Awareness: The New Key to Success

By Philippe Rebillard

"Awareness—The New Key to Success" is the ultimate guide to success in business and personal life. Are you ready to transform your life?

Have you even wondered the following questions?
• Where is the top of my potential?
• Can I get back on track after a failure?
• Who am I, really?

Life is an endless marathon, with ever-changing goals, objectives, and achievements. We will fail and divert our ideas onto new paths. But what if these "failures" are simply misinterpretations of a situation?

People may find themselves drowning in a flow of information, having to give it their all just to remain where they are. Getting to a different place would require going even faster.

It's time to be aware.

The way to prepare for change is to become changeable. Stop, take a breather, and find a comfortable rhythm. Financial success isn't going anywhere. Life's challenges are now within your capability. Implement the knowledge about awareness into your routine and level up your game! The right mindset will make your business thrive and your personal life shine.

This book is your personal assistant to success in life. Start shaping your own reality and your own success!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9785903966684

Book preview

PART 1:

THE PATH

AWARENESS FOR HAPPINESS

AND SUCCESS

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

Theodore Roosevelt

Once upon a time

Once upon a time — a timeless opening to a story. Perhaps I’ll start with that.

So once upon a time, I bought a one-way ticket, packed a suitcase, and took off from my home country of France to Russia to make a buck (or at least a ruble) and start a business.

I was 26. No wife, no kids… just twenty thousand dollars of debt temporarily being left behind. It sort of materialized out of nowhere, the debt, as most do I suppose. I suspect a lack of strict oversight over my expenses, or more specifically spending more money than I earned, or even more specifically allowing myself more luxury and comfort than I could afford, might have been a good part of the cause.

I left behind a well-regarded, stable job and went to a country about which I knew practically nothing. My friends thought I had lost it. To part with a cozy career as an official in the Ministry of Health, dive headfirst into the networking business, cut ties with my homeland and fly away to a country going through economic turmoil, with zero knowledge of its language? I guess that does seem somewhat odd.

I sat on the plane, realizing that only a couple of hours stood between me and Moscow, where a new chapter of my life was about to begin. I had no regrets. Even then I was confident that the future lay not with traditional, but with the networking business, and I wanted to play a part in helping it blossom. The Russian market was determined to grow, there was almost no competition, and our product had every chance to be profitable and in demand. I believed in myself, I believed in the business, and I believed in luck.

I was overwhelmed with emotion: euphoria, adrenaline, and the anticipation of success coursed through me. I imagine these were the same emotions felt by the explorers who first discovered the New World. Sitting in the plane with me were another hundred or so crazy French explorers, inspired by the possibilities that Russia promised.

The reality in no way resembled the expectations. My New World turned out to be a living nightmare.

In Russia, I survived the toughest six months of my life. Money ran out after two weeks and we were evicted from our hostel. Some quickly grew miserable, some wrote to their relatives begging for money, and some wandered aimlessly around Moscow, simply wondering what to do next. In the end, 80% of our conquerors gave up and went back to France. Only a few remained.

Step by step we began to solve each surfacing problem: together we chipped in and searched for cheap accommodations, then translators. With no knowledge of the language, each one of us felt totally inept: we couldn’t purchase necessities at the shops, or even arrive at the right station in the underground metro system, never mind using other forms of transportation — all the signs were in Russian. But most importantly, we couldn’t recruit anyone. The business ground to a halt before it even got rolling. It was then no small fortune that some of the translators agreed to join our team. The language issue was sorted, but other issues quickly emerged to replace it.

We expected the product to be launched in Moscow by June, but in reality, only received it by October. For half a year we worked with no money, surviving on a loan of trust. At times there wasn’t enough to purchase even the simplest food. Some months, we barely managed to scrape together enough money for rent. My shirt would darken into grey in just a week, and I had but one suit. Even my shoes were practically worn through by autumn. But we held on and kept working, regardless of the hardships.

