfying and fulfilling way to be. - Arianna Huffington 2. … the more successful <people> are, the more willing they are to share their secrets with others. … The interesting thing is, the bigger they are, the nicer they are. … I believe that a person can reach a certain level of success without being particularly special. But to get really, really big, to reach the kind of stratospheric success we are talking about, people need to have something on the inside, something that’s genuine. 3. … the majority of people operate with a mindset that says to the fireplace, “First give me some heat, then I’ll throw in some logs.” Or that says to the bank, “Give me interest on my money, then I’ll make a deposit.” And, of course, it just doesn’t work that way. 4. Most of us have grown up seeing the world as a place of limitation rather than as a place of inexhaustible treasures. A world of competition rather than one of co-creation. 5. In life, you often don’t get what you want. But, here’s what you do get - You get what you expect. 6. Go looking for the best in people, and you’ll be amazed at how much talent, ingenuity, empathy and goodwill you’ll find. 7. Ultimately, the world treats you more or less the way you expect to be treated. … you’d be amazed how much you have to do with what happens to you. 8. A very useful thing to remember: appearances can be deceiving. … Truth is, they nearly always are. 9. … the Golden Rule of Business - All things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like and trust. 10. … the point isn’t to have <your customers> pay you more, it’s to give them more. You give, give, give. Why? Because you love to. It’s not a strategy, it’s a way of life. And when you do, then very, very profitable things begin to happen. … but I thought you said you are not thinking about the results. That’s right, you are not. But that doesn’t mean they won’t happen. 11. All the great fortunes in the world have been created by men and women who had a greater passion for what they were giving - their product, service or idea - than for what they were getting. And many of those great fortunes have been squandered by others who had a greater passion for what they were getting than what they were giving. 12. It means that you get to determine your level of compensation - it’s under your control. If you want more success, find a way to serve more people. It’s that simple. … It also means there are no limitations on what you can earn because you can always find more people to serve. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, once said, ‘Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.’ Another way to say that might be, ‘Everybody can be successful because anybody can give.’ 13. “There are people who get rich, and there are people who do good. My belief system said you are one or the other, you can’t be both.” … “And I saw that my old belief system was only getting in the way. It wasn’t serving. So I decided to change it.” “Have you ever made up a story? … Life works the same way. You just make it up. Being broke and being rich are both decisions. You make them up, right up here.” She tapped her finger to her temple. “Everything else is just how it plays out.” What you focus on is what you get. 14. There are three universal reasons for working. Survive - to meet your basic living needs. Save - to go beyond your basic needs and expand your life. And serve - to make a contribution to the world around you. … Unfortunately, most people spend their entire lives focussing on the first. A smaller number focus on the second. But those rare few who are truly successful - not just financially, but genuinely successful in all aspects of their lives - keep their focus squarely on the third. 15. Changing my focus from seeing what I could get to what I could give was when my career started to take off. 16. … by a network I don’t necessarily mean your customers or clients. I mean a network of people who know you, like you and trust you. They might never buy a thing from you, but they’ve always got you in the backs of their minds. … They are people who are personally invested in seeing you succeed, you see? And, of course, that’s because you are the same way about them. They are your army of personal walking ambassadors. … You want to know what makes that kind of network happen? Stop keeping score. … most of the time, what people call ‘win-win’ is really just a disguised way of keeping track. Making sure we all come out even, that nobody gets the advantage. … When you base your relationships - in business or anywhere else in your life - on who owes who what, that’s not being a friend. That’s being a creditor. … Make your win about the other person … Forget win-win - focus on the other person’s win. … if you place the other person’s interests first, your interests will always be taken care of. Always. Some people call it enlightened self-interest. Watch out for what other people need, with the faith that when you do, you’ll get what you need. 17. Money. Position. … a history of outstanding accomplishments. …. These things don’t create influence. - influence creates them. … Putting other people’s interests first <creates influence>. 18. Have you ever wondered what makes people attractive? I mean, genuinely attractive? Magnetic? … They love to give. That’s why they are attractive. Givers attract. 19. I believe there is one reason, and only one reason. that we have stayed together so long and are as happy together today as we were forty-eight years ago - more so, in fact. That reason is this: I care more about my wife’s happiness than I do about my own. All I’ve ever wanted to do since the day I met her is to make her happy. And here’s the truly remarkable thing - she seems to want the same thing for me. 20. “Besides, ladies.” She tapped her index finger a few times in her temple. “It’s what’s inside that makes you beautiful, not the wrapping.” … My husband gave me the most surprising gift of all. He gave me the wake-up call of a lifetime - when he walked out of the door and never came back. … It took me one full year to unwrap, open, understand and use that gift. … When I said that my life as a mom, wife and household manager left me with nothing the marketplace wanted, I was wrong. There was something else I’d learned over those years, and that was how to be a friend. How to care. How to make people feel good about themselves. And that, my friends, is something the marketplace wants very much - always has, always will. ... What I am here to sell you on is you. People, remember this: no matter what your training, no matter what your skills, no matter what area you are in, you are your most important commodity. The most valuable gift you have to offer is you. Reaching any goal you set takes 10% specific knowledge or technical skills - 10%, max. The other 90 plus percent is people skills. And what’s the foundation of all people skills? Liking people? Caring about people? Being a good listener? Those are all helpful, but they are not the core of it. The core of it is who you are. It starts with you. As long as you are trying to be someone else, or putting on some act or behaviour someone else taught you, you have no possibility of truly reaching people. The most valuable thing you have to give people is yourself. No matter what you think you are selling, what you are really offering is you. … You want people skills? Then be a person. … It’s worth ten thousand times more than all the closing techniques that ever have been or ever will be invented. It’s called authenticity. 