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: As they describe them--Who you are (the story you grew up with), What you do (your work view), and What you believe (your world view). I have to say, it was interesting to see what came up for me so clearly and so effortlessly. I thought I would share it with you:

WHO YOU ARE

The Story I Grew Up With:

Every February 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 erupt leaving us constantly walking on eggshells. 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 even telling me that if any senior corporate leader told me I was lucky to have my job, I should reply, "we all are, including you". My mother had always wanted an adventurous life, reminding me on many occassions that she wanted to be a journalist or a "news reader". 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...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.

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 at times). 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 a friend in high school asking if I wanted a summer job at the camp she worked at; my high school Vice Principal offering me a part-time admin position at the school’s continuing education programme on Saturday mornings; to my university classmate asking if I was interested in volunteering at an event at the local TV station in Toronto.

I said yes to all of them.

Those experiences taught me to trust breadcrumbs more than blueprints; that my work was to remain open enough to recognise opportunities when they appeared. It's what happened when CNN came knocking. CNN wasn't the result of a carefully engineered career plan. It emerged through being open enough to say yes when an agent who had seen my work by chance offered to represent me even though having an agent wasn't the norm for journalists in Canada at the time. He would send my showreel out to various outlets. CNN was the only network that showed interest in me.

In my first career, it was all about proving myself to myself and to the voices of naysayers--especially those in my own head. Alot of it was also trying to prove to my parents that this career will make me "successful" and would keep the eyes of judgement from our community at bay. But even with that, I had to do it my way (and not be a doctor like they wanted--or get married at 21).

I didn't chase the money (although perhaps maybe I should have). 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. The first step is recognising your own value.

In the workplace, that 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. Looking back, 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 no less, live television, venturing out to a different country to live on my own, international broadcasting, anchoring world news, learning to expand my life without my family's influence.

What I needed was something different: To understand who I was, how I felt, and to trust it.

Opportunities had never really been the problem. Understanding myself well enough to know which opportunities were right for me was. That took longer. And it came through experience, not through instruction.

Sometimes self-awareness comes in life-defining moments--what Jim Collins calls "cliffs" in his book What To Make of A Life. Sometimes though, it can change things slowly. For me, it has taught me to notice when I am abandoning myself and to consciously use that space that Viktor Frankl writes about--the space between stimulus and reaction--intentionally.

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.

But the person who does benefit is you.

So my work today is now a living emodiment of how I see myself--more relaxed, constantly growing, but still (as an ode to my early professional years) believing in serendipity and a path that will continue to unfold if I take the brave steps towards that life I dream of.

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, and contracts came with morality clauses. I learned pretty quickly that I was always being observed.

I was always aware of the world outside of me because that's what I was led to believe was important. While it is good to understand that we don't live in a bubble, that we have a moral responsibility to be aware--and help if we can--those more vulnerable than us, there is a danger in only looking outside and responding to that focus--even when the focus is seemingly selfless and giving.

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.

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.

It's ongoing, but there is relief in that.

Relief in knowing 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.

Success, I've come to realise, is not something handed to us by our family, our culture, our profession, or society.

It is something each of us must define for ourselves.

Monita xo