How to Gain the Power to Choose and grow 1000x

Silicon Valley Billionaires say a Startup grows at a rate of 5%-7% every week. And I did that maths, at that rate it grows 1000x in 123 weeks. That is really accelerated!

Do you want to grow accelerated? Then these are 3 Super Powers you need to develop:

1. The power to choose your relationships

One of the recent scientific discoveries is that people don’t have the power to choose who they are attracted to. This is why you find someone falling in love with an abusive and even a  drug addicted partner and they still go ahead and marry this person and it ruins not just their life but also the children they give birth to. And the bigger problem is that most people don’t have choice over how they feel in certain situations. Someone who gets angry with their spouse/children continues to do so even if they feel bad about it. Some people feel nervous when they meet some of their colleagues and some people feel tongue tied. Some even feel jealous and feel guilt about feeling jealous. But all that is really not a problem if you have the capability to change and evolve fast because you can set yourself free from the limitations that stop you from having great relationships. And if you have the personal power to let go of certain relationships, then you can choose who you have in your life as mentors, friends, companions and trusted associates.

However, we can’t always let go of people in our life.  And we can’t really change the people in our lives all the time. Yes, we can change some of our friends and associates. But there are some people with whom we would rather change the kind of relationship we have with them. Because sometimes, you cannot change the person in your life but you can change how you both relate to each other. As we evolve, choice, is being able to change the way we relate with each other, so that you are happier interacting with each other, more often, and you are building each other uP!

I heard about this girl from a client, she is the only daughter to her single father and she loves her single father, and her husband is kind and supportive and welcomes the father home to stay with them. They tried it for a while and then the father moved out. Because sometimes, people can love each other but they can’t help themselves to feel different and relate differently with each other than how they have been doing all their life. The daughter feels guilty, the husband misses out on weekend work they were doing together, the grand child lost a wise mentor and the father lives lonely. What would have changed this equation in that family? If the father could have learnt to relate to his daughter slightly differently and if the daughter didn’t get so disturbed every-time the father misunderstood her. But, the sad part is that, in most parts of the world, even when people consciously understand the underlying emotions that is coming in the way of their relationships, they feel helpless to change the way they respond in certain situations. This is why I have so much respect for John Grinder For the first time in Human History, there is a method to break old patterns and develop new habits in minutes, not days or months because of the methods in Neuro Linguistic Programming that he developed.

One type of relationship that I treasure and is very precious to me are people I learn from. You will always have people in your life who can compress time for you, their sheer excellence in what you love, will help you get there in years or maybe months instead of decades.

A lot of people learn from their immediate boss. Or the nearest expert in the area. What if, instead, you can learn from your super super boss? And from the best in the world instead of the nearest available expert.

Likewise, choosing how you relate within your business / office is going to be key to the success of your business. Often, people start a relationship on a particular note, and then that relationship continues in that same frame in that same shape as long as they work together. But we all change and some evolve. And when people evolve, their values, their core nature also shifts. So, why not also, continuously evolve the relationships within your business?

One of our participants who doubled his 20 Million Dollar business after being stuck in a plateau for five years achieved what he achieved because we were able to change how he related to his leadership team and how they in-turn related back to the organization.

New growth of an already successful business is easily proportional to the quality of relationships within. And key qualities like trust and ownership are things only good leaders can observe. However, developing the power to change what is not right and to choose a different culture for the organization, requires a completely different level of skills altogether. One needs to develop layered relationships along with deep insights of what drives people to develop this power to choose.

Some people say that it takes two hands to clap. And that it requires both the people in the relationship to evolve personally, for them to relate to each other differently. As much as I agree to that, I have also seen the power of one person developing new choice and how it changes the other person over time. There was a lady who had an abusive husband. And when we helped her overcome her fear and develop a zero-tolerance attitude, the husband evolved to become a better person within a few years. And when we helped a father overcome his anger, and have choice over how he responds when he is irritated, he found his daughter opening to him and sharing things in her life that she didn’t for several years. An Entrepreneur who developed new choices to trust his key leaders found them developing new sense of ownership and respect for his vision.

