My Vision for Personal Growth and Wellness through Transformational Education @vishenlakhiani @CNN​

In terms of goals, my next guest has set his sights pretty high. Transforming the lives of a billion people is the aim of Vishen Lakhiani, the founder of Mindvalley. Billed as an online personal growth platform with 20 million students worldwide, Mindvalley offers 30 courses to lift the mind, the body and the spirit. The company says its clients include Facebook, Google and the airline Emirates. Vishen Lakhiani joins us live now. Vishen, thank you so much for being with us. I absolutely love, love, love this app, mindvalley. I mean, it represents the intersection of technology and also spirituality. Two things that people think are somewhat incongruous, but of course they're not. And this app really did change my life. You've got so many online courses and workshops to choose from that really sort of focus on your inner growth and also just helping people live up to the highest ver of themselves. Just walk us through. If you're a business leader or if you're an entrepreneur or if you haven't found your calling or your passion, walk us through what mindvalley offers.

Well, firstly, thank you for saying what you said, that that warms my heart that the app changed your life. That's the key word we try to do at mindvalley. We want to change a billion lives. So if you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, one of the most important things we need to keep in mind is that the era of business is changing. We know that soft skills are important. We know that our ability connect as leaders to people, to lead teams, to nurture ourselves, to take care of our health and wellness, to have mindfulness practices. All of these lead to happier employees, better company culture, more productivity, more connectedness between a team. But a lot of these skills are not found in many traditional forms of education. And what mindvalley seeks to do is to get the best, best teachers out there in the world to teach this in mass to the best quality training in the world to as many people as we can.

Yeah. So explain to us the sort of structure of mindvalley, because you've got these sort of small bite sized videos, right? You're supposed to watch one video a day. If you pick a particular workshop that's focused on personal growth. And I mean, it ranges. I mean, it's absolutely everything. It's everything either from spirituality, it's meditation, it could be any form of personal development, career growth, goals. To just explain to us specifically what the course the various courses offer.

Absolutely. Well, firstly, it starts with your goal. We look at around 290 different human development outcomes, which could be anything from speed reading to greater confidence to greater productivity to learning to use AI to speed up productivity, things like ChatGPT. And then we find a really great teacher and we put them together with someone called a learning theory designer. So learning isn't just passive consumption of facts. Learning is installing in people new beliefs, new behaviors, new attitudes, new habits. It's a slow, gradual accumulation of wisdom that you are then putting into practice. Now, we deliver this not just through content and teacher, but through our app itself, which does micro lessons every single day that get you hooked, that get you engaged. And every single day, we build up a new behavior and a new attitude and a new habit until at the end of, say, three weeks or four weeks, you are literally completely different in that specific area of your life.

You know, Vishen, I am so sorry. I was so excited to talk to you that I forgot to mention your book. Guys, can we. Can we pull up his book? You're the author of the six six Phase Meditation method. And actually, what's interesting is that you're not a fan of meditation and in the traditional sense, because we talked to a lot of people who, you know, focus on meditation, especially for entrepreneurs and business leaders. Just explain to us, you know, what the difference is here in terms of how you view meditation.

Well, a lot of people think meditation is long periods of silence, focusing on your breath. That is mindfulness. Right. There's a different aspect of meditation called active meditation, where you are not trying to steal your mind. You're not trying to. To. To focus on your breath. You're focused on the problems that you want to resolve and the results you want to create. It is an active application of the mind towards changing your future, but also creating emotional balance. So the six phase looks at three methods to create this incredible, juicy emotional balance within you, and then three methods to get your mind focused on the future. It's meditation for entrepreneurs, for athletes, for people who are going out there and really wanting to compete in the game and build something and create something. But the side effect is really beautiful peace of mind. You become a better, nicer, more blissful, kinder, happier person.

The side effects is absolutely that it does make you a better person. And what is, I guess, kind of surprising here is really how successful this app is. $100 million in revenue. I only say surprising because it's so niche. You know, when you think about spirituality and personal growth, it is still somewhat niche. Is becoming more popular, but still niche. $100 million in revenue. Did that kind of success Surprise you at first.

Well, we are a product led company, right? So we want a product to be so good that people who come on want to bring their friends. I mean, you just said it changed your life and you're bringing me on cnn. This happens all the time. And so what starts happening is that customers start learning about this from other customers. And we hit well over 100 million in revenue before taking a drop of venture capital. The company is fully self funded at, but it's all about changing lives. So on our website I'll share an interesting statistic. We have 18,000 case studies from people who came to us and wrote a case study because mindvalley changed some aspect of their life. My personal goal is to get this to about a million. Like I want to die knowing that I've changed in some way through the app, change a million lives. And that's why what you said means so much to me.

Oh well, what you've done means so much to me. So when you think about, you know, being an entrepreneur and being spiritual, a lot of people think that those two things are mutually exclusive. So for example, that being an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur obviously means thinking about competition to a certain extent. Being cutthroat and being spiritual is all about sort of letting things come to you and sort of meditating. And a lot of people think that those, those two things do not go together. But you don't believe that. Explain why.

No. Well, firstly, we confuse drive with competitiveness. The best entrepreneurs I know are driven, but they are respectful to their competitors. They see their competitors as beautiful mechanisms for them to get better. And in today's world, we are more connected than ever. Human beings are so closely connected that the best way to build companies is to build our skills and how we relate with other people. But at the same time, there's also so much emerging research that shows that we, when we take care of our minds, our spirit, our sleep, our health, we simply do better. And that's why entrepreneurship and wellness have to come together. The best entrepreneurs I know, their non negotiables are their health, their spirit and their family and team.

And you're a major advocate of the three day work week. So I'm going to have you talk to my bosses. Okay? Vishen. Vishen Lakhiani. We have to leave it there. Thank you so much, so much. CEO of mindvalley. I absolutely love that app. You're very, very welcome.