I own a small machine parts unit in Hubli. Business was running — barely. More importantly, I was running on empty. My team knew it. My family knew it. I didn’t know where the business ended and I began anymore. What changed wasn’t a strategy — it was perspective. Prasoon helped me see that the bottleneck was never the orders or the margins. It was me holding every decision like it would fall apart if I let go. Six months later, I have a manager who runs daily operations. I am working on the business, not just in it. My wife says I have come home. I didn’t realise I had left.

Llevaba doce años construyendo mi reputación como experto técnico. Cuando me ascendieron a director, me di cuenta de que no tenía idea de cómo liderar personas de verdad. Prasoon no me dio un manual — me hizo preguntas que nunca me había hecho a mí mismo. Sobre por qué lideraba como lo hacía, y quién quería ser. Fue incómodo. También fue lo más útil que he hecho en mi carrera. Hoy confío más en mi equipo, y me confío más a mí mismo en la sala.

Llegúe a Prasoon después de conseguir el ascenso que había querido durante cinco años — y no sentir nada de lo esperado. El trabajo no me dio respuestas inmediatas. Me dio el espacio y la estructura para hacer las preguntas correctas. Seis meses después, lidero de una manera que se parece a mí. No a la versión que creía que debía ser, sino a la que realmente soy. La diferencia es enorme, y se nota.

I was 48. Good job, good house, good everything on paper. And one Tuesday morning I sat in my car in the office car park for 45 minutes because I couldn’t find a reason to go inside. I didn’t tell my wife. Prasoon was the first person who didn’t try to fix it, reframe it, or rush me through it. He stayed in the middle of it with me. Eight months later, I went back to that same car park and sat there again, just to feel the difference. My life didn’t change completely. I changed completely inside it.

I was getting results but burning bridges. My team respected my numbers — they didn’t want to work for me. Prasoon’s first session was uncomfortable. He pointed out the gap between what I thought I was communicating and what my team was actually experiencing. I wanted to argue. He let me. Then he asked one question that stayed with me for three days. A year on, I have kept the results. The bridges are mostly rebuilt. I lead from a different place now.

I was the youngest Head of HR in our organisation’s history. What I hadn’t done was prepare for the person playing the role — not just the role itself. I was carrying insecurity about my age, compulsive over-preparation, a deep fear of being found out into every boardroom. Prasoon didn’t make those things disappear. He made them visible. And visibility, it turns out, is almost enough. Once you see a pattern clearly, it holds far less power. I walk into those rooms differently now.

My daughter stopped talking to me — really talking — about a year ago. I thought it was a phase. Then her school called. What I expected from Prasoon was advice on how to handle my daughter. What I received was an honest look at how I was showing up — not as a villain, just as someone who had forgotten what it feels like to be seventeen in this world. Three months later, she knocked on my door one evening. We talked until midnight. Not about grades. About her. That conversation was everything.

My wife and I had built fifteen years of a good life. Somewhere in there, we had also built fifteen years of carefully avoiding one particular conversation. We both knew it. We were equally afraid of what would happen if we had it. Prasoon worked with both of us. He didn’t take sides. He kept creating the conditions where the conversation that needed to happen actually could. We had it. It didn’t break us — it broke the distance between us, which is what we had both been too afraid to touch.

Divorce at 39, when you have built your entire identity around being a capable professional and a good wife — that is not a chapter ending. That is the floor giving way. I didn’t know who I was without the role. Prasoon didn’t coach me through the divorce. He sat with me through what came after — the silence, the identity question the lawyers cannot answer. He told me it was survivable, and that survivable was the beginning. A year later, I am building something. Mine.