Shilpa

When we are on the verge of a transition, we usually define it in visible terms — a new role, new responsibilities, a step into management, into leadership. Yet I have never seen a visible transition truly happen without a parallel transition within.

That truth took seventeen years to arrive. Here is where it came from — first at work, then at home.

My career did not begin in a boardroom. It began on a retail shop floor — learning what the day asks of the last person on the ground. That respect never left.

The years after took me through retail, consumer goods, big tech, and one of India's fastest-growing startups. I built the machinery careers run on. Frameworks. Processes. Promotions. I watched careers get built, and not built. I watched hundreds of people cross the lines that change everything — individual contributor to manager, manager to leader.

Through all of it, one truth held. The visible transition is researched, documented, full of patterns. The transition within has no pattern. It is personal. Often painful. Unique to every life. It surfaces as confusion. As discomfort with how things are. As the quiet frustration of not being able to change what you want to change — or do what you want to do. It is rarely spoken of. Often it is not even noticed by the person it is happening to.

I am an engineer by education. It never left me. The engineer in me kept looking for the system. This is exactly where the system runs out.

Home taught me the same lesson, less gently. For my first forty-five days as a mother, I was a headless chicken. Then I learned to breastfeed. To bathe her. I told a wise lady: I have got the hang of things now. She smiled. "There is no final getting the hang of it with children. The moment you think you have figured it out, they grow older." The most documented transition on earth — and no manual for the person you are quietly becoming.

I spent years trying to change organisations. Culture. Systems. Mindsets. And arrived at the biggest realisation of my life: real change starts with one person. If you want to change the world around you, begin with yourself.

So this is my place in the world: sitting with people on the verge, where the current way of being has stopped making sense. A new parent. A new manager. A new leader. A new role, or the end of one. The inner work cannot be rushed. But it can be held. That is what a deep coaching session is — a space built to hold it. I trained with the Center for Transformational Coaching and Back to Source. My own shift began there, and it continues. From inside that shift came the call — to hold that space for others.

I still lead HR inside a global organisation, which knows of this practice and has given its blessing. The Being Space stays deliberately small. A handful of clients at a time. An hour, every two weeks. Six sessions across three months.

The résumé lives on LinkedIn. The reason lives on this page.