Three Questions I Answered About My Life

I recently came across the work of Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, the co-founders of the Stanford Life Design Lab. They are also co-authors of the bestselling books Designing Your Life and How to Live a Meaningful Life.

I decided to take on their Worldview and Workview exercise, which asks you to explore three things:

• Who You Are (the story you grew up with)

• What You Do (your work view)

• What You Believe (your worldview).

  
  

It was interesting to see what came up for me so clearly and so effortlessly. It brought into view how rarely we hold all three of those things in the same frame at the same time. How often they sit in separate parts of our lives without us really noticing the distance between them.

Here is what I found for me. I thought I would share it with you:

WHO YOU ARE

The Story I Grew Up With:

Every year on my birthday, my mother likes to tell the story of the day I was born.

Without prompts, she will tell me that I was born on “the coldest day of the year” and in Hong Kong in winter, that was very cold. She then goes on to say that the moment I “came out of (her) tummy” (I was born via emergency C-section), all the nurses exclaimed at the thick black tuft of hair on my head and remarked at the beauty of this little 7 pound girl. They called me “a Japanese doll” (which I know in today’s language isn’t really acceptable but it was a different time so let’s leave it at that).

On this day every year, my father tells me that the moment I was born, he called his relatives in India to say that “Lakshmi has arrived”. Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth and fortune. The reason this is important is the context. At that time, the early 1970s, girls weren’t always celebrated in Indian households. For my father, a proud Sikh man, to describe his newborn daughter as a goddess, and that of wealth and fortune, was his way of stating in language his culture would understand, that his daughter was welcomed, valued, and loved.

My parents are good, decent people. Honesty is my father’s leading and guiding virtue. But it is perhaps the one thing he didn’t always use on himself when it came to his mental health or his happiness. He would bottle up his emotions and experiences until they would come out in ways that made the atmosphere at home feel uncertain. But when the days were good, they were great. I remember the parties in our house--the food, the drinks, the music, the jokes, the laughter, and everyone leaving with full bellies and huge smiles on their faces.

My mother loved those parties. She loved entertaining and being entertained. She still does. It’s her love language. She’s the social person in our family. She has always been a determined, positive person who learned early on that mindset and attitude were the things that would move the dial in her life towards stability and even success. She taught me to never fear authority or corporate hierarchy. That everyone, even the chairman of the board of a large company was human and vulnerable to changing economies.

My mother is perhaps my biggest inspiration in life. She taught me to be audacious, bold, courageous, and to never fear anyone. She went through hardships in her life so that I wouldn’t have to. For her self-respect was everything.

My mother had always wanted an adventurous life, reminding me on many occasions that she wanted to be a journalist or a “news reader”. But circumstances and survival meant her dreams had to take a back seat. It’s perhaps why she would make my brother and me read the front page of the newspaper every night before we would go to bed. She would tell us it was because she wanted us to be articulate, and growing up in a city where we were subjected to stares and overt racism, being articulate was her way of arming us against those aggressions. Little did she know it would also be the first seeds planted to manifest a life in front of the camera for me to be seen by the world in the most respected way...perhaps the biggest ‘Fuck You’ to those who ever looked down on us.

For my mother, nothing was or is impossible if we are willing to work for it. We just have to try and believe we can. She held that belief by building safety through a steady income and a home no one could take away from us. It was up to us to make the most of the safety she and my father provided.

It is with that mentality that I have lived my life--a belief that nothing is impossible. It framed in my mind’s eye a picture of possibility and a willingness to work for that belief in a life of adventure, and even greatness.

There is always a shadow side to that, of course there is. But I believe the shadows have brought a depth to my life and the work to understand my shadows has been a work of a lifetime. Part of that understanding is the realisation that those challenges weren’t just mine but were inherited from my parents, their parents, and the list goes on. We are shaped by our experiences, our history. But we are not sentenced by them.

My parents gave me something powerful: the belief that life could be bigger than circumstance. They also passed down the anxieties that often travel with ambition: prove yourself, don’t waste opportunities, keep going, keep achieving, be the best because you have to be to be accepted. And acceptance and validation comes from “being successful.”

Love and pressure can arrive in the same package. Both things are true.

When achievement becomes linked to acceptance, it can be difficult to tell whether you’re pursuing something because you genuinely want it or because you’ve learned that success is how you earn your place in the world.

The gifts my parents gave me were obvious to me. The pressure took longer to recognise because it looked like drive, determination, and ambition. It wasn’t until much later that I began asking a different question: Who am I when I am not achieving? Who am I if I don’t have a big title or big brand attached to my name?

Perhaps one of the great tasks of adulthood is learning to distinguish between what we’ve inherited and what we consciously choose to carry forward. Not because our parents got it wrong, but because each of us must decide for ourselves what a meaningful life looks like.

WHAT YOU DO

My Workview:

I have never had a strategic plan when it comes to my career. In the early days, I just put one foot in front of the other and the path would unveil in front of me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a smooth path and there were many, many moments of angst and worry (there still are). But looking back I can see that whenever I tried to go the traditional route of finding work--filling out applications, sending out CVs, numerous follow up calls and emails, I would get nothing in return--not a reply, not even a hint of a reply...just crickets.

But when I would follow breadcrumbs things were different.

From my university classmate asking if I was interested in volunteering at an event at the local TV station in Toronto to arriving at CNN. I said yes to all of them. It was all an education on being proactive in my life. Did I feel the fear and incompetence? Always. Did it drive me to keep pushing forward? Absolutely. Because there was no Plan B.

I didn’t chase the money (although perhaps maybe I should have). Back then, I believed that my work should speak for itself and if I was honest and worked hard I would be remunerated fairly. But I have come to learn that’s not how the world works. I’ve come to learn that the world often measures value through currency. And that recognising your own value and worth is separate from that.

