Using Meditation for Performance | Jim Kwik & Vishen Lakhiani

Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik. This episode is actually recorded live at a live event in Los Angeles, and we're gonna talk about the 6-Phase Meditation by Vishen Lakhiani. Now, we've had Vishen on the show in the past, and we're honored to be able to have him back. This was at a live event of about 1,000 individuals. I surprised Vishen and the audience by showing up, and we had a conversation for a few minutes about his 6-Phase Meditation. Book and the process. Now, this is something that I have incorporated into my weekly routine to be able to have greater levels of focus and calm in my life, to be able to create from a place of centeredness and harmony. And I think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Now, I met Vishen in 2009 while we were speaking at an event together in Calgary alongside individuals like Sir Richard Branson and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Since then, we've done a number of things together, including producing our Superbrain program. On the Mindvalley platform, and so I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. So again, six-phase meditation with Vishen Lakhiani. I hope you enjoy.

Are you guys ready to get started?

So I I have a question.

Who asked that?

From the audience right here. Hey, buddy.

Oh my god! It is Jim Quick. Jim, what are you doing? Congratulations.

Congratulations on the book.

Thank you, Jim.

I was actually at Tom and Lisa's this week, and Lisa mentioned that, and she asked me if I could stop by and fill in today. I hope that's okay.

Wow. So, I gotta swear, I was not expecting this. So, Jim, before you say anything else, I gotta introduce Jim. So firstly, the best way I wanna introduce you is this way. Lisa's husband, Tom Bilyeu, and you guys all know Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory, right?

Yes.

Tom and Lisa are an amazing couple. They started Quest Nutrition, which is a billion-dollar nutrition company. Tom runs Impact Theory. And Tom once told me when I was on Impact Theory, maybe about 3 years ago, we were talking about Jim. And Tom said, you know, I have so many guests on this show, but Jim, there's something about Jim. Every time Jim is in town, I wanna connect with him. I just have so much love for that man, for the energy that he radiates. And that's something that's really special about you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

So Jim's book Limitless, Jim's book Limitless is a phenomenal bestseller. I think like 10,000 reviews on Amazon. And Jim is the the meta-learning instructor on Mindvalley. Meta-learning meaning improving brain cognition, improving memory, speed reading, learning. And he has officially been last year the most watched Mindvalley author. So thank you, Jim. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

How many people have this book or ordered this book or have it coming?

Amazing.

And I thought that you've interviewed 1,000+ individuals, including myself, I thought maybe we could switch seats and I could talk to you and have a conversation about the book. How great is it? This is my first Mindvalley event in years, so good to be here with all of you. All right, so the question I've always wanted to ask, I've known Vishen for going on 14 years, so we have some history together.

Yeah, we started out actually doing an adventure together in the Amazon rainforest. So, and then the Malaysian rainforest. Jim and I started out as friends that loved exploring jungles together.

Yeah. So, I have a question. My burning question I've always wanted to ask you in front of, you know, like for years is, how'd you become so sexy, man? Is this like a 6-phase? Maybe that could be— 6-phase meditation makes you more sexy, right?

Well, I can say that as I've gone deep into mind over body, I've used my mind to shift my body. Very cool.

Sexy Feast. All right, let's just jump into the book. So, why— for me, this book is really about mind training.

Yeah.

You know, we hear a lot about, in terms of performance and productivity, about time management. This, for me, is about mind management and the thought exercises. I was very fortunate to be exposed to Six Phase early on. It's something that I do on the regular. How many of you, this is a practice for you?

Amazing.

So why— maybe we could talk about the origin in terms of how it started.

So there are 2 things that fascinate me right now. And the first is the idea that we are all deeply connected and that we can communicate with each other through our minds. The Rumi has a quote. I closed my eyes and spoke to you in 1,000 silent ways. And what this means is that we can literally go deep and communicate with our children, with our lover, across time and space. The 6th phase, as you know, starts with that protocol. It starts with a protocol from the HeartMath Institute to go into your meditation in the 6th phase. You close your eyes. And you see the face of someone you love, you focus on their eyes, you see their nose, and you feel that love for them radiating in your heart. And you're doing exactly what Rumi prescribed. When I do the 6 phase, I always start with my children, Hayden and Eve. And I think that's why I have such a close bond with them. I'm actually missing Hayden's birthday. He's turning 15 years old tomorrow.