And it worked.

By 28 I reached the million-dollar milestone. Then, soon enough, the yearly turnover had risen to 120 million.

I was seen as a lucky guy. Some envied me, looked up to me, and even presented me as an example of success. Life was drawing up some very colorful perspectives before me and I was determined to remain at the peak of success and affluence forever.

Moreover, at one point I began to feel that I was Success itself. I was a leader, I was a badass. Without me, all operations would grind to a halt. This perspective was shared by all the members of my team. Back then we were confident that the leader was more important than the process. If it was us who created and launched the process which brought such financial success and fortune, then that’s how it would stay as long we were the ones managing it. Without us, the company would instantly fall apart.

Perhaps we were dizzy with success and big money.

At some point we made an emotion-based decision to leave, thinking that without us the business would go bankrupt. Alas, we thought wrong. It wasn’t the company that went bankrupt — it was us. The company not only survived but elevated to a new level. Back then, none of us were familiar with what I now regard as the principal law of life and business: the process is always stronger than the person.

No matter how talented, powerful, and intelligent a leader you may be, the process will be stronger than you. A properly structured and organized process will outlast any person, even its founder.

So that’s how I went bankrupt. It’s still not a sensation I find easy to articulate: only yesterday you had millions in the account, felt that you owned the world, and today you’re hurtling head-first into the negatives, utterly dispensable to the world.

Falling always hurts, but it hurts even more from the height of a millionaire. After all, it’s not just the bank account that takes the hit, but the self-esteem along with it.

The bankruptcy process consisted of three stages. The first was the most difficult and painful: I hadn’t yet fully grasped the fact that success and wealth were a thing of the past, and I still considered myself a winner, on top of the world. In reality, I was essentially face-planting into the ground. The situation had changed rapidly, and I was yet to catch up.

The second stage came next: digging into myself and the situation, ceaselessly analyzing my mistakes, relentlessly suffering. This stage can often last an unspecified amount of time, the problem being that while in this stage you simply continue to fall, over and over again.

This is why it is crucial to stop yourself in time and refocus on the third stage — the creation of a new process. This is like a rebirth. It started the moment I stopped recalling the victories of the old days, when I finally turned my attention to something new, when I quit comparing myself to whomever it may be, and especially to myself — to who I was before I went bankrupt.

Fortunately, I realized in good time that sitting down and feeling sorry for myself was a dead end, a deterioration of sorts, a path that led to nothing good. A new process had to be created, and then worked at. A dream had to be sparked. I suddenly realized that even this situation had something positive to offer: newfound experience, knowledge, and skills. The hardest thing at that moment was to switch off emotions and switch on the mind.

Bankruptcy is also a process, and (like any other process) it is, therefore, stronger than you. This means that if you start feeding it through bitterness, resentment, or scapegoating, one day it will consume you. On the other hand, abstracting it in order to extract the maximum benefit from it can turn bankruptcy into a springboard.

Bankruptcy teaches one of the most important life lessons: it helps you understand who you really are, and to what heights you can still rise. Everyone falls, but not everyone gets back up.

At this point, I realized that when launching a new process, reaction and adaptation is critical. I could, after all, carry on wallowing in sadness… or I could transform the melancholy into enthusiasm, and anticipate the day I put my valuable experience to good use.

It’s not bankruptcy that destroys people, but their attitude towards bankruptcy. Everything depends on how you look at it, how you react to it emotionally, how and to what you shift your attention. When there is full awareness of the situation, it cannot destroy you. It only destroys the wrong attitude.

When I finally realized this, I began regaining lost ground, step by step.

The bankruptcy itself resulted from a number of factors: my overconfidence, the economic situation, conflicts between partners, the emotional walk out on the company, and unrestrained and meaningless expenditures. Many things played a role. But what is to gain from blaming others? From blaming myself? Life gave me a challenge, and I took it. I had to start over: the heavy workloads, non-stop activity, sleepless nights, new encounters, new mistakes, and first results. I initiated the process, and it carried me through.