Sometimes you must be patient, and sometimes you must demonstrate zero-tolerance, sometimes, it is a thin line of difference there. And that calls for wisdom to make the right shift in you at the right time. This also calls for personal power because one of the things we have noticed is that when one person changes, some people around them do everything to get them back to their old behavior. A senior director we worked with, went back to his organization with new personal choices and capabilities, but his boss tried to get him to slow down. The good thing is that this senior director was able to hold his frame. And if you have the personal power to hold the frame long enough, people will join you in your model of the world and adapt themselves to your frame. If you are gifted with such personal power, it is very important to also have the insights to validate that your frame creates a win-win-win consequence in the long run. Holding frames is a concept a lot of people who are exposed to conversational programming will be able to relate. In a simplified sense, a frame is why you (mostly unconsciously) do what you do, and holding frames is your ability to hold on to it, even at the cost of a temporary strain. Like, a parent who says no to a child who is stubborn about watching a particular TV show. And this act of saying ‘no’ may create a temporary unpleasantness but results in positive character development for the child. Some parents can’t hold their frame for more than 5 minutes, and some parents hold onto the wrong frames! To change your relationships, you need to develop deep insights, emotional intelligence and systemic thinking, so that have great frames. And you need to develop personal power, so that you can hold on to your frames.

2. The power to choose your customers

“Chasers can’t be choosers”, but more on that at the bottom of the section.

When it comes to business, the power to choose your customers is freedom! I have seen people with a great product, great service but stuck with the wrong customers. And eventually the business fails. The customers you need to attract if you are running a lottery service is different from the type of customers you need to attract if you are running an investment service.

One of the enablers for 7% weekly growth is a concept known as Product Completion. According to Silicon Valley growth hackers, your product is complete ONLY when the process of delivering your product also becomes the marketing channel. In other words, you have engineered or designed your product to markets itself. More than 80% of our referrals are family members. And this started happening a lot more, specifically after we introduced a program called Conversational Programming Mastery. When, we helped our customers to help their family members make better decisions in their life and shift mindsets (conversationally), they developed a new layer to their relationship, and these family members paid more attention to the new capabilities of our customers, and they started coming to our events. It’s a simple concept but very hard to implement yet totally worth it. Some people get the concept of product completion totally wrong, they think of the product marketing itself to mean, upgrading and bullying the customer to get more referrals or buy more products. Nothing is as disgusting as some seminars, training and coaching programs were the promoter spends hours and hours promoting their products and hard selling their other stuff, instead of delivering results right there. Instead, let your work shine. That’s what it means. But, even when it shines, like even when our customers got accelerated success like double promotions in 6 months, it wasn’t enough for the acceleration we wanted, it had to shine in other areas and introducing CPM made it visible to their own family even more and very soon referrals within the family became our strongest marketing channel.

And for this to happen in your business, for the delivery of the product to become your strongest marketing channel is very critical. Having the right customers is very important because your initial customers are not about how much money you can make but about how fast can you grow from Product Completion.

These are 5 Customer Filters that works for our business:

Have such a filtering criteria for our customers, increased our total sales revenue by 400% in one year and reduced the cost of acquisition by 50%.

It will be a bit of a struggle to let go of some type of customers but you do the math, doesn’t your car or bike slow down a bit when you are shifting gears? The acceleration that comes after that is worth the pause between gears. (if you drive an automatic you may not know this happens, but it does)

1.  Driven and Motivated but not Desperate

A driven person wants to improve and incrementally develop their skills, qualities and capabilities. They leverage this personal acceleration to change their career, quality of life and everything else. A desperate person on the other hand is looking for career growth immediately and delays personal development as a long term outcome. A driven person prepares ahead of time for what is going to come. One of the assessments we have for every customer I personally interact with, is to validate that they are here for the right reasons, they are super motivated in life. And they have already done their best to help themselves.

