What happens when you arrive in a new country with a master's degree and discover you aren't allowed to work? Mindset coach and storyteller Niya Desai spent eight years on an H-4 visa before she could start her career, and she shares how she rebuilt her sense of identity along the way.

In this conversation with Anu Arora, Niya talks about the years she thought she'd lost, how interviewing hundreds of founders on her own show taught her that obscurity is expensive, and why she now believes that what we're going through isn't our struggle, it's our story. The episode closes with a playful rapid-fire round on mindful leadership where Anu and Niya each answer the same questions, and the answers are sometimes different and sometimes surprisingly alike.

Key takeaways:

• A hard season is a chapter, not the whole story

• Trust yourself first, before you reach for anyone else's advice

• Stop comparing your life to other people's

• Don't confuse your identity with your productivity, your paycheck, or your title

• A good mentor, who is not your spouse, tells you the truth and holds you accountable

• Mindful leadership is creating a pause between what happens and how you choose to respond

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About Niya Desai:
Niya Desai is a mindset coach, podcast host, speaker, and video storytelling strategist who helps founders, leaders, and high-performing professionals communicate with greater clarity, confidence, and authenticity.

Her own journey has been anything but conventional. After moving to the U.S., she spent years unable to work because of visa restrictions, navigated significant personal and professional setbacks, rebuilt her career from the ground up, and ultimately found her voice through storytelling. Today, she uses those experiences to help others overcome self-doubt, lead with intention, and show up more powerfully in both business and life.

As the host of The Niya Desai Show, Niya has interviewed entrepreneurs, executives, and changemakers whose stories reveal the human side of leadership. Her work has been featured on KING 5 News, and she is passionate about conversations that remind us that success is built not only through strategy, but through resilience, self-awareness, and the courage to evolve.

Connect with Niya:
Website: https://niyadesai.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/niya-desai-00bb628/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conversationswithniya
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theniyadesaishow

If this conversation spoke to you, please subscribe, follow, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Connect with Anu Arora:
Website: https://anuarora.com
Podcast home: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindful-leadership/id1675397867
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anu.mindfulleadership
Substack: https://www.mindfulleaders.info

In this episode, Anu sits down with Noeyoni — architect, sustainable community builder, and author of the poetry collection As You Be for a conversation that started as an interview and turned into something much closer to two old friends comparing notes on the same uncanny journey.

Noeyoni and Anu discovered, almost by accident, that they'd each spent almost the same stretch of years writing a book of poetry — without knowing the other even existed.

What unfolds is a conversation about what it actually takes to stop gripping the wheel: the two things Noeyoni had to let go of to feel free, and what she found on the other side of letting go.

In this episode:

• How Noeyoni's nickname — and the meaning behind it — became the name she reserves for her creative work

• The eight-year spiritual journey that ran parallel to her career as an architect

• Seven accidents, one vertebra, and the strange, physical way she was pushed toward writing

• The real difference between living with intentions and intentional living — and why one of them is secretly a checklist life

• The first thing she let go of: needing to control the timeline of her own life

• The second thing she let go of: complaining — and what she believes complaints are actually trying to tell us

• A live reading from As You Be, complete with an explanation of the dance mudras behind them

• Why Noeyoni believes leadership is shifting from a "culture of lions" to a "culture of ants" — and what that means for the next generation of leaders

CORRECTION: Around minute 23:30, Noeyoni references Vinyasa Yoga when she was referring to Vipassana Yoga.

About Anu Arora
Anu Arora is an executive and team coach, speaker, and host of the Mindful Momentum Leadership Podcast. She works at the intersection of mindfulness, neuroscience, and leadership — helping mid-level managers and senior leaders navigate complexity, burnout, and the gap between performance and presence. Subscribe to her newsletter at mindfulleaders.info or follow her online at anuarora.com.

About Noeyoni

Noeyoni is a pen name. She is a sustainable community builder turned poet who synthesizes teachings she has gathered from all of her experiences into moving poetry that can help people make connection, grow, and improve their lives. You can read As You Be here.

What does Indian classical music teach us about leadership in ambiguous times? More than you might expect.

In this episode of the Mindful Momentum Leadership Podcast, Anu Arora sits down with Shalaka Kharche — product leader, founder, and lifelong student of Indian classical music — for a conversation about rebellion, the importance of beginner's mind, and what it means to listen for what is not being said.

Shalaka spent two decades leading products at Amazon, GE, and Honeywell before founding CareGrid Health, an AI consulting company dedicated to reducing the administrative burden crushing independent medical clinics. She is also a trained vocalist, harmonium player, and current sitar student and she argues that the raga has taught her more about leadership than any framework ever could.

