Positional Advantage: How do we prepare for the ‘Unknown Unknown’

Published: December 17, 2020

Antano Solar John is the creator and developer of the most advanced technologies to design and fast-track personal evolution and an investor in startups that have access to cutting-edge solutions for personal excellence.

Are you ready?

The pull and push of the earth, sun and moon lifts a portion of water in the sea somewhere far away from the shore… And the drop of that lift from a different force creates a wave, and a casual on-looker on the beach only observes the wave approaching him or her, not knowing the origin of the wave!

The wave has a trajectory. And we notice it closer to the shore. And like-wise every major event on the planet has a trajectory shift. Like the lifting of the water that is yet to become a wave, the event in itself is just the beginning, setting in ‘the movements’ for a whole new world!

Just like the stars are just particles of dust floating across the galaxy for millions of years until they become a star , the interesting thing about trajectory is the beauty of what is to come and all the pieces fitting in together like a beautiful design.

In this article, I share with you how everything you do can BUILD up to something larger than the sum of all the individual actions, while being READY for the unknown ‘shifts’ in the world that are unknown and yet to come.

And I am going illustrate this point by diving deep into – the thinking behind the – things we did with our business during the pandemic that paved way for our rapid growth and compressing the time-frame to enable several industries with Excellence Installations.

We started with the idea that any individual must have access to any capabilities they desire – immediately. So that they can overcome their weakness and also develop genius level mastery in their natural gifts. The grand vision was that any person can pick what they wanted to develop and there will be a corresponding game, gadget, toy that they have to spend time with for a few minutes and just like that – a new capability is formed. And since this entire vision was focussed on some methods from Neuro Linguistic Programming, we wanted to get empirical evidence that it works the way we think it works, that it works on scale, that it works even if the same process is repeated by an individual other than Harini and I.

And the experiment began, teaching hundreds of people how to do what we did with Neuro Linguistic Programming and validating thousands of results across all possible human and communication challenges. And that is when we stumbled upon this incredible possibility of Time Compression. The possibility to target the LIFE OUTCOMES in Health, Relationships, Business, Personal Genius and make them happen for people in unbelievable timelines, 10% or lesser than it otherwise would take. And even more crazier than Time Compression, was the idea of making it all happen in altogether simultaneously: business, health, family and personal genius outcomes in compressed time-frame.

We didn’t just succeed in making that happen consistently for thousands of people. We managed to convert that into a Model and a Technology that can produce consistent results even in scale.

With this Magic Formula, we are set to transform this research organisation into a revolutionary business that is ready to take the invention to every corner of the planet. We hired a huge team for converting enquiries to customers. We contracted payments from our customers to fuel all the expense of the business for the next 12 months. Everything was set for ‘Action’ and ‘Scale’, and just then the Pandemic hits.

The Pandemic, posed a real challenge to the business because back then our business depended on large immersive events where large groups of people gathered for 7 – 20 days together, immersing 15 – 18 hours every day. This meant, 90% of the contracts become almost void for the next 2 years. The other challenge because of pandemic was our offering. We are a business the delivers TIME COMPRESSION. During the pandemic, people were concerned for the life, safety and well-being, in that period, time compression was a luxury for most individuals. That meant – our enquiries dropped by 99%.

So, the business had to deal with no cash, no active product that that the market desired, remote teams, scattered leadership, countries in crisis and a whole bunch of new hires with nothing to do. That was what Pandemic was for us. And in here are some of the key pivots, and our thinking behind them, that you can adapt to navigate muddy waters and pivot towards an expansive horizon and even pave the way to be Epic in Pandemic and Non-Pandemic.

Everything that happens in Life is a Training for the things to come.

When I was 7 years old… I played my first chess tournament. And it was a state-level competition. I ranked 2nd. It happened because my mother, saw me skating, and she saw my obsession with speed and wanted a safer sport for me. I loved skating, the sharp turns while maintaining the speed of the wheels, and the way you manoeuvre your body to shift the centre of gravity and the thrill in saving a micro-second and more importantly the built-up momentum. In added to the thrill, that our coach used to encourage us to skate without the brakes, so the body angle essentially is the speed control!

All that training, not so that you don’t slow down but so that even in your turn you don’t lose momentum! And it is understandable that I was good at it and won prizes. But for chess, I had only a few months before the BIG tournament with seasoned players, in fact the person who had come first in that particular tournament went on to win the national championship and became a top player internationally.

Looking back, I can clearly see and learn, that for me, coming second in a state-level tournament when it was my first tournament ever and beating chess players who had been training for many years together happened because I learned something about the game that most people don’t for a long time. And this ‘something’ can be very useful in the context of business.

My First Chess Lesson: The four centre squares

My chess master told me, the person who controls the space around this area, the four squares right at the center, wins the game!

An average chess player is counting pieces, or computing the next tactical trap the opponent can fall into. But looking at space? That is known as Positional Advantage. You can’t predict what your opponent is going to play, (in real life – translates to- you can’t predict how the market or the economy or the world will move) but you can get certain positional advantage in the game that would allow you to navigate – to a victory – irrespective of what your opponent plays.

The beauty of chess is that you can witness a game played by two grandmasters and for the 99% of the players it may look like nothing is going on, and then 20 moves later, suddenly one player has a solid advantage, to win the game.

And those moves which looked casual, just like everything else, were calculated strategic inches towards a solid POSITIONAL ADVANTAGE, that orchestrated that drama after 20 moves.