Wow.

But I know that because every morning I start my meditation with expressing love for him, he feels that. My children feel secure in my love for them. That idea that we can send positive energy across time and space is something that fascinates me. A lot of people think that that is simply a way of relaxing. No, you are actually physiologically affecting the person you send that energy to. So William Broad, the scientist at the San Antonio Mind Science Center, did this crazy experiment, right? He divided people into 2 groups. One group was senders, one group were receivers. The receivers were hooked up to 19 different neurological machines that measured brainwave, they measured skin resistance. Skin resistance is a marker of how relaxed you are. They measured your breathing rate, your heart rate, heart resonance, and so on. And at exactly a specific point, like 1:53 PM, the senders had to send positive thoughts to the receivers. And exactly that moment, the machines would show something was changing in the receiver's body. And these people were not trained. The idea here is that when you close your eyes and send love to someone, you are actually healing them, but you're also creating a deeper connection between you and them. The ease of your relationship improves. Anything that is a resistance to true love, to connection, goes away. And people can feel that. How many of you here know what I mean because you felt this? Okay. So this is a really powerful idea. And I wanna suggest that you all do that when you kick off your meditation. And this is why it's important in the 6th phase. Remember this quote by Rumi, I can close my eyes and speak to you in 1,000 silent ways. So that's the first idea that really, really interests me right now, the energy between human beings.

And how it affects our nervous system and our minds.

So how—

and then we're gonna do a number of exercises today. I'm looking forward to going through it. Imagine the butterfly effect we could create in this room. You know, in terms of the resonance with everybody having that intention and going through that process. How many of you are familiar with the butterfly effect? This idea that a butterfly flapping its wings here in Los Angeles could create a tsunami of transformation halfway across the globe. Who did you write this book for?

I actually wrote this book for the next generation. So, The 6 Phase really took off when I— it started out this way, Jim. I started dabbling in meditation around 19 years ago, and it had such an incredible effect on my life. If you've read my story, you know it helped me go from— literally, when I started, I was broke. The dot-com bubble had burst and September 11th hit. The company that employed me left the United States without even paying the final month's salary. So imagine working for a month and then your employer just bails on you and doesn't pay you. That's how bad it was. I crashed my car because I couldn't afford to fix the brakes. I was sleeping on a friend's couch. It was miserable. Now, in that time, I got a job which was essentially telemarketing. I had to pick up the phone and convince lawyers to buy legal software. You did not get paid if you did not close a sale. In that moment of desperation, sleeping on a couch, being a freaking telemarketer, I Googled online and I discovered the Silva Method. Or rather, I'd known of the Silva Method. I discovered Jose Silva's newest work, Silva Ultramind, which today now sits in Mindvalley. And that meditation protocol opened me up to all of these different aspects of human beingness, one of which was intuition. Rather than just randomly call people on the Yellow Pages from A to Z, and all of you can try this, I would run my fingers down the pages. And feel an impulse of who to call, instantly, empirically, I double my sales overnight. I did the seminar on Saturday. I was back on Sunday. Monday overnight, my sales doubled with that simple technique. And the thing is, all of us have this as well. Just like you can connect with someone across time and space, you can connect with information that can help you figure out— The right impulse, the right guidance. This is the second idea I'm obsessed with right now. So instantly my sales improved. Now, all of you can try the same technique. All you gotta do is be able to get into a rested state and trust your gut, trust that intuition, right? And then I started going deeper. I started dabbling with creative visualization, seeing myself closing sales. I started doing a technique called subliminal connection, again by Jose Silva, where you would connect with the mind of the person who you are trying to talk to and you would give an intention, let this sale close if it is best for everybody concerned. Because that force that connects us does not connect us for coercion. You can't say, buy my shit. And so, as I started stacking all of this stuff together, I started getting better and better and better. In 4 months, I got promoted 3 times. I was 26, I became vice president of sales. And then I stayed with that company for 18 months and then felt a calling to leave and teach meditation because of the impact it had on me. So, this brings me to that second obsession that we can source information across time and space, and we'll be talking about that in one of our sessions today. Now, again, let's talk about the evidence. Okay?

Yeah.

