Raising the bar
1. Welcome to this BW dialogue, being well and keeping your energy and spirits high. What have you been doing in the past 50 days? When you say you are working on your well being, I’m sure you are working with your clients as well, but on a personal level, how did it give you a chance to reimagine yourself, what you practice? How do you preach and practice what you preach? Also please give us a couple of learnings as well.
Antano – The message we pass on to people is don’t be satisfied with the best version of you. You are born with unique gifts but there are complimentary gifts, neighbouring gifts that, if you attach to who you are, the unique impact that you can make in the world is incredible. There comes a point in time when focusing on yourself is the correct strategy, because there was nothing else to do to check your limitations. However, in addition to working on your strengths, strategically identifying and developing the missing capabilities will allow you to create an exponential impact with your strengths.
So, one of the core philosophies of what Harini and I are working on is “how a person evolves”? When you look at a person every 10 years, there is a vast change in terms of their perspective, emotional capabilities, understanding of others and themselves, and their abilities. But, there is no scientific way to design how you want to evolve. Personal evolution happens through life changes and life experiences, like managing greater responsibilities at work, meeting new people, overcoming any kind of distress or learning new skills.
The personal transformation would normally take a year or two but with EIT (Excellence Installations Technology) it is proven that a person can transform in a few minutes or a few days. And we’ve done it with tens and thousands of people over the last decade.
In the time of COVID, we have been working with doctors. In fact, there are doctors who are consulting the Ministry of Health and we're working for the safety of doctors. We have also been using excellence installation technology to help families stay together, not fight.
That is on the professional front; personally, Harini and I have deeply looked at what are some of the things that are missing in us as individuals that, if we were to improve, will allow us to impact our rarity.
Harini – Like, for Antano, he has always been good with technology, but he wanted to become really good at singing, but he was missing the fundamental core of capabilities that it takes to be able to sing well. So, Antano has been using this time to develop on the absolute core capabilities and has made a huge leap on that front. There are many examples of what geniuses have created pursuing a passion apart from their work. For example, Albert Einstein was not only a great physicist but also one of the most soulful violinists, Steve Jobs had an impeccable flair for design and typography. So humans have broken the glass ceiling and are also skilled at activities other than their main field of work.
“An artist who does not explore skills and boundaries beyond their art and the logical geek who does not explore any art form are both on the same boat”
- Antano Solar John
Antano – The reason why Harini said that singing was fundamental to me is because Geniuses have cross-mapping of the brain as a tool to be at their level of being geniuses. Harini and I, our work is to do installations of core capabilities. And what I mean by that is, we tell stories, that actually change people. And our stories have a one-on-one impact. It's generated on the fly, it's not rehearsed but delivered in a sequence.
Harini – And the stories are directly a mapping of their unconscious processes. People change finding themselves on a unique path. Our stories have instruments, that is when we blend in music and we have adopted this method to make it fun and soothing for people. With Antano’s music transforming from how it was 10 years back, there has been a vast change.
2. Give us the stories of a couple of people who were difficult to transform and a few key learnings which will give people hope as hope is the need of the hour. Right now CEOs and entrepreneurs are in a fix. How can you transform them in such a difficult situation?
Harini – One of the fond memories that I have is of working with underprivileged children adopted by A.R. Rahman. These kids have been learning music for 3 years, and Rahman didn’t find them to be launch-ready. So, we took up this project some 7-8 years back and fixed several personal limitations for these kids, right from nervousness, anxiety, inability to learn fast or focus, to really deep-rooted limiting beliefs that “how can I possibly be a musician, my father is a tea-seller, my mother is a housemaid.”
The personal challenges that they were dealing with could have taken 10 or 15 years to overcome and some of them would even have dropped out, succumbing to the challenging situations that they've always been exposed to. As a consequence of our work, within 6 months, the children had gotten so good with their skill and art that they were ready and 8 months after our interventions, Rahman Sir launched them as the “Sunshine Orchestra”. From that point on, they have performed at United Nations concerts and so much more. Most importantly, they’ve become fantastic learners and are able to make the most of the ecosystem they are in, and are continuing to grow into fantastic musicians.
Antano – When people go through bad situations they have it imprinted on their minds. With the kids, more than anything else, we worked on their deep-seated beliefs of not being worthy of musicians and helping them get over the bad memories of their past like parents fighting, physical abuse, and seeing their houses burnt or destroyed.
Harini – In addition to that, we stacked up further other changes for them and development of certain capabilities like one of the things was, how do you learn from the genius that's in front of you? Not everybody can learn as fast as children learn. Think about how you learned how to walk, how to talk etc. Children observe without analysing and pick up skills. We teach people how to learn from the geniuses around them by helping them activate these learning circuits again.
Antano – Children have minds that are ready to think easily. Adults have doubts. Children are meant to learn easily. There is a state of mind that children have, which is the “know-nothing state”. Our neurology has a built-in circuitry called mirror neurons, responsible for our imitative learning of complex things that we can't consciously understand but can absorb, can assimilate.
3. ‘Know nothing’ means you are in the now?
Harini - Being in the now so much that your attention is on what it needs to be at.
Antano - One of the reasons that adults find it difficult to do is because of ego. A lot of times unconscious assimilation means you're allowing yourself to be the other person for a while, which is the basis of empathy as well, because when your mirror neurons get into play, you start to feel like the person. Doubts and inferiority complex just goes away. Emotional mastery is a core thing we encourage.