21. He thought about Gus’ long, rambling conversations, his easy manner with potential clients, his erratic, extended vacations. He smiled. “You just love what you do. You love talking with people, asking them questions, learning all about then, finding ways you can help them, serve them, fill a need, share a resource … 22. It’s not better to give than to receive. It’s insane to try to give and not receive. Trying not to receive is not only foolish, it’s arrogant. When someone gives you a gift, what gives you the right to refuse it - to deny their right to give? … In fact, every giving can happen only because it is also a receiving. 23. … if the secret of staying young, vibrant and vital throughout life is to hang on to those precious characteristics we all have as children but which get drummed out of us - like having big dreams, being curious and believing in yourself - then one of those characteristics is being open to receiving, being hungry to receive, being ravenous to receive. … having big dreams and being curious and believing in ourselves - those are all aspects of being receptive, they are all the same thing as being receptive. … Inside every truth and every appearance, there’s a bit of opposite tucked inside. … So, the secret to success, to gaining it, to having it, is to give, give, give. The secret to getting is giving. And the secret to giving is making yourself open to receiving. 24. The point is not what you do. Not what you accomplish. It’s who you are. 25. I just told you we are giving this contract to your competition. Your response was to thank me and give them a compliment. You’ve got heart. 26. And, the 5 Laws of Stratospheric Success are: i. The Law of Value - Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. ii. The Law of Compensation - Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. Your compensation is directly proportional to how many lives you touch. iii. The Law of Compensation - Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first. iv. The Law of Authenticity - The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself. In other words, your authenticity is the most valuable gift that you can offer. v. The Law of Receptivity - The key to effective giving is having the humility to stay open to receiving. Having big dreams and being curious and believing in ourselves are all aspects of being receptive. These are not new ideas. Just that most of us understand them only intellectually without living them at a much deeper level - emotionally and spiritually. One of the reasons my clients have created wealth and fulfilling business success is because they get coached to live these principles viscerally instead of these being mere intellectual ideas in the head. That's the magic the authors have weaved with their book. They have made available to us, through the enchanting story, the age-old wisdom in a way that it awakens us from deep within and connects us to our inner knowing. As a result, who YOU are shifts and then everything outside shifts. Wishing you the joy of deeply fulfilling, joyous stratospheric success. It is not given to a few special ones. It is available to all of us. We are at the source of it. It is an act of creation. Each one of us has an equal opportunity to make the choice to create it in our life. Then, let me end with wishing you the courage to make that choice. Love, Jyoti.  As your Business grows, your role changes rapidly. Most businesses fail to scale up because the founder never learnt how to adapt his / her role to the changing needs of the growing business and ends up becoming a bottleneck in the growth of the very business that (s)he is committed to grow. A business has 5 distinct stages and the founder CEO has to re-invent herself / himself at each stage. The re-invention required is so dramatic that if not consciously planned for, gets invariably missed out. Unfortunately, the Founder CEO looks at the wrong questions to solve for as (s)he is looking to grow her / his business. Wrong Questions Examples of wrong questions are: a. How do I increase profitability? b. How do I get more customers? c. How do I hire fast enough to manage the growth? Such questions indicate that the torchlight is turned outwards. Powerful solutions do not get created with an outward focus. Right Questions To leave the corridors of mediocrity to occupy the throne of market dominance, the right questions would look like as below for each question in the list above, respectively: a. How can we make a massive difference to our existing clients? What are their needs that are not being served by anyone in our industry so far? How can we build even more trust in our relationship with our clients? b. How can we give such enormous value to our target customer community that they queue outside our office to become our customers; instead of us queuing outside the customer’s office to get them to become our customer? How do I and my team get more committed to my clients’ business growth than to selling our products and services to them? How do we make such huge difference to our customers that they take over the role of sales and marketing for us? c. How do I grow my people to manage our business growth? Answers to these questions move you in the right direction to help you and your team discover powerful, effective, creative, innovative solutions to create your blue ocean. Questions that are One-Level Deeper After asking the Right Questions, as above, by turning the torchlight inwards; the next right step is to increase the intensity of the torchlight by asking deeper level questions as below, respectively: a. What do I need to do to build a culture of Being of Service to our customer community? A super successful serial entrepreneur I spoke to last year told me that they never set profitability goals. That they grew by 30% is more an observation than some goal they set out at the beginning of the year. In the same breath, he also observed that the structure of the company is such that it serves the employees first. The jobs are structured such that their lives are compatible with their roles, rather than forcing it the other way around. b. How do we engage deeply with our customers so that we really understand them? Another highly successful professional CEO of a large international Bank told me that he gets his team to regularly call up the customers for informal conversations. c. Where do I need to grow the most to create the space for my people to grow? An observation I have about authentically successful leaders is that they have no desire to dominate or any need for external power, whatsoever. They are constantly looking at the mirror, taking responsibility for any mess-up and giving away credit for any progress made or success achieved. They have a space that has people feel whole, complete and perfect; and inspires them to unleash their inner genius. It is never so much as who do I hire, as much as who do I be that people give not only their mind, but also their heart and soul to the jobs that they do. Answering the questions which are one-level deeper grow your business with even greater velocity as you find clarity, direction and inner power to lead your business from good to great. With the above context, it is now easier to answer the question that we started this conversation with - How to Let Go and Delegate as your Business Scales? Going one level deeper, the real questions then become: 1. Why am I not able to let go? 2. What are my fears that are stopping me to delegate? 