Interview with Dhanishtaa | Metamorphosis Coach | Astrologer | NLP | Influencer

How do you manage to keep going despite the challenges? What drives you?

Standing up for women, especially those who have been wronged by the patriarchy. Whenever I feel terrible, I remember how many women out there also feel the same, and that forces me to keep my hopes high. I want them to see a better tomorrow.

Besides the desire to independently finance my own necessities and comforts, my need to see monetary success is driven also by my desire to help acid attack survivors, domestic abuse survivors, and other classes of women that society shuns.

My need to see success in other areas – gaining knowledge and spreading it – is driven by my love for the subject and the process of change. My mentor Anil Thomas taught me that movement is the best healer, not time. That was the most important thing I had to learn to heal myself. Now I feel like it’s my mission to spread that knowledge.

Who do you believe has been the biggest source of motivation in your daily life?

My parents and grandparents have built me to be the way I am. My grandmother was the one that first introduced me to the idea of agnosticism. She believed in spiritual ideas from various religions – Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. She told me stories from all these cultures, and she often stressed that they were all saying the same thing in their own language.

Seeing her and my mother heal with the help of different spiritual experiences over my childhood, I developed the belief that there really was value in healing and in expressing your truth.

With that foundational belief, I think I was set up to be motivated to speak my truth, which is perhaps the reason why I was able to resist social pressures and make “crazy” decisions like staying away in the hills for almost a year. I’m always grateful to my mother and grandmother for that.

You are always positive and motivated, what keeps you going?

I am not always positive and motivated actually. I experience frequent lows. And I like that because I believe we humans have access to a range of emotions, and the moment we decide not to feel negative feelings, our capacity to feel positive ones reduces as well. 

So I feel my negative emotions very strongly, and I allow them to move me to a more productive place. If they’re coming up, that’s for a reason. They need to be dealt with as such.

That said, sometimes I can’t find the reason so soon. At those times, I reach out to the people I love and allow myself to receive from them the energy that I’m lacking. Usually, it does the trick 😉

What are some of the strategies that you believe have helped you grow as a person? 

Learning something new about myself every day. People will tell you to learn something new every day, but that’s easy. I could say I learned today that someone in my class cheated on her boyfriend. Big deal! If it doesn’t change anything in me, why should I care?

The focus should be on learning something new about yourself – the way the world sees you, the makeup of your inner world, and the interaction between the two. That’s where the juice is.

(a) Scheduling a time to slow down: Meditation and reading allowed me to finally get that space to slow down, soften my thoughts, and allow my gut to speak to me again.

(b) Dancing – allowing the body to move when it wants to is the easiest way to feel confident, get a laugh from people, and reconnect with the present moment.

In your opinion, what are the keys to success?

> Define your success. If you don’t know what success is, there’s no point chasing it. Find a way to put it into a vision, a sound, a feeling. Then it’ll be real and you’ll be able to chase it.

> Feel all your emotions and allow them to move you. As Sri Akarshana puts it, emotion = energy in motion. Allow the motion to give you momentum instead of squeezing your willpower dry.

> Leave identity behind. Focus on becoming like water – taking on any form you need to take on in the present moment.

> Find a way to keep at least one element of nature near you at all times. A plant is great, an animal is better, and the forest or beach is the best. Nature is real. Everything else is made up. Stay with reality, or at least have a reminder of it, so you can come back when you get lost in the world of social structures.

> Listen to people’s language carefully. It has clues about their perspective, and that’s the most important thing to understand if you want to live in society.

What are the business mantras you have embraced as you sought to establish your success story?

I have found that being vulnerable is the best way to build connections. And a strong network of connections is what makes a business.

 

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What has worked well for you so far?

The most important thing that I’ve had to learn is that the world of categories is fake and exists only in school. Real-life is living in an ecosystem, not in the world of one subject, one perspective, or one idea.

The most important learning we need to have before starting a business is that no perspective holds more power, no matter how much science and authority it has behind it.

We’ve seen that clearly in these times. It’s important not to hate the other, but to integrate it. Whether it’s in society, in your friend circle, in your family, or yourself. The only way forward is together. That doesn’t mean you desert your values, it just means you make enough room for the coexistence of all.

On the action level, that looks like:

– Telling people when they are not the right fit for your product/service

– Focusing on the transformation in the people you’re serving, not on the sale

– Selling only what you truly believe can make a change

– Listening FIRST

– Confronting yourself before starting that argument or that meeting with the team.

Please share with us a unique challenge you faced in your early career?

I’m still in my early career. I face quite a bit of opposition and hatred for my beliefs, my gender and my body. I’m still learning to effectively manage these problems, but my learning so far is that hate is really important. If nobody is opposing you, nobody really likes you either. It is the opposition that shows you that what you’re doing is valuable, even if just to some.

Also, on the individual level, hate always comes from hatred within oneself for what that action represents. I saw this in action when I found that many of the people who ‘hated’ my work were unable to accept their own sexuality, and still live in a world where everyone else’s validation drives their self-esteem. Then their position became clearer. I’d be lying if I said that took away all the pain of seeing such seething comments, but I can say it’s far reduced now.

What advice would you give students and young professionals who want to have a successful life?

Go find your salvation in tales untold. No one else’s story will be half as good as the one you create when you forget about all the tales you’ve heard and write your own.

 

Follow Dhanishtaa At:

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/dhanishtaa_/

Please don’t forget to read – Interview with Ora Nadrich | Coach | International Keynote Speaker | Author | Founder & President at The Institute For Transformational Thinking

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