The tides of economics can change, anytime. It can change due to a Pandemic, Innovation or something unknown. What is your Positional Advantage in LIFE, so that irrespective of how the market, economy or the world turns you still have a leading advantage?

Are you prepared to preempt challenges and capture winning possibilities!?

Do you know what are the 4 squares in your business/career, relationships, personal evolution – that you got to pivot around to design the winning strategy?

Positional Advantage applies to all domains of all

Here is an example of Positional Advantage in the context of business.

A business that OWNS quality assets (Intellectual Property, Impeccable Teams, Cutting-Edge Technology, etc…) has a positional advantage over a business that doesn’t. And in that sense, it can pivot and succeed even when tides change. This is why, one of the Excellence Installation we orchestrate, when a person wants to move from being a freelancer to having a business, is to develop the mindset of creating business assets. While a freelancer is chasing cash flow, the entrepreneur is creating assets that ensure cash flow.

So, even in certain types of businesses, when the entrepreneur provides a seemingly similar service of a freelancer, he or she has added elements into the design, so that every delivery leads to the creation of an asset . We have noticed that brining this to the attention isn’t enough and it requires Excellence Installation for this mindset shift. This is because even though most people are educated about this difference, at some point in their life, when it comes to day-to-day execution and closing deals, freelancers think and act like freelancers. They just can’t make every effort, every deal, every service, every solution, to ADD UP to an asset. While the way freelancers function, allows them to sail through, each STEP doesn’t count to the larger outcome in itself.

To build a successful business, an entrepreneur has to build assets that gives them a positional advantage. Even the more, if you are disrupting an industry or creating a revolutionary technology that can disrupt the way several industries function. So, this is one of the most important guiding Directives we maintain for the A&H business. And we held to it even during the Pandemic. To make every step count towards a long-term strategic outcome while benefitting from the immediate rewards of every move.

The Four SQUARES for our business is Black and White. The more CONTEXTS we have to give REAL FIELD experiences to Excellence Installation Specialists, the faster we can impact more people in the world.

Given that we did 100% of our work, mentoring, and apprenticeship in group immersive physical events, making the in-the-field mentoring, impact validation and exposure to highly skilled specialist: happen ONLINE looked almost impossible.

Imagine a teaching hospital going online

Not only was the surgery happening online, the resident surgeon is learning on the job – by doing an actual surgery along with a senior surgeon. And the senior surgeon is responsible for the outcomes of the surgery and the development of the resident surgeon. Imagine all that happening online. That was what we set out to do.

There were easier ways out but we KNEW what’s our positional advantage. And we had to be prepared to handle however the world turned due to the pandemic. These CONTEXTS we created (Social Services, Critical Support, Economic Boosters, etc) became solid assets, functional working grounds where we could establish the equivalent of a teaching hospital for the Excellence Installation Specialists.

Unlike most businesses, the work was not to find newer opportunities to grow or find new types of customers or deliver things. In fact, we shut down our ads, and we stopped sales except for all the referrals and urgent requests from our existing customers for their families.

Instead, we focused on building the equivalent of a teaching hospital (B!G Accelerator) for Excellence Installation Specialists, while supporting our existing Legacy community.

To make this happen – We gave all our customer 1 Additional Year of our subscription (and later extended that by another year), typically making everything we do during the pandemic year(s) complimentary.

This helped us bridge and get operation with building the equivalent of a teaching hospital setup online. The participants who aspired to become an Installation Genius as part of their EIT Education could intern, they could work on the field as apprentice with someone who knew how to do it, and finally they could get on the field by themselves with a mentor. And we build a system to do all of this while supporting a large community of people ONE-on-ONE across their business, health, family outcomes across 18 industries and age groups ranging from 14 to 70.

We ensured to make every step count towards a positional advantage by creating THE ASSET that matters the most to accelerate and achieve our vision of Excellence Installations impaction the 8 Billion People in the Planet.

Every effort we put out there to build a better world for the participants, the community and the business had to translate to a better SETUP for the Excellence Installation Specialists to Become an Installation Genius (B!G). The pandemic will come and go, but what we build during the pandemic has to last longer than the pandemic. And it has to influence the year that is yet to come! While the team worked very hard to support every participant, we added that additional effort to convert all of it also back into a POSITIONAL ADVANTAGE that will outlast the current situation.

Working this way helped in becoming 5 times bigger by 2021. We hired, we scaled, we built 5 times capacity to deliver in that very year.

Looking back, we are so happy to have made the choice we made, because the other path wasn’t a bad one, not just as legendary as what happened. Because back then during the Pandemic, we had two choice.

Path 1 – Cater the crisis with a paid product and grow your cash reserve.
Path 2 – Cater to the crisis with a free product and leverage that to bootstrap the BIG Accelerator.

Path 2 was a winner in ALL counts. Firstly it felt ethically right to not charge for crisis management. And secondly this path increased our POSITIONAL ADVANTAGE because we managed to create a robust system to scale on demand.

The lockdown and its consequences, and the next set of lockdowns, went on for longer and much longer than what was announced or what the ‘global experts’ predicted. But we were able to grow, do more for our existing community and newer participants… more than we ever did even during the extended lockdown, even the next year. And that is what positional advantage looks like, irrespective of what happened as an aftermath of the pandemic, you are just better equipped to achieve BIG.

