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Christina Ko

It is 9.45am on a February morning in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. The weather is sunny, cool – and thick with the energy of transformation. Or is it impatience?
It is 15 minutes before the opening ceremony of an extravaganza hosted by the world’s largest personal-development platform and attended by 2,000 people and, at the VIP registration counter, the printer is broken.
As the event’s PR agency reps try to corral journalists covering the event into one area to sign waivers and be escorted inside, clamouring VIP ticket holders – who have paid US$900 a pop for the privilege of upfront seating and after-party access as opposed to US$499 for the cheap seats – are desperate.
We have been waiting, they grumble.
The event’s opening ceremony is imminent, they plead. You are letting people in who were not even in the line, they chastise the reps. That would be us, the media.
This is Mindvalley Live Dubai, two days of talks, musical performances, a VIP party and satellite events nearby, hosted by local volunteers.

Earlier, while in the wrong VIP line, I stood ahead of a Dubai-based teen-confidence coach who admitted these events are addictive.
Today is Saturday, and just on Thursday she attended hypnotherapist Marisa Peer’s full-day “I Am Enough” workshop.
In about an hour she will hear Peer – a Mindvalley coach and speaker, in addition to having her own practice – reiterate her message for a larger audience, in a 45-minute format.
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The woman in line has also nabbed tickets to see Jay Shetty speak in a month’s time, though her diehard favourite remains Tony Robbins, who visited Dubai twice in 2019.
In front of me in the queue is an older gentleman who has flown down from Qatar. He has trained virtually with Peer and is licensed to practise her signature Rapid Transformational Therapy technique, though he is still logging qualification hours.
Then there is a trio of Peer devotees who powwow over their heroine’s revolutionary reframing techniques but also her pushy sales team’s tactics – a turn-off, but a small price to pay in the grand scheme of personal transformation.
This commercial component is part and parcel of most experiences in the personal development industry, and most definitely present at the about-to-begin Mindvalley conference.
Personal development is big business: market-research firm SkyQuest Technology Consulting valued the industry at US$41.7 billion in 2021, and forecast that it will grow to almost US$60 billion in 2028.
In a saturated market with a very low barrier to entry, Mindvalley is the dominant player. The author-aggregating platform, which brought in US$110 million in revenue last year, gathers together some of the world’s most renowned voices, and charges members a monthly subscription fee to join masterclasses in categories covering mind, body and spirit.

Separate programme tuitions apply for coach and therapist certification programmes and corporate development, as well as retreats and conferences such as the one we are at today – which, unlike Mindvalley’s older and more exclusive A-Fest, is an application-free event.
At Mindvalley Live Dubai, some 60 per cent of the audience has travelled from overseas, and represents some 100 nationalities.
This is the brainchild of Vishen Lakhiani, a 47-year-old Malaysian entrepreneur of Indian descent. He launched the platform with his now ex-wife, Kristina Mand Lakhiani, after multiple failed ventures that propelled him into teaching meditation and, finally, founding Mindvalley in 2002.
Lakhiani is one of the most well known figures in today’s personal development scene, and he will host a quartet of 45-minute sessions over the next two days – four times the number of any other speaker – in addition to leading the festival’s closing ceremony. In other words, we will be seeing a lot of him.
Lakhiani’s technique combines wisdom from other authors, anecdotes from personal experience and empowerment advice that seems sound – enlightening, even. He talks of failure, and overcoming it. He tells his tale of pluck and bravado that led to him asking successful motivational speaker Lisa Nichols to lunch, and then to speak at his first event, and how she agreed.

I wonder how many in this 2,000-strong room will accost him in the same way before lunch today.
Lakhiani is a seasoned presenter and a compelling speaker, but it hardly seems that the crowd is here to learn as he describes the tenets that make up his theory on the four levels of human consciousness.
Beside me in the VIP zone, Selma El Rhezzali, who also hails from Hong Kong, is finishing Lakhiani’s sentences before he does. A Mindvalley member for more than seven years, she bought her ticket in November, and is bubbling with excitement at the prospect of meeting the sensations who have graced her computer screen for most of the past decade.
Mindvalley’s marketing strategy relies heavily on retargeting ads placed on search engines and social media platforms – a fact I discover in Hong Kong, having been inundated with sponsored posts for weeks after, it seems, mere mentions of Mindvalley, or Lakhiani, within the vicinity of my devices.
This at least partially accounts for Mindvalley’s 2.25 million subscribers on YouTube and 1.7 million followers on Instagram, but many of the speakers also have comparable followings.
Mind, body and spirit is one of the fastest exploding trends in the world, in every language across every society
Vishen Lakhiani
On Instagram, Lakhiani’s personal fan base totals almost a million, while brain coach and The New York Times bestselling author Jim Kwik has double that.
Clinical psychologist Dr Shefali Tsabary, who often appears alongside Oprah Winfrey as an expert on conscious parenting, also counts a million followers, while investor, entrepreneur and money-matters motivational speaker John Lee has a whopping 2.4 million.
Having a captive audience that has paid for the privilege of personal development is a gold mine for the various speakers, who will gain new fans from this event.
“Vishen’s intro was already familiar to me,” says El Rhezzali, “but his last session was amazing. Even if I knew the concepts, the way he delivered them, for me, was really impactful.
“And Ronan [Diego de Oliveira, who spoke on healthy bodies over perfect physiques] – what I loved about him is that it was super personal, and a very emotional talk, not about the [Mindvalley] course. I haven’t taken his course yet, but now I want to.”