Time passed, and I reached millionaire status once again — only this time, the capital was in euros.

Here is my take-away lesson from the first failure. There are all kinds of situations in life; as we grow and gain experience, we’re bound to encounter crises and become bankrupt in the most varying aspects of life. The important thing to understand is that crises need to be worked through with sensibility to be overcome. For a long time I followed the usual procedure of rising — declining — free-falling — nullifying — slowly recovering — and rising again, which is probably at least in part familiar to most of us. But with all the energy, time, and money this procedure can take, it’s natural to speculate whether there’s a way to bypass it, and it turns out oftentimes there is — the moment you feel that there is a crisis ahead, start working on it, ahead of time. Reinforce and stabilize all internal resources before the nullifying hits.

Imagine that you need to climb up an infinitely high ladder. However, this ladder is unstable: the first step is loose, and the cracks are spreading to higher steps. Reinforce this step, ensure that it is stable. Then you may continue to the second and the third. Feel the confidence and composure with which you continue the ascent, because now, you are sure that the ladder will hold out and not let you fall. It is the same in life. Try to bolster any situation leading to a crisis or bankruptcy with the help of your internal reserves: your experience, your confidence, your goals, and, perhaps most crucially, your dreams. At first, this may happen only at the nullifying stage, but after some time that nullifying moment will become more foreseeable and the crisis response may be initiated before the crisis itself even occurs. And do you know what will happen then? Not only will you acquire more time and energy, but it is then that you will feel incredible and newfound growth and personal formidability.

Looking back, I see a difficult path stretching back from 1996. What positions haven’t I held in that time: I’d been a vice-president, a top-consultant, a member of the board of directors, a coach, an auctioneer. In each position, I had to face the peculiarities of national mentalities and widely varying business approaches. This molded my entrepreneurship into a completely new format. Or rather un-molded the one I had. Once the more stultified conceptions lost their rigidity, I became an entrepreneur who reacts to changes in the market like a school of fish reacts to shifts in their environment, seamlessly adapting to them as they occur. It made me a person of change. I’m afraid neither of changing myself nor of the fact that the entire world is always changing. Change is an opportunity to try yourself out again, to get a feel for what you’re capable of. Changes are new steps on the stairway to success.

Some people tell me they’re afraid of change. I tell them, Then you are afraid of yourself! If you are afraid of change, then you will never know your full potential, which will lead only to loss. Change is a major law of life, one of its only constants. Everything in this world is built on the idea of evolution. Without evolution, we wouldn’t be what we are today. The ability to adapt, or at least to be open to change, is akin to a leap of faith. Just have faith and… jump. Only not down, but up.

In 2015 I had the idea to create my own networking company, and even though I was determined for it to become a reality, in the first stages I was caught again in the trap of my own ego. My ego was convinced that the market would respond favorably to the product we devised. I was confident it would propel me to immediate success! The market gave its feedback, and it was diametrically opposite to what I expected. Rather than insisting on what I had in mind, I decided to infuse more awareness into the endeavor, to listen, and to stop resisting. I realized that the fact that the world is in a continuous state of evolution should be embraced and that I should trust this process and follow suit.

Business, just as other facets of life, often sees two extreme viewpoints. For conservatives, abiding by the established, time- and society-tested rules are the governing principles, whereas innovators hold that old rules are a thing of the past and only innovations must be used. I’m not a person of extremes, neither a conservative nor an innovator. My stance and worldview are somewhere in the middle. I don’t resist the old world that at some point established the rules, and I don’t resist the innovative changes of evolution. I use one and the other in both my professional and personal life, and then I create my own. My take on it is, Respect the old rules, and have no resistance to evolution. The success point lies at the intersection of the old and the new. This is the point at which balance exists. Once a balance between the old world and the future is found, there is harmony, a natural result of which is a more conscious perception of all processes.

