Urvi Shah

For me, it's my faith. I'm actually very spiritual myself, and for me, it's nothing but I'm just here to serve the higher power, I call it God, and so everything in my life is through that spirit.

The best career advice I received was from one of my former supervisors' bosses when I was in consulting. He used to always say that especially within consulting, as you move from project to project, you want to make sure that whoever you are is always online, pretty much. Whatever your essence, whatever your style is, you're not losing that as you're moving from project to project or client to client. You're bringing your style, because that's what actually makes the project yours. Everybody has a secret sauce, it's identifying what that secret sauce is and just bringing that secret sauce to the game every single time.

My advice would be to stay true to yourself, to know that you actually are important, valuable, and you come with your own gifts, and to not lose that sight. I think one of the biggest things being women is we kind of get lost in the noise and kind of have this sense of inadequacy that we just carry, and then women in general, I feel like we carry a lot of guilt in general. So it's to remember that you're special, and you're important, and you're valuable, and you're enough, and you just show up every day with your power.

I think one of the biggest challenges is that a lot of people are really latching onto AI for a lot of different things in mental health, like coaching and therapy, and they're getting a lot of false information or information that might not be tailored for their specific life. I feel like that's a big challenge to kind of break that. The other challenge is just that initial stigma. I feel like with mental health, whether it be coaching or therapy, people are just hesitant to seek help, to seek support. They feel like they can do it on their own. I feel like a lot of people are capable to do it on their own, but a lot of times you do need that support. I get it, specifically for those women that are in the time period of pregnancy, postpartum, a lot of things are happening where it's like maybe you could do it on your own, but you're already doing so much on your own, so don't be afraid to ask for support or to seek it.

For me, alignment is a very big thing, and so for me alignment means mind, body, and soul. All of my values are kind of based off of that, and so if something feels misaligned to me, that's out of my own integrity, so I wouldn't do anything that is misaligned to me. That's one of my biggest values. The other part is honesty and transparency is a very big thing for me. I'm very vulnerable when I share my story and when I am working with my clients, and even when I was in corporate, I was very empathetic, and I think that empathy came from being vulnerable. So I feel like that's another big value that I have, is being transparent, vulnerable, and just empathetic when you're working with other people. And then I think the last value I have is in terms of just my working style. From somebody that used to work 80 hours a week, just like crazy, going through burnout after burnout, one of the things that I really value is my time. That incorporates rest, that incorporates once again, if something feels misaligned, like if I'm trying to push too hard and that doesn't feel right, I'll just back off a little bit for that day and shift my day into something else. So that's also a very big value for me.