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Game-Changing Career Coach | 2xTEDx Speaker | Best Selling Author | Shilpa Kulshrestha

Shilpa Kulshrestha

Shilpa Kulshrestha

"You must love and care for yourself because that's when the best comes out.” Shilpa Kulshrestha

Roadmap to Entrepreneurship

An accident! Yes, I call myself an accidental entrepreneur. Working for the big corporate companies and with a strong educational background, I had started off pretty well. In a short period of time, I gained the name and fame of being the one with a Midas touch. It was like everything I touched turned into gold, and I loved it!

Years passed, and I continued to contribute. But somewhere, my contribution had started to cut corners. As my hands started getting loaded with other things—family, kids—societal expectations started taking priority, and I started giving work my bare minimum. My small contributions over time led to a feeling of insignificance at work. But I kept brushing the feeling under the carpet, losing a bit of myself each day.

Over the years, the ace performer in me was captured hostage by the average game. I started operating way below my potential. I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t. One fine day, my company had enough of me and my average game. Yes. I was asked to leave.

But like everything that happens for the best, it opened up a Pandora’s box—a swarm of problems that I had been sitting on—invisibility, imposter syndrome, introversion, not having a voice—the biggest one being mediocrity, but I fought it all!

My pursuit of connecting with myself with the help of my coaches led me to my newly discovered version. As I fell in love with my new avatar, I started warming up to an innate desire to contribute. Obviously, if I can come so far, so can anyone, and hence, I've started a revolution inside of me!

I spotted people who, like me, were high performers once upon a time but now had become part of the average game. Murdering their mediocrity and leading them to their best game became my new pursuit! That’s how the accidental entrepreneur in me was born!

Crossing Milestones to Success

My biggest challenge was being stuck in a job where I got the comfort of consistently lying to myself that I was outstanding. The truth was that I had become mediocre!

I was walking without a destination in my GPS. I was busy, but in the daily rut with mundane tasks that no one else wanted to do. I was invisible, and I kept giving myself the excuse of introversion. The fact was that I relied on others—my manager, my company, and my life—to treat me well without taking any responsibility for it myself.

I was obviously doomed to fail. Mediocrity led me to my worst game. Today, I actually feel glad that, after 16 years of my career, my company decided to kick me out. Though the times were tough, looking back, I am convinced that it was the best thing that happened to me.

I needed that jolt to wake up. That’s when I decided to make that the biggest pivot of my life! With a pen and paper, I designed how I would like to see myself. And surprisingly, the risk-averse me opened herself up for failure. With failures came new leanings and, eventually, new successes.

A Guiding Light For New Leaders

Rather than giving them advice, I would love to ask them,

What is your signature sin?

Well, a sin that you have committed every single day of your life. My biggest sin was hypocrisy that ate up decades, and gobbled up my excellence, achievements, and the speed and depth of my career. I thought I was stuck forever!

It is simple! Once I decided to face it, wrestle it, and win it, what followed was a multiplier effect!

Everything multiplied from:-

The Strategic Approach To Achievements!

Most of us do not even know what is possible for us!

We stick to a known world, known format, and known winners. It is nice to be happy with some growth, but the real fun comes from the unknown zone, and that’s called transformation. The space where you shift into the identity of being an unstoppable force And this is where you happen to switch from an automatic mode to a deliberate mode and start laying brick by brick of the life that you wish to design. You also get amazed by your own possibilities as you see them becoming real.

Always know that your unknown zone is a goldmine—you don’t know what you don’t know! Leveraging that can make you a magnet for opportunities.

Today, I help mid-career corporate professionals who are stuck: get into their best game, get promoted in as little as 3-5 months, attract new jobs with 55–180% salary increases, make successful career transitions, and become a highly sought-after black swan in the market.

Identify it, and grab someone whose time and experience you can buy to get rid of it. And then, instead of complaining, thinking things through, staying stuck, or procrastinating, just snap out of it. It is as simple as that to rehash, reinvent, and redesign your career!

Source of Inspiration

I had a lot of coaches, and my heart is full of gratitude as I see the impact they have had on my life. My journey started with a simple ‘Unleash the Power Within’ programme by Tony Robbins, which led me to do every single programme by him. And then it was Ben Harvey from Authentic Education, followed by Brody Lee and Russell Branson.

Over the past 4.5 years, I have travelled to different parts of the world to dig deep into the minds of my coaches and learn from their diverse methodologies, one at a time.

I would also like to mention the contribution of my husband, Kapil, as he is the closest to what I do on a day-to-day basis, and his unconditional love and mentoring make him my platinum coach.

I attribute who I am today to each one of them.


My biggest learning

Each of us has 1440 minutes in a day. The quality of life that you end up creating is not defined by what you do from 9 to 5, but by what you do between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m. Those are your golden hours, because that is where your possibilities are hiding!


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