Some people ask what do motivated people need? They need time compression that comes from evolving themselves in all aspects of life, fast.

You may ask, why then do you continue to help parents who want their children to stop drugs, or a teen who is addicted in love and missing out everything else. Well, those I do as a personal favor. And I don’t charge for that!

As a business, we have decided to engage only with people who are highly motivated and have been highly motivated yet they haven’t accelerated to their satisfaction and full potential.

2. Curious and Not a Skeptic

We love it when people do their research before they come to our events. We want people to check the facts and discerns how we are different. This ensures we get serious customers and not someone who is ‘just checking out’. There was a time when we got obsessive about this to the point that my team only spoke on phone to people after they have done their independent research. In 2017, we tried an experiment to drop all sales calls. This meant, encouraging only the customers who came through their own independent research. And our sales revenue stayed the same.

Curious people also get Fascinated. They see something at the events that they have not seen in all their life and even if it is not about them, they get fascinated, they explore what happened, they learn better, it’s such a great vibe around and everyone in the eco-system benefits. Even though, a curious person and a skeptic are both going after more data. The difference between a curious and a skeptic is that a curious person is invested. And a skeptic is a time hogger.

By dropping calls in 2017, the team that was educating prospects was able to use their energy fully focussed to create content that fed the curious. And this way, from a mixed bag of customers we moved to a set of highly curious customers. And these customers continue to be curious even after the events. And this leads to better results for them and for our business. In 2019, though my team does talk to people, we still maintain what we learnt from this experiment. And instead of a 100% no call policy, the team uses several ways to educate the self-exploratory curious prospect and only then gets on a call.

The point here is this: Does the above strategic decision miss out on some clients. Yes. But what would you rather have? A 30% increase in clients or the 400% increase in growth. (from the figures explained above).

3. Are willing to pay the price

Our programs produce unique results. There isn’t any one-to-one impact and installation programs in the world. And for some people these results are so important that every challenge in coming to the events, feels doable. And this attitude of our participants is very important for a variety of reasons. For example, our events are sometimes, inconvenient. There is up-to 2 months of waiting time for consultation, even if you are on a priority list. And even if you get a consultation, the pre-process before the consultation takes 3-4 hours and sometimes goes on for 6 – 8 hours. The events happen for 6 days and some events go on for 14 days. And if you are doing a residential event, you pay for the stay in a 5 Star. And even during the non-residential events, people stay back and do their activities till 12:00 am and travel all the way back after that to come back at 7:00am in the morning. And some people based on where they live have to spend on travel and stay for every event and consultation. And parents with infants make arrangements in great length to come to the program. But at the end of the day, if you come out of a trap you didn’t know you were in, find answers to what you have always been searching for, find what was missing all along, even if it saves you just  2-3 years and not 10 – 20 years, and you achieve within months a new level of personal power and you taste the life you didn’t even dream of, it is all well worth the effort.

There are people who make the effort to come to the event from any part of the world, wherever they are, because it is important to them. And that is the type of customers we want. More than 90% of our customers, acknowledge that what they have got from these interactions, they haven’t got anywhere else.

These customers want what we have to offer so much because of their priority to evolve themselves, correct the things in their life, and most importantly, develop new capabilities and accelerate their growth. This gives them the heart to go that extra mile to make it happen.

Benefit:

This type of filtering allowed us to have a very close-knit relationship with our participants. And that helped us discover, exactly what was required for them at every stage. And this is how we were able to develop each of our products.

This is how NLP Certification got morphed to uPwithNLP where the focus shifted from solving issues to developing superior capabilities.

This is how we knew that people who evolved and developed new capabilities, required some guidance for accelerated success and that is how uPwithNLP transformed to the uP! promise with a personal one-on-one consultation before and after the event.

