Hello friends, A question I keep returning to is one that is very personal to me: How do I know if I am being resilient in a given situation, or if I have simply succumbed to inertia? The journey of building something on your own is one of patience. Outcomes do not follow actions that linearly, and sometimes you do not even know when they are likely to arrive. This is very different from the corporate world I inhabited for nineteen years. Work hard or work smart, and in most cases you can see...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Hello friends, For the past three months, I have been trying to track my eating. Not calories, not macros. Just a simple daily log of what I ate, roughly how much, how stressed I was, and whether I moved my body that day. It sounds easy (theoretically). It is not. The mental effort of recalling a full day's food, combined with the discomfort of seeing how blindly I actually eat versus how I imagine I eat, means this habit has resisted every system I have thrown at it. I set reminders. I added...
18 days ago • 5 min read
Hello friends, The comments on last week's edition - Addition vs Subtraction: The Hidden Bias Keeping Your Plate Too Full - illustrated what I see constantly in coaching: knowing that boundaries are needed and actually putting them in place are worlds apart. One reader shared they had to work with the guilt of saying no with their therapist. Another said it's just so easy to keep adding, subtraction feels impossible. Both responses point to the same truth: boundaries are hard, even when we...
25 days ago • 5 min read
Hello friends, My friend has a simple rule: every time she buys new clothes, something from her wardrobe goes into her donation pile. One in, one out. It sounds simple and obvious, but pay attention to what she's actually doing. She is refusing to let addition happen without subtraction. She's treating her closet as finite space with clear priorities. Most of us add to our wardrobes instead of subtracting straight away. We wait until we can't close the cupboard doors, and then we purge in...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello friends, This year, I started tracking my daily plans and learning notes in a Bullet Journal. My last BuJo experiment in 2018 lasted a few weeks before I gave up on it. That may have been because I over-engineered it instead of keeping it simple. This is something many of us tend to do. Instead of sticking to our plan, we try to do more than we intended. We keep stretching our tasks and goals until we burn out. This illusion of time is something I see often with my clients. At 9:30 pm,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hello friends, I’ve spent the week working with clients on how to harness their energy so they can keep moving towards their goals, especially when it doesn’t seem possible to align intentions with actions. As we settle into week 4 of 2026, some of us may already notice it’s getting harder to stay consistent with the goals or intentions we set at the start of the month. Some of us may have abandoned those goals by now. The beginning of the year is like a clean, tidy house, with no one in it...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello friends, I am now fully back to work after my annual vacation visiting family in Chennai, celebrating the harvest festival, Pongal, and spending the week in ‘pause mode’. During the break, most of my routines went for a toss. Regular habits could not withstand the unstructured environment, so I went into maintenance mode. I had only one habit that I ticked off daily. I suspended everything else. They could all wait until I was back home, in my own environment where I could control my...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello friends, I took a week’s break, and though it was hectic, it gave me a much-needed pause. I had my sister and nephew over, and we had such a good time together. We painted, played games, listened to music, tried new dishes, and had long conversations. Every year, we try a new activity together, usually some kind of craft. He is not too keen on drawing, colouring, or painting. Neither am I. So this time, instead of our usual origami adventures, we decided to explore painting together. I...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Hello Friends, It’s that time of the year when you are thinking about goals, intentions, and habits for 2026. For many, motivation is high right now, fuelled by possibilities of what could be radically different this year. Others have stepped away from goals and resolutions altogether, content to be carried along by how things unfold. I find myself somewhere in the middle of these extremes. I don’t have new goals that I’m setting this year, as I continue to work towards the goals and habits...
2 months ago • 3 min read