In this conversation, Anu and Shalaka explore:

• Why the most important thing a musician learns is not the notes — but the space in between them
• How a beginner's mind is not just a mindfulness concept, but a competitive leadership advantage
• The systems-thinking approach to AI that most organizations are getting dangerously wrong
• What the Bhagavad Gita's teaching on right action looks like in the context of a modern startup
• Why embracing ambiguity is the defining leadership skill of this moment

Shalaka's closing message: Toss out your ego. Have the beginner's mind. Focus on right action. Outcomes will follow.

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Shalaka Kharche is the CEO and co-founder of CareGrid Health, an AI and business consulting company helping independent and specialty clinics grow sustainably. She brings 20+ years of product leadership experience across Amazon, GE, Honeywell, and the healthcare sector. She holds a master's in engineering and an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has been a student of Indian classical music for most of her life. Connect with Shalaka on LinkedIn.

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Anu Arora is an executive and team coach, speaker, and host of the Mindful Momentum Leadership Podcast. She works at the intersection of mindfulness, neuroscience, and leadership — helping mid-level managers and senior leaders navigate complexity, burnout, and the gap between performance and presence. Subscribe to her newsletter at mindfulleaders.info.

#MindfulLeadership #ExecutiveCoaching #LeadershipDevelopment #IndianClassicalMusic #BeginnersMind #AILeadership #HealthcareInnovation #WomenInLeadership #MindfulMomentumPodcast #StartupFounder #Ambiguity #BhagavadGita #AIHealthCare

What's your biggest AI fear?

This week on the Mindful Leadership Podcast, I sit down with Ashish Singh, technology leader at Amazon, longtime friend, and someone who's been building with AI in both his personal and professional life since it first launched. Together we discussed how to work through the five fears people most often have about AI.

We cover everything from job security, the changing shape of leadership and coaching in an AI world, to what happens to human intelligence with the increasing use of AI, real risks of voice-cloning scams, and whether AI can ever replicate what a human teacher hears in your voice.

Along the way, Ashish shares how he built a bedtime-story app for his daughters in a few hours, how a song he co-produced with his daughter reached 5.4 million views, and how he uses AI to track his own progress as a student of Hindustani classical music.

So let's tackle our fears about artificial intelligence together.

[NOTE: The views expressed by Ashish Singh are his own and do not reflect those of his employer.]

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Learn more about Ashish Singh:

Ashish Singh is a Technology & Product leader and PMP-certified professional with over 15 years of experience building software across e-commerce, devices, avionics, and telecom. He currently leads technology and product teams at Amazon, where he's known for attracting top talent and coaching high-performance organizations. An excellent communicator who bridges technical, business, and financial perspectives for both executive and engineering audiences, Ashish is also an early, hands-on adopter of AI — using it to build tools, create with his family, and deepen his lifelong study of Hindustani classical music.

[NOTE: The views expressed by Ashish Singh are his own and do not reflect those of his employer.]

#AIFears #MindfulLeadership #FutureOfWork #ArtificialIntelligence #AILeadership #HumanIntelligence #ExecutiveCoaching #TechLeadership

In this episode of Mindful Leadership Podcast, recorded on the 250th anniversary of American independence, Anu sits down with her dear friend Mudita Nigam — a technology and engineering leader at Amazon who builds trust among teams in the age of AI. A fellow immigrant, Mudita crossed the seas from India to build a new life in the US.

Their conversation moves from the deeply personal with anecdotes about being born a girl in a small Indian town where daughters weren't celebrated and learning young that her "sub-caste" was simply human — to the very professional, including what it takes to lead teams of teams, how to advocate for yourself, and how to build trust with both people and machines.

Mudita shares her philosophy on AI: it's exceptional at repetitive, rule-based work, but human judgment — shaped by lived experience — remains irreplaceable. The conversation closes with a message she hopes to pass on to the next generation: your humanity, your presence, and your love will outshine anything a machine can do.

Highlights:

• The story about how her father celebrated a daughter's birth against convention
• Why advocating for yourself is a skill, especially for women in leadership
• Crystal balls vs. rubber balls — knowing which priorities can bounce back and which can't
• Building trust with people vs. building trust with AI systems, and why she'd still choose human judgment
• Addressing the real fear of redundancy among new graduates
• Why humanity and love are what no machine can replicate

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Learn more about Mudita Nigam:

Mudita Nigam is an engineering leader at Amazon with over 18 years building large-scale production software systems and more than a decade leading engineering organizations. She currently leads a growing engineering team as a manager of managers within Brand Protection — a two-sided AI-agentic and ML-powered platform safeguarding both brand IP and shopper trust across Amazon's global stores.

Throughout her career, Mudita has grown engineering organizations from the ground up, shaped org design for execution speed, co-authored multi-year product strategy, and partnered closely with Legal, PR, and business teams to bring complex platforms to life. Earlier in her career, she led delivery for Microsoft's Global Datacenter Availability, guided Agilent through a cloud migration and entity split, and built ITSM platforms at Dubai Telecom and British Telecom.