This is how we knew people who accelerated success required a new layer to their dream, legacy! And new dimensions to their life directives. And that is how we came with Super Life Directives.

This is how we knew, people who have a legacy dream need to Close important Deals in their life. And that is how we came with Close the Deal like a Pro!

This is how we knew, even when people have deals flowing in and have a legacy dream, in order to accelerate and find more satisfaction and fulfillment, they needed to relate with their own people and their own family in more evolved ways. And their personal growth is also going to be leveraged from their family and their immediate eco-system. This is how we came up with Conversational Programming Mastery.

This is how we knew people who have it ALL still need to find people above and beyond their league and the world they live in, to continue to compress time. And for this to happen, their reputation has to precede them and their stories have to reach where they haven’t reached yet. And this is how we came up with Charisma Intensification.

This is how we knew there is nothing more satisfying for a person than evolving his or her own family member and that is how we designed Excellence Installation Specialization.

Without having the right customers, the right relationship would not have been possible. And right relationships leads to unique insights. And unique insights helps you in product completion.

4. Who will Impact the Society

We understand the psychology of Different Buyers. This is an important aspect of our business we are in. We help people learn the psychology of people that is not taught in psychology or in business schools. So, we know that there are different triggers to attract different type of customers. There are some people who want to make a lot of money, some people are hungry for fame, some people are hungry for social recognition, some people are hungry to impact the society. And our communication automatically filters and only appeals to the category of people who are hungry to impact the society. The people who are hungry for social status is the easiest cash pot but those are not the customers who will become a great eco-system and definitely not the customers we want to attract, on the contrary, people who want to impact the society have a kinder heart and a grateful attitude, in my opinion.

One of the things that I wanted to change when we were doing NLP Certification programs was get people who wanted to learn the skills and not just flaunt their certificates. There were a lot of people who came in because they could get a hike in their salary or training fee, because of the certificate. So, when we introduced uPwithNLP, slowly and systematically we got rid of the certification, this ensured we filtered away those people and only got people who are committed to their own personal growth and development. Yes, we did get a push back, we did miss some customers, but as an eco-system I am so much happier about the customers we have now.

A driven and super motivated individual who is both curious, has a kind heart and a big vision is my ideal customer. This is the person I want to meet for consultations because when Harini and I help such an individual to compress time, the impact they create is exponential.

The kind heart and gratitude is difficult to filter at the beginning. But, since we are in the business of evolving people, we know the cues to read beyond the thank you and the gifts and the smiles and the hugs to actually discern who is grateful from the heart. I believe people who have a sense of gratitude pay things forward. They enable people around them. My team is not equipped (yet) to filter participants for uP! based on this criteria but they have definitely done the filtration with great accuracy for the Fast Track membership. And for Excellence Installation Specialization, Harini and I personally, get involved in the filtering process and this is a key criterion.

And also, the beauty of uP! is that some of these things change for participants after the event. A girl who had zero sense of gratitude for what her parents had done for her, after 6 months, had a total shift in her attitude towards her parents. When people evolve it can also have an impact in their character.

Is it necessary for a business to expect their customers to have a kind heart? No, not at all. We have some business verticals within our business like the Breakthrough product, where we filter exclusively based on commitment. But the business of Fast Track Membership and EIS, this has my involvement over time and if I am dedicating my time and energy to building relationships with some people at the cost of not being available for some other people, then I rather choose carefully who I want to invest that time with. And I like to have in my close set of participants, people who share some of these basic value systems at the core.

This filtering makes it delightful to do business. A multi-millionaire who came to our program, all the way from Canada, asked Harini and me while having dinner together. “Antano, is this your passion or your business”. And I told him, “we are fortunate that our business revolves around our passion”. In some business, if you want your business to be aligned with your heart then you need to choose who you want and don’t want to work with, also based on the value system and ethics.

