I grew up in a family that was always in business. My father was a writer and publisher. I grew up in an environment where everybody was in some way involved in some kind of business. So I never felt the pressure that people feel when they’re giving up a full-time job and starting out on their own.
Amita nandi
In today’s final episode of Season 2, I spoke to Amita Nandy, CEO and Founder of TACT World, Selangor, Malaysia. Her story has a twist at the end and yet we had a truly engaging conversation!
TACT World began in 1991 when she had to leave full-time work to take care of her family. Working from home isn’t new to her; Amita has been working from home since her business began in 1991. Remember, this was the 1990s when it wasn’t cool if you didn’t have a brick-and-mortar office!
She has been running her training business for 31 years. In the early years, she designed training based on popular topics that her clients wanted. Her clients were large multinational corporations back then when she was still living in Penang.
She still works with corporate clients but she also now focuses her energy on women. Amita has a passion for working with women using women’s circles and retreats, incorporating storytelling and coaching and group therapy to help women overcome self-limiting beliefs. In this regard, she has certified close to 60 women facilitators on Divine Feminine work since 2018.
It is no surprise then that Amita of late has chosen to specialize in conscious leadership and personal transformation, areas that she felt resonate much more with her own journey in life and business.
When I was conducting my training in the [Penang] Free Trade Zone…I found that I got into a routine of just doing the buzzword stuff like design thinking and agile. I felt like I was always on a bandwagon. And there was almost a fear to it if I came out with my own brand. For example, if I spoke about humanity-centered leadership or conscious leadership ten years ago, five years ago, there would be no takers.
Interestingly, Amita and her husband and three grown-up sons are all involved in entrepreneurship with social consciousness.
Amita believes it is time she opened up hearts and minds through her work and promoted the idea of living more consciously for the greater good of the planet and humanity.
Amita is an ICF Accredited Consciousness and Life Coaching Certification – she pursued this during the lockdown. She is also currently pursuing a PhD in Integrative Medicine from Quantum University, Hawaii focusing on consciousness in the workplace, with a thesis on conscious leadership.
Some of her favourite books include Gina Hayden’s Conscious Leadership, Bruce Lipton’s Biology of Belief and Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural. She also enjoys the Bhagavad Gita which she calls a manual of life based on scripture. She is inspired by Oprah, Dr Paul Drouin and Deepak Chopra.
On leisure and pastimes, Amita proudly says that she is the first Malaysian woman to have participated in the International Silverstone Asian Rally in 1997/1998.
She is also a proud grandmother of two!
Whether it is a job, whether it is a deal that we walk away from, whether it is the way we deal with people or the decisions we make, the first thing we check with ourselves is this: Does this feel right? Are you going to be able to sleep after you make this decision? Would you be able to, you know, look at it 10 years later, 5 years later, and still feel proud that you made the decision?
In this episode, Amita talks about:
- The first book she authored had nothing to do with training or development surprisingly
- Why Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in India also affected her and changed her path in life
- Why she is more willing to embrace that which is uncommon right now in her life
- Being a one-woman business handling everything when she started although her passion was in designing training curriculum
- Why she checked herself when her son said that he didn’t want to go to college
- Why corporations need to be focused on one key area if they want to overcome the turmoil and uncertainty of the present and future
- The importance of divine feminine work for living a courageous life
- How she got the opportunity to study consciousness coaching under Marc Steinberg in South Africa
- Why she believes corporate conversations will be much more productive and holistic if they take into account preventative medicine and energy healing
- How the pandemic really hurt her training business and trainings was cancelled indefinitely and how she pivoted
I hope you have enjoyed Season 2. I will be back with an even more stellar line-up of women CEOs and women founders in Season 3 (in fact, I am recording the episodes now). Please rate the podcast if you haven’t done so yet. I also have a message for you in this final episode of Season 2 which is at the end of my conversation with Amita.