In the workplace, I learned that demanding what you know you’re worth monetarily comes with time and experience. When you have the evidence to back up what you know to be true and how you want to be recognised, it is up to you to advocate for yourself and build relationships with those who can influence your career trajectory.

Careers are shaped by active participation, not passive hopefulness that you will be seen. There is a point where visibility and cultivating relationships with those who can have an impact on your career trajectory is not vanity—it is responsibility.

From the outside, my first career looked impressive. It came with titles, travel, visibility, and status. But external success can disguise internal confusion. I knew how to perform competence long before I knew how to ask myself whether I was happy.

When I was younger and just starting out in my professional life, I wasn’t asking myself whether the life I was building actually suited me. I was given a formula and told that following it would lead to success. The formula is the same one many of us were given: work hard + get good grades + stay out of trouble + get a good job + marry the right person + have kids + buy a house = happiness.

Looking back, I followed the formula, but not the timeline, and not the job, nor the partner that was expected of me. I don’t think I needed to be told to be braver. I was already stepping into things that stretched me — a career that went against what my parents wanted for me (at first anyway), dating outside of my culture, working in television news, moving to different countries to live on my own, international broadcasting, anchoring world news, learning to expand my life without my family’s influence.

It was exhilarating and, in many ways, a truly exceptional life. Except for the niggles that would eventually creep in. I didn’t have the vocabulary for what they were.

I came to understand eventually that while I was living this outwardly expansive life, those niggles were pointing me towards something quieter: to understand who I was, how I felt, and to trust it. To figure out who I was without anyone telling me who to be.

Opportunities had never really been the problem. Understanding myself well enough to know which opportunities were right for me was. That has taken longer. It comes through experiencing life, learning hard-knock lessons, and choosing to not waste my suffering. None of it came from instructions or someone else’s roadmap.

For me it meant leaving an established career to become a mother; to take some time to just be with him and watch him grow; to live in a place that feels nourishing and quiet; to retreat inwards to figure out who I am without the noise, to build a new career that feels aligned with that. This has been a 12 year journey thus far. One that has brought into question everything I thought I knew about myself and how to earn, and one that keeps testing my resolve to be true to this version of me today.

So my work today is not about abandoning who I was in my first career. That career gave me a foundation I still draw from. Today, I’m trying to live and work in a way that feels more steady within myself—still growing, still open, and still trusting that life unfolds when I take steps towards what feels right.

The latter is tougher now. I am older and time, not to mention opportunities aren’t as widely available for any of us today. The professional world has changed so much. The tension I feel lies between earning for survival and earning in a way that is aligned with who I am and the kind of life I want to live now. It’s a tension many of us feel, and maybe the task is not to solve it, but to stay aware of it as we make our choices.

WHAT YOU BELIEVE

My Worldview:

I grew up being taught that my behaviour had an impact on how “the community” would see my family. Later, I worked in an industry where visibility meant constant scrutiny. I learned pretty quickly that I was always being observed.

Growing up, awareness of the world was also forced upon my family as we lived in a city where we, as Indians, were the minority. We always knew we were outsiders. And were made to feel that way. For me, when you grow up attentive to how others might judge you and your family, and later work in an industry where image matters and you’re always subject to criticism from how you look to what you say, it becomes easy to mistake approval for safety. You become skilled at reading the room, while losing touch with yourself.

Looking back, I can see how many of my choices were attempts to meet needs I didn’t yet know how to name: belonging, significance, safety, acceptance.

When I started in news some 30 years ago, I was taught this saying: “Think global. Act local.”

I still believe that. But I’ve come to realise there is nothing more local than starting with yourself.

The better you understand yourself, the more capable you are of helping others and contributing to the world in a healthy, sustainable way.

Sometimes self-awareness comes in life-defining moments. Sometimes though, it comes slowly. Whichever the pace, what it has taught me is to notice when I am abandoning myself and to consciously and intentionally use that space that Viktor Frankl writes about--the space between stimulus and response.

Self-awareness has a ripple effect on the relationships around us. Some deepen. Some end. Not everyone benefits when you become clearer. Not everyone will stand up and cheer for you when you change. But the person who does benefit is you.

Self-awareness has not made my life perfect. It has made it clearer. I have become better at noticing when I am abandoning myself to please others, when fear is masquerading as practicality or even safety in the familiar, and when old patterns no longer fit the woman I am becoming.

The learning--and unlearning--is ongoing, but there is relief in that. Relief in knowing that the goal isn’t perfection. It’s creating a life that feels expansive rather than constricting, one where the clues are found in moments of lightness, joy, and genuine contentment.

And learning to trust those clues.

At the end of it all, success, I’ve come to realise, is not something handed to us by our family, our culture, or society, our profession, our bank account, or the masks we wear to show we are successful.

Success is something each of us must define for ourselves. And to make peace with that.

Monita xo

PS. Who we are in one context. What we do in another. What we believe somewhere in the background, usually unexamined, usually assumed rather than articulated. In life, it all becomes fragmented.

And in that separation, it becomes easier than we realise to build a life where those things are not necessarily in conversation with each other. Where one is leading, one is compensating, and one is simply not being looked at closely enough.

What the exercise seems to do, when you actually engage with it properly, is not provide answers, but make that separation visible. And once it is visible, it’s hard not to ask whether it needs to stay that way.

Whether there is a way, over time, for those three parts to sit a little closer together. Not in some perfected or resolved sense, but in a way that feels less fragmented than it often does when we are simply moving through life without checking in with ourselves.

It can help to clarify the “niggles”. The sense of disconnection. Or it may simply help us understand what has been sitting in separate places for a long time. And bringing them closer together is what “being in alignment” actually means.