You have to make your choice about who you want as your customer based on your business. But remember you cannot choose, if you don’t have the power to choose.

I have seen so many good people, go broke. People with such great products shut shops, quality services going unnoticed. Great entrepreneurs stuck with vulture capitalists. I think business education around how to close quality deals and how to improve your personal power to communicate, let go, take risks, has to take top priority in our educational system. Because these are the qualities that lets a quality service to achieve the status of choosing their customers. This is what I try and address in Close The Deal like a Pro! Because when you can close the right deal, you will develop the power to choose. And you will know, you have arrived here when you no longer have to chase your customers. And having the right customers as well as filtering out the not so useful apples, will grow your business at an unprecedented speed! Your customers are your brand ambassadors. Choose them wisely. Weed your garden, it’s your garden protect it. Be enthralled in your garden. Let the aroma be sweet and pleasant, may the shades of green stir your soul, let the fruit be nutritious and the leaves medicinal. Let the birds make a sweet sound. It’s your garden. And let the fruits of the soil multiply. It’s your garden.

Some say, “Antano but your business is unique so you can choose”. Yes, thats true but it’s unique not because of the industry I am in, its unique because it is designed to be unique. Long time ago when I was 22 and did freelance IT training, I know companies that waited as long as 6 months for my schedule, although there are hundreds of trainers. And that’s not just about me, a friend from those days called Chandrashekar Babu is still in the IT industry, and companies even wait over 6 months until he is available. Hyundai waited over a year to start one of it’s operations in India, until they found the right HR head to lead that division. So, it’s not about what industry you are in, it’s about you.

Are you that person? Can you provide unique and unparalleled results within your own domain?

A lot of people think big companies don’t filter their customers. Not true, everyone does. Facebook doesn’t allow hate movements and socially discriminating ads even if it is subtle. Apple clearly has its market segment divided in polarities. Google certainly launched gmail with invite only passes. Think again. These are things done subtly and every company that growth hacks, leverages this. And this is what marketing has to evolve into, it has to attract the right fit. And that is why the most successful silicon valley businesses have the founders taking the most important branding and marketing decisions, because they will naturally communicate what they stand for and that in itself is a filtering process. More on that on a another article or perhaps on the new solar voice season that is coming out soon.

It may help you to think of the customer mentioned in this article in a broader sense. For an employee, this could be your boss. For certain startups, this could be your investor. When it comes to business, the power to choose your customers is everything!

3. The power to choose your Capabilities

There are things I can do exceptionally well. And there are things that, at this point in time, I just haven’t trained to do. One needs to know that difference. Just knowing your strengths and current limitations, in itself can accelerate and bootstrap a significant success. Some people are good engineers but they don’t know that their business strategy needs help. Some people are good influencers but they don’t know that they need to tweak their products.

Once you get into the habit of playing to your strengths, another opportunity that opens up for you is to evolve your rarity. How about overcoming your current limitations and enhancing your gifts. You can compress time to evolve by strategically choosing on which capability development, you rivet your attention.

Every individual has a set of experiences that uniquely enables them to create something very meaningful for the world. But there are also invisible speed-breakers on the way. And missing ingredients. A good dish that doesn’t have salt, isn’t complete even if every other ingredient is of the finest quality and in the perfect proportion.

And in order to create the full impact of your rare combination of experiences (rarity), you have to close gaps on your missing capabilities at this point in TIME. I am emphasizing on time, because where you need to strategically evolve changes from time to time based on the opportunities available to you the people in your life, you aspirations and the rate and speed of your growth.