4. How can people get out of fear and anxiety? Give us some tips that our readers and viewers can benefit from.
Antano – The first thing to recognise is that these are biochemical responses. It means it is not in your control, it is not a choice. When someone becomes aware that they are nervous they are already nervous. After one becomes nervous and angry then they respond. The key is to prepare, to prepare for a possible future when in a good state. Our recommendation is that when you are at home you feel you can conquer anything, that’s the time to prepare. In NLP, we call it future-pacing, where from a good state of mind, you see yourself in the situation and you rehearse it mentally, like several times until you're able to do it without nervousness. It may take some time when you are doing it alone. There are NLP procedures that can shrink it down to minutes.
Harini – The reality is, there are tonnes of free advice from all over the world on the Internet to overcome these emotions. People say count in reverse order or have some water and calm down but that doesn’t help as you are really angry. No amount of conscious trying is possible. It’s like, if there's a surgery that needs to be done, there's no amount of advice that a doctor can give you, that's going to change it. But if he does the surgery, then it's actually solved forever. The procedures we do are like a surgery without knives or drugs, in fact, no physical touch, yet fixes the mental pattern and generates new behaviors even in the same contexts of challenge.
Antano - The surgery has to be done. Every procedure that we know, has produced a shift that is a one-time effort but sustains for many years or even lifetime, but takes time to learn. Here is something that is easy to do by self and can produce some results for some people. I’d suggest future pacing, which is different from creative visualisation.
Unlike visualisation, you are not imagining a rosy picture of the future. You see similar situations and see how differently you are responding from a good state of mind. Repeat it often until it becomes innate.
5. What has been a key learning working with people over the last 10 years, which either reconfirmed what you did or surprised you that wasn't true?
Antano - Harini and I started this company thinking we're going to create bio-wearable and gadgets that can automate what NLP procedures do, so that people can wear a helmet and get the work done and I don't need to be dependent on the skill of an expert to do changework that is required to evolve the genius in a person. But the shocking thing for Harini and me, the first learning, is that people don't really know what they need. They know what they're craving for, they don't know what they need, and that's the difference.
An example I have is of a person who walked till great lengths to come and meet us and he wanted us to help him stop procrastinating at his job. In the consultation, I noticed that he was having a drastic response, each time he would talk about his work. I said, “it looks like you don’t really enjoy your job” and his response was, “well, obviously.” The image I had was that at his job, he was slapping himself and wanted me to help him slap himself harder. It turns out, that the real phobia he had was of heights and that was the reason he was not looking for a new job, because while this job was comfortably located on a ground floor, a new job may have him work from a higher floor and he was terrified of even thought of having to attend interviews that may require him to confront heights. Instead of helping him with procrastination, we helped him get over his fears of heights and that had a generative effect, enabling him to find a new job and multiply his success.
The problem is, when people are stuck in a problem like this person was, with the fear of heights, after a few years, it becomes the foundation based on which all their other priorities are made. I've helped some people who are paralyzed to get back movements. But if I meet somebody who's been paralyzed for more than 10 years, they never ask me to help them get back movements. They ask me to help them accept that limitation. Whereas, if I meet somebody within the first year of them meeting with an accident, they would invariably ask me to help them get back the movements. And one of the key realisations we’ve had is that people always don’t know what they need to get what they want. And years of limitations become their identity and so innate that they don’t see it as a limitation anymore. So they don’t even ask for that ONE CHANGE THAT COULD CHANGE A LOT OF OUTCOMES IN THEIR LIFE.
This is when we looked back and decoded the work we were doing and understood the significance of knowing ‘what change to make’, keeping in mind the consequences it will produce in a definitive period of time. This is how we designed the A&H ATC model (™) (Adjustments * Time = Consequences), which forms the core of EIT (Excellence Installations Technology).
6. How can you change your belief system?
Antano – People don’t have fears, they have an image of the fear. It happens in a millisecond.
Harini – It is important to know that each person does have a belief system which is through past experiences and other factors. So, we change the structure of how they create and continue to hold beliefs that are not useful anymore, in a way that the outcome they begin to create after that is significantly different. Their vibe, how open they become to people and life, the opportunities that they are able to see, the relationships that they are able to build, it’s all so different and beautiful. They find themselves to be in more resourceful states of mind and experiencing a better quality of life. The question we ask ourselves before “how can you change a belief”, is What beliefs to change? And what will be the consequences of changing this belief. The diagnosis of what changes a person needs keeping in mind the entire system they belong to is critical. Because you don’t want to fix something and break something else.
7. What was your takeaway from the book ‘Frogs into Princess’, the book that started this journey of you doing what you do now?
Antano - When I read the book, my key takeaway was that who people are, their core nature, and who they are is not written on stone. Before that, I read a lot of books on psychology, profiling people, and I’ve studied a number of psychometric tests. I was curious about the mind from a young age. I don’t believe people are the same as in at home, or in the office or with friends. The context keeps changing. So this book gave me a realistic approach to show that there are practical tools to evolve, change and move ahead.
As we started to work with people, we recognized that these tools are great to help people change. But the missing aspect in every single methodology out there is the wisdom of how do you know what to change. That’s the aspect we are solving with EIT. To help people design their personal evolution in compressed time.
