How did my own DNA evolve? Well, having asked the question, I need to answer that myself first. When I was younger, an astrologer said to my mother ‘she is strange, for she is a man and woman rolled into one.’ I will spare you my family’s reactions when they heard that! Notwithstanding the gender stereotyping, decades later I suspect I am beginning to understand what he meant.
Passages from my life and a few big personal transitions have shaped my DNA. Let us explore these. I was born in London but returned to India when I was two, which had a profound impact on me. I practically didn’t remember London, so imagine if I had not been told, I would not register my UK inception. But here is how the power of the subconscious and subtle cues influence us more strongly that we know. I was exposed to several realities.
I grew up in Calcutta listening to both Bollywood and the legendary Beatles which had influenced my parents in the 60s. I traveled in rickshaws as well as my Dad’s British Morris Minor on Calcutta’s pot-holed streets. I celebrated Diwali and Christmas with equal enthusiasm, was made to learn three languages and simultaneously learned ballroom dancing and Bharatnatyam (an Indian classical dance). The points of reference were truly varied. I saw Bertrand Russell and Tagore cohabiting on my parents’ bookshelf. I watched Dad’s entrepreneurial leather business with Chinese tanneries and Ma’s career with Philips, a multinational company, grow in different ways.
Watching Fawlty Towers, the fabled British 1970s sitcom, reading Indian folklore and listening to Dadu’s stories all fed in. These contrasting elements extended to my changing family circumstances. When I moved from a large joint family with four cousins under the same roof, to a small nuclear family when my parents separated, I transitioned from a sense of competition to one of individualism. This individualism was anchored in a harsh reality of having very little resources yet making the most of every moment.
So when in 2008, I became a finalist for the UK’s Women of the Future Awards, under the corporate entrepreneur category, it made me stop and look back on my journey. How did I get here?
The reality is that while flashes of England were blended into my DNA as I grew up, I never physically touched down on British soil until 24 years later.
My first big transition was from Calcutta to Delhi at 17 to study English Literature in Miranda House. This was my choice. Now you may think they are two similar Indian cities but they are as different as Minnesota and Melbourne. Delhi was everything Calcutta wasn’t. While Calcutta was philosophical, culturally rich and intellectually minded, Delhi was fast, entrepreneurial and filled with a can-do attitude. It gave me a sense of freedom, self-belief and hunger to work things out for myself. I chose a hard life to commute thirty kilometers each way, twice a day, on hideous Indian buses to get a degree. I used to leave home at 6:30 am and return at 10pm … all in the attempt to gain intellectual weight while rapidly losing physical! My mother and I had to start a life from scratch. While we had nothing to begin with, we ended up with something far bigger and meaningful – a renewed self belief. That was another passage of re-channelling myself in a new context. The third big transition was Delhi to London at 26, prompted by another repeating pattern of wanting to prove myself in a new context; this time, across the oceans. I still remember as the plane touched the tarmac in Heathrow in September 2000 and I took off my seat belt. It felt alien – like another ‘ping’; I didn’t know a soul except Auntie Daniel. She is my mother’s second cousin’s French wife and became a great ally from that moment until ninety days later, when I found a little studio apartment to move into.
Making a name in a foreign land with a last name, Duttgupta, which people either hesitated to pronounce or avoided altogether, presented its own arc of distortion for me to manage.