Every effort and every step that you take has to lead to building something larger in addition to satisfying the purpose for which you are taking that effort in the first place! When you know what gives you Positional Advantage, that something larger is easy to spot, even in uncertain times.

5 Drivers for Positional Advantages:

Driver 1: Innate Readiness

Superior Capabilities like systemic-intelligence, creativity in business and stress free high performance states during challenging situations are some of the things that help you be ‘ready for anything’.

“Be prepared for nothing but ready for anything”. – John Grinder.

The beauty of developing capabilities, choice of behaviours, and peak states, and emotional mastery is that you can design the best route by yourself for the situational challenges and opportunities that come your way.

This is the biggest differentiator between an Excellence Installation Program and Coaching. While Goals and Plans become irrelevant or require the need for creative adaptation during unexpected events, developing great capabilities makes you ready for both certain and uncertain times. And the readiness is coming from innate capabilities that you can contextualise for any situation.

Covid is one example of unexpected situations. But doesn’t the world have unexpected situations of various degrees? This is why it is important to Focus on Innate Readiness anyway, Covid or not!

A participant registered for the uP! event just before the COVID before the price doubled. She did save 4000 USD by registering early. Yet she said, the greater gain for her is not that she saved so much money by doing uP! in 2019, rather the greater gain was how she was ready during the pandemic which she wouldn’t have been if she delayed it by another year. During the Pandemic, her husband lost his job, her business suffered a slow down and her close relatives were going through depression. Earlier should would panic and even go into a shell during such situations. But Innate Readiness for her meant, that instead of her previous nature to panic, she was able to disassociate from the situation, shield herself from the ‘depressing reality’ and focus on building her business, emotionally supporting her husband and pulling her close relatives from the miry pit. And it’s not like she went into it with a plan, but innate readiness is figuring what to do when you find yourself in the midst of something that you didn’t plan and you need to do beyond the best you have ever known yourself to do.

Driver 2: Predictive Intelligence: Distil What is IMPORTANT?

Just like the 4 squares on the chess board. One has to really consider What Matters. Do that and results follow! The challenge is in the DOING. Because doing comes at a cost and requires DEEP CONGRUENCE.

Chess ,even though looks complex, is relatively simple compared to LIFE. Consider this there are just 64 squares, and yet a trillion possibilities. But the truth is every single human cell is just as complex and they are connected to trillion other cells to make the human body and consciousness. And each of these humans are inter-connected in zillion different ways to the 8 Billion people in the world.

In the earlier days, computers couldn’t play chess as well as humans because, there was just not enough computing power to go through all possible moves and combinations, even to 10 moves deep. But a human player intuitively only had to focus their attention on thinking through the relevant moves, leveraging their intuition. Now super computers have caught up to ‘some’ standards of beating a human player because of the increased ability to brute force all possibilities and also because of the increased intelligence by knowing the end-outcomes of a million games in advance.

When it comes to life, you can’t know the end-outcome and come back and play it all over again a million times. This is why you need such an intuition that you can trust so much, that you can go all out and focus only on the few things that really matter instead of the million good to do things. It is one thing to know what matters, but it is a different standard of reality to do the things that matter, when you may have to trade something else, when you may have to learn to do it, and in some cases even involve a whole set of people to support you in doing it.

Bonus: Transformational Podcast that orients your unconscious to enhancing your Predictive Intelligence.

Three examples from the context of the business on the challenges and efforts required to convert the distilled areas of action into actualised outcomes.

  1. DO IT! Even if you don’t like it… Even if it has a high price…

    As a self-funded organisation that has grown 100X in revenue (compared to the first year), we have always worked in close collaboration. We often are 4 times smaller in size than the team required to do the job at hand. And especially during new phases in the business, we all sit around, like people sitting around a campfire during vacations, to brainstorm and innovate. Every year, we innovating at least 2 new products and 4 significant shifts to our current products. For us, product development requires a lot of in-person communication and thinking-together.

    So, back then we couldn’t have even imagined, working remote. But much before the formal announcement, before the rampant rise of COVID, we knew, it was time to send people back to their home towns. This was a big deal. Because sending people back home at that time meant pausing many Core Business Functions. So, before the Government announced a lockdown, all the team was secure in their hometown avoiding all exposure to the Covid-19 virus.

    While at that time the whole business appeared to come to a standstill because of this decision, we did it because we needed to consider what is REALLY important. But what we didn’t know at that time was that this single decision was going to make us ready for International Expansion.

    11 months during the lockdown phase, we built the capability to drive the organisation even when Harini and I are not around. And added the necessary people, systems and leadership in place, so that no we are more and more equipped each day to arrive at a place, from where, business growth, product innovation, and all the wonderful things can happen integrated no matter where Harini and I are in the world.

    It is not like we didn’t have remote tools. In fact, we have always been equipped to complete tasks, organize work and work remotely. But the core of our business is research, innovation, and translating that back to business models. And to be able to do this from anywhere in the world is something we hadn’t planned for in 2021 but thanks to sending all the team back home, we have just arrived at this possibility much before we had planned for it in our business time-line :)

  2. Do it! Even if you don’t know how…

    April 10, 2020: We made an important announcement. That any A&H community member who is going through anything that is disrupting the balance in their family, wellness or their emotional readiness to handle business challenges, can seek support and we will for FREE solve that issue for them.

