As Steve Jobs rightly said, you can connect the dots backwards, , I need to take you back to some of the important incidents of my life.

My father was a banker with RBI and one thing he taught us through the way he lived his life was how to make deposits in our personal bank account with everyday choices of integrity, love and accountability. My mother was on 24 by 7 duty with no offs, no expectations but was a giver throughout her life. My parents by trusting choices of we three sisters gave a very important message that you are accountable for your choices. That always made us in the driver’s seat of life.  My interest in people, individual differences led me to do my Graduation and Post-Graduation in Psychology and a career in HR.  This phase marked the shaping years of my life.

Life moved on and gave me  many roles/titles, HR Business Partner, wife, daughter in law, sister in law, care giver(as my husband feel ill during my pregnancy), mother, relocation spouse(as we relocated to US for 3 years), a person with career break.

Like an iceberg, on top everything appeared fine but inside I was full of doubts, am I good enough, am I a good mother, wife, always felt judged especially for parenting skills.  You are in this parenting job where there was no job description, no orientation program, no training program, and no performance review process? But this parenting project is an ongoing project with no manuals, no deadlines.

Year 2007, we came back to India and my son was going to pre-school. He used to love rhymes and I used to love singing with him. The more I sang the rhyme with him, the more the mess I was feeling internally, changed into powerful messages.

1 2 3 God loves me, reminded me of how we are the chosen ones and how we forget and start neglecting ourselves so self -care became my mantra

4, 5 I am glad to meet the life, why to resist what’s happening, why not to embrace it, and when you know that there is no manual rather you need to keep upgrading your manual as when your child grows, you grow too, imperfection is inherent in this role and believe me this was liberation for me. Self-Acceptance became my mantra

6 7 8 God is great, this I had learnt from my husband as during his illness he had never questioned as to why he fell ill, surrendering to God’s plan is what I learnt from him.

9 10 let’s sing it all again: the best thing that happened was that it connected me to my song of life, my purpose. During those years, I realized if I feel like a mess, I pass on my emotional clumsiness to my kid so I started researching on emotional intelligence and made this my mission to help people make their emotions their friend instead of avoiding, suppressing or denying that. Acceptance of emotion is a must to thrive.

Why not to accept that yes I am in mess but I am at the driver’ s seat and I can change this mess into a message.

I am again in US after 12 years but I know my anchor song…..

With these tools of self-acceptance, self-awareness, self-discipline, I have made friends with imperfection, conflict, resistance as they teach me a lot which I apply to other areas of my life.