3. How do I grow so that I create the space for my team to become better than me? 4. What is the experience that I leave my team with? Do they feel respect for themselves, for me and for each other in my space? 5. What is the impact I want to create through my business and what kind of culture do I need to nurture for me to be able to create that? And, of course, if you know me well enough, that’s where I leave you - with even more questions than you started out with me because I contribute to you not by giving you answers to your questions but by leading you to even more powerful questions. Though, before we end today’s conversation, here are the 5 distinct stages in the life-cycle of a business and what re-invention is demanded of you at each stage, incase you got curious about it. I call the stages Mountains because that is symbolic of the experience a business owner / CEO goes through from stage to stage - as if flying from one mountain top to another. And, if the flight is not powerful enough, finding themselves crashing right to the bottom in the valley between the two mountains. Mountain 1 - Mountain of Purpose - On this mountain, you are fired up with purpose, passion and the intense burning desire to make a dent in the Universe. Your business idea fires you up, is the cause that touches, moves and inspires you. Mountain 2 - Mountain of Value - On this mountain, you marry your passion and purpose to what’s missing in the world for the customer community that inspires you to make a difference to. You iterate to find your Blue Ocean. Making a difference, making an impact, being of service to your customer community is what now fuels you. Mountain 3 - Mountain of Growth - On this mountain, you continue iterating till you find your repeatable, scalable, profitable business model. On this mountain, your cause becomes bigger than you and you inspire others to get lit-up with the cause that you and your business stand for. Mountain 4 - Mountain of Scale - On this mountain, you grow so much in leadership depth that your people experience themselves as whole, complete and perfect in your space; and engage with their work with not only their mind but also with their heart and soul. Only when employees are engaged this deeply in their work that a business can truly scale in a sustainable manner. Mountain 5 - Mountain of Mastery - On this mountain, you have mastered yourself. You lead your business to become a steady-state corporate and have put in place a leadership team to succeed you and create business outcomes even more powerfully than you did. To have created a team better than yourself gives you a sense of accomplishment. You have successfully made yourself redundant and it gives you great fulfilment at having transformed your business to become a self-sustaining engine of growth, making an impact in the world and creating passive income for you. Wishing you the joy of the journey to come home to yourself because as you fly from Mountain 1 to Mountain 5, you grow deeper and deeper to come home to yourself. That's what makes this journey worthwhile. Love, Jyoti. Why Must You Deepen Yourself in Mastery Consciousness to Lead your Business to Market Leadership?13/2/2019  Let’s begin by defining Mastery. I love the way Robert Greene describes Mastery in his book ‘Mastery’: “… we can identify three distinct phases or levels. The first is the Apprenticeship; the second is the Creative-Active; the third, Mastery. In the first phase, we stand on the outside of our field, learning as much as we can of the basic elements and rules. We only have a partial picture of the field and so our powers are limited. In the second phase, through much practise and immersion, we see into the inside of the machinery, how things connect with each other, and thus gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subject. With this comes a new power - the ability to experiment and creatively play with the elements involved. In the third phase (Mastery), our degree of knowledge, experience and focus is so deep that we can now see the whole picture with complete clarity. We have access to the heart of life - to human nature and natural phenomena. That is why the artwork of Masters touches us to the core; the artist has captured something of the essence of reality. That is why the brilliant scientist can uncover a new law of physics, and the inventor or entrepreneur can hit upon something no one else has imagined.” For an entrepreneur to run a successful profitable business, (s)he has to hit upon something no one else has imagined. To get to that stage, the entrepreneur has to necessarily focus on being a master of his / her craft, his / her domain. Let’s now define Consciousness. As per the dictionary, Consciousness is the thoughts and feelings of an individual; awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings etc. Therefore, Mastery Consciousness is the physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual awareness of Mastery, a deep burning desire to be a Master of one’s craft / domain that one is passionate about and walking the path to become one, irrespective of barriers outside or inside. In fact, the definite march towards Mastery gets greater fuel, greater the barriers. How do you implement this in your business? Based on my experience and study of the masters, the journey to being a Master of your Craft has five stages: 1. Amateur: This is the stage of Passive Learning, when you learn on your own through reading works of masters in your field, training yourself through material available in the public domain. 2. Professional: This is the stage of Active Learning, when you implement whatever you are learning to make a difference to your chosen target community. 3. Expert: You become an Expert by learning through Apprenticeship, when you learn directly from an existing Master of your Craft. 4. Mentor: You become a mentor when you coach others to become Experts in your domain. 5. Master: You finally become a Master when you coach other coaches to coach others to become Experts in your domain. This is when you go inside your craft and become it. There are 2 other journeys an entrepreneur must necessarily undertake in parallel to the journey of Craft Mastery because all the 3 journeys are inter-linked. You cannot travel on one journey without undertaking the other two journeys. The three journeys are: 1. Craft Mastery - From Amateur to Master. 2. Business Excellence - From a Business Idea linked to one’s Purpose of Life to a Self-Running, Self-Sustaining, Repeatable, Scalable, Profitable Business making a dent in the Universe of its Customer Community. 