Outside the arena, in the big bad real world, “self-help” still carries a stigma, and the cost of conversion is considerably higher.
In her session, Tsabary condemns parents for putting their own unachieved dreams on their children – expectations that were unreasonable already when placed on themselves, more so when transferred to the next generation.
Everybody nods along to this, tough though the accusation is to swallow. Later, Tsabary points out that she is “always welcome” at Mindvalley, but not in other places. And it is because what she says is challenging the traditional paradigm.
“We believe that all solutions start with self-growth, and that’s the focus and foundation of conscious parenting. We have to bring the message with a sledgehammer and just bulldoze our way through because the resistance is so strong; you have to combat it with a lot of strength, because people are not open to these new ideas.”

Lee, who started his career as a property investor before becoming a speaker and investment coach, may not yet be a Mindvalley author – though the offer was extended and accepted at the end of his talk at the Dubai conference – but his advice is almost universally welcomed, given that it revolves around the practical skill of generating passive income.
Even so, he laughs as he recalls the audience at a Hong Kong event he spoke at: “I was doing a talk there, getting into my story, and a guy goes, ‘Excuse me, Mr Lee, could you get straight to the content?’ I was like, wow, that’s never happened before. Either he didn’t like my story, or maybe he just wanted me to get straight to the point.”
That does not happen at Mindvalley Live Dubai.
In this city, which Lakhiani says has the highest concentration of Mindvalley members in the world, Lee is inundated with fans seeking photo ops that interrupt our interview more than once.
In fact, the attendees can sometimes seem a little too open-minded, by real-world standards.
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During the lunch break, after lounging on the grass eating burgers or doughnuts from the array of food trucks outside the conference venue, participants mill through booths.
These include a vanity publisher-cum-writer coaching academy offering to help anyone upgrade from audience member to author; an organic-broth maker touting good bone health; and a flashing-light biohacking session intended to induce a psychedelic experience – if not an epileptic episode.
I meet no shortage of coaches, all here to elevate their careers and be inspired. There is Chenyang, a fitness coach from Dubai by way of New Zealand. Alexa, an aspiring life coach from Hungary. Katarina, a wellness coach and energy healer from Macedonia.
They are not the only ones being transformed. Hypnotherapist Peer announces to me, “The people here are so nice, so friendly, so welcoming that we’re moving here now. We came out here with no intention to move, then within a week, we thought, ‘Wow’.
“The opportunities here – I live in LA and London and we get offered a lot of work, but we’ve been offered more work here in the last week than in the last year, there’s so much.”

Lakhiani himself says that “a few days ago, a guy in the grocery store who was sweeping the floor came to me and goes, you are Mr Vishen from Mindvalley? And I said yes. And he explained that he was from a village in India.
“He had moved to Dubai, and he’d been saving up to get a Mindvalley membership. And until then he’s been teaching himself all of these principles of personal growth through YouTube. I was so impressed, I gave him a free membership.”
The difference between helping people and paywalling that help is one aspect that can rankle, but this kind of elevation of mind, body and spirit does not come cheap, and the marketing aspects of this conference can be overwhelming. Self-help and self-promotion, it would seem, go very much hand in hand.
The sells range from QR codes for discounts on Mindvalley’s certification programme, to pre-order specials for the ex Mrs Lakhiani’s coming book, to a goody bag filled only with fliers for sponsors, to a closing ceremony that includes a 30-minute play-by-play of Mindvalley’s many commercial offerings.
Though interspersed with gems of knowledge, these moments linked together start to feel like a very long infomercial.
Our philosophy is that everybody steps into personal growth. We do not try to convert at all. I think you’re confusing us with religion
Vishen Lakhiani
Yet, what is the alternative? The audience needs so little prodding it can seem like lions stealing from lambs – but is this any different from Instagram influencers who use their status as arbiters of cool to peddle the latest and greatest in brand-sponsored posts? From politicians beholden to the titans of commerce who fund their campaigns, who hawk their agendas accordingly?
The difference, arguably, is in the vulnerability of an audience that, in some cases, has turned to self-help as an antidote to trauma.
While most of the attendees I meet are coaches of some sort, at breakfast in my hotel after the festival, a woman from Germany, upon overhearing our conversation on Mindvalley, chimes in that she is a regular event attendee and even volunteer.
She turned to the platform after suffering an accident, and “manifested” a three-week schedule break to attend the entirety of Mindvalley University, a festival of festivals that comprises user-generated events taking place across the Lakhiani home base of Estonia.
She has volunteered as a greeter at events – “the best position, as you get to feel the excitement of everyone arriving” – and this year will induct her 14-year-old son into the university experience – of his own volition, of course. She is jubilant, and far be it from me to dissuade her.