So University of Edinburgh did a really interesting study called the Ganzfeld Test Experiments. Again, 2 groups of people, senders and receivers. This time the senders were shown one of 4 possible images. So these images could be something dark, like a tank rolling across a battlefield. It could be something beautiful, like horses running through a stream. It could be a mountain in Switzerland. The receivers were put in a relaxed state. And to get them really relaxed, because these were not trained meditators, they put them in a sensory deprivation chamber. Have you guys ever been to one of those salt baths where you're like lying in salt, floating? It's like super relaxing. You have iPads on your eye. There's typically mellow music and you go into this super relaxed state. Well, that state is called theta. It's the state between like dreaming and being awake. So then they would wake the receivers up and they would show the receivers 4 images and said, what did the sender send you? Guess. The receivers and the senders were not in any form of contact. Now, if you understand probability and math, what would be the percentage of correct guesses? 25%, right? Which is what a linear mechanical world tells us it should be, but it wasn't 25%. it was 33%, 1 in 3. Now, that is a significant boost.

Yeah.

33%, and these were not trained meditators. And this again speaks to the idea that we are deeply connected and that information can flow between us. So, this idea is also within the context of the 6 Phase. We don't go deep into intuition, but by practicing the modality, the phases, the way they are layered out, you learn to activate this. And in one of our sessions today, just before lunch, on intuition and connecting with your guides, I'm gonna give you some tools to activate this ability.

How many of you have gone through my program on Mindvalley, Super Brain? Raise your hand. In that program, we talk about brainwave states and theta states specifically, and how it's really a wonderful way to tap into more creativity, and you come up with such Such amazing insights. You know, interesting, when you take showers or running water, how many of you, when you're taking a shower, you have come up with these ideas that puts you in that kind of theta brainwave state? I took 6 showers for you guys this morning just to be good like that. But I wanted to ask you, I love the science that goes behind it and the practicality. What I love, and I could talk about it because I sped read this book on the way here.

You literally read it on your Uber ride?

On my Uber ride here, yeah. I could give you some tips also if you want on how to retain the 6 phases. Like, was it love and then gratitude, or then it goes to—

So let's talk about that. Well, firstly, I wanna test you. I wanna test you.

This is the first time I had a physical copy, and I prefer to— I know your team sent the digital, and I'm not— how many of you like physical hard copy before more digital? The audiobook, I'm looking forward to. Did you— is there an audiobook?

Yes, yes. I decided to narrate this audiobook myself because for my last book, The Buddha and the Badass, what happened was I was trapped in Malaysia under COVID. I couldn't get to— Malaysia was the country with the biggest lockdown. Of the G50, it was the worst lockdown country. So I couldn't record the audiobook myself. So my editor hired this Indian guy with a British accent from London to do it. And he didn't bother to check the pronunciation of my name. And so the entire book, and now half the world thinks my name is Vasyan Lekiani. Vasyan Lekiani.

Is that like on Audible?

Yes, the audiobook is available. I narrate it myself.

I love your voice because it's very— how many people love Lovishen's voice? It's got that, it's very alluring. And interesting, I can't listen to your voice at night because it's It's kind of stimulating my mind. But someone like Eckhart Tolle puts me out like that.

That's the idea. So, Jim touched on a very important aspect of the 6 Phase Meditation. This meditation is best done in the morning because it's designed to activate you for the world. It's designed to get you to wanna go out there and crush it at work and make things happen. And that is actually what makes this different from passive meditation modalities, which are more mindfulness, more focusing on your breathing. The 6th phase is not about that. It's about actually shifting your sense of being. Phase 1, 2, and 3 is about bliss. Phase 4, 5, and 6 is about action because we believe that it's not just about improving yourself, sitting on a meditation pillow and becoming the best damn Buddha you can be. It's about becoming a badass. It's about getting out there into the world and rattling the world, shifting the world, improving the world for next generations. Ken Wilber, who's one of our fellow authors on Mindvalley, wrote a beautiful essay called Egolessness, and it'll take you 10 minutes to read it, 1 minute if you've studied Jim's work. In Egolessness, Ken Wilber says this, the great spiritual sages of the world were not feeble-minded milquetoasts. They were movers and shakers who rattled the world with the force of their ambition. From bullwhips in the temple to subduing entire continents, They created revolutions that lasted generations. And what he's saying is that if you think about spiritual teachers, they were not passive. They were action-oriented. They made change happen because they knew that if they just sat meditating under that Bodhi tree, they might be blissed out, but it would be a waste of so much potential to improve the world. This is why phase 4, 5, and 6 is about getting out there, and being a changemaker. This is why the people who use Mindvalley internally among my team, we refer to you guys as changemakers because we don't want you to just improve yourself. We want you to create movements, companies, ideas, inspiration, products that can improve the planet for generations that will come after us. This is why this is not a meditation you do to help you get to sleep. Because you'd wanna— your sleep is gonna be fidgety because you'd wanna get back on your laptop and make things happen. But that's exactly what this is about.