3. Leadership Depth - From Unconditional Love, Acceptance and Reverence of oneself to having others in your space experiencing Unconditional Love, Acceptance and Reverence for themselves and for each other. Here’s an article for a deeper dive into these three journeys - How to Lead Your Organization from Good to Great The question that we are really exploring right now is - Why Must You Deepen Yourself in Mastery Consciousness to Lead your Business to Market Leadership? With the preamble as above, we are now in a position to understand why? 1. For market leadership, you have to hit upon something no one else has imagined. You need Mastery of your craft / domain for that. 2. Without physical, emotional, mental and spiritual awareness of self and one’s surroundings, there can be no Leadership Depth, no inner wisdom without which Mastery is not available. 3. Without your Business being a vehicle for you to live your Purpose of Life, there will be no drive, no joyous passion, no burning desire to walk the path to Mastery. Wishing you the intense burning desire to discover your purpose this lifetime and to live that through your business, through the work that you do to come home to yourself. Love, Jyoti.  What is Integrity? The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete. Integrity is the state of being whole and complete, to be in perfect condition. It is an inner experience of being whole, complete and perfect; with nowhere to go and nothing to prove; with nothing to change or fix to experience wholeness, completeness and perfection in who you are. Only from this state of Being, can creativity, innovation, performance, productivity and effectiveness arise. How can a business survive without all of these? The access to an experience of being whole and complete is to be honest, truthful, and to value and honour oneself. Valuing and honouring myself means to value and honour what I say to myself and to others. Integrity, therefore, is not only about being honest and truthful; but is also about honouring myself by honouring my word to myself and to others. What is my word? There are 5 words that define me: 1. When I say, I promise X: This is my word at the bottom of the ‘promise’ / ‘word’ hierarchy. 2. What I say: I say, I will come. I didn’t say, I promise I’ll come. Even then, it is my word, my promise to go wherever I said I will go. 3. My intentions and dreams: Our intentions and dreams are our promises to ourselves to transform our wants and burning desires into reality. 4. My commitments: Our commitments are our promises too. The values that we are committed to, the relationships that we are committed to, personal growth that we are committed to, whatever it is we are committed to is then also our promise, our word to ourself and to others. 5. Expectations that people have of me: People in our life have expectations of us. Those become our promises too unless we have a straight conversation with others and let them know that you are aware of the expectation but are choosing to release yourself from it. Unless a conversation like this has happened, we are bound by others’ expectations of us. They expect from us, they hold that as our word to them. The truth is we are aware of the expectations but may not have the courage to have an obviously difficult conversation and choose to push this under the carpet instead of rock the boat. The impact of pushing under the carpet is that we anyway won’t do what is expected of us because we don’t want to and yet the other continues to expect of us feeling hurt at our not honouring the expectation. This throws the relationship in negative spiral to a certain death of the relationship in the near future. You may still be staying together, and yet the relationship is dead emotionally, mentally and spiritually. How can we honour our word to ourself and others? Honouring my word is to keep my word; doing what I said I will do, at the time I said I will do, the way I said I will do. If I missed to keep my word, then Integrity would be to restore my word to regain my experience of being whole, complete and perfect. Restoring your word means to acknowledge your broken word and the impact of breaking your word to whoever the promise was made (either to self or to another), take responsibility of the impact and make a new promise. Though, why really bother? I came 2 minutes late to a meeting; or made a customer delivery 5 minutes late; or I said to a colleague “I will be with you in 5 minutes” and didn’t even see my watch to know when the 5 minutes started; or I plan to wake up at 7:00 am daily and hit the snooze button every time to snuggle in for another 2 minutes. Surely all these things are insignificant. Unfortunately, not. Why are such seemingly insignificant things so important? It is because our dreams and our intentions are our promises to ourselves, our word to ourselves. If we don’t value 100% of our own word moment by moment, the five bodies of our Being (physical, energy, mental, emotional, spiritual) assume that our word is of no value to us, we are not really committed to creating what we say and will not throw their full weight behind our dreams and intentions. With no inner power (physical, energy, mental, emotional and spiritual support from our own self) to fulfil on our intentions and dreams, we struggle through life wanting so much but not experiencing fulfilment at being able to create all that we want to. Unfulfilled dreams and intentions rot us from inside, killing us softly with their unsung song. If you want inner personal power to create a magnificent Life, if you want to fulfil all your intentions and realize all your impossible unimaginable dreams that scare you because they seem so big, then value and honour every Word that you are at the source of. Keeping your word means doing what you said, doing it the way you meant it, at the time you said it. Lot of factors play to not make this possible always. Instead of just brushing something you missed under the carpet, Integrity would be to honour your word by restoring your broken word to restore your power to create. Restoring one’s word is a 5-step process: 1. Acknowledge your broken word. A word is broken when either you didn’t do , or didn’t do it the way you meant to do it, or didn’t do it by the time you said you would. You acknowledge your broken word to yourself if you had made a promise to yourself or you acknowledge your broken word to whoever you had made an explicit or an implicit promise to. For example - I had promised to finish this report by 5-Feb and I missed to submit it. I acknowledge my broken word. 2. The 2nd step is to share the impact of the broken word on yourself and on others. To continue with the same example - I had promised to finish this report by 5-Feb and I missed to submit it. I acknowledge my broken word.The impact on me is that I am feeling guilty and have been avoiding you. The impact on you is that you felt let down and got delayed in honouring your commitments. The impact is also that you lost trust on me. 3. The 3rd step is to take responsibility for the impact: Here’s how you do it - I had promised to finish this report by 5-Feb and I missed to submit it. I acknowledge my broken word.The impact on me is that I am feeling guilty and have been avoiding you. The impact on you is that you felt let down and got delayed in honouring your commitments. The impact is also that you lost trust on me. I take responsibility of this impact. 