    We had full faith that the community had the emotional capacity and readiness to handle the unexpected. But we also knew there will be a percentage of participants, even if it is a relatively smaller fraction, who may need help in at least one area of their life. Maybe their business is doing well, but conflicts have begun to enter their home. Or maybe they are doing amazing with their kids, but have lost their job and are not equipped emotionally and with the right strategies to find the next job. Since, we take care of ALL aspects of a person, it is fair to expect that there will be some people with at least one aspect of their life requiring urgent attention.

    Now, let me explain why this was a big challenge to us. The cost for a private consultation with A&H is about 25,000 USD. But in the FastTrack legacy it comes packaged with the product and if you compute the cost, it comes to around 1000 USD. Why the big difference? Timing!

    In the FastTrack legacy, I meet participants one by one in batches within a token based queue system, based on a yearly schedule that I have conveniently planned way ahead of time. So, that Harini and I can focus on our research and innovations to take the technology to millions of people.

    So, to distract the team from the ongoing work and to put attention outside of a scheduled plan for the participants is a huge cost to the business. And it doesn’t make any financial sense because we had already informed participants, that the events are postponed and we are giving 1 year of the subscription extended. So, anything we do that year, is just added cost for the business. And to do it as Critical Support, to be available immediately was a huge financial decision.

    This was also a big thing because we notice, muscle movements and changes in colour of the skin tone to understand internal unconscious response on an on-going basis. And thus, we just didn’t know how it can be done, online.

    But we knew one thing. That this is the MOST important thing in the business. To support the community IMMEDIATELY at the time of their need. And to do it. And figure the way on the way.

    And that is exactly what we did. And although we opened Critical Support to take care of our current participants who wanted that additional help, what came from these efforts in addition to turning the trajectory positively for every single person who participated in critical support is the creation of a new products A&H Wish and A&H Light. Something that I am very proud of and something I think has done Time Compression for our business. And making it easier for Global Reach. With these new innovations, global participants don’t have to wait for a year, make 3 – 4 long trips, to experience Time Compression in their lives.

    You got to know what is important and do it, even if you don’t know how to do it.

  3. Do it! And Empower the Leaders in your Community to it…

    May 12th to June 11th: 2020

    We understood that within the community 85% of them were doing well, managed to do well, some even soared during the pandemic. And the remaining 15% required a review or consultation.

    While the FREE Critical Support we introduced online (explained in the previous heading) was sufficient to develop emotional mastery, and handle stress and state-related challenges. There were also opportunities for growth in the Pandemic and even in Family situations, there were unprecedented level of openness to solve long-term conflicts. And to maximise the opportunities, An A&H review was necessary for all the community. And additionally the 15% required it on war-speed to change the underlying circumstances in their family, business and well-being that led to the emotional challenges in the first place.

    The logical thing at that point in time, seemed to help groups in the community that had the majority of that 15%. Those were typically the uP! participants, who were also recent members in the community. Some of them had financial challenges. At first, look it didn’t make sense to put our immediate attention on the B!G participants who had come for EIT Education or the Launch Your Legacy members because waiting a year to Launch your Legacy is not as sensitive as the segment of the community that is in distress.

    But what is we were to look at it from a Global Perspective and not just from the point of view our community. What if we enabled the people who could enable each other. Wouldn’t that also take care of the people in immediate need but also create an impact in the world. Wasn’t that the intention for us to develop Excellence Installation in the first placed?

    So, instead of working on the people in distress (except for Critical Support), we focussed our attention on the B!G segment of the community, who were already doing well in life and wanted EIT Education for themselves.

    2 months after that. We went ahead with the Launch Your Legacy customers. Again, although these people hadn’t formally enrolled for EIT Education, the fact that LYL participants were not in financial need, meant, they had the bandwidth to support the other members in the community. And it was interesting how we found many of the members, just helping and being there in a personal capacity for the uP! Participants.

    The difference in starting with the B!G Participants, is that they understood the significance of ATC and Capability Acceleration than someone who has not been through EIT Education.

    And in many ways accelerated, development of the MOST IMPORTANT arcs of ATC Intuition, through the community, and I cannot think of a greater gift from A&H to the individuals in the community.

    Seeds of thinking and installations at the community level are much more complex to design and implement than doing installations with an individual.

    We have an ecosystem where people from all walks of life and all ages groups enhance and enrich each other. While this topic deserves a book in itself, I can share this from my experience of creating this community, that a tiny shift in the orientation of a community will create ripple impact in the lives of each of the individuals connected to that community.

    We believe there is a set of adjustments that are essential for anyone to maximize the opportunities in the world post-covid and EIT education for B!G Participants in 2020 has set in motion a wave and in its due course all the A&H Community will benefit from this.

    Achieving this outcome of enhancing Predictive Intelligence for the Post-Covid world, while we were still within the Covid World. was not easy. We had to stretch myself on several occasions to the point it felt at times, like I was doing our immersive installation events every weeks (instead of 3 times a year).

    When I look back, I am grateful to God, that I had the strength to endure and accomplish all of this. How many people in their lifetime get the opportunity to orient an entire community with newer capabilities and legacy directives to be EPIC even in a Pandemic.

    In this sorting, to enable those who already had the capabilities, instead of those who were struggling, we managed to equip the community as a whole with superior ATC skills and followed it with the acceleration of each participant personally.

    In many ways, this is a parallel to what we do with our business as a whole. We believe if we impact the Impact creators, the world will benefit as a whole including the privileged. All the beautiful reports we get from B!G participants who have arrived at the level of an Excellence Installation Specialist only re-iterate the fact to us that a single EIS contributes as much or more than what several NGO’s are able to achieve combined in their life-time.

