Whenever someone asks me about myself, I wonder what to say.
Shall I speak about my journey to date, my country, my work, family, or I shall speak about the roots of my being and the reasons for my becoming?
While a part of me wants to tell stories, another part of me is too exhausted from the limitations of language.
Roots of my being
Born to teacher parents, and both of them being first in their families to go to college… So, in our home, in my father’s presence, you would be either reading a book or will be hit by one.
My parents’ big dreams for their children made us switch schools often, and every change was an upgrade in the social and cultural capital. I started teaching junior class students ever since I entered high school to earn my pocket money. I enjoyed my students’ success as much as I enjoyed my financial freedom. Still, the idea of choosing a career in teaching felt limiting to me.
Eight transfers later, I completed my education as a Master in Computer Application with the taste of the privilege of studying in the city’s best school, college, and university.
Becoming
I was 22 — young, hungry, and foolish. Every day, I boarded the train with my corporate world dream, engineering & management training, and learned values. It was a 4-hour daily commute from Rohtak, my native city, to Delhi. I chose this over a fifteen-minute commute to a teaching job in my native city.
I learned about the corporations I wanted to grow with. Soon I was working with a renowned firm on their biggest engineering project. I moved to Delhi. My starting salary equaled my parent’s monthly earnings at the time of their retirement from their government job. I felt gratitude and success, security and freedom, connection and expansion, all at the same time.
While I was celebrating my choice and daydreaming, the perceived impact of Y2K and the real impact of the 09/11 World Trade Centre incident knocked me into reality. I lost my first engineering job in the first year itself.
I packed my 11 months of experience, and my heart filled with the tension of my two primitive life values — safety and freedom — boarded the train back home.
My family reminded me of my teaching passion and advised me to take a teaching job. 4 hours of a daily commute returned. Those long days drove every ounce of energy out of me, physically, mentally, emotionally. It was my belief, faith, hope, and the taste of my newfound value, Freedom, that kept me going.
Fast forward 16 years, when I had experience working with fortune 50 firms, the taste of cultures from four continents, creative connections from dozens of transformational engagements, and I’ve also learned how to oscillate well between security and freedom, something went off balance. I was in the middle muddle, overwhelmed between family, parenthood, my love for work, and the need to see my expansion that I was used to since childhood.
Middle muddle
Despite my love for Alexandra Bracken and her imaginative mapping of colors with children’s neurodegeneration condition in her The Darkest Minds series, the colors didn’t speak of creativity to me. Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue were the personality types, and I struggled to find the place and space of my color.
I had no clarity of what I was looking for. But I dreamed of finding an Elixir, an alchemic preparation, which has always saved the souls in pain in my childhood stories told by my grandparents.
I discovered my passion for diversity and inclusion at work, and my dream of creating a world where everyone is seen and heard from the space of equality set me on a new and rewarding career path.
“If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible,” I thought.
After a long time, I saw myself from the observer’s eyes. I saw myself trying to find the joy inside the validation of a good mother, good daughter, good wife, good sister, good friend, and a good colleague. I wished to go invisible.
Reentry to the Expansion
It was time to make space for discomfort.
Only with the heart can one see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye ~The Little Prince.
While the newfound insight inspired me to oscillate between being and becoming, it also terrified me. For me, unknown presented an odd rarity; it sounded like reentry to a child’s mind, who is silly, witty, kind, and compassionate, all at once.
I expanded my perspective by learning human psychology, specializing in child psychology; I did executive coach training, facilitated workshops, and learned the Inclusion & Diversity frameworks from industry experts. I integrated the parts of me, piece by piece, similar to the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi. You can find my “Leadership formula of expansion” here.
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The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. ~ Carl Rogers
I can only tell about myself at this moment. I am a flawsome mom, a teacher, and a self-proclaimed DIP (discoveries-in-progress). Every time I discover a new part of me, I integrate it in me with the speck of compassion and care. I relate my identity with the” Kintsugi,” the Japanese art of
embracing broken and whole. The big parts of my Kintsugi are parenting, leadership and writing.
My hope
My journey has equipped me with a unique lens to see and understand an individual’s need for different expansions at different times in their journeys.
As a leader who has experienced both the advantages of privilege and the sting of stigma, I challenge leaders’ assumptions about self, leadership, and others while providing frameworks that help them take inspired action today for a more inclusive tomorrow.
We are not in the space that we could proudly hand over to future leaders. Our humanism, systemic thinking, and integration duties are more important than ever today to create an inclusive world. My hopes for us is that we together create a new pathway by breaking our old thought patterns, and redefine what it means to truly belong—in the workplace, in our families, and our communities.