4. The 4th step is to make a new promise: Continuing with the same example - My new promise is to finish the report by today end of day. 5. The 5th step is to share your structure of success that will support you to fulfil on your new promise: In the above example - My structure of success would be to re-prioritize and re-schedule everything else on my calendar today so that I can fully focus on the report. To re-cap, Integrity is honouring and valuing yourself. Valuing and honouring yourself requires you to honour your word because you are the words you say to yourself and the words you say to others. Therefore, Integrity is honouring your word which is to keep your word - doing what you said you will do, at the time you said you will do it, the way you said you will do it. If you missed to keep your word, then Integrity requires you to restore your word to be in honour of your word. Integrity can either be 0% or 100%. Let me prove it mathematically. We are born with 100% integrity, with an experience of being whole, complete and perfect. Then something happens and we break our word and push it under the carpet. Our Integrity falls below 100%. Our integrity now, for example, is at 90%. Something happens and we are faced with the choice to honour our word or not. Our probability of honouring our word is only 90% of 90% which is 81%. Next time we are faced with a choice to honour our word or not to honour our word, our probability of making the choice to honour is now only 81% of 81% which is 66%. The next time, our integrity will reduce to 61% of 61% which is 37%, next time it will be 14%, then it will be 2%, finally it will fall to 0%. Therefore, keep track of promises you make, carefully observe what you say, take committed actions to fulfil your intentions and realise your dreams, honour your commitments and review the expectations people in your life have from you to ensure Integrity. Build the courage to have the difficult conversations to free yourself from the promise implicit in others’ expectations from you or have the strength to become bigger than who you are in this moment and honour others’ expectations from you. Remember Integrity is a Gear 4 value. Without the workouts on the other Gears to cycle up from Gear 0 to Gear 1 to Gear 2 to Gear 3, you will not have enough strength to be Integrity. Refer to the below 2 articles to understand this journey to come home to yourself. 1. How to use Gratitude as a Leadership Tool for Business Growth? 2. How Reverence for all of Life Supports you to Lead your Business from Good to Great? May you have the wisdom to be self-aware, courage to face your blind-spots and commitment to go beyond to connect with your Highest Self. In your personal journey from good to great, you will find the wisdom, the courage and the commitment to lead your business from good to great. Love, Jyoti. Inspiration: The Curriculum of Living from Landmark Worldwide  Have you ever noticed that a senior leader is usually kinder and more respectful than people down below in the corporate ladder? I had a billing issue with our internet service provider. The call-centre representative was rude and point-blank refused to consider my request saying it is just not possible. I told her in that case I would request for disconnection. She told me - “Sure. I will connect you to our Disconnection Department.” That is inspite of the fact that I have been with this service provider for 14 years now. After a few minutes of waiting, she connected me to her supervisor. The tone and language of the supervisor is remarkably different - gentle and soft instead of brusque and loud. She has me soothed in no time, accepted my request in the first breath of the call and re-engaged me as a customer. After 14 years, going somewhere else was anyway a pain. I was only too happy to continue now that all my requests were accepted. This is my experience everywhere. Higher in the leadership hierarchy I go, there’s greater ease in communication, lesser stress, greater listening, lesser rush and a sense of respect flowing in both directions. Here’s a trick question: What comes first - reverence or growth in the organization? Always reverence. You can train yourself to be respectful but that’ll only take you so far. If you are aiming for the top seat and aiming to sit there for a long time, you would necessarily need to train yourself to be Reverence for yourself, all Beings in your space and for Life itself. This is because Respect is at the level of behaviour while Reverence is at the level of the Being. When some attribute is at the level of behaviour, it’s not deep enough and you may shift your behaviour based on where or with whom you are. Reverence means Deep Respect. It has trickled to the core of who you are - not only behaviourally / physically / verbally but also intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. If you reflect, you will find that Leadership Growth is nothing but evolution of the Leader on his / her journey to be the greatest version of themselves. As they walk on the inside to be the greatest version of themselves, they inspire followership and mass movement towards the future they want to create. That is when magic happens in organizations, when employees stop working for money and work for the joy of building cathedrals. Only then a business stops struggling to be good and heaves upto the zone of greatness. How does one melt into Reverence? It is a step by step process involving all the 4 bodies of your Being - physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. I love the analogy of a car to describe Leadership Evolution. You shift from neutral to Gear 1 to Gear 2 to Gear 3 to Gear 4 to Gear 5. Reverence comes in Gear 3 of Leadership Evolution. Gear 2 is when you soak yourself in Gratitude. Without Gratitude, Reverence is not available. Gear 1 is when you take responsibility for all that happens in your life - the good, the bad, the ugly - without making yourself or others wrong. Gear 1 is when you can see what you believe as a view from a point and recognise that it is just as valid as other views from all other points. Then you find yourself without a reason to argue, debate or feel righteous. You are at peace, knowing you have simply chosen a belief because you have chosen it and that doesn't make you more right than others. Gear 1 is when there is nothing to complain about because you know you are responsible for all that happens in your space. Though you neither make yourself wrong, nor others nor the situation. Gear 1 is to be able to see yourself as the source of your upsets and not people or circumstances. Gear 1 is the ability to make the choice to be happy, irrespective of what others do or don’t do, irrespective of what Life throws up at you. Only after this shift is Gratitude available to you as the most powerful creative force for you to create everything that you want to create in this Lifetime. Yes, you can create whatever you want in this Lifetime. Just that you have to keep becoming bigger than yourself, other people and Life itself; moment by moment. Welcome to your Hero’s journey. Love, Jyoti.  