The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
Inside the £200 Mindvalley experience where Paul McKenna rubs you rich
Concrete advice for entrepreneurs is hard to come by at the financial wellness conference in London, reports Tom Haynes
Paul McKenna enters stage left to rapturous applause. Outside in east London it’s a quiet, sunny winter morning, but here in the ExCel Centre the mood is jubilant. Within minutes, however, the room falls silent.
I look around the cavernous hall. I see the hundreds of audience members close their eyes as the television hypnotherapist instructs us to run our hands lovingly from our shoulders to our elbows. McKenna begins soothing affirmations about letting go of greed and our fear of losing our wealth.
Apparently, doing this is supposed to make us rich.
This is the Financial Freedom Summit, being hosted by wellness community app Mindvalley. It is a conference for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to get in the right mindset to be wealthy.
The event’s mission statement is laid out in a booklet being handed out by event staff.
“The real roadblock standing between you and financial independence is not what you don’t know, but what you believe you know,” the booklet’s manifesto reads.
About 20 uncomfortable seconds go by as the audience rubs their shoulders. On the gigantic screens behind the stage, I spot one man rolling his head in apparent ecstasy, his eyes still closed as McKenna tells us to imagine ourselves letting go of our fears.
“Who here feels good?” asks McKenna as he returns to the front and the audience opens their eyes. Hundreds raise their hands. We’re not done, though. McKenna invites Meghan Asha, an entrepreneur from New York, on to the stage.
“Now, what I’m about to do with Meghan is, I’m about to desensitise any irrational or unnecessary fear about losing money,” McKenna says.
“If you’re constantly frightened of losing money, then what are you reinforcing? You’ll be constantly moving away from a fear of loss.”
There’s much fervent nodding from the audience as McKenna outlines the “new series of psycho-sensory techniques” he’s about to show us.
In theory, this involves concepts like “delta waves” that “phosphorylate” in the brain. In practice, this involves stroking Asha repeatedly, from her shoulders to her knees, for about 20 seconds at a time, while encouraging her to visualise her feelings about money.
“What we’re going to do is we’re gonna get rid of the fear, then we’re going to go after greed,” he tells us. “Every atom of Meghan’s being will be vibrating, oscillating, on a frequency that is not fearful of losing money – she’ll be in a zen state.”
The stroking begins again. Asha closes her eyes as McKenna says to her: “I’d like to imagine you’re walking on a beach, and with each step you take in the sand count from one to 20.”
Asha gamely obliges, with McKenna sending “delta waves” through her with every count. This process repeats, this time with Asha narrating a fond memory with friends. McKenna instructs her to visualise her happy feelings as a colour, moving it through her whole body. “Now double the brightness of it,” McKenna soothes. “Double it again; double it again; double it again until you’re glowing with this lovely feeling – that’s it!”
‘There was a calm that came over me from the visualisation – a homeostasis feeling’
The pair from Ireland attended the event to get advice on how to grow their own business ‘There was very little practical information given and overall it was just a big sales pitch.’
Tickets for the Financial Freedom Summit start at $249 (£199). Alongside McKenna, speakers include entrepreneurs- cum- financial coaches Alfio Bardolla and Robert Allen, as well as Mindvalley founder Vishen Lakhiani.
Today’s audience is almost universally made up of devotees of the Mindvalley app. For the standard price of a $ 499 (£400) annual subscription, users gain access to a “full curriculum of more than 100 transformative programmes”.
These “quests”, per the app’s terminology, range from lessons in public speaking, to “mastery of sleep”. There are more than 200 of them, most of them designed by authors and motivational speakers.
Each quest requires 20 minutes of participation a day, and the range is such that you could feasibly run your life through the app if you so desired.
Though Mindvalley started as the kind of generic wellness movement popular in the US, recent additions of courses related to entrepreneurship have proven incredibly popular.
It turns out Asha is one of the Mindvalley faithful. After her on-stage experience, we get chatting. “There was a calm that came over me from the visualisation,” she says. “It was like a homeostasis feeling.”
A former hedge fund manager with millions in the bank, Asha now runs a trade show business. “I’ve sold a bunch of businesses, but nothing is diversified right now and I wanted to get clear on the different opportunities because I know I’m not returning as much as I could be.”
Judging from the work book we were all handed at the door, it’s unclear whether such granular advice will be forthcoming.
Throughout the event, speakers instruct us to open it to specific pages, which resemble primary school exercise sheets with questions such as “what is your take on money?” and “what do you think of rich people?”.
Another Mindvalley disciple, Agnes Kowal, approaches me next. A self- described fitness instructor, life coach, holistic healer, and marketer, she has been a user of the app for years, and credits it with her “evolution as a human”.
She says: “I am an all-or-nothing person. I’ve done the speaking one – it’s really simplified, where you’re working on being your authentic self.
“You might record yourself speaking on a subject and share it with the community.”
This isn’t the first time Kowal, 41, has been at a Mindvalley event, having previously attended a similar conference in Dubai. Today’s gathering in the ExCel is the first time a financial wellness event of this scale has happened in Britain, costing more than £1m to put on.
Back in the hall, Mindvalley’s founder Vishen Lakhiani is giving the second of his two speeches. Like McKenna, Lakhiani’s speech revolves less around the minutiae of mortgage rates and index funds, and more about how the audience should be “unf---withable”, and divide their budgets differently.
In Lakhiani’s world, 10pc of your money should be spent on luxury, and a similar share should be given back to charity. Two hours a day should also be spent on learning, he adds.