A new voyage was about to start with a series of mini moves and international immersions – consulting assignments, in other words! These
transitional experiences albeit short were powerful and life changing. From Italy to Japan, Ghana to Hong Kong and Sweden to Dubai, I experienced over twenty countries in short stints – my leadership DNA was being influenced by new values, local ways of working, new rules of rights and wrongs. Just when I would work out the ‘how to be’ code for a country, I was picked and dropped into another! Here is what was most startling though; in between, there was always the annual pilgrimage to India – a strange homecoming where every winter, I revisited India through the lens of a visitor (or a non-resident foreigner as, I sadly felt, when they stamped my passport at the Indian customs). My views of India had altered. As my own self was morphing, I started to appreciate India a lot more. Transitions taught me that when our ‘lenses’ with which we view the world change, our reality alters. Even if the world doesn’t change, our perspective does, so keep trying new lenses. They may be uncomfortable initially, but give a richer vision. The other big transition was leaving a corporate directorship to start my own business in early 2007. Leading up to that point, life as a consultant in a big firm really suited me – I enjoyed seeing different clients, tackling different assignments and the variety, creativity and the opportunity to soak up different realities was offering me the best learning curve ever, far steeper than an MBA, but it was all under the ‘safety net’ of corporate employment.
After ten years or so, my entrepreneurial streak finally took over. Dadu’s wish was coming true! I started to believe in my own story. It was time to leave the safety net. The attitude or restless curiosity I introduced in the opening lines of this chapter took over my existence with a relentless ‘what if…?’ What if I could start my own business? What if I could set my own targets and outreach them? Or, hire my own eclectic team? Handpicked and uniquely bearing the label ‘blended by Rhea’? What if I could upgrade my corporate vision to an entrepreneurial identity? We will read in the chapter on resilience about life passages and living in seven-year cycles, including why 32 is a major turning point. Indeed at 32, I gave up a corporate directorship and cleared out all my savings to start my own leadership consultancy. The adrenaline rush was irresistible, but it wasn’t just that which drove me to exit the safety net and start on my own. I detected this recurring pattern in my script. Seven years back I had left the safety net of Delhi to move to London and now, the next seven year cycle was itching to uproot me again. The chance to be free to follow my own inclinations, my own internal voice, to immerse myself in practising leadership from the inside out and in doing so, rediscovering myself in a way I would never have been able to otherwise. Had I not taken that leap when I did, I would
never have jumped at all. Talking about jumps, I will compare this with a skydive later in the fear chapter.
With every transition, I realised every now and then I was altering a current reality, discovering a new one to make my new reality richer and bigger. Just as rules were changing, the self was re-adapting and channeling to context. With several hits and misses, I realised it was important not to apply old rules to a new context, buy equally important to define some new ones of your own. The more I moved realities, the more I realised the world is much more interdependent and connected than I thought but with bigger opportunities, creating room for more leaders.
Seeing the patterns and connections is essential. I felt the whole fabric of life was being woven from these multiple reference points. In all my transitions it was about upgrading my own version as soon as a current version felt strong and predictable. Restlessness and disrupting the core to discover more and push myself to the edge, continues to give me my edge. Now that may be different for others.
During this intense self-discovery period in my thirties, I also realised that, as strange as it sounds, disruption is a good force for me. I took to extreme sports – ocean rafting, canyoning, skydiving and stunt planes. I only share this to convey how important it is to connect the seeming linkages between our different passions and how the inner free child wanting to be a maverick needed and wanted to coexist with my grown adult role. A kind of risky experimentation, controlled chaos, the adventure of wanting to control just as impending danger/fear was taking over, gave me a whole new self belief and confidence to push boundaries. It activated many dormant neurons. For me, this gave me an appetite for risk and ability for dogged concentration, conquering fear which I was applying and transferring to my high-stake and high risk leadership business. That may sound utterly bizarre, but it did.
We all have what I call a ‘Play safe’ (keeping balanced) versus ‘Play risk’
(channelling your aggression) quotient. There’s no happy medium or a perfect equilibrium in this quotient; how much risk we are ready to take is unique and dependent on your DNA. Risky sports sharpened my mind and helped me find new solutions to work. It may be something else for you – not everyone has to jump off a plane, write a book and bare their soul or even risk all one’s savings to start a business – but it will be something. Of course, we all like moments of being safe, but imagine if that
is all you ever did. The point is to be aware of the price of just playing safe. If you play always safe, you will always get safe results.