As Lakhiani says, “We don’t have to grow the market, the market is growing on its own, it’s exploding globally. As of 2018, 45 per cent of Fortune 100 companies have meditation training for their employees.
“Mind, body and spirit is one of the fastest exploding trends in the world, in every language across every society.”
During the conference, observing the level of fandom in the crowd, I had asked Lakhiani, given the reach that Mindvalley and by extension he has, how he avoids succumbing to a messiah complex.
In person, the entrepreneur is different from on stage, and although that is not unusual for those who spend time in the public eye, he does seem almost consciously disengaged, making no eye contact until the interview begins, clasping his hands neatly behind his back when asked for a photo afterwards.
“What is a messiah complex?” he asks. “Nobody here feels the need to save everyone in the world because that’s not Mindvalley’s point. Our philosophy is that everybody steps into personal growth. We do not try to convert at all. I think you’re confusing us with religion.”
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Indeed, it has crossed many minds, mine included, that this self-development scene can resemble more than a religion, even a cult. The tried-and-tested format of rousing audience engagement, for example, echoes sessions associated with pastors and avid church-goers.
Day two’s sessions kick off with Kwik addressing the audience: “Yes or yes?”, or Nichols’ “Yes yes?” eliciting exhilarated collective affirmatives from the attendees, who reach dizzying new heights of elation with each positive pronouncement.
And yet, one cannot discount the impact behind these coaching strategies, once you get past the stereotypes and truisms and the shouting and yes, occasional singing and dancing.
There are moments – many, in fact – that suggest that at worst, what we have joined is a very benevolent, very uplifting cult.
Yes, watching Vishen Lakhiani end the conference by directing the attendees in a sort of Mexican wave while warbling along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a little unnerving – particularly when we are all instructed to hold hands, and the tall stranger beside me holds his palm towards me expectantly.

And while there may have been a little more touching of strangers than I would have liked, I cannot deny that I did pick up a few good tips:
Lakhiani’s suggestion to work in a daily 20-minute meditation and learning time along with doctor’s appointments and work calls;
Coach Ajit Nawalkha’s proposal of defusing domestic disputes with a hug before launching into full fight;
Kwik’s method of teaching what you learn to better internalise new concepts.
As an experience, too, I enjoyed unexpected performances from a beatboxing recorder player and Muslim twin-sister hip-hop duo Ain’t Afraid, and there were real moments of positivity that are rare in the functioning world, like how everyone you speak to is friendly and ready to network, except if you are seen as cutting the entrance queue.


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Vishen Lakhiani (left) and DJ Bliss at Mindvalley Live Dubai. Lakhiani co-founded Mindvalley in 2002. Photo: Mindvalley Live Dubai

Motivational speaker Lisa Nichols at Mindvalley Live Dubai. Photo: Mindvalley Live Dubai

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John Lee at Mindvalley Live Dubai. The investor, entrepreneur and money-matters motivational speaker has 2.4 million followers on Instagram. Photo: Mindvalley Live Dubai

Kristina Mand Lakhiani at Mindvalley Live Dubai. Photo: Mindvalley Live Dubai

Ronan Diego de Oliveira at Mindvalley Live Dubai. Photo: Mindvalley Live Dubai

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Mindvalley Live Dubai, a self-improvement festival, offers attendees from Hungary to Hong Kong two days of talks by personal development coaches – at a price


Mindvalley Live Dubai, a self-improvement festival, offers attendees, from Hungary to Hong Kong, two days of talks by personal development coaches – as long as they can afford it.


Long Read

Motivational self-help for mind, body and spirit – as long as you are willing to pay

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;}Mindvalley Live Dubai, a self-improvement festival, offers attendees from Hungary to Hong Kong two days of talks by personal development coaches – at a price

Mindvalley Live Dubai, a self-improvement festival, offers attendees from Hungary to Hong Kong two days of talks by personal development coaches – at a price