Gesturing to the screens behind him, which are filled with the faces of people on Zoom, Lakhiani says: “You guys are doing this in a big way, you’ve carved out eight hours for three days to be here – and I can already tell you, this is going to make you back so much money.”
But will it? Escaping the event briefly, I come across Eva Bellova and Solomon Sonowo, both 23 and from Longford and Dublin respectively. They are here to get advice on how to scale up their own business. Neither are Mindvalley users, and neither seem impressed, despite paying some £800 to be here.
“With these kinds of seminars, it’s either a hit or miss,” says Bellova. “But this has been terrible. We were trying to be open-minded with the hypnotherapy, but I didn’t like it.
“I could have said all that stuff on stage. They’re good at presenting, but it doesn’t fool me – all this visualising money as a colour thing ... I don’t get it.”
We head back in for the third speaker on the bill, hoping that some actionable tips will soon follow.
Enter Robert Allen, another entrepreneur-cum-author, who as part of a challenge put to him by the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, managed to buy several properties in San Francisco without a cash deposit. His book, Nothing Down, was the best-selling real estate investment book ever upon its release and has been revised every decade since.
Sadly for the audience, the specifics of how he succeeded in his challenge, or what happened next, are withheld from us. To find out, we have to come back tomorrow (or buy his book, which he mentions several times).
Allen’s talk otherwise largely mirrors those of McKenna and Lakhiani. “I was millions in debt, so I went to my spiritual adviser,” begins one anecdote. “Let me prove to you that it’s all about mindset,” starts another.
‘You have to look at the spiritual side of money’
While Allen’s talk continues I’m taken backstage to meet Lakhiani. I ask him where all the financial advice is in this finance event. “We’re on the first half of day one, right? You have to start at the mindset level,” he says.
Lakhiani believes everything can be traced back to mindset. Take exercise for example: “You don’t just tell people what exercise to do, you’ve got to put them in the right mindset. You can’t just look at the physical, you’ve got to look at the mind, and the spiritual.”
He assures me that there’s “a lot of evidence” of the placebo effect, “where a patient’s thoughts influence their healing”. He continues: “So the physical part of finance is knowing the difference between a mutual and an index fund.
“The mindset is understanding more about your beliefs about money, and the third is spiritual, where you understand how your cultural or religious beliefs have given you ideas about money that are no longer serving you.”
When I ask him to give me a flavour of the practical advice to come, he keeps things vague.
He says: “I’ll give you an example. Right now, it makes more sense to rent a property than buy a property.
“If you actually do the math, and you do long-term math, and you calculate things such as mortgage rates, inflation ... Depending on the country that you’re in, you may not want to buy property, you may want to rent property.
“But even if you are buying property, many people buy a second or third home, you need to know how can you buy property so that your property is actually appreciating [and] what indicators to look for.
“How can you use, for example, Airbnb, or the right type of rental tenancy, so your property can make you a passive stream of income.”
As for investing, Lakhiani goes on: “Recently, I bought Tesla stock – and it fell. It fell the next week, and I lost 20pc of my stock holdings because Elon Musk sent another tweet that angered the world. I was not paying attention to the right diversification strategy.
“Let’s say I had, I had £3,000 to put in Te s l a stock, I shouldn’t have put
£ 3,000 all in one
‘All this visualising money as a colour thing ... I don’t get it’
go. I should have put £1,000 in first, then another £ 1,000 in week two, then again in week three. That’s time diversification.”
I ask, if Lakhiani has thousands to invest in Tesla stock, why are volunteers used at the event not paid for their time?
“Our members are community- based and they self- organise around the world,” he says. “Many of them want to come to attend the event, to see each other, so they come as volunteers. When they do they get access to certain perks. They’re getting a free education.”
Allen’s talk is still playing on a screen behind us. He is taking the audience through pages in the workbook. Given Allen’s “no money down challenge” happened 40 years ago, is he the best person to put on the stage?
“He doesn’t just talk about property,” Lakhiani says. “You’re looking at many different things he’s teaching us – and maybe you wonder if that’s applicable today and maybe you’re right.”
But Allen is talking about property, I point out. He’s almost exclusively talked about it; he has plugged his book about buying property with no money four times. “It’s not my business to talk about his approach,” Lakhiani replies. “What would you do?”
So would Lakhiani follow in Allen’s footsteps and invest in property “with no money down”?
“It’s not a situation I need to worry about,” Lakhiani says. “But let me tell you how Robert [Allen] has changed me. He influenced me to set aside 10pc of everything I earn to donate to charity. Great teachers move you to shift and improve yourself.”
As I move to leave, Lakhiani is at pains to point out that the event is good value for money. The tickets were discounted; 90pc of the Mindvalley talks are available for free on YouTube; their Net Promoter Score is well above average. “Show me another organisation that does that,” he says.
I later checked back in with Bellova and Sonowo. After a full weekend of Financial Freedom, did they think they got their money’s worth?
“When it comes to the seminar, it actually progressively got worse,” Bellova says. “There was very little practical information given and overall it was just a big sales pitch.
“We were very disappointed as we expected a lot from the event. We also felt there was very little time and space allocated to networking which most people sought. Overall the event didn’t live up to what it stated on the website whatsoever.”
A Mindvalley spokesman said: “We are disappointed to hear that a small number of people didn’t feel they got value out of the Financial Freedom Summit. The content of the three days was curated to cater to different people who are at different stages on their journey with money. We are confident that throughout the event the majority of people would have received information that was beneficial
to them.”