    You got to know what is important and empower the leaders in your community. A community for many people could be a combination of family, friends, teams and in some scenarios, a full blow eco-system like the A&H community!

Driver 3: Adapting Rapidly

  1. Adapting to Challenges

    Just a week after sending the team back home, the lockdown happened. And we knew, that was not the time to put out a ‘Launch Your Legacy’ advertisement. So we stopped all Advertisements.

    Even though our business ran on referrals. Advertisements used to accelerate referrals by 10 times. Because an A&H member would casually speak to a family or friend about what they experienced and then it would spread to friends of friends but it is when these educated individuals notice an advertisement in their screen, that they would click on it and enquire. So by closing the advertisement, we we essentially impacting assisted referrals.

    Since we had recruited a whole new set of team members exclusively for sales, just before the pandemic, we didn’t just have the burden of not doing sales but also the challenge of continuing to evolve team members who are otherwise going to stagnate for an entire year.

    And we did something that I still can’t believe we did. We opened the doors to Pre-EIT Education for all the team members. While we did this to avoid stagnation for the team, we managed to solve the pressing challenge of training people outside of our Immersive Events, to meet capacity challenges.

    At that time, this metric – time taken to get a fresher to be equipped for delivery across various levels was a black box. And all kinds of planning, investment, scaling up, all of it was dependant on it. We could never prioritise this function, when we had a whole set of challenges to deal with, that any self-funded yet rapidly growing business does. But finally it happened, we tried solving the challenge of avoiding stagnation for our team and found ourselves arriving at an important metric for the business. Yaaayy!!

    This is very different from keeping employees ‘busy’. In fact, it is the opposite of that while you are taking care of people in the present, you are building an asset that is required for the future. In this case, the asset is the set of systems, materials, opportunities and frameworks to give on-the-field experience to any new team member we recruit without having to wait for our immersive events.

    It is important to not just handle challenges. Adapting is different from adjusting. Adjusting means you accommodate and tolerate the inconvenience. Adapting means you master the circumstance, to creatively solve the problems Making Each Move Count. (for the future and the present)

  2. Adapting to Uncertainties

    When you meet someone who has just learned to play chess and when they know that you played the game professionally, they ask you a variation of this question – ‘so in how many moves can you checkmate?’.

    I am going to give you a little primer into chess and the logic behind that question to bring to your attention to a very significant quality about uncertainty. And it very important to develop the ability to discern this quality.

    When beginners play chess, they set up what are called ‘booby traps’. Typically a 3 – 4 move sequence leading them to win the game when the opponent makes a particular mistake. And when the opponent is also a beginner, this seems to work fairly well.

    But the problem with that approach is that in setting such an ‘amateur trap’, the person is moving away from the 4 square focus that I had mentioned earlier and in essence makes their position strategically weak.

    This is how Amateurs play, they wait for the opponents mistake or oversight to win the game. The opposite to this is the way a Grand Master would play the game, the Grand Master makes their move assuming the opponent would make the BEST possible counter-move to their move. Here the anticipation is not about whether the opponent will ‘wishfully’ make an error, but whether, the Grand Master himself has not seen a better move for the opponent.

    In the Amateur scenario, the risk and uncertainty are about the other person, making a move to escapes the trap. In the Grand Master scenario, the risk and anticipation are about the possibility that you have missed a better sequence in your calculation of the moves available for your opponent, as well as yourself.

    When it comes to Pandemic and the Uncertainty, I would rather rely on the strength of our brand, the community, the impact that has happened already, the ongoing value creation and the potential in the future and not be complacent on wishful thinking and predictions on when the Pandemic impact will end.

    And that is exactly what we did.

    We have invested so much time on Innovation. Today, we are equipped to deliver the value we have delivered, with 50 times less waiting time, and to 20 times the capacity, and bridged the gap to delivering online, even though a lot of our work required and still requires fine calibration that is both sensitive and sometimes micro in nature.

    We asked, what if the world doesn’t ever go back to ‘normal’ and we can never have physical events, then, what next?

    I am glad that the world is opening up and we are back to our Immersive Events. To me, what is fascinating is that, the doors that opened from the constraints we had back then, will continue to remain open and are already opening newer doors!

    So, there are two types of uncertainties, one which will remain uncertain until it doesn’t and isn’t in your sphere of influence. The other type is ‘not having figured out yet’, the best possible ways forward. And that is a good place to be in. Most people rush in to feel certain and make decisions. While doing that gives them a sense of comfort that they have clarity on what to do next, they also have likely missed on making the best of the situation.

    When you have the later kind of uncertainty, the superior capability is to comfortably wait long enough, till you have several options, and make decisions from that space. This gives you, the time, it takes to generate enough dynamic routes to maximise your actions to the changing circumstances.

  3. Adapting to Unplanned Opportunities

    The best of the opportunities in the World just show up. And it happens often, that your very focus, becomes a challenge, stopping you from processing the gifts that arrived by themselves.

    If someone, got you a big fancy, dream car and drove it to your house, you have to atleast make the adjustments (or adaptations) to park it in safely.

    When opportunities that you didn’t expect, come knocking, there are things you will have to do, that is not was not in your agenda. But doing it is better than not doing it.

    If you got a prize for 10 Million USD and you have to take a flight to the other part of the world to take possession of it and bring it back, won’t you fly all the way?