Therefore, when the market gave its verdict despite my expectations, I decided that it was right, and adjusted the business process accordingly. This produced results, and it was when we hit the 15 million dollar benchmark that I felt I had created a revolution.

There it was, the peak! Now I could sit back and enjoy success. Or so it seemed…

Despite the victories, I still felt haunted by important unanswered questions:

How to interact with a world which is ceaselessly changing?

How to keep up with all the needs, requirements, and trends that pop up on an almost daily basis?

How to maintain success in business and harmony within the family?

How to develop an interesting and self-sufficient personality?

How to remain mentally stable and not get exhausted by the flow of information washing over us every day?

I speak daily with all sorts of people from different corners of the world and can confirm that they all share the same fears: being too late, facing misfortune, struggling to make a sharp turn, losing pace, slowing down. In other words, the fear of failing to rise to the challenges which life throws at us every day.

I’m afraid of being left on the sidelines of life, I get told. I’m afraid to lose.

Does any of that sound familiar?

We live in a unique period, a time of globally instantaneous changes. Numerous remarks have been made about it by thinkers who saw it coming, though I’m curious how these figures, such as Confucius or Lao-Tzu, would have navigated through these turbulent times. Would they be able to keep their peace of mind and continue to philosophize calmly while other philosophers tread on their heels on the Internet, or demand they form a personal brand for promotion on social media?

Societal changes that used to take years, if not decades, to unfold may now take effect in a matter of weeks through the interconnected global web. It’s not impossible to imagine ourselves going to sleep with one set of rules and behavioral algorithms and waking up to the rules completely altered and the algorithms no longer functional. The knowledge and skills to which we are accustomed may rapidly turn obsolete and leave us needing to adapt, adjust, learn, update and renew.

People may find themselves drowning in the flow of information and, like Alice in Wonderland, having to give it their all just to remain where they are, while getting to another place would require going even faster. The world challenges us every day, and every day we challenge ourselves. The life of a modern-day human is a series of such challenges.

Life is an endless marathon, with ever-changing

goals, objectives, and achievements

We may raise the bar of expectation, load ourselves and the people around us with new responsibilities and run, run, run. Somewhere midway through this marathon, we may lose our strength, energy, and self-confidence, then fall and realize that we can’t get up. We’ll hear the familiar voice in our head: Congratulations, you have fallen behind everyone yet again! Time to start all over again.

The world has run us over and we are crushed, no longer able to rise to the daily calls of life, nor keep up with its many challenges. We are unhappy and displeased with ourselves, no longer feeling joy when the morning alarm notifies us of a new day. We hate that alarm, and the new day it’s trying to draw our attention to, and all those global changes to which we can’t adapt.

Stop!

Take a slow inhale and an even slower exhale. What if that’s just the way we’re interpreting the situation?

We were in such a rush to get to the next level of financial success and improved quality of life that we left behind some important questions: what is my true place in this world? Where is the real me? What if the challenges that we took on every day weren’t meant for us, but for others? What if our personal challenges remained unclaimed?

Was that a little unexpected?

I may have some news for you. Of course, both good and bad. The bad news is that the world will always be a step ahead. The sooner we accept that, the better. Moreover, in a few decades, the outer workings of society will change so much that most of us probably lack the imagination to even visualize it now. Our knowledge and skills may become obsolete.

The good news is that we can also change. Not just by remolding ourselves into something different, but by increasing the very plasticity that makes molding possible in the first place, allowing us to seamlessly take up any given shape a particular situation may demand, and being free to reshape once more once the situation plays itself out.

That’s one of two ways of preparing for the constant flow of change that is life; the other, as far as I can tell, involves complete indestructibility (if you are immortal and absolutely unwavering in all dimensions of your being, then this might be a better path for you).

So it seems the way to prepare for change is to become changeable (somewhat of a truism, but so are many other important concepts), meaning we can start preparing for what