Vishen Lakhiani explains how identifying your soul print—your unique set of core values—can transform your business. After a 2016 exercise taught by a Sudanese refugee named Dreamer Starlight, Vishen discovered his values were unity, envisioning, and transformation. Within months, aligning his work to these values led to Mindvalley Quest and a major business turnaround.
Chapters
See if the philosophy of the welcome to the first of a series of nine videos I'm going to be sharing with you guys on ideas from the Buddha and the Badass. So these videos are designed to be educational and to take an idea from each chapter of the book and give it out to you directly here, whether you're watching this on YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. If you like this video, leave comments and buy the book. It is an amazing book. Now before we get to chapter one and a really powerful idea from chapter one that involves this mysterious piece of paper. This by the way, is the most important piece of paper in my life. And no, I cannot read you what's on it. So video camera guys, please blur this. There's some confidential data here, but I'm gonna come back to this in a moment. First I wanna tell you an interesting way to in which I wrote this book. So I believe that the idea that you have to read a book from Chapter 1 to Chapter 10 or 9 in order is nothing more than a brule or a bullshit rule. Okay, I guess that applies to most books, but not the Buddha and the Badass. I want you to hack this book. I want you to open this book, read the intro, see what every chapter is about, see if the philosophy of the book resonates with you and then dive in to the chapter that most matters to you. Maybe what you care about is bending reality. The idea of using your mind to accelerate probability of success so that the work that you do moves with ease. Maybe you don't give a damn about that. Maybe what you care about is activating your inner visionary, which means to go into your beliefs, your ideas of just how much you can do and to inflate them. Or maybe you care about attracting your allies, how to create a mission, a company, a product, a life that is magnetic to people who can support you in that vision and mission. Or maybe you care about discovering your soul Print the real reason your soul choose your life and your body to come into this human existence. Now what's interesting about this book is it's deep in spirituality and mysticism, but it's written in a way where all of those ideas are acceptable to the wider world of business. Today I train sports stars from every major American sports team. I train world class CEOs, Hollywood actors. And mindvalley is being used by world class organizations from the U.S. air Force to to some of the world's biggest companies in the Fortune 100. So when I talk about spirituality, I speak about it in a code that Makes it acceptable to everyone, but also wakes people up to just how much the powers within us get suppressed. In traditional business, we talk about productivity, we talk about software and tools to increase employee output, but the real way you magnify what you're able to do in the world are the tools within. And so let's get to chapter one and the first tool. So chapter one is called Discovering youg Soul Print. And I want to tell you a story about this. This particular tool is based on this idea that your soul chose to be born in your body for a specific reason. And just like all of us have a unique thing, fingerprint, all of us have a unique soul print. This is the patterns of your soul, the patterns of your life that your soul desires to see emerge in this particular lifetime. Now, the problem is most people are completely unconscious and unaware of their soul print. And so they don't live life in tune with what their soul wants. And this is what kind of happens. You start going off this way, following the rules of the culturescape, following the advice of people who may not really know what's best for you to fit in, to stay common, to follow the road most often traveled. And what does your soul do? Your soul gets irritated at you and causes something to break. We call this the beautiful destruction. Your soul might mess with your relationship or mess with your health or mess with your business to set you on the right path. It's in Zen philosophy, this is called a kensho moment. It's the idea that we can have awakening through insight, or we can have awakening through kensho, or pain. We understand that we're on the wrong path, but what if this pain is nothing more than an impulse from your soul to autocorrect you? Now, what if you could avoid the pain altogether, understand your soul's unique soul print and then create your life and your business and your career based on what your soul wants to express. This is the exercise in that chapter. And I learned this from a Sudanese refugee. If you follow global politics, you know that the government of Sudan was overthrown. But before this dictatorship was overthrown, this guy was a freedom fighter, and the dictatorship was trying to assassinate him. He sought asylum in Canada, which is where he is right now. He changed his name to Dreamer Starlight. That's a really, really amazingly cool name. And he taught me this technique. In 2016, he made me do an exercise, and I didn't understand the point of the exercise. I gave him 45 minutes to have coffee with me, and this so changed my life. We spent the Next four to six hours going deep. He made me realize that I was not living my life based on my true values. When I did this exercise, I identified key components of my soul print. For me, that's unity. It's envisioning or creating, and finally, it's transformation. Then he showed me how to take these three values and plug it into my work so that everything I did would transform. Now, this was the summer of 2016, and back then, Mindvalley was going through one of the hardest years of our life. We had had failure after failure and we were bleeding money. Shortly after doing this exercise, when I started aligning with the vision for my soul, magical things started happening. I ended up inventing a new type of learning system called Mindvalley Quest. This was roughly five months after doing this exercise, and it hit all of the categories. Unity, transformation, envisioning. And immediately from that year onwards, mindvalley started growing at a remarkable pace. Now, was it the fact that I was now aligned with my soul print? Was it mere coincidence? I'll let you decide when you read this chapter. Now, even if you are not an entrepreneur, maybe you're a CEO, maybe you're a founder, maybe you're a freelancer, maybe you work for a company. All of us, if you care about your work, there is something that you want to get really good at. And when you understand your soul print, it lets you inject itself into your work and it makes you a true original. All the great filmmakers, artists, writers, the great scientists, the people who are doing the best work at companies around the world, and the best entrepreneurs are, whether consciously or unconsciously, operating in alignment with their soul print. The question is, do you know yours? So join me in the Buddha and the Badass Chapter one. If you don't read any other chapter, just chapter one itself will probably change the course of your life. Thank you.
