Join me on the journey to Get unstuck, Accelerate your work and life goals, and Sustain wellbeing.

This pandemic gave many tech leaders a chance to get off the hedonistic treadmill. I was certainly one of them. Two weeks before the pandemic I had enrolled with a wonderful life coach. I had crossed the limits of going from gradual to full blown burnout. My wounds were fresh and I had a burning desire to seek clarity on my mental state of mind. I knew and believed what got me here was not going to me to get me there. I didn’t know how to do the impossible. Become this person who is capable of achieving big goals at work, and also be an example of someone who can do so while taking care of their wellbeing. I had lost my back and could not hold onto to simple commitments, like making a sandwich for my kids. I didn’t know how to overcome my urges to drink wine or overeat at the end of a stressful day.

In the midst of all of this, similar to the rest of the world, I now had a pandemic to understand and deal with. I didn’t feel or look like myself anymore. It so turned out that the world had finally started to mimic my state of mind. In some ways it was the perfect recipe to blame it all on the pandemic. However, I was aware it was me and my mind drama that needed to be unpacked. It was time I faced the music. That thought, I don’t have my back anymore was also nagging me.

The desire to seek and find answers that lay deep inside me was the path. All I had to do is find the courage the patience to walk it out. As Rumi puts it “We carry inside us the wonders we seek outside us”.

This newsletter outlines my experience of overcoming overwhelm, burnout, and sharing my learnings as a life coach. My true desire is to coach and enable diversity and underrepresented leaders in tech to learns the life skills of being unstuck across any situation that can comes across in their work and life. If we all can cultivate and coach ourselves to get unstuck on any situation then we can continue to accelerate towards our impossible goals while sustaining our wellbeing. This then became the nexus of the research and program I started to create called “worklifeunstuck”. As I started to go deep into this, one thing was clear on the onset that I didn’t need a lot of data to prove that burnout was for real for a majority of my colleagues and many who had been working in technology for a long period. A survey done by blind showed about 58% of tech workers saying they felt burnout even before the pandemic started (our tech world had crossed medical professionals who now stood in 2nd place at 44%). During the pandemic the survey done increased this number to a whopping 70% across top four tech companies. So it’s fair to assume a lot many can associate with the feeling of overwhelm and burnout at some point in their work life journey.

We all seek to continue doing the great work we love. However somewhere we also seek to find fulfillment for the entirety of our work and life and not just parts of it. I sure felt torn for the last few years of my career especially after having two kids and trying to climb the corporate ladder to strike that so called famous work life balance in the tech industry. It turns out, I had limited beliefs about my own ability to achieve it. The day I decided to let go and rethink my own ideas and those that had resulted from years of confirmation bias by others is when I started to have a breakthrough at cracking this problem for myself. Like a true student of science, I started exploring my mind and rethinking many of my limited beliefs or even better bringing awareness to my belief ceilings. One such ceiling was my self-confidence around practicing deep empathy for myself and always having my back no matter what worklife situation presented in front of me. This is typical with burnout candidates as you end of judging and beating yourself the most. Another breakthrough was when I applied my product management skills and asked myself the question. Am I willing to build deep customer empathy for myself just like I do for my target audience while creating new products? The answer pointed in the direction of this empowering thought. In order to build deep empathy with myself, I must first learn to create evidence for more curiosity over judgement for my thoughts. This is one of the biggest gifts I learnt and applied. I start my coaching sessions within the worklifeunstuck program with this thought and encourage my clients to create more evidence for curiosity over judgement as they embark on this journey.

So who is this newsletter for?

My newsletter is for product and engineering tech leaders who realize during their work life that “what got you here won’t get you there”.

  • If you find yourself stuck in common work life situations like overwhelm and burnout, fear of failure, buffering with overeating or overdrinking, leading with authenticity, self-doubt, then you may associate with the many thoughts, feelings & situations that we encounter during our work life that can keep us stuck.
  • They deeply desire to learn, practice, and imbibe the belief that getting emotionally fit is a skill that is going to critical for them to learn and excel at in order to take their performance to the next level.
  • It is also for anyone who loves self-improvement, loves learning, and practicing self-coaching & running experiments on themselves.
  • It can be a gentle nudge and reminder for anyone who wants to seek clarity and let go of limited beliefs that no longer serve them. It is putting in practice the art of rethinking as it applies to the beliefs we have about ourselves and the world.
  • It is for anyone who wants to stop buffering with overdrinking and overeating and shift spending time from false desires to pursuing true desires.
  • It is for anyone who wants to discover what possibilities look like for them when they can open themselves up to feeling and processing all their emotions.
  • It is about empowering yourself and practicing the art of deep unconditional love for yourself and others.
  • It is about learning to have your back and creating massive evidence towards it as you pursue your impossible goals.
  • It is about taking stock of everything that is not working in your work life and turning it into a massive opportunity for yourself.
  • It is about wanting to create a new version of yourself that you didn’t believe was possible.

My beliefs around the process of coaching and writing are threefold – simplicity, storytelling, and creativity. I hope to incorporate them with my weekly newsletter just like I do with my coaching.

  1. Simplicity – I believe problems are best solved using simple frameworks that can be easily understood and applied to a wide set of work life scenarios.
  2. Storytelling – I believe in telling authentic stories as they form an intimate connection. The connection makes it relatable for the readers personal context and creates for the best learning experience.
  3. Creativity -I believe a creative mind is a brave mind. A brave mind is one that can sustain the learning & keep the mind clear and focused to create from one’s highest potential.

Lastly, through this newsletter, I also plan to write and share my experience of loss. I know millions can associate with the loss of a loved one this year due to the fateful Covid-19 pandemic. I didn’t know when this pandemic started and my journey with discovering coaching that I would be experiencing the sudden loss of my father. I know I am not alone in experiencing that emotion of grief from this circumstance. As part of self-coaching, I am now learning to apply and put to test the frameworks to this situation in my life. I am no expert in grief coaching. However, my hope is to share my learnings along the way. My father was a wonderful coach, author, and journalist, apart from my biggest cheerleader. He always emphasized and taught me to write and offer ones learnings back into the world. This newsletter and my journey as a life coach and writer is a meaningful way for me to carry forward his legacy. I can think of no better day than his birth anniversary today (4/4/2021) to mark this memorable milestone.

I am grateful for my readers to be on this journey with me. I will see you all next week.

Maithili Vijay Dandige