The nice-guy mentality dogs India, says Arfeen Khan

Arfeen Khan came into the spotlight when he began working with Hrithik Roshan. The actor even released his book last year. Over close to two decades, Arfeen has helped over 500,000 people in over 43 countries creating personal and professional metamorphosis. From CEOs, students, Bollywood celebrities and industrialists — his clients hail from every field. Through his company, Peak Performance Seminars, with offices in the UK and Mumbai, Arfeen has travelled around the globe to offer business solutions. He has spoken to over 150 corporations, including global Fortune 500 companies, and his presentations are said to produce an immediate reduction in conflict between staff members, improvement in communication and a massive increase in work performance.

When I ask him about being a life coach, he’s quick to correct me. “I’m not a life coach, I’m a performance coach which means I enhance mental performance. It can work in any area of your life while a life coach will probably give you an advice. In my opinion it’s overrated because who the hell knows about life? I can’t give you an advice on how to live life, but I can change your perspective on how you view the world. In a nutshell, what I do is, I change the way people view their world. I don’t give them solutions to specific problems. How can I do that?”
He explains with an example. “You make money, you lose money. It happens all your life. I can bet you a million dollars that your belief system is about money. You may have some past memories attached to it that are negative so whenever you’re making abundant wealth, your brain says get rid of it.”  So what Arfeen does is, he tweaks and changes that perspective. “Once I got a cocaine addict and in four hours, I got him rid of his addiction. I just take their perspective and I show them what could happen if they carry on. They’ll change. I’m more of a performance coach.”    

‘If your life is a mess, deal with it’
“I was young and ambitious and I knew I was intelligent. but when it came to exams, I’d flunk every time. I’d think, ‘What am I going to do with my life? I don’t have the education and the background’. I thought to myself, ‘I’m not dumb, I’m fairly intelligent’. After I failed in my exams, my father asked ‘What are you going to do with your life in the next five years?’ I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be something, there’s got to be a way for me to become popular’. I started researching and I came across a few development programmes.” 

He wanted to take charge of his life. Then he came across few behavioural sciences like Neural Linguistic Programming and mastered them. “I would go to someone with a phobia and they would get rid of their phobia like that. I would meet someone not confident of public speaking and fix it. When I applied it to myself, I started a business, when I was 20 years old and in two years, I was financially free, I was driving a Ferrari, with a complete turnaround in personality because I changed myself. But then, what happens is, I make the money and within the next few years, I’m broke. Because when you make the money quickly you do tend to blow it too quickly. I was really down and out. I discovered that all the successful people in the world who are happy, know how to manage their emotions. They don’t believe that life is about positive thinking which I don’t believe by the way, which I think is a total waste of time. If your life is a mess, it’s a mess, deal with it. So I decided to look at life the way it is. I modified my own behavioural methods, and I started implementing them on my staff and team.”

One seminar led to another 
“One day someone invited me to speak. It was a Rotary club type of an event and I got an amazing response. Because I had gone through it myself, I knew how it worked. So many years, 47 countries now, half a million people. No matter which country you go to, everybody is the same. I can take a middle class, an upper class person and a poor person and they’ll have identical problems. No difference. Lucky for me, my job is quite easy. In a nutshell I got into this not because I wanted to do it but because it had such a profound impact on me. I realised there are so many people out there who are unhappy. There’s so much pressure on people - ‘have money, have a car’. People are having a tough time right now. In India especially, relationships are a mess, people are in financial debt, they don’t know what to do. I can’t tell people to be positive.” 

‘Indians are people pleasers’
“The problem with India is that people are brought up with the mindset of - not to make mistakes. ‘You make a mistake, you’re punished’. If you’re punished, next time you won’t take a risk, you’ll play safe. You’ll find here, children when they grow up, when they are 24-25, they’re still looking for parental guidance, which I find nice yet strange. They can’t make a decision, they’ve been told all their lives not to make mistakes. Abroad one good thing is that you’re encouraged to make mistakes. If you make a mistake there, it’s not frowned upon. Having said that, things are changing here now. We’re also told to please people. Everyone is a pleaser here. Men have massive complex because women are becoming stronger and men are turning into pleasers. There’s a conflict. So if there’s one thing I could change in India would be the nice guy mentality - ‘pass your exams, don’t make mistakes, keep quiet’.”  

