Natasha and the Levels

"The time will come when you'll be standing where I am."

That's what my sponsor used to say at presentations. He'd stand up in front of people, and I'd sit in the audience. My job was to invite people, nothing more.

And I'd laugh. Honestly. I was sure I'd never in my life stand where he stood. The stage was for other people.

Years went by. I'd long since been running my own presentations and trainings. And only then did I learn that the state I'd been in back then had a name. It's called Despair. And it's not a life sentence — it's the first step.

Natasha was the one who told me about it.

Natasha and I were husband and wife back then. It was an intense chapter of my life.

She's an unusual person. A coach, a personal-growth trainer. A master of the Chinese tea ceremony. My life changed more than once just from being near her — sometimes from a single event.

The first thing I learned from her was a system of levels of personal growth.

I'll be honest: at first I was very skeptical about this system. I had dozens of trainings behind me already. What levels could there possibly be?

But there was no getting around it. I was living with someone who grew people using these levels.

Here's how Natasha worked. First she'd figure out what level a person was on. Then she'd run sessions with them and give them assignments. The person would work on themselves and start acting differently in their life.

In essence, she was doing the same thing I'd spent years traveling to trainings for. Just without the hall, without the stage — one on one with a person.

We lived together, and I saw it all with my own eyes. Sometimes I'd overhear a session. Natasha would tell me what was happening with her clients, what was changing in them. And I watched these people grow.

I also helped her package up her knowledge for the internet, to promote her coaching. And to package something, you have to actually understand it. That's how I slowly got into it. I started to understand what these levels actually were. To understand people. And to understand myself: so which level was I on, anyway?

The levels built themselves into me gradually. Not through a lecture, but through living alongside it.

Natasha didn't invent the system herself. Its foundation was laid by a writer and a sociologist back in Soviet times. For twenty-five years they traveled across the Soviet Union searching for a formula for talent, and they wrote a book called On the Nature of Talent. Natasha took their system and reworked it heavily for her own coaching. I'll walk you through it the way Natasha applied it, and the way I came to understand it.

There are eight levels in total. Most people live on the bottom four.

Despair. The person believes in nothing. Goes to work, burns through life. Sits on a bench outside their building and complains about everybody: the president's bad, the governor's bad, the neighbor's bad.

Searching for Meaning. The person has broken free of despair and is searching. "I don't know what to do, where to go." They start trying things: get into network marketing, switch from company to company, buy courses and never finish them.

Pleasure. The person hammered away at one thing for a long time, broke through, and it worked. "This feels amazing! This is great!" There are a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of businesses at this level.

Awareness. "I need to think about this." The person looks at every situation as a lesson and tries to figure out what inside themselves is getting in the way.

Next comes Talent. Here, the person does what they love, lights up doing it, and people can feel it. And above Talent come Genius, Sage, and Creator. Very few people ever make it there.

Today, I see myself somewhere between Awareness and Talent. And the path keeps going.

Remember that guy who laughed at his sponsor's words? As a speaker, I was in Despair back then. Not in my whole life — just in that particular role.

That's what Natasha explained to me. A level isn't a lifelong brand burned into you. It's a state, and it's different in different roles. In one role, you might already be enjoying real results, while in another, you're still sitting on the very bottom step.

And a leader in network marketing has a lot of roles — about thirteen of them: speaker, communicator, organizer, financial planner, and more. If you only work one "muscle," you end up lopsided. Like an athlete with enormous shoulders and a gut.

There's one more thing she said that stuck with me: network marketing is, by itself, a personal-growth training. The newbie's shaking, but they run their first presentation anyway. They might not even know they're growing. But they are.

These days, this system helps me live my life enormously.

A few minutes of ordinary conversation is all I need to tell what level someone's on. Every level has its own vocabulary. People tell you everything about themselves — you just have to listen.

And here's what that gave me. My expectations and illusions about people disappeared. If I can see where someone is right now, I have a rough idea how they'll act. They say something, do something, and it's not a surprise to me. It's just their step. Nothing to take personally.

For a leader, that's gold. You stop demanding things from people that they're not yet capable of. And you start giving them exactly what they need right now.

Here's what I understood then: a level isn't a label. A label says, "this is who you are, forever." A level says, "this is where you are right now, and there's another step ahead."

For years I carried the label "black box." The jewelry box of diamonds showed me what was actually inside me. And the levels became a map: where I was, and where to grow next.

But Natasha had another line, too: there's no point pushing someone up to the next level until they shift something inside themselves first.

She gave the assignments. The person did them, on their own.

Later, Natasha and I recorded video lessons together and broke down this whole system in detail. But that came after.

Back then, Natasha showed me the map. And in return, I brought her to Marik.

And there, at "Time, Vision, Purpose," something happened that's still hard to believe.