My name is Smita Das Jain, and I am the Founder of Empower Yourself Coaching Program. I would love to share what led me to quit my corporate job to start this business to empower busy professionals unhappy in their jobs to find time to transform their passions into professions and get more out of their lives.
My entrepreneurial journey began when I reached a tipping point in my corporate career. Despite being an alumna from one of the premier B-schools in India, and working in leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies in my 14-year tenure in the corporate world, I was not happy with the impact I was making on lives and the world around me.
There was a sense of restlessness that comes when your work is not aligned with your interests and passions. You may be good at what you do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be happy.
The Career-Shift, and the Challenges
When the pandemic struck, I realized that there are many others in the high-pressure corporate world in the same boat as me who were going through the motions of life without being enthused about what they did for a living. There was disillusionment, disengaged, and complaints all around me, and this was before the Great Resignation wave started.
I decided that rather than join the chorus, it was time for me to do something about it. So in March 2021, I resigned from my corporate job and moved in the direction of Life and Executive Coaching. Three months later, I founded Empower Yourself- a set of customized Personal Clarity and Performance Enhancements coaching interventions to enable you to take control of your life.
Coaching is a relatively nascent concept in India, equated with therapy and counseling and associated with social inhibitions and stigma. Besides, coaching being an unregulated sector, just about anybody can claim to be a coach without having the desired certifications and qualifications.
While enrolling in the International Coach Federation certified coach training program, I started to identify the pain points of my target audience- busy professionals in high-pressure corporate jobs and started to reach out to them via webinars and seminars.
Throughout my career, be it corporate world or as a certified coach, I have found myself fighting a perception battle. At the outset of my career, I had to overcome certain stereotypes and biases on what a woman, married woman, and working mother can or can’t do. It was no different after I made a career pivot to coaching.
Many in my professional circle were surprised initially by the drastic shift from a strategy and management consultant to life and executive coaching. I again had to overcome biases- especially in the case of executive coaching- about my non-HR background, previous experience in coaching, shift from consulting to coaching, etc.
Despite the challenges, I have always focused on helping my clients arrive at a solution. Once I got my first set of clients, word of mouth spread, and I got more clients. The glowing testimonials and client success stories on my website are my biggest achievements as a coach. It took patience and perseverance on my path for Empower Yourself to reach where it has reached today.
See Also: Five STEPS a Day – Brand Story by Dr. Len Lopez (Author)
People Are Unhappy and Stressed
From what I have seen in my interaction with clients, people are struggling with too much to do in too little time, are in stress, and want to have a fulfilling personal life along with a thriving career but aren’t sure how to go about it. They also lack confidence and second-guess themselves while making decisions.
They want to get something more out of their lives, without knowing what this something more is and this is where Empower Yourself Program comes in. Through the Personal Clarity and Executive Performance enhancement programs, my clients learn to find time for all they like to live the life they dream.
Get Better at What All You Do- In 8-12 Weeks
Through a structured but intensive program spread over 8-12 weeks, Empower Yourself programs enable clients to determine what matters to them in their lives, discover their passions, make more time and space for those things in their lives that make them happy, elevate their confidence, or achieve financial independence. While the approach is scientific and robust, each client is unique.
To understand the client’s priorities before the commencement of a program, I hold a Complimentary Strategy Consultation with each prospect to understand their background, drivers, struggles, and challenges. The session is an opportunity for both me and the prospect to determine our suitability of working with each other to enable the prospect to reach their goals.
We arrive at the prospect’s priorities and the time frame required to achieve them after this session. This provides the foundation of the subsequent eight to twelve sessions with the client- the customized Empower Yourself program- for clients to feel more ‘Empowered’ in their lives.
See Also: A Self Guru – Brand Story by Amira Irfan (Founder)
The Impact So Far
With just over a year and close to 200 coaching hours, webinars, and live learning sessions, Empower Yourself has positively impacted the lives of many working professionals ranging from entry-level to the topmost hierarchy. I have also become an ICF credentialed ACC coach and a TEDx speaker during this period.
As a certified personal empowerment life coach, I enable busy working professionals to work because they want to, and not because they have to. As a certified executive coach, I enable executives to speak with confidence and communicate their way up the corporate ladder so that they emerge leaders faster than envisaged.
While the realization of the ultimate objective- getting that dream job or transforming your passion into a second career- takes some time, the bigger goal is broken down into smaller action steps in terms of months, weeks, and days.
From the first day of the program, they start making tangible progress towards their goals which enhances their beliefs in themselves. This translates into a lot of positivity which gives me great satisfaction.
The Empower Yourself Mission
In a dynamic and unpredictable world, where people are too preoccupied making a living to live their life, I want more and more people to find time to do all that they like so that they wake up with a smile in the morning, every single day of their lives. Empower Yourself aims to enable people to live the life they dream of so that the world is a better place to live every day, one happy and positive person at a time.