    When we do Legacy Diagnostics for our Launch Your Legacy members, we often do it, just before the Immersive events, so that – what we identify as accelerators for their next level of evolution happens (is done for them, one-on-one) within the immersive installation events. And the beauty of that is that when they come back 6 months later, they have had such unexplainable and newer life experiences, that they have become a totally new person, ready for the NEXT LEVEL of evolution.

    During the pandemic, when we did not have access to these immersive installation events, there was something strange that we noticed during our review with the FastTrack Legacy members!

    The Fasttrack Members got their Legacy diagnostics by the Excellence Installation Specialists who were in the Fellowship track. And then we met these participants about 2 months from the time they got their first diagnostics, to review the completeness of the list and to add to it, what we may notice as further enhancers.

    When we saw the list, we were surprised by how the diagnostics created for the participant appeared like a complete mismatch! The participant we met during the review and the list presented to us by the EIS had no correlation whatsoever! And this baffled us.

    The fellowship team has always created exceptional Legacy diagnostics. Then, how is it possible that the set of Capability Acceleration they have come up with for the participant doesn’t match what felt relevant for the participant when Harini and I met the participant?!

    After carefully reviewing what was going on and backtracking, we found out that the person that the participant was when the EIS Fellowship team had met them 2-3 months ago, was a completely different person – and the diagnostics was relevant for who they were back then! And the beauty is – the EIS Fellowship had accurately diagnosed Capability Acceleration areas, prepared an immaculate list and also spearheaded Implementation through EIS Apprentice and validated it all the way through completion.

    And then 2-3 months had passed, and in this time, the participants have gone through new life experiences post Installations and the person we finally met at the review seemed to be the NEXT version of himself/herself.

    What had successfully happened, is that each participant experienced achieving one FULL Cycle of Evolution so quickly to the extent, that the person we met during the reviews made the Legacy diagnostics from just 2-3 months ago, absolutely old and redundant!

    Somehow, the context of the Pandemic, was surprisingly giving the context for people to change fast. And for those who had the right preperation it meant, evolving their excellence in a much shorter time-frame than we have ever noticed before.

    We were so surprised and thrilled by the New Revelation. This Impact was not what we had planned and expected. This is what happened. Due to a variety of different things including the community impact we discussed earlier, the extra attention to future pacing and state installation by the fellowship team during diagnostics, the implementation being orchestrated by people in EIT Education.

    And in the space of 2 months, most implementations that were not scheduled had already auto-generalized, meaning, it happened spontaneously without dedicated attention to it. And the changing contexts due to Covid gave many of the participants the life contexts required to accelerate their personal evolution.

    So what we witnessed was the completion of a cycle that happens over 4 – 6 months within 2 – 3 months. So, Harini and I in our review accelerated another cycle on top of it :)

    We didn’t plan this. This happened!

    And it was important for us to notice it and more importantly make the adaptations to accomodate the advantage.

    Given that until that moment, Harini and I haven’t met the uP! Participants, we decided to take this even more accelerated cycle of evolution the to the uP! Participants too. But there was a challenge. The new level of acceleration means almost 4 – 6 times longer time frame to complete. Which means we had 2 choices:

    Choice 1: Do reviews the we have always done. And finish it all in a month.

    Choice 2: Make every review, a FULL cycle of evolution even if it means we need MONTHS to complete the review for everyone and can go into the next year.

    We chose the latter! If we have the opportunity to complete an ENTIRE evolution cycle for our participants then why wouldn’t we, even if it meant additional work?

    It could have been an impediment for the business because it means our business has lesser time with the team to get back fully into all the other business functions. But this is what we did, in our hearts we knew, choice 2 is an unprecedented opportunity to impact the people, documentation for research and just have more validation to the boundaries of what is really possible, and we are not going to miss it.

    This decision we made time-compressed the research and eco-system required for the Launch of B!G Super Specialisations (priced at 136,000 USD) by at least 2 Years.

    Sometimes unplanned opportunities look expensive, may look like it is coming with a lot of struggles, you may have to pause something to pursue it and make that extra adjustment to accommodate the unplanned opportunity. But, it is some of these opportunities that help you jump the curve from where you are to the next league, altogether.

    Looking back, we are so thankful we didn’t aim for closing reviews quickly by doing it the way we had always done and instead grabbed the extra, additional cycle of acceleration that we could enable in the trajectory for our members.

Driver 4: Crash Protection!

If you want to get to the top and create opportunities out of thin air not only do you need the drivers for creating POSITIONAL ADVANTAGE and be prepared for the ‘unknown unknown’ but you also must safe guard that stuff that you already have!

In the previous driver, we illustrated how we adapted rapidly during the pandemic phase to challenges, uncertainties and even unplanned opportunities. It was an unexpected challenge to everyone… Some people were equipped and ready to handle such a situation better than others. We mentioned how choosing what matters made a big difference and the power of adapting rapidly! But adapting at warp speed has it’s own ‘load’ and ‘risk’ on relationships!

When playing chess, I opened my game with Gambits. A gambit is where you make sacrifices of high-value coins for low-value coins or sometimes for nothing, in exchange for a positional advantage. The thing about a gambit is often, the opponent doesn’t have much choice other than to go along with your play. It is a very risky style of playing chess but one that differentiates legends like Bobby Fischer.

The thing about a Gambit is what happens after a Gambit. You have let go of things, you have exposed certain positions and made some areas of the board vulnerable. And you have gotten back an increased gain over the next 10 – 20 moves.