This is about change and transformation. How many of you wanna make a positive, positive change in yourself or in your environment?

And so— Now, Jim, before you go, I'd love to ask you, what are your tips to the audience here to get the most out of this event so they can retain information, they can apply it, because you are the brain expert.

Yeah, I would say specifically for the book, now by the way, we can't just buy a book, right? How many of you buy books and they sit on your shelf unread, right? And the old joke that it becomes shelf help, not self-help. Some of you are excellent, 'cause I know many of you are really, the skill set of buying a book is very different than the skill set of reading a book, right? And some of you can add to cart, really, you're really skilled. And that's the challenge though. So just, we have unfeathered access to the world's information through YouTube and podcasts and books and Mindvalley. And so what I would say is I have a to-learn list, right? And things that I have on it, it's always growing, just like you have a to-do list. For me, I think it's so important to schedule this learning. I honestly think that for every hour you spent Learning, I think you have to spend an equal hour applying what you learn and get in that kind of mindset that start thinking like a person of action and start acting like a person of thought, right? And where it's knowledge by itself is only the potential to be power until we utilize it. Because the truth is somebody who reads this book and doesn't apply it, because that would be the third phase, buying a book, reading it, and then applying it. Because some people read the book, but they don't use it. And that's That's the equivalent, you know, in terms of real-world results as somebody who hasn't read the book or somebody who's functionally illiterate. And so, I would encourage people, when I'm at these events, and I'm looking forward to learning from the other speakers today, is ask yourself, how can I use this? And I'm obsessed with this question, how can I use this? Second question, why must I use this? Because it has to go from your head to your heart, right? You have to feel it. If you don't have a reason, you won't get the result, right? And that's more of your purpose and your motivation. And then it goes from your head to your heart to your hands where you're actually executing and applying it and getting those kind of results. And when you start getting the results, then you have a positive feedback loop, right? You wanna do it more and more. The big challenge though is I feel like people don't schedule it. They don't schedule their workouts, and they don't schedule their meditation, or they don't schedule the time that they're gonna do the read or something else. And I think one of the most important productivity performance tools we have our calendars, right? You schedule doctor's appointments or PTA meetings, and when are we scheduling our own personal transformation each and every day? If you've gone through Super Reading, you know my techniques, even something simple like using a visual pacer while you read. And the reason why, again, when you're reading, you don't have to touch the screen. It's because your visual focus leads your mental focus. Does that make sense? Your eyes are the only part of your brain that's outside of your skull. And that's why actually a lot of people have mental fatigue, because they have visual fatigue. If you're looking at a— how many of you look at screens a good part of your day? And so, when your eyes are tired, so taking time to look out into the horizon, doing some kind of palming technique to rejuvenate your eyes. I tend to read and work in 25 to 45-minute kind of sprints in terms of I know my rhythm and my cadence. For learning and doing deep work. I break it up with a 5-minute brain break where I move. I think that's important. I do some deep breathing, whether it's box breathing or nasal breathing, alternate nostril breathing. And then I hydrate because I feel like just a 2% dip in your water levels will actually greatly, dramatically affect your thinking and your reaction time. And so those are the kind of things to get my state, because all learning is state-dependent, right? The state you learn something in. And so using a visual pacer will help you read this book 25% to 50% better. Not only speed, and don't take my word for it, read for 60 seconds, count the number of lines you read, and then use a visual pacer, and then count 60 seconds. That number will be 25%, 50% across the board. And that really adds up, because you could save 20 minutes on every hour. Right? If you save an hour a day over the course of a year, that's a lot of hours, right? How many hours is that? A little math this morning. 365 hours, which equates to 9 40-hour work weeks, just doing something ubiquitous like reading. Memory techniques is really— for 6 phases, how many of you are familiar with the chain linking techniques I talk about or the body list? Very easily, you could take Love and compassion and place it on your body head to toe, right? You can imagine a big heart on your head. Gratitude, which is the second phase, you could just associate that to your nose. Even something that sounds like, something silly like a grapefruit coming out of your nose for gratitude. Forgiveness, which is number 3, you associate that maybe going to your mouth. Vision, having a vision for your life, and maybe you're looking or you're putting glasses on your ears. But simple things like that, or even some kind of acrostic. You could come up with a phrase, and I do this, but that starts with each of the letters. L, for example, and it could be L-G, let's go, right? And then here, for, and just build that out. But there's so many easy ways, because I think we don't use something because we don't remember. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

