Happy 5th Birthday CONNECTEDLIVING!!!-  HOW IT ALL BEGAN!!

 

I am so happy to be celebrating the 5th birthday of CONNECTEDLIVING today!

I remember that it was on this day 5 years ago that CL started with just one client in my living room.

It all began a few months before that when, one evening, I had met up a few ladies casually for drinks and I happened to just float an idea to this nice lady sitting next to me. I happened to ask her what she thought of this bizarre idea that I was having. My idea was to develop a program to help women understand and manage ‘Menopause’ better using concepts of psychology, art and Mindfulness. I was expecting a very sweet but non-engaging smile to just be rid of me and this conversation. Strangely, just the opposite happened! She immediately told me that if I ever developed such a program, she would be the first one to enroll.

Oh Lord, I definitely didn’t expect that! All those years of work that I had done in India, working with clients, helping them through therapy, flashed in front of me. When I moved to Switzerland, I had decided that that life was over for me. I had even taught myself to paint and was doing quite well with my exhibitions and sale of my paintings online. Here, I was known as an artist to the few people who knew me. I did not once think that somebody would give an artist the time of day to talk about help/ coaching and definitely not about the topic of menopause! But this nice lady, ever so kind, didn’t brush me off as a crazy person who brings up strange topics for conversation at a casual meeting. She asked some relevant questions and got more and more interested as I spoke. Until now, she only knew me as an artist from whom she had bought a few paintings. But her kindness and those moments of interest that she showed me, gave me the courage to start this venture which came to be called ‘CONNECTEDLIVING’.

To the best of my knowledge, there was no other program like this that combined concepts of psychology, art, mindfulness and meditation into one program!  And to top it all, my program was going to be in English in the German -speaking part of Switzerland.

And so CONNNECTEDLIVING was born on the 10th of May, 2016 (though it wasn’t called anything, then!).  It was just a program with one person in attendance in my living room. In a couple of weeks, one Sunday afternoon, my husband, I and a close friend of ours sat down brain-storming for a name for this ‘probable’ venture and the name ‘CONNECTEDLIVING’ was born. A couple of months later, I had more people wanting to attend one or the other programs/ services that CONNECTEDLIVING was offering and the living room was not ideal. Soon, CONNECTEDLIVING moved out of my living room to its own office in Cham, Switzerland and today celebrating its 5th birthday just because of the kindness shown to me by a very kind lady.