Akarma - International Coach I Emotional Intelligence Journeys Creator

Footprints from Formative Years:

Having no idea what significance it would hold, in 2002 an incident occurred that made me the person who I am today. Four years after that, in 2006, I faced a personal crisis, which accelerated my transformation into the person I am today.

That crisis created the opportunity for me to restart my Spiritual Journey in this life. I began by enrolling myself in a Diploma of Life Coaching from The Coaching Institute in Melbourne (Australia). I was very clear about the need for it. I didn't do it to become a professional coach. It was purely to equip myself to handle the crisis I was facing.

But as-if fate had something else in mind. I was required to offer pro-bono sessions to complete my diploma. Although I was doing it for personal reasons, it was a 3 years course and I thought to myself that I have already given this much time, why not complete this formality and get the certificate too.So, I began offering pro-bono sessions. It turned out that those who received it benefited a lot. They started referring me to others and one day I decided to make this my full-time profession.

In the last 15 years, I have helped

• hundreds of people to launch their startups, as a Business Coach
• hundreds of SMEs to scale their business to new heights, as a Business Coach
• hundreds of Leaders to become Invisible Leaders, as a Leadership Coach
• thousands of people with their complex relationship challenges, as a Relationship Coach

I feel very lucky to have many mentors and gurus that helped me on this journey of Self Mastery. Some of them helped me to gain new perspectives and others helped me to drop the old perspectives. With their help, guidance and support, I enhanced my Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness. I walk the path first. I live it myself and when I achieve what I want through this path, I share it with others.

Embarking onto the Entrepreneurial Journey:

The Entrepreneurial Bug bit me when I was about 10 years old. I was very fond of comic books, especially ‘Chacha Chowdhury’ ones. But I didn't have much money to buy or rent them. So, I saved up some money from my pocket money (and money received from relatives visiting us, a common practice in North India) and bought a few comic books. Then I started renting them out to my friends. Whatever money I earned from this activity; I used it to buy more comic books. When the comic books get old, I would sell them at a cheaper price to whoever wanted to buy them. In a few months, I had a very good collection of comic books and a thriving business. 

Even when I started my career in the IT Industry, I was clear that one day I will have my own consulting business. I wanted to learn about the IT Industry by first working in it because the Industry was booming in those days. And I also started a small consulting business after a few years of experience in the industry.

My consulting experience has helped me greatly in setting up my coaching business. One valuable lesson I learned from the Consulting Industry is… Most Consulting Firms are seen as "just body shops" by the clients. The clients judge the capabilities of a consulting firm by the quality of the consultant they provide. If they like the consultant, then they want the same consultant again and again. The firm fails to establish that they have a pool of consultants of equal caliber; that even if they send a different consultant, the client will get the same results. But clients get attached to the consultant so much that they don't recognize this value proposition. And in the end, it just becomes a personal transaction.

From the very beginning, I was conscious that I don't want my company to become centered around me or on any coach. We work as a team on a challenge. So, if one coach is unavailable, then we assign a different coach but this doesn't impact the continuity with the client. All coaches in our team are equally capable.

This principle has helped me to establish our coaching practice around the challenges we solve instead of becoming synonymous with my name only. This not only gives me personal freedom but also helps us to scale easily without any resistance from the clients. They know that whoever will be assigned to them can help them achieve their goals regardless of my personal involvement or not.

Embedding Emotional Intelligence Into Your Life:

Emotional intelligence is the intelligence that is required to handle one's own emotions and those of others. We need to deal with people all the time. Even if we work as freelancers, independent consultants or contractors, solopreneurs, and so on, we still need to deal with people, not only in our professional life but also personally.

So, basically, there is no bypassing people. And that being the case, it is imperative and inevitable that someone will push our buttons and we will push other people's buttons. So, you see, it's not even a question of if and when. This is happening; it happened in the past, and it will happen in the future. And hence, I emphasize a lot on the importance of enhancing emotional intelligence. You see, emotional intelligence is very practical in nature. There is not much to learn as such. It has five components, namely

These are pretty self-explanatory terms. We can think of them as core competencies. So, when we work on developing these 5 components, then we indirectly improve our emotional intelligence. And I say that emotional intelligence is practical in nature because all those five components can only be developed by practice and not just by learning about them. Among the 5 components, it all starts with self-awareness. To improve self-awareness, I believe that mindfulness is the best way.

So, as we observe more, we become more emotionally intelligent, and that's why I say it is practical in nature. And as we become more emotionally intelligent, we handle our emotions better, other people's emotions better, we create harmonious relationships with others, and we experience more balance in life. All this leads to more happiness. And since every person on this planet ultimately wants happiness, I believe that the path of emotional intelligence and mindfulness can lead us there.