A leader who builds trust in the age of AI as much as she builds systems, Mudita brings both technical depth and a deeply human philosophy of leadership to this conversation.

#MindfulLeadership #TrustInAI #HumanFirst #WomenInTech #ImmigrantStory #ExecutiveLeadership #FutureOfWork #AmazonLeadership #EmpatheticLeadership #IndependenceDay

In this episode of Mindful Momentum, Anu reunites with her dear friend Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy — Singelyn Family Dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona, an IIT Bombay graduate, and a recognized thought leader in AI for a wide-ranging conversation on what it means to live in an AI world. Together they unpack the idea of what exactly AI is. Artificial intelligence is informational, instrumental, and singular, while human intelligence is plural, conscious, and irreducibly complex. From the real economics behind corporate layoffs and the hidden costs of agentic AI, to practical advice for the next generation entering the workforce, and the danger of "artificial intimacy" replacing real human connection, this conversation returns again and again to one grounding idea: I > AI.

Highlights:

• Why AI acts intelligent and why that's different from consciousness

• Artificial intelligence vs. human intelligence

• What's really driving AI-related layoffs (hint: it's not just automation)

• Career advice Sandeep gives students navigating an AI-disrupted job market

• AI intimacy and what it means for human connections

• Why human beings — plural, complex, unrepeatable — can never be replaced

#MindfulLeadership #IWeUs #ArtificialIntelligence #HumanIntelligence #AIvsHI #MindfulMomentum #ConsciousLeadership #IGreaterThanAI #ExecutiveCoaching #Neuroscience #DeanKrishnamurthy #CalPolyPomona

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Learn more about Dr. Sandeep Krishnamurthy: He is the Singelyn Family Dean of the College of Business Administration at Cal Poly Pomona and a recognized thought leader in Artificial Intelligence. A graduate of IIT Bombay, he spent over a quarter-century at the University of Washington Bothell, where he served as founding dean of the School of Business before joining Cal Poly Pomona in 2023. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Arizona and was named to the Los Angeles Business Journal's LA500 list of the region's most influential leaders for two consecutive years.

What does it really take to develop leaders — not just train them? In this episode, Anu Arora sits down with Nandini Chawla, CEO of TV Rao Learning Systems, a leadership and talent development organization celebrating its 30th anniversary.

Nandini has been part of the company for 25 of those years, growing from a young facilitator once too afraid to be taken seriously to a PCC-certified coach and CEO who has shaped leaders across some of India's and the world's largest organizations.

Their conversation weaves together Nandini's personal journey — from engineering to sales to marketing to discovering her calling in leadership development — with remarkably practical wisdom that leaders at every stage can apply today.

Here's what you'll hear in this episode:

• The 360° feedback myth: Why this powerful tool is most often misunderstood, misused, or feared — and what a truly holistic 360 looks like, including why Nandini's firm invites family members into the process.
• The workshop moment that changed everything: How Nandini learned the most important lesson in facilitation — and in leadership — by throwing away her agenda and simply listening.
• Insecurity as preparation fuel: How Nandini channeled her early self-doubt about youth and experience into deep, relentless preparation that became her greatest professional strength.
• Humanity in the age of AI: Why the rise of artificial intelligence makes being genuinely human the most strategic leadership skill you can build right now.
• Gratitude as a system, not a practice: How TV Rao Learning Systems is embedding gratitude directly into 360 instruments — and why building it into process is more powerful than leaving it to intention.
• The two habits every aspiring leader needs: Reflection and continuous learning — and how to access both even when you believe you have no time.

Nandini closes with a beautiful invitation: everything can be a source of learning, from the dinner table conversation about Friends characters to observing how a senior leader handles a difficult moment. Leadership development doesn't have to be formal. It has to be intentional.

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Learn more about Nandini Chawla, CEO TVRLS:

An ICF Accredited PCC coach, Nandini has 29 years of rich cross-cultural work experience in the areas of Leadership Development and Organisation Development. She is the CEO and Co-Founder of T V Rao Learning Systems and Perfect Professional.

An Electrical Engineer and a Post Graduate Diploma in Business Administration from NMIMS Mumbai, she started her career with Titan Industries Limited in the areas of Sales and Marketing.

Nandini brings to the table a live business exposure as a successful line manager, having interacted, managed & dealt with sales professionals, subordinates, peers, senior management and above all Customers.

She is a life member at the NHRD network and was a member of the Executive Committee for the NHRD Network Bangalore chapter for two consecutive terms. In addition to presenting papers in conferences, she has authored many Articles and co-edited the book on 360-Degree Feedback and Performance Management Systems Volume 2, 360 Degree Feedback and Assessment Development Centers Volume 3, Life after 360 and ADCs Volume 4.

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#LeadershipDevelopment #360Feedback #TalentDevelopment #MindfulLeadership #TVRaoLearningSystems #LifelongLearning #HumanLeadership