There was a point when I would get tensed and struggle in front of a camera. And a few years from then, my videos, both from recording an ongoing event and interviews have become one of the key cornerstones of our business growth. A while ago, I was invited to the launch of a restaurant in Hyderabad. The promoters had spent a huge amount of money on the infrastructure and they made an executive decision to not have any pictures of the food and also went to a great extent to avoid the smell of the food fill the space. Think about it, the promoters didn’t realize that part of the eating experience is the anticipation, the neurology prepares and gets ready from the visual triggers, and the aroma, to enjoy the taste of the food even before it comes. Videos to us is what aroma is to a restaurant. And I had to work on it. It wasn’t enough I didn’t tense before the camera. I had to become natural and excellent. And I invested my attention to experience familiarity with the camera and very quickly my neurology went “bring it on!”

There was a time in human history where people can only leverage the capabilities they had already developed. Or invest 10 – 20 years to get a new capability. Like, if someone is not a great story teller (enchanting :) ), the average time it takes for a person to have that kind of a personality is about 10 – 20 years. However, today, that is not the case. And especially, with Excellence Installation Technology, we have seen people get to excellence in new skills and develop a completely new layer, personality and vibe (in addition to all that they already have) in as fast as 6 months.

I just spoke to a Fast Track member yesterday, who has been offered a CEO position in a 1000 Crore+ business. And he was concerned that he may not be ready because of a couple of skills he felt he missed. After our conversation, he felt assured, because what he has to offer as a CEO is superior to many other people who could take that place and what he doesn’t have YET to be complete in his role, shouldn’t stop him as we will work together to compress time for him to evolve those capabilities.

Here is a video of Sonika, who demonstrates the power of having the choice to add new capabilities and how it helped her become the future of her family business and get past the struggles of an industry in turmoil.

The power to choose and incrementally add capabilities will complete your rarity. And exponentially multiply the impact that you bring to your business. Some people need to evolve themselves to think of the business they are working in as their business. Some people need to add the executive presence NOW, not after 10 years. Some need to add the ability to connect with people who are different from them. Some need to develop more variations in their voice. Some need to develop the ability to build rapport. Some need to develop the choice to learn somethings that they haven’t been able to learn. And some need to develop the capability to be firm. The list is endless and what you can develop also is endless but the wisdom of time compression is to pick the ones that will strategically multiply and compound with time.

The tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming, exclusively the ones that John Grinder has tested and validated, are exceptionally powerful in giving the power back to you about how you feel. The situations and circumstances around you can change, but how you feel and emotionally respond can be your choice with NLP (in most cases). And in the last 40 years, we have been blessed with these incredible tools to sit in the driver seat of our emotions.

My focus along with Harini, has been to leverage this wonderful technology in systematically going after a specific long term outcome. What strategic shifts in mindset, what capability development, what unconscious patterns, will impact our power of choice in our relationships, customers and capabilities. And one of the key ideas for this comes from John Grinder’s book along with Judith Delozier called ‘Turtles All the Way Down’, where they map this decision making process (what will you change if you have the tools to change anything about your emotions, habits and behaviours within minutes, forever)  based on long term consequences.

What choice if I leveraged today, in how I feel everyday about certain situations will lead to a long term consequence of this, that AND That… This is how I knew that helping Harini to develop the choice to leave the lyrics book behind will exponentially improve her performance and growth as an individual. And this is the foundation of Excellence Installation Technology. You can watch this story along with the description of this model here.

Someone once asked me: Antano, where would you choose to live if you could live anywhere in the world, would it be near the beach, would you like a rainy place or moderate whether. And I said, I would rather choose to choose where I live based on the people I can have in my life. Choose what parameters you are particular about, wisely :)

Choice is power. Choice without Wisdom is a Crash. And Choice with Wisdom is Evolution. So, power uP! responsibly :)

Not every business can grow at a 7% every week. Some are just not tech enabled yet. Some are ahead of its time and needs a different yard stick like electricity and computers when they were introduced. And some of you can choose to be happy with just doubling your salary or with a comfortable business that makes you a few millions in profit every year. Irrespective of that, When you develop the power to choose, even if you don’t actually grow at a rate of 7% every week. The power to choose, in itself is a special feeling more valuable than 1000x.