Fads worry me because people pick them up more for their current flavour rather than the in-depth understanding to implement them to move their lives irrevocably to the next level. But the real problem is not so much that. The real problem is that the fads don’t shift us from the inside because their implementation is on the surface, only engaging the intellectual body. As a result, a very powerful habit that has the potential to uplift our life comes and goes; leaving us a little cynical about its value, lost to us forever. Gratitude also seems to have become a fad. I do hope it doesn’t remain one; so that the power of this leadership habit can be experienced in its full-blown intensity as the source of business growth. Gratitude is the most powerful creative force in the world. I have known it to heal cancer in the body, heal relationships, create health and fitness, financial freedom, business growth. What is Gratitude? It is being in the state of deep thankfulness. The most important word in the last sentence is BEING, as in the Human Being. The Being of the human being actually has four bodies - physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. Therefore, to really bring on the power of gratitude in your life, you have to be engaged at all the four levels, all the four bodies of your Being experiencing deep thankfulness. I recently observed from a distance the concept of Gratitude being implemented in an organization. I applaud the organization for this massive new thinking initiative for their employees. Though, unfortunately, only the intellectual mind seemed to have got engaged as I could see from the use of timers for regular gratitude moments and mastermind style group updates. I wonder if the BEING shifted for the people participating in this initiative. Did they feel different? Did they create different outcomes in their lives, personally and professionally? Did they experience being suffused by Divine Love and Intelligence. Till it is not this deep, Gratitude doesn’t work. It is not about thinking Gratitude, it is about feeling Gratitude viscerally beyond the level of the mind. Though, intellectually understanding Gratitude is the beginning of the journey. My one-time teacher, Brandon Bays, used Gratitude to shift her body at a cellular level to heal and melt her basket-ball size tumour in her stomach that had her look like a fully-pregnant woman. She calls that process “The Journey”. I did a one-year program with her to understand and learn to deliver it to my clients. I have had my clients clear up emotional blocks from childhood to finally access Gratitude viscerally to heal themselves, heal their relationships and grow their businesses. Gratitude is like a Gear 2 process. Without moving from neutral to Gear 1, shifting habits across all the 4 bodies of the Being, one cannot step into the zone of Gratitude. Let's call that Gear 2. Then, Zone of Genius would be Gear 3. Here’s a true story for you to understand the steps to accessing Gratitude. If you chant the magic mantra “I love you. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”, nothing much may shift because the mantra actually captures the 4-step inner transformational journey that is required for the kind of magic that Dr Hew Len was able to create through what he called ‘Ho’oponopono’ and that Brandon Bays was able to create through ‘The Journey’ process. It is the same 4-step shift that a prayer or a spiritual practice can induce if it is intense and from the depths of one’s heart. I heard of a Sikh lady who healed her breast cancer by simply chanting ‘Wahe Guru’ with childlike trust and fate. It is the same 4-step inner process. Here are the 4-steps: 1. The 1st step is to unconditionally love and accept one’s own self, however one is and however one is not; relating to oneself as whole, complete and perfect. (I love you) 2. The 2nd step is to take responsibility for all that happens in one’s space - the good, the bad, the ugly. (I am sorry) 3. The 3rd step is to forgive oneself for causing the mess in one’s own life. (Please forgive me) I call the above 3 steps part of Gear 1 leadership transformation. 4. Now, one is ready for experiencing Gratitude viscerally in the body and emotionally. (Thank you) This is what I call as Gear 2 of the leadership transformation journey. And, wait there are 3 more Gears to step up to. Though, as of now, we will content ourselves with understanding Gear 3, which is the 5th step below. 5. Therefore, the 5th step is falling into childlike trust and faith in the Universe, which is really experiencing Gratitude spiritually. Without experiencing Gratitude emotionally, this step-up is not available. The important thing to remember is that all the 5 steps are available as an outcome of dropping our limiting physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual habits and taking on Growth Habits. Habits are like building blocks of who we are and what we can create. To shift what you can create in your life, you have to shift who you are. And, to shift who you are, you have to shift what your habits are across all the 4 bodies of your Being. Wishing you the joy of this deeply fulfilling journey of growing yourself and your business. Love, Jyoti.  If you are in the business of services, this is one book you want your sales team to read. The book is about what sabotages client loyalty and how to get past that to have not only your clients asking to do more business with you but also sending more clients from their network to your doorstep. But, before you gift the book to your sales team with the expectation of seeing increase in your top and bottom line, you would need to read it first because what is in the book cannot be implemented unless you as their leader believe in and live these principles. The author, Patrick M Lencioni, is Founder and President of The Table Group, a successful management consulting firm specialising in executive team development and organisational health. His business principles are now course material at the University of Saint Mary. CNN Money listed him in 2008 as one of "10 new gurus you should know”. He is "one of the most in-demand business speakers.” His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Bloomberg BusinessWeek and USA Today. Read below few excerpts from the book to get an overview of the magic formula and experience deeply fulfilling, joyous success even as you smile all the way to your bank by implementing the ideas from the book. 1. Without the willingness to be vulnerable, we will not build deep and lasting relationships in life. That’s because there’s no better way to earn a person’s trust than by putting ourselves in a position of unprotected weakness and demonstrating that we believe they will support us. 2. For those who provide service to clients, vulnerability is particularly powerful. Those who get comfortable being vulnerable - or as I call it, naked - are rewarded with levels of client loyalty and intimacy that other service providers can only dream of. 3. …even though clients require us to be competent enough to meet their needs, it is ultimately our honesty, humility, and selflessness that will endear us to them and allow them to trust and depend on us. 4. … we need to make sure that they’d be the right kind of client. … We’ve learned over years that having a bad client is worse than having none. … it prevents you from finding other good clients. And you’re unlikely to get a good reference. In fact, they are likely to tell everyone they know how you weren’t able to help them, because they certainly aren’t going to admit it was their fault. … it just makes you feel bad about coming to work. It destroys the culture. 