Namaste everyone. I am your host, Ritu Kant Ojha. I have been receiving queries from some of my listeners to help them create their personal brand. I will address the topic of creating personal brand from next episode. 

I want to share a question that a listener sent today… and I found it so interesting that I decided to do a podcast on it… that serves as a foundation for creating personal brand podcasts.

So he says he is not enjoying the business he is in and while he thought he would be super happy when he crosses the benchmark he had set in his business, he is actually quite unhappy. He asked me how I decided to move away from what I was not enjoying…. to doing things that I loved. So here’s my story in short with the lessons that I learnt. 

I turned entrepreneur in 2013 and by 2016 I realised that I was not running the business…. but the business was running me. I had a formidable team, a nice office, the earnings were decent and I had turned profitable within first year of starting-up.

But, I figured out….that this is not me. I was making money but wasn’t enjoying myself at all. I was working like crazy. My daughter was born in 2015 and that kind of changed something inside me. 

For the next one year I spent much less time with my daughter than I could have spent. I was a journalist earlier and loved writing, but despite getting opportunities to write for top media houses, I had no time. 

By early 2017 I started losing interest in chasing business, doing business development in the traditional sense and started to dig deeper on what I wanted. 

For a long time, I was itching to produce short films.

I scripted, directed and produced two short films and a web series in 2018. Since I was so passionate about conversations, I started my research on how smartphones are impacting face to face communication and that lead to my book Real Conversations In Digital Age that was released worldwide in December 2019. 

So, I was able to achieve two of my dreams - of creating short films and writing a non-fiction. I was also able to get back to what I love most — meeting people and exchanging ideas. I started travelling more and finding opportunities to understand from them how they were upgrading themselves, are they following their dreams, role of conversations in their lives and so on.

During these meetings, people started asking me if I can train their team on conversations, few of the leading educational institutions like IIMs and IITs invited me to give a talk around conversations. I started working with individuals and different teams on helping them manage disagreements in workplace, creating a personal brand and training their sales force apart from grabbing the professional speaking opportunities that came my way. I started getting invitations to moderate events ranging from budget to entrepreneurship. 

So, was I making a lot of money? No. 

Was I happier than before? Certainly yes. This is who I was….. doing what I truly loved….. and that was conversations! 

And yeah, how can I forget….doing podcast was one of my dreams that I had given up and the lock-down allowed me to achieve that dream too.

Now, not everyone has this kind of a story or similar dreams. It could be going a top business school, or getting that dream job, or starting your own business, or maybe quitting the urban life and become a farmer - I mean yeah a lot of people do that as well. It all starts with real conversations with your self. You can also call them inner conversations.

The lockdown has given us that opportunity to dive inside, dig deeper and ask ourselves whether what we are doing is in sync with what we really want to do in life. If it is not, dig even deeper and write down what you REALLY would love to do. 

You know, A top business news anchor moved to Himalayas, a client of mine sold off his IT company