Category: Stories

What’s your conversion story?

Neera

Every successful coach knows they need a signature story.

The story that builds their creditability and inspires their audience to resonate with them.

But most coaches tell the wrong story.

They share a story that builds their credibility or connects with them but DOESN’T make the audience want to work with them.

They don’t need to tell their credibility story. They need to tell their conversion story.

A “conversion story” is the story of your transformation.

Your transformation story builds creditability, connects you with your audience, and leads them to want to work with you in your program.

People come to you for transformation. Show them how you did it.

My transformation story is:

I was a terrible writer.

In a performance review, my boss told me, “The only thing standing between you and a senior management position is your written English.”

I was crushed. I desperately wanted to succeed in my career. But in my heart, I knew he was right. English was my second language and my weakness. Rather than getting disheartened, I took his feedback as a challenge.

I joined a writing group.

I enrolled in writing courses.

I learned to write minutes, reports, and discussion papers.

I started working on improving my written English.

But instead of focusing just on business writing, I learned storytelling.

I gathered that writing was nothing but storytelling.

I learned to tell stories in my resume.

I started including stories in my reports.

I developed skills to weave stories in discussion papers.

With my storytelling, I not only won the senior management position I wanted, but I became the author of five books.

Now I coach others to write their books.

My transformation story is my conversion story.

They see my transformation and they think, “If she can do it, I can do it too.”

And that converts them from being my audience to my client.

What’s your “conversion story?”

This story will blow your mind

Neera

At a truck suspension shop, they’d do a year-end tally to count all the different kinds of screws.

One

By

One

It would take daaaaays!

Can you imagine the time-sucking, soul-crushing agony?

A new employee joined the team.

He was assigned the task of counting the screws.

The problem was, he was too lazy. He couldn’t be bothered with counting the screws, one by one.

So he came up with an idea.

He weighed an individual screw.
Then weighed the bin full of screws.
Then divided the weight of the bin by the weight of just one screw.

BAM!

He got the total number of screws.

The job went from taking days… to be done in a couple of minutes.

The best way to do anything… is to be lazy.

Be lazy like the car mechanic.

Build a system!

Let me tell you a story…

Neera

In June 2018, a rover, lovingly nicknamed Oppy, fell silent after getting stuck in a massive dust storm on Mars. NASA officials beamed up hundreds of commands to the little rover, asking it to call home, but with no success. Oppy was officially pronounced dead in February 2019. But such a significant incident didn’t get most people’s attention.

Neither did the fact, that Oppy operated on Mars for over 14 years, well past its 90-day lifetime. Nor was the record-breaking 28 miles it traversed on the red planet, far more than any other extraplanetary rover.

What took the world by storm was the rover’s final transmission to Earth, reported in a tweet by a journalist:

My battery is low and it’s getting dark.

The tweet went viral, generating a media frenzy across the globe. Designers on Etsy jumped on the bandwagon, rushing to sell T-shirts, mugs, and coasters emblazoned with Oppy’s final words. Numerous people had the words tattooed on their bodies.

For 14 years, the little rover dutifully obeyed human commands all alone, millions of miles away, in space, while getting whipped around by fierce Martian winds and dust storms. The dust was slowly swallowing it. Its batteries went low. And it started getting dark. Poor Oppy. Your heart cried for it. You cursed NASA engineers for not sending a rescue mission to save it.

Here’s the problem.

This was not the message Oppy sent home. Right before it went silent, it beamed a bunch of routine code to Earth that reported, among numerous other things, its power levels and the outside light reading.

The journalist took a small part of this random code, paraphrased it into English, and tweeted it to the world. And everyone fell for it.

Why?

Because it generated emotions. Oppy’s message resonated with us in part because we all feel, from time to time, like our batteries are low and it’s getting dark out there. To have the same sentiment expressed by a machine practically made us connect with the machine as we connect with other humans.

Every time, we hear a story that generates emotions in us, we throw the logic out of the window and rush out to get a tattoo.

Stories do that to us. In the book Sapiens, the author Yuval Noah Harari writes, homo sapiens used “gossip” to be able to grow into tribes of at least 150 people … but gossip could only take them so far. To grow larger, they needed a stronger “glue.”

That “glue” was “stories.”

Storytelling is the most important skill one can learn.

Incorrect. Allow me to rephrase.

Storytelling is the most important skill humans have. It is inbuilt into us since the cave days. It allows us to connect, inspires uplifting feelings, and enables people to cooperate on a large scale. the only thing is, with our isolated lifestyle, we are no longer using it and hence we think we are not good at it.

My next book will be on the art of storytelling. While researching the topic I am also learning to find stories from my everyday life. Yesterday, I was walking on the hill behind our home, lost in my thoughts, on a perfect day bathed in a beautiful winter sun when I had an epiphany. I finally figured out how to find stories in everyday life.

Of course, I will reveal the story of my epiphany in the book and the several others I have been collecting in my personal knowledge management system. This book is becoming an absolute joy to write. I already have so much material in my personal knowledge management system that it will take me much less agony (and time) to write it.

I Am Testing Silva Meditation Method To Work Less And Produce More

Neera

On a Monday morning, just three weeks ago, the universe responded to my pleas for a way out from all the stress and overwhelm associated with online writing.

I was watching Tim Urban’s TED Talk when a sponsored video interrupted it. Normally, I would quickly click ‘Skip Ad’ and get back to the video, but this time I kept listening because the story was very interesting.

I watched the video for 23 minutes and bought the course the speaker was selling. Then I watched two more videos, by the same speaker, and bought another course and membership to the community.

For three weeks, I have been learning and testing the concepts and meditation exercises taught by the course. My stress is gone, my productivity has quadrupled and my future looks brighter than ever.

Before I go any further with the benefits, I am observing I want to share with you Jose Silva’s story I heard in the sponsored video three weeks ago.

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children’s IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

José Silva was an electrician in the US Army. Once, while going through a routine army mental health checkup, he noticed a psychologist was assigned to ask all army recruits a series of questions. It was just a routine thing, but he grew fascinated and started reading more and more books on psychology.

As an electrician, he knew if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it.

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if we could reduce the resistance in the brain, can our brains operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency — beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So, Jose Silva would put his kids into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from their school textbooks. He found she could remember better when she was in this alpha or slightly relaxed level of mind with her eyes closed and when he would ask her questions and she could recall better.

It is a well-known fact today that you can remember and retrieve information faster in the alpha level of mind.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him while he was still formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her even before he could verbally speak it.

He was a devout Christian. He couldn’t figure out how his daughter could so-called read his mind. So he wrote to Joseph Banks Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

He told JB Ryan he had figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said, your daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with.

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. Their kid’s grades were going up. What’s this man doing with them? So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas.

Jose found it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique, but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped.

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance? He called it a centering exercise.

It spread across America through the 70s and 80s. Soon it was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

And the Silva method, as it spread globally, ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

A Weird Coincidence

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling, but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to just running his electrical business. One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated, he flung his psychology book across the room and went to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night, he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number.

He wondered, what is this four-digit number? And the first thought was it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car.

So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with a four-digit number. As he was going to his radio repair business, a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream. They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came into your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought the lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that it was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side.

Another coincidence happened when his friend saw the lottery number while he thought it was a car license plate number. All of these strung together were like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I have been going through a 28-day program and recording my progress in a journal after each day.

I have gone through many self-development programs, but never I have seen so much growth in so little time.

I am meditating three times a day, five to fifteen minutes for each instance. It is not the normal relaxation kind of meditation I was familiar with. Instead, it is an active meditation designed to help turn problems into projects.