5. “Do you ever worry that you are going to do too much during your sales call, and that the client will take it and use it and not hire you?” … “I don’t worry about it. Very few people are going to do something like that. If they need help, they need help. Even if what I show them makes perfect sense, they usually know they need help implementing it and getting the rest of their team on board. … even if they do that, then they’d probably be a pretty lousy client anyway. So it would be better to find that out up front.” 6. … fairly long list of principles … but not much structure around their approach. 7. … one of the most intense, interesting and effective behavioural therapy exercises I had ever witnessed. All in a little more than an hour. Starting with the CEO, they went around the room and told him what they thought his most valuable attribute was for the team, and then they went around and told him the one thing they thought he should work on. The answers were pretty consistent; he took them well, and promised to do his best to address the biggest area of weakness, … Then they went around the table and did the same for everyone else … 8. Almost all of the time and energy … was being directed toward consulting to (servicing) paying clients. Those clients in turn became the sales engine for the firm, and even when we did an occasional cold call, it was the references from clients that shortened the sales cycle considerably. I’m not even sure I’d call it a sales cycle at all. 9.” … They spend almost none of their time selling. … most of their business comes from referrals and warm leads. And in the rare event that they do a cold call, they spend very little time doing research or writing up proposals or wordsmithing presentations.” What do they do then? … “… when they meet up with a client, they spend their time asking questions and doing primary research right there. It’s like they skip the entire sales process. And, they are remarkably successful. … instead of trying to outsmart the companies they are selling to, they just go there and start consulting.” 10. … they are far less professional than we are. They are also less sophisticated, less rigourous and less systematic. But they are so much more effective. … every client … raves about these people. They do most of the marketing for them, and without being asked. More than half their clients come from unsolicited referrals. 11. Why did the client pick them instead of us? The client tells them why - “It just felt like you guys were going to tell us how to run our business, and you were trying to convince us that you knew more than us, I guess. And you were telling us all the things that you would do for us if we hired you. They didn’t do that. … They didn’t come up with any answers. But they asked questions. And, they had suggestions, but they admitted that some or all of these suggestions might not be right. And, some of them weren’t, but some were, and more than anything, it felt like they were more interested in helping us figure our problems than they were in closing the deal.” What has it been like working with them since then? “The same as it was that day. It’s like all they are interested in doing is helping us solve our problems. I’ve already told half a dozen other CEOs about them. I couldn’t be happier.” 12. The power of what they do can be explained in one word: vulnerability. 13. The three fears that sabotage client loyalty i. The 1st Fear: Fear of losing the business It’s not that they go out of their way to tick off their clients. It’s just that they are so focussed on saying and doing whatever is in the best interests of those clients that they stop worrying about the repercussions. They make themselves completely vulnerable, or naked, and don’t try to protect themselves. … they’ll usually look at a company’s website and get a general sense of what business the client is in. But they do most of their research when they meet the client, by asking questions. And they certainly don’t come up with a slideshow or a marketing packet. a. Consult, don’t sell. Give away the business. The other part of this, giving away the business, is about never worrying about the fees. Don’t bring them up during the sales call unless they ask. Don’t apologise for what you charge when they do ask. And if there’s ever a dispute about fees, side with the client and charge the lesser amount. … That’s what nakedness and vulnerability are all about. If a client wants to take advantage of you, let them. I’ve seen their consultants go to a client and suggest that they pay a lower retainer because they weren’t using their services enough.’ … It’s all about standing there naked in front of the client. It’s about building trust. And in the end, that means the client trusts them and takes care of them. b. Tell the kind truth I know a consultant who told his client that he needed to move his son out of a leadership position because he was incompetent. Another guy I know recently told a CEO that he doesn’t hold his staff accountable. And, last week I had to tell a guy that I thought he talked too much during meetings. But remember the ‘kind’ part. We give them that sort of feedback with a level of empathy and concern that you would normally reserve for a friend. No matter how uncomfortable the conversation might be in the moment, eventually the clients are so glad that someone cares enough about them to be honest, they probably can’t imagine not having you around. c. Enter the danger In consulting, entering the danger comes into play in those moments when you are in a meeting and someone says something that is either strange or politically sensitive, and you know that the level of anxiety and discomfort in the room is high. What you are tempted to do is just be quiet and let the moment pass, but what great consultants do is walk right into the middle of the situation and call it out. Whenever I see someone enter the danger …, clients inevitably come up to you individually and thank you. They say things like “I am so glad you made us talk about that’, and ‘I’ve been wanting to do what you did today for three years, but I felt it would have been a career-limiting move.” ii. The 2nd Fear: Fear of being embarrassed One fear that most consultants struggle with is the fear of being embarrassed or looking stupid in front of their clients. a. Ask dumb questions Whether it’s an industry term or an acronym or a concept that everyone else in the room seems to understand, they just never pretend to know more than they do. … I think their clients appreciate that about them. b. Make dumb suggestions <Don’t hesitate to make suggestions, even if they turn out to be dumb.