A deep dive convo with Pooja Lalwani, founder of Slayrobe, leadership advisor and podcast host whose journey from India to Singapore and eventually the Netherlands became a deeply personal exploration of agency, ambition and what happens when external success no longer feels like your own.

Pooja experienced agency long before she had a word for it. At fourteen she chose to leave India on a scholarship to study in Singapore. Years later, motherhood, corporate leadership and an intense drive to keep achieving brought her somewhere very different. She was succeeding externally while slowly losing connection with herself. 

The turning point came when recognition as a woman in leadership put her image on a billboard while that same evening she found herself crying on the floor and realizing: 

⇾ 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗺𝗲!

We deep dive into:

👉🏾 Restoring personal agency: why having a say in who we become and the choices we make is fundamental to living on our own terms;

👉🏾 The hidden cost of ambition: how continuously pushing through motherhood, work and increasing responsibility gradually disconnected Pooja from herself;

👉🏾 When the body says enough: from crying on the floor to feeling nauseous opening her laptop and finally listening when her body demanded a pause;

👉🏾 Redefining success: moving beyond titles, promotions and external validation to question whose definition of success she had actually been pursuing;

👉🏾 Turning lived experience into impact: how rebuilding her physical confidence and agency eventually inspired Pooja to create Slayrobe and build her leadership advisory work!

Signs of empowerment:

🙌🏾 Agency starts with recognizing that even when circumstances constrain us, there can still be a choice in how we respond and who we choose to become;

🙌🏾 Sometimes achievement can look exactly like success from the outside while feeling completely disconnected from who we are on the inside;

🙌🏾 Pausing is not giving up. Sometimes it is the first conscious choice that allows us to hear ourselves again and decide what deserves to come next!

In Pooja's words: 🙌🏾 “Nothing is worth losing yourself to”🙌🏾

There is something powerful in Pooja’s journey from having agency instinctively to losing touch with it and consciously reclaiming it. Awareness became the moment she could stop following the script she had inherited and begin choosing again.

Perhaps the question is not only whether we are successful, but whether the success we are building still belongs to us?

Connect with Pooja:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pooja-lalwani-/ 

Advisory: https://www.poojalalwani.com 

Website: https://www.slayrobe.com 

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