But you still got to come back and cover, strengthen the weak areas that you left vulnerable during the rapid escalation that comes from a Gambit.

Adapting RAPIDLY to challenges, uncertainties and capturing unplanned opportunities are like Gambit in the sense of how fast you have to act in rapid singular focus to make things work. And when you do that, some important things are delayed.

Some forms of adaptations require Warp-Speed. Even in ancient days, roads were built, fleets equipped and walls constructed in days during a war, that which otherwise takes weeks, months or even years.

And throughout history, you notice that during massive rapid adaptations of any sort, there is a place for misunderstanding, missed critical communication and delayed progress in several areas.

While in life, you are not going to gambit or sacrifice one thing for another, people may misread your timeline. They may equate your intent to do it at another time, as an indication of rejection or lack of interest.

During rapid adaptations you may delay things but not more delayed to the point it becomes irreversible. It’s like running late to a flight, in some circumstances, you may be rushing in late, but if you get more late, there is a point after which you cannot enter. For some people, this is 44 minutes before departure and for some it is 20 minutes before departure and for some it is 5 minutes before departure. And the Proactive cleanup serves the function of not missing the flight, to address the delayed areas before it is too late!

Some People may misunderstand your action to be a comment on them because they don’t necessarily get where you are heading and why some things are done (or not done) because the nature of rapid adaptation by in itself, means moving into a form that it isn’t already!

But not everyone who is offended will communicate, and not everything that is broken will show itself. Proactive cleanup becomes possible only when you already know the things you have let delay or given lesser attention because of the series of rapid action you had to take during the rapid adaptation. So that you can go back to each one of them and giving it the due attention it requires.

In that sense, although the Proactive cleanup happens after you are free from the rapid series of actions during the spontaneous adaptation, the preparation for that happens in parallel. And that is what Crash Protection really means, in the sense the protection is BEFORE a crash could happen. In many instances, Crash Protection is a superior capability that makes all the difference! Or in the game of chess, just because you are rushing in to close the gain from the gambit doesn’t mean you are unaware of the positional weakness that it has created in some other areas that you need to fix!

When people don’t have a culture of proactive cleanup, they discover the cracks later and may never learn that the beginning of those cracks was much much earlier than when it seemed to surface into their attention. Improving in this area significantly builds crash protection.

You have raised a monument by your rapid adaptation but the crash protection ensures what was already there is preserved, in that sense what you have achieved is progressive and addition to what was already there.

I read this story, in the book Turtles All the Way Down about a horse that grew with one unhealthy habit: that horse learned to eat grass while walking. And years passed by and the horse grew into an adult in its full glory. And one day it had to go on a race and when it was running in full form, as it approached a land with a lot of grass, the bad habit was in play, it ate some of the grass while it was in full speed, it strained its neck, fell down and died.

Just because something isn’t a problem yet doesn’t mean you don’t improve and work on your limitations. (PS: Something about this story, has gotten so many people to quit smoking! Whenever it was delivered to them in a specific arrangement.)

While we managed in those 8 months, over 40 EIT Education Calls, long calls, each of them varying between 2 – 4 hours, delivered over 8000 Implementations during the review, helped everyone who reached out for Critical Support, have communicated to everyone the longer cycle of the review given the enhanced outcome described above, and extended the product delivery period by two years; We also know that some B!G participants weren’t part of the calls, some had much longer waiting period, our social media had almost zero posts for almost the entire duration, superb video content delayed in release and many more loose ends that we needed to tie together quickly the next year! And really ensure that all open loops were closed and brought to their fullest completion, in harmony.

I was heartbroken to know a dear friend of mine during the lockdown phase was alone in his house for months with ZERO humans to talk with during that entire phase. He is the kind of person most people would call a ‘geek’. His only friends were people in his office and a couple more people like me. I am glad I proactively got back to him!

Life would have been much easier if you could organize it based on priorities, but it doesn’t work that way! You can’t let go of a friend or someone dear to you because of ‘another priority’. No, you just can’t. Instead, you organize yourself in a way that you make ALL things and ALL relationships work! And you make it work like the seasons on the planet, where at the right time, the right season shows up to nourish the earth, to shine the warmth, to bear fruits and to replenish and that is the Sanctity of Human Relationships!

Driver 5: Expanding Horizons

My opening question was “What if the entire duration of the Pandemic is a preparation for what is to come! Are you ready?”

Everything in life is a preparation for everything to come following that :) The conventional meaning of preparation means having plans, ideas, and approach to something you already know is coming. In the sense of this article, preparation means something more, it means being READY to handle whatever comes next!

And that is what truly evolving in any aspect really means. That you can handle what comes unplanned.

We have met CXOs, Directors and several people at the TOP, who are perfect in every way for where they have arrived in life. The challenge they face is getting to the next level. Some even doubt if they will ever get there. Even a top achiever thinks that way because, even after getting to the top, to get to the next level, is a totally different story. The person not only has to break their own ceiling of excellence, often they also have to overcome some of their limitations, discover blind spots and develop complimentary capabilities that are required for that level.

This is not just for the CXO’s of the world. This is also true about your vibe, your relationships, your influence, your impact, across all levels and every aspect of life. That once you reach a threshold, it requires a COMPLETE SET to get to the next level, next league.

Discovering such new dimensions and fulfilling the completion of that complete set is Personal Evolution. An average successful individual experiences a full cycle of evolution every 10 years.