> c. Celebrate your mistakes If a suggestion turns out to be dumb, you admit it was a bad idea as soon as you realize it. You laugh at yourself. You take their ribbing. And most important, you don’t stop making suggestions. Most of your ideas won’t be horrible. Even the ones that aren’t so good won’t hurt you as long as you are humble enough to acknowledge that you are not an expert. And if you have built trust with the client, they don’t think about it for a second. … The idea is that your clients are looking for good suggestions, and they don’t mind sifting through some not-so-good ones as long as they are offered with good intentions and with no ego attached. iii. The 3rd Fear: Fear of feeling inferior One of the last things consultants want is for their clients to look down on them or, even worse, look right through them. There is something about wanting them to see you as being important that goes with the job. The fear of being embarrassed or looking stupid is about taking an intellectual risk. It’s about the pride of not wanting to be wrong. The fear of feeling inferior is more about humility as a person, not needing to be the centre of attention. Even taking on a role of true subservience to a client. … some of the principles that go down with this … a. Take a bullet for the client b. Make everything about the client c. Honour the client’s work - This is about genuinely displaying enthusiasm and respect for what the client does. d. Do the dirty work There is something so powerful about a person who in one moment can be confident enough to confront a client about a sensitive personal issue, and then in the next moment humble themselves and take a position of servitude. It’s the paradoxical nature of it all that makes it work. Here are few excerpts from the book where the author explains what he means by The Naked Service Model and what to do specifically to shed the three fears that destroy client loyalty. At the outset, let me tell you that it won't be as simple as reading the book to get breakthrough business performance. What the implementation of the ideas in the book really requires is the transformation of what it means to be you, what it means to be a leader in your organization, what it means to be a business in the world. Its only on this journey of leadership transformation beginning with you will you get access to your inner creative power and outer enthusiastic followership to lead your organisation to cut over from good to great. What this journey requires is for us to build high levels of self-awareness about our own evolutionary fears - I am not good enough, I am not important, I am all alone. After being present to one of these or a combination of these fears, the journey requires us to march forth like peaceful warriors to transmute these evolutionary fears to step into the highest version of ourselves. Click here to read the 5-Stage Leadership Development Process I use with my clients to support them to become naked service providers; unleashing their performance, productivity, creativity and innovation. They create not only breakthrough business results but also breakthroughs in other areas of their life - health and fitness, relationships, kids, finances, purpose, spirituality, emotional intelligence. I find it incredibly beautiful to observe how building a great business only happens in parallel to going within to be the greatest version of who we are. Wishing you the joy of the journey. Love, Jyoti.  Values are our commitment to ourself, a promise to our own self as to who we are committed to be; irrespective of the chaos inside or outside, irrespective of how people are or aren’t, irrespective of what people do or don’t, irrespective of what people say or don’t. Defining our personal values defines for our own self as to who we really are. It gives us a place to stand in firmly, instead of swaying to every strong wind that may push us in one direction or the other. Instead of reacting to how people or circumstances are, we can learn to respond from who we have committed to be. This makes us far more productive, effective, in control of our lives, in control of the outcomes in our life, creative, innovative, happy, joyful and at peace. If your inner values drive you, I call you a Peaceful Warrior fighting your battles within in recognition of the fact that the problems outside are mere reflection of what’s inside. If you take out your sword every morning to fight the challenges that the day lays out for you, I call you a Fighter. It is an exhausting lifestyle, constantly fighting to get what one wants. Fighters fight the Victims or other Fighters because Peaceful Warriors are on a different path. If you constantly hear yourself complaining, you know you just slipped into the Victim mode. Who would you rather be - Peaceful Warrior, Fighter, Victim? What you choose determines the destination your organization is headed towards - industry innovator and leader, one of the many or struggling to remain out of the red. So, what are your Values? They would be inner resources that inspire you. Here are examples of what they could look like - love, gratitude, reverence, integrity, mastery, joy, gentleness, abundance, kindness, generosity, compassion, fun, freedom, fulfilment, creativity, leader, service, contribution, commitment, dedication, loyal, innovation, humility, respect, understanding, appreciation, positive, cheerful, enthusiasm, energy et al. You could choose from this list or come up with your own. Once you are clear about your own values, it is about living them moment by moment by having your thoughts, beliefs, words, actions in alignment with your core values. If your core value is kindness, observe your every thought, word and action to assess if you are truly being that. Only if you live your values will you be able to inspire your family at home and your people at work to live those values. No amount of talking or plastering the walls with lot of words has an impact as much as you living those values. It is important that your core values are aligned with the organization you are leading for your people to learn to live the organisational values. Your biggest and the first job as a chief executive is to reset values, vision and mission for your organization which are in alignment with your personal values, vision and mission that inspires you. A mismatch here will reduce your power to lead your organization forward from good to great. Values define who you are, your vision is the future you want to create and your mission is what you will do to create that future. Organisational values defines what the organization believes, stands for and values more than profits. The organisation’s vision is where is the company going and why it exists. The organisation’s mission is what it is upto to lead itself to where it wants to go and fulfil on its reason for existence. Before an organisation’s values, vision and mission can be defined, the CEO and the senior leadership team needs to come together to discuss their personal values, vision and mission to reset the organisation’s values, vision and mission that is deeply connected with their own. Without this visceral connection, your company’s values, vision and mission would be empty words on the walls instead of being the source of inspiration for the whole workforce to come together to transform the industry and lead from the front, making a massive difference to your customer community. Market leadership, profitability and scalability will be an effortless by-product of this process. If you want to pump in new blood into your business and are committed to learn, evolve and massively grow, write to me at [email protected] for a session to reset your organisation’s values, vision and mission. Wishing you a joyous journey to contribute to your customer and employee communities as you grow not only your business but the social eco-system along with it. Love, Jyoti. |
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