I was 12 years old when my class teacher punished the naughtiest boy in class by making him sit next to me. I cried the whole day. I skipped school for almost a month after that. Looking back, it sounds funny. Back then, it felt like the end of the world.
That was me for a long time - the quiet girl nobody really noticed. I wasn't the one with big dreams or a big voice. I just watched, absorbed, and kept to myself.
At 19, I had my whole life planned out. Neat, proper, exactly how it "should" be. Almost none of it happened that way.
I won't pretend that phase didn't break me a little. But it also made me curious about something I'd never really thought about before - how the mind actually works, and why some people move through life so differently than others.
I went to Pune for my MBA, and took up a role at a corporate training company on the side. My job was in marketing, but I spent every spare hour I had sitting in on Life Skills sessions run by a senior at the company.
I wasn't even attending as a participant most days - I was serving tea and snacks in the room, just so I could stay and listen. That's really where it all began.
I started training in NLP soon after. Slowly, I began taking small sessions of my own. The audiences were tiny in the beginning - sometimes it was just my mother and my best friend in the room.
People called me a "modern-day baba." Some called me a fanatic. I kept going anyway, because I believed in it more than I believed the criticism.
It took years - close to five - of showing up, again and again, before things really started to shift. Along the way, I built HappyMinds.
Today, when I announce a seminar, seats fill up within the hour, and I still have people writing to me disappointed they couldn't get in on time.
I owe most of this to my mother, my husband, and our families -
the people
who stayed in my corner even when the room was empty.
Children don't need us to correct them constantly. They need us to actually be there first. It's the one thing I keep coming back to, in every seminar and every conversation I have with a parent.
Every "difficult" child is really just an unseen one. Before I ever try to fix behaviour, I try to understand what's sitting underneath it.
What worked for my two kids might not work for yours. My job isn't to hand you a rulebook - it's to help you understand your own child better than any rulebook could.
The wins are for that day. The setbacks are for that day too. I show up again the next morning, and that's enough.
Everything I share - on stage, in a seminar, or in a room with just a handful of parents - is something I've lived through first, not something I read and repeated.
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