A Quest to Empower Others Transform Their Passions into Professions, A Founder’s Story with Smita Das Jain

Smita Das Jain, the Founder, and CEO of Empower Yourself is a Certified Executive Coach, Personal Empowerment Life Coach, and Neurolinguistic Coach, Practitioner. An IIM Indore and SRCC alumna with 14+ years of experience in leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies advising Indian and global clients in their business strategies and transformation, Smita knows that people need more than strategies to succeed. Her Empower Yourself Coaching Program empowers busy corporate professionals unhappy in their jobs to transform their passions into professions, and introverted executives to communicate with confidence and emerge leaders faster than envisaged. Smita is also a TEDx speaker, an expert speaker on various platforms, corporate conferences, and OTT channels, and a bestselling fiction author.

My childhood was a period of travel and adventure, not necessarily in that order. I am based out of India, and my father worked in the Indian Armed Forces. That meant I grew up across all corners of the 3.3 million sq km strong India. While I have fond memories of all the mainstream cities and remote regions I stayed in during my childhood, this also means that there is no particular city or region that my heart beats for over the rest. In hindsight, I can see that the constant changes I witnessed during my childhood have made me more flexible and adaptable to dynamic business situations- an asset in the VUCA world.

My entrepreneurial journey began when I reached a tipping point in my corporate career. Despite being an alumna from one of the premier B-schools in India, and working in leadership roles with Fortune 500 companies in my 14-year tenure in the corporate world, I was not happy with the impact I was making on lives and the world around me. There was a sense of restlessness that comes when your work is not aligned with your interests and passions. You may be good at what you do, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be happy. When the pandemic struck, I realized that there are many others in the high-pressure corporate world in the same boat as me who were going through the motions of life without being enthused about what they did for a living. There was disillusionment, disengaged, and complaints all around me, and this was before the Great Resignation wave started. I decided that rather than join the chorus, it was time for me to do something about it. So in March 2021, I resigned from my corporate job and moved in the direction of Life and Executive Coaching. Three months later, I founded Empower Yourself- a set of customized Personal Clarity and Performance Enhancements coaching interventions to enable you to take control of your life.

The Impact of my Entrepreneurial Venture ‘Empower Yourself’ From what I have seen in my interaction with clients, people are struggling with too much to do in too little time, are in stress, and want to have a fulfilling personal life along with a thriving career but aren’t sure how to go about it. They also lack confidence and second-guess themselves while making decisions. They want to get something more out of their lives, without knowing what this something more is and this is where Empower Yourself Program comes in. Through the Personal Clarity and Executive Performance enhancement programs, my clients learn to find time for all they like to live the life they dream. Through a structured but intensive program spread over 8 weeks, Empower Yourself programs enable clients to determine what matters to them in their lives, discover their passions, make more time and space for those things in their lives that make them happy, elevate their confidence, and achieve financial independence. In a dynamic and unpredictable world, where people are too preoccupied making a living to live their life, I want more and more people to find time to do all that they like so that they wake up with a smile in the morning, every single day of their lives. Empower Yourself aims to enable people to live the life they dream of so that the world is a better place to live every day, one happy and positive person at a time. With just over a year and more than 250 client coaching hours, webinars, and live learning sessions, Empower Yourself has positively impacted the lives of many working professionals ranging from entry-level to the topmost hierarchy.

Be disciplined in your approach. For me, discipline is the vigor to stay committed to certain actions for a finite period of time; this either fosters consistency and you start seeing results, or you can conclude for sure that the idea/concept/outcome is not meant to succeed, and you can move to something else. I get up at 5 AM every day to write something- that’s the discipline that has made me write 100+ articles, guest posts, and blogs over the last year. I have blocked certain hours in my calendar every day to reach out to prospective clients, which has helped me to fill my roster. Again, the discipline to talk to some new prospects every day has helped my coaching business grow. The difference between success and failure is often not quitting, and discipline enables you to stay the course for just the right amount of time to get the results.