Healer Q&A: Mastering business longevity with Rajesh Ananda
The following interview is a transcript excerpt from The Heallist Podcast episode. Listen to the full audio version below and subscribe to get notified of new episodes.
Discover the secrets to business longevity and spiritual fulfillment with our esteemed guest, Rajesh Ananda, a celebrated spiritual meditation teacher and leader of the Foundation for International Spiritual Unfoldment (FISU). Rajesh shares his remarkable journey from a troubled youth to a passionate meditation teacher, revealing the core principles that have guided FISU's impressive global presence. His personal stories shed light on the transformative power of meditation in maintaining focus and resilience, offering invaluable insights for anyone aiming to create a lasting legacy in their own endeavors.
Unlock strategies that blend spirituality with practical business acumen. We delve into the world of lead generation where CRM tools play a crucial role in brand expansion and customer engagement. By tailoring personalized messaging and maintaining a consistent brand identity, Rajesh highlights how creative outlets—like podcasts—can serve as powerful lead magnets. This episode is packed with tactics for reaching new audiences and fulfilling a mission of serving humanity, emphasizing the importance of diversified lead channels to ensure a robust and impactful reach.
What Defines Business Longevity
Rajesh Ananda: Longevity is an incredible word. I think behind that there always has to be a deeply profound effort on our part to keep things going, because we are going to have the challenges, we are going to have market changes, personal changes, everything going on in our lives, because our lives are moving forward, generally at quite a fast pace. When we have our organizational business it is a huge challenge. My story of success being able to maintain the organization over this long period of time. I've been involved for about 45 years.
The organization has been going for just over 50 years, and so I've been involved since I was in my late teens, when actually I was a bit of a troubled teenager, going through those difficult teenage years and I sought advice, and generally the advice was learn to relax. I discovered meditation and in three months it completely changed my life, so much so that I basically said I cannot go through my life without being able to pass this on to other people, and that's how my focus started, and I have never strayed from that focus. In those days I was the youngest new teacher in the organization. My guru, guru Rajnanda Yogi, invested time in me, and the lady that became my wife. As a new teacher in the organization, they allowed me to teach, even though I was just 20 at that stage. I was passionate, I kept that focus.
The challenge of running a large organization is its organization and method. At the beginning of the year, we decide what we're going to do, what courses are going to run. Now, normally the courses that we run the residential deepening courses for the people that have learned with us have to be booked a year in advance anyway to get the venues.
Lead Generation Strategies and Tools
Rajesh Ananda: One of the focus beyond the creativity is we're lead generating. We want new customers, not always from a commercial sense. We want to spread our message that we want to help people. Our organization is basically founded in serving humanity - that is, that is our core mission. Everything else, we do want to generate leads, but the purpose of that is to have more people that we can educate into our system. We can teach them to meditate in our unique system, and we know their lives are going to be much better because of that. Our purpose is to connect with those people, to help them, to serve them. But that's all under the umbrella of what I call lead generation.
So for any business, you cannot neglect this. You've got to be on it almost every day if you can. Or you will portion certain times where you're going to look at your posts - what do I say here? How can I attract new customers? Do I need to pay for advertising? Is it appropriate to pay for advertising now? Is this the right time? We all go through those continual questions about how we put ourselves in a good way in front of other people, so that people can identify that eventually with us.
But any business we've just got to commit. This is probably the most challenging part of any business, whether you're a commercial business or you're a non-profit. How do I get new customers? So we've got to allocate, we've got to read, we've got to learn what's going to fit well in our arena. Do not get obsessive about this, but be active. You can't just go for three months and not say anything or post anything or do an advert and then accept customers. You've got to raise your presence, you've got to raise your profile and you've got to spend, I would say, an hour and a day thinking about that. It doesn't have to be every day, but maybe like three days a week. So it's that time commitment, that focus that we need to just carry on amazingly well.
Balancing Spirituality and Materialism
Rajesh Ananda: Meditation has a much higher profile than mindfulness. In mindfulness, you're meant to think about who is the observer at the end of the day - it's still you. The meditation endears you with that knowingness of yourself in such a deep way that you are the observer. Okay, it's not your mind, it's a deeper aspect of you that's observing. We held fast because, at the end of the day, what we do is quite unique, and that's what I want to get across. There's only one you. It sounds a bit of a cliche now, we hear this all the time. There's only one you. There's only someone who has your experience, but we have to celebrate that.
The balance between the material and the spiritual which confuses so many people. The important thing is to stick to your guns. Look at what everyone else is doing, learn from what they're doing, because there might be some gems in there that you haven't thought about, or things have evolved and you've stood still a bit. So you need to move forward. But essentially go back to I am unique, my offering is unique. Yes, there is a tribe for me out there. I just now have to be a bit more clever in how I connect with that tribe. How do I put my head above the ball pit, so to speak? How do I show my uniqueness? And all that is completely possible with your messaging.
Final Thoughts
Rajesh Ananda: You need time to rest, you need time to center within yourself. Meditation is a perfect tool for doing that. It takes you from the surface levels into that deep peace within, and relaxation is the door to our higher self. When we learn to relax, also in the deeper areas of ourselves, is strength, and when we go through meditation within ourselves, we feel stronger, we increase our self-esteem. That helps our confidence.
In business, running an organization dealing with people, we're much on it. It's so much easier for us we stop worrying. There's a difference between concern and worry. We have difficulties in life we should be concerned with, but we need to stop worrying because that goes nowhere. So many people are totally stressed and anxious and their minds are whirling the whole day, and that's creating so much energy that depletes their physical energy, leads to disease.
Meditation is just an incredible tool. In my system, every person that comes to learn receives their own individual mantra, which is based on their vibration. So if we were to condense you mentally, physically, mentally, back into sound value, we're basically atoms that are vibrating and we vibrate at a certain frequency and that frequency for each of us is unique, which is confirmed by the iris in our eye, our DNA and our fingerprints. So, even though we're related as the brotherhood of man, we found our own individuality of man. We found our own individuality.