He adds, “On the other hand, you’ve got so much culture here, long hours of hard work, bonding, entrepreneurship and high energy people. If I were to pick between living in the West or living in India, I’d pick India any day. The challenge here is everybody wants to be Western. Nothing wrong with that. When people are trained to be someone they are not, there’s a massive conflict. When I cam here first, most of the problems were financial - ‘how do I make money, how do I gain stability?’ Today 80 per cent of the problems are relationship. There are relationship challenges galore. Divorce rates are going up. It’s not because women are becoming independent but because people can’t keep up with the really fast changing world.” 

Hrithik and I 
“I’m not Hrithik’s life coach and I want to make it very clear. We’re friends. We share ideas. There’s no hiring a life coach to make life better.” When I ask him how Hrithik sounds preachy and philosophical in most of his interviews, he’s quick to defend the superstar. “ In my opinion, the way he spokes may come across as philosophical but what you hear is genuinely the man.” I don’t think he’s stubborn. I didn’t have to guide him. It was the other way around. He guided me on how to lose weight. I followed his advice to the T for eight weeks and I lost 12 kilos. I pushed myself over the limit. We hang out. We have coffee. We talk. We share information. I ask him, how to increase my metabolic rate, he’ll ask me how to gain focus. How to do things he wants to do. He’s an exceptional guy and whatever he touches will work. He wants to become better. Being a superstar, he can impact the world in a profound way. He’s got loads of challenges in his life and he’s overcome them. He’s good at what he does. I didn’t help him.”

He recalls his first meeting with the superstar. “I have known him for four years. We met through his trainer Satya who’s been a friend of mine for 14 years. The conversation started with ‘What do you do? What’s that? Never heard of that before’. We started hanging out and became friends. Then for losing weight, I thought, who’s the best guy I could think of and I thought of Mr Roshan. He’s very open with information and he’s not shy to share it with anyone. He gave me the guidance.”

Brush with films 
“I was in a movie called Mere Brother Ki Dulhan. I’m not an actor but someone tricked me into going for an audition. I play an autistic guy and I look big in the film. Then I lost weight.”

Personal life 
“I have a wife who’s amazing. We don’t have children. We had a miscarriage. I love children. I’d love to have four or five by now. I’m from London. I keep coming to India on and off. My parents are from Kolkata but they’ve been in London for 60 years now. I met my wife in Mumbai. My wife now is an actor on TV - Sara Khan. She’s come in a lot of TV shows. It’s been a passion of her. It’s very strange I met her through a friend of mine. I saw her. I met her two to three times. I said to my friend, I’m going to marry her one day. I don’t believe in love at first sight but I just knew.”

Books 
“I have written three books. Become Rich Now With Network Marketing, The Secret Millionaire Blueprint, You Can You Will It’s Your Choice. The fourth one is being published by Penguin Books. It’s really bizarre because I failed in English three times. I never passed. Now I’m writing books. I say that not because I’m proud of that. 
I transcribed all my chapters in my first book and it was published by McMillan. Next one I self published it because the publishers weren’t pushing it the way I wanted it to be pushed. I must have sold 90,000 copies without going in the book store. Now my book is actually going to be launched by Hirthik with a foreword by him in August in Delhi. The one published by Penguin is to be delivered in October. It’s called - Where will you be in five years time.”

My seminars - live reality TV
“I work with corporates and ask them why would you hire someone only on the basis of their degree. How about the way they communicate, they move forward. In my line of work, my seminars have gone from 50 people to a few thousands. If you come to my seminar, you’ll be shocked. Some woman will stand up and say, ‘my husband is a b******’. People in India don’t do that usually because one is not comfortable having a conversation. It’s like a live reality show. It’s amazing how India is changing. This wouldn’t happen 10 years ago.”  
 
Life coach coming out of corner
“Ultimately results will decide. I believe in ETR: Earn the right - for me to come and coach you, I need to earn that right. How do I earn that right? I should have sufficient evidence to prove that I’m capable enough to do what I do. Now unfortunately this industry, people read a motivational book, they mug it up and they become a life coach. It’s dangerous. Most people who come to me are not the people who are depressed, they are the kind of people who want to make a difference to their lives. A lot of life coaches deal with people who are depressed. Next five years it’s going to be a jungle, it happened in the US early on and over a period of time, there will be one or two or three, who’ll be set apart from everyone else.”