Powerful Lessons From My Mentors:

I'm very fortunate to have had many mentors and gurus in my life. My very first guru was my physics teacher in school, Gaur Sir. I was very good at physics. In my 10th board exams, I got less than expected marks in Physics. Gaur Sir was so confident that this marking was incorrect that he personally went to the CBSE headquarters to get my papers re-evaluated. He came to my house after the result and asked one question, "Paper acha hua tha na?" I said yes. That's all he needed to know.

He went there and insisted that my answers be re-evaluated, and there was in fact an error in marking. I got much higher grades than before. Before that, I never had anyone believe in me so much. Not even my parents. Not even me. Although I knew that I could have gotten higher marks, I didn't have the confidence to stand up to it like that. Gaur Sir gave me a valuable life lesson that to date I haven't forgotten.

I also consider Sharon Pearson (owner of The Coaching Institute, Melbourne) as one of my mentors. She not only taught me about life coaching, but also about life, people, and relationships in ways that I never knew existed.

She told me something that I say a lot to people now. When I meet someone who is struggling with a relationship challenge and they tell me that they have tried so many things, I ask them, "Have you spoken to a professional?" They not only say NO but also look at me in a strange way as if they are saying, "Why?" I'm smart enough to figure this out!This reminds me of what Sharon used to say, "I have coached thousands of people and have seen thousands of versions of relationships. You have only dealt with a few specific scenarios that are specific to your life. Let's say you have experienced 10 relationships up till now. Let's say some of your friends, relatives, etc. also approach you for relationship-related advice. So, let's say you have experience with 25 versions of relationships. I have experience of a few thousand over the last few decades. If you are unable to resolve your challenge from the 25 versions of experience you have, then why not get a second opinion from someone with more experience?

"In the last 15 years as a professional coach, I have come across clients going through challenges that made it quite clear why this path selected me! My clients included a woman who was forced to go through multiple abortions by her family in desire of a male child; a lesbian couple struggling to find their place and purpose in society; a man who was the victim of domestic violence; a bed-ridden, handicapped man wanting to tell his wife to have a sexual relationship with another man but couldn't; a rape victim who wanted to meet and forgive the offender; a woman in an extramarital affair but also equally in love with her husband; a man with wife and kids and also gay inside; a young girl who had phobias from anything that could shake when she was inside, like lifts or cars; a 36-year-old man who was addicted to Coca-cola from the age of 2 and was facing multiple health issues including early age diabetes; These are a few of the many extreme cases.

And then there are clients with regular relationship challenges that include abuse, domestic violence, infidelity, outside interference, childhood traumas, childhood abuse, depression, suicidal tendencies, etc.

In the early days of my coaching profession, my clients' stories used to affect me a lot. Sometimes I would feel as helpless as they were. I knew that this was not sustainable. I must look after myself and shield myself to help my clients better. That's when I found Osho. I instantly resonated with Tantra's philosophy, as if I'd already been practicing it for the past several lives. Knowledge and practice of Tantra felt effortless to me. Many times, I knew intuitively what Osho was going to say before he said it. I found my shield.

Many years later, I found my second Guru, Mooji. By the grace of Mooji, in 2019, I realized "Who I am." That's when my spiritual name, "Akarma," came to me during one of my meditations. With the help of Osho and Mooji, my spiritual journey unfolds every day, and I feel so lucky every day to be doing what I'm doing.

Wuji International and Its Irreplaceable Values :

For nearly 10 years I helped entrepreneurs as a Business Coach. I helped Startups and SMEs through a 5-day business program called Business Inception Camp (BIC).

Then as my alumni grew, they started asking what's next? What's after BIC?

After much thinking I concluded that after sharpening their Entrepreneurial skills, I need to sharpen their Leadership skills. Hence, I started creating the next level of BIC on the theme of Leadership. That's how the framework of Invisible Leadership was born.

But after I finished designing Invisible Leadership, I realized that it solves those problems of leadership that most Startups and SMEs don't face yet. That's when I launched Wuji International and started offering this program to the Corporates. This Good to Great Leadership Program was welcomed by Senior Leaders of Industries by open arms.

Laser Coaching is an advance-level coaching practice to bring paradigm shift in lesser number of sessions in comparison to traditional coaching methods. Our core philosophy while coaching someone is to develop Emotional Intelligence via Mindfulness.

We believe that people in general are good and want to do the right thing. They sometimes make decisions that may be considered bad or wrong because we judge those decisions by the result they produced. However, the person never intended to make a bad or wrong decision. They experienced a certain “lack of choices” and they just chose the best option out of the available ones.

Our job is to expand their perceptions so that they have more choices. And we do this through Laser Coaching.