You can extend it to cycles of evolution for a business, industry when every several years – the game completely changes.

Expanding Horizons is having the vision to start capability development, and designing experiencing for what is going to come next – after your next complete cycle of evolution. This accelerates the entire process and can help you achieve a full cycle of evolution much faster. This is one of the core guiding directives we leverage to help individuals Launch their Legacy in 2-3 years instead of 10 or 20 or to help entrepreneurs create world impact even if they believe that is not their league for the next few decades!

Expanding Horizon is an important Accelerator for achieving Positional Advantage.

All the new products, innovation and community acceleration we did during the pandemic, made the business READY for creating a Deeper, Extended and Cross-Border impact for a lot more people. It was important that even though we were building assets, distilling only what was important, rapidly adapting to reality while doing proactive cleanup, we still continued to expand our horizons and become ready for the impact we can create in the world when we achieve a FULL CYCLE of evolution for our business.

A friend asked me, if she could quantify what she has gotten from the FastTrack Legacy program as 10/10, would everyone else have gotten at least above 6/10 of what she gained.

She asked from a good space, meaning, that she has gotten so much, that even if someone else has got a portion of some of the things that she got, it is a win for them!

I agree with her on that. But it took me a while to understand why I wasn’t quantifying the way she did.

The challenge was I don’t think of what she has gotten from the fast-track program as a 10/10. I see it as a 10/10 in THAT cycle of evolution. Some people come several depressed, and some people come having everything they desire in life. The number of cycles each person requires to Launch a Legacy really depends on all the areas they need to evolve to create a legacy. And that is why I created the Launch Your Legacy Quiz. It identifies the number of personal evolution cycles a person needs to Launch their Legacy.

I helped her realise that there was a point in time, she didn’t know she was this beautiful on the inside herself. And little did she (and I) know at that time, that all the things she is doing right now are possible in her life. And in the next 10 – 20 years, she will discover things about her that she will relish even more. The Fast-Track Legacy program reduces that time frame to discover that. Afterall, there is certain artistry and delight in making some of that happen NOW in 1 year instead of 10 years later.

When people ask me, how do I ‘unlock my potential’. I rephrase it into ‘how do you maximise your current potential’. The truth is potential isn’t a ‘fixed’ thing. It evolves with time. It evolves with who you grow into. And like everything in nature, Personal Evolution happens in cycles. With Excellence Installations it is possible to reduce the time-frame for this cycle. This is why we are able to FastTrack Personal Evolution that happens in 10 years to make it happen in 2-3 years. And design and shift to a better trajectory that leads to integrated life outcomes.

The real joy for Harini and me is in discovering for ourselves along with the participant what becomes possible when you advance personal evolution, the possibilities of possibilities that open up. It is difficult to know ahead of time where we would hit a hard stop at which point we cannot enhance or accelerate the next cycle of personal evolution for a person. If there is a such a point, I am yet to discover that!

That means, no matter where you in life, there is always another whole new level, league and dimensions to excellence that is accessible to you. Can you spot it? That is the true meaning of Expanding Horizon.

The careful reader in you may have already recognised, while Accelerator 1: Innate Readiness and Accelerator 5: Expanding Horizons are dealing with things widely apart in the timeline, in many ways they are inter-twined into a beautiful, intricate design that is unique to your personal evolution. This is why Harini and I take immense joy in discovering, exploring and taking people into their next several cycles of evolution and helping them personally reach a place where no one has gone before.

This is how we even managed to do what no one has ever done before. We started measuring personal evolution and managed decade for over a decade. The results of all of that has allowed us to finally develop a scientific way to design and fast-track personal evolution.

We could have never achieved this, if we did not continue to Expand Horizons. Because for us to be ready in 2020, we had to start expanding horizons in 2011. And we are the lucky ones, for most inventors, who have brought a cutting edge technology like electricity, , , to the planet and make it available for the common one, it has taken decades, and sometimes even half a century.

It was a surprise when we noticed people who got over allergies. It was a surprise when everything we did happened for the first time. It was a surprise when we realised personal transformation is great, but hundreds of personal transformation leads to time-compression and personal evolution if they happen together in a short time-frame. It will always be a surprise, as we continue to discover what is possible for someone that we didn’t know was possible until then and that is the nature of Evolving People.

Summary:

The contents in this article can help you create Positional Advantage. A place in your life, in your world, in the world outside your world, where you can navigate in any way and still have an higher chances to succeed, compared to others, irrespective of how the world turns – because you have positional Advantage. Even if you manage to improve on any ONE of the five Accelerators mentioned in this article, you will find yourself inching closer to achieving real Positional Advantage. I hope you make good use of it and impact the world, positively. – Antano Solar John

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The Antano Solar Voice  is one of the most cutting-edge blog and podcast in the world with fresh insights from validated life experience. The Solar Voice season 1 podcast has been ranked #3 in Apple iTunes News & Noteworthy. And the posts have been published in over a dozen publications including Business World, YourStory, Hindu Business Line, Economic Times and  many more. To listen to any of the past episodes for free, check out this page. And to read the past article, check out the blog page.

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  1. Superb Read Antano…. A great sense of gratitude to God to make me reach you and Harini… A great sense of gratitude to both of you for evolving millions like me… I am equally curious to see the ripple impact of everything you could lead the organization to during this pandemic…. Feeling so so proud as well…..

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