You learn something at an event, like, that's really a great idea, But you don't retain that information. So many different methods.

Thank you, Jim. And we did a study on over 1,000 people who did Superbrain. And what we found is that on average, after 3 weeks, people improved their reading speed by 270%. So that's almost 3 times as many books, and that's on average. But the funny thing is most people doubled their reading speed in just the first week. So even if you don't do the full 3 weeks of Superbrain, the first week itself, most people already doubled their reading speed. They get to 200%, and then the rest starts coming in week 2 and week 3.

And my suggestion for everybody here, again, you buy a book is one part, right? The second one is reading the book, and then sharing it, and then putting it into action is most important. I really do believe as we come together here, the metaphor I use, especially the past few years, is that of transformation, is that of a butterfly, which is the ultimate It's a symbol of transformation, these wings. And some of us feel like we've been cocooning the past few years.

Do you feel that?

Yeah. And when you're cocooning and you're distancing, you're alone with your thoughts, you're alone with your fears, you're alone with your doubts, it could be a challenging time. And so you wanna be able to emerge. And by the way, while the beauty is in the butterfly, the growth happens in the cocoon, right? It's us going through this transformation, and change sometimes is a little scary. Especially, we get attached to how things used to be, right? And that kind of attachment creates a lot of challenge. But something like a 6-phase could help you to transcend, to end that trance that could help us to get us to who we wanna be, what we wanna do, what we wanna have, and also share with the world.

Awesome, Jim. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah. My final words is this for everybody. There's a quote in my book Limitless. Limitless, from a French philosopher. It says, life is the C between B and D. And now just ingrain this. Life is C between B and D. B stands for birth. D stands for death. Life, C, choice, right? I just wanna always remind you that we have agency, right? We have a personal responsibility. And, you know, it's easy for us to make excuses or to complain and put things outside of us, but then we don't have the power to make things better. And when we make choices, And like, we're the sum total. Like, you're here. How many of you, like, your friends or family have no idea, like, what you're spending the day doing right now? And then if you try to— and worse, you try to explain it to them and it gets even worse, right? Because you can't possibly explain what's going on, like, in one day like that other than people having the experience of being here, you know? So I have massive amounts of love and respect for each of you who put some of your time, your money, your focus for doing this. And that ripple effect is amazing. Every day we wake up with a chance because we have a choice, that these difficult times can define us, these difficult times can distract us, these difficult times can diminish us, or these difficult times can develop us. We decide. And I think part of just getting this power back is to take information from people who have done this, who've walked the walk, who have decades of experience that you can sit down and read a book and and download that in days, right? Because there's a version of all of us that's patiently waiting, and the goal is we show up every single time until we're introduced. So thank you so much for writing this book.

Thank you, Jim. Please give a big round of applause to Jim Kwik.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode with Vishen Lakhiani. Make sure you get a copy of his book, Six Phase Meditation, where books are sold. And if you got value out of this, please take a screenshot on whatever platform you're enjoying this on. Tag Vishen, tag Myself and share your thoughts about this episode. And if you really, really enjoyed it and you want to help us on our mission to build better, brighter brains, to help people change their mindset, their motivation, the methods they're using to maximize and optimize their limitless learning and their life, then please leave a review on the platform you're enjoying this on. Make sure you subscribe, and we have much more to come. My name is Jim Kwik, and until I see you again, be limitless.