[100 Emerging Women Leaders] How Myah Payel Mitra made a career shift to become a successful somatic leadership and career transition coach

In 2014, Myah Payel Mitra was hard at work, rolling out yet another new software product as a project manager, oblivious to the toll it was taking on her.

“After reaching home one night at 1.30 am, I crashed, and the next morning, I couldn’t get up from bed. I had this massive pain in my back, and this resulted in me confined to bed for close to two months,” Mitra tells HerStory.

Clocking long and continuous hours at work, seated in one place at a stretch had rendered her almost immobile for a while. That’s when Mitra realised that she had ignored both her physical and mental wellbeing until then. It was a wake-up call, no doubt. One that would change the trajectory of her life and career.

In 2001, when Mitra was ready to pursue software engineering, the dotcom bust put paid to her plans. Bowing to pressure, she decided to take up telecommunications engineering instead. She followed this with an MBA and landed her first job in TCS through campus placement. 

At TCS, Mitra  worked with the strategic solutions group and then went on to lead teams. She worked with senior TCS leaders across the globe. Later she moved onto HCL and KMPG, amassing over a decade’s experience in the corporate sector. She was working for a loyalty aviation-focused firm when she fell ill. 

Mitra was advised surgery for her back but she decided against it and thought she would go for rehabilitation and physiotherapy. 

“The two months helped me reflect upon what I was running after and what success meant to me. The time of introspection helped,” she says.

During this time, Mitra chanced upon an advertisement for a workshop on dance movement therapy in a newspaper. It intrigued her and she decided to check it out. The two hours at the workshop ignited a spark within her, urging her to explore more. 

Gauging her interest, the facilitator suggested she look at a course in dance movement therapy from Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS). This put her in the right direction.

Mitra attended the course on weekends and took a sabbatical from work for two months for field research. She enjoyed it thoroughly. 

“After completing my course, I went back to my job, but the seed was already planted. Something kept tugging at my heart, and I started to offer sessions during weekends to friends. 

“I was primarily working with a lot of women in communities to empower them on their body image, on confidence … those returning to work after work,” she says.

Creative approach

Mitra’s focus was on empowering people through movement. She was soon invited to be a master faculty at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai to help students think creatively and out of the box.

Mitra and her work started getting noticed. In 2016, after winning a marketing pitch at a fest, she slowly began thinking about expanding her work beyond a weekend hobby. Her family and friends thought she was crazy, and told her it would be impossible to make ends meet and also maintain the lifestyle she was used to. 

She took some time to realise that a tech job was not what she wanted to do 30 years down the line. She started visualising herself as someone who wanted to go out there, inspire others, and create an impact by transforming people. The idea was reinforced when she met Sheryl Sandberg (former COO of Facebook) at an event in San Francisco in 2019. 

Mitra came back determined to set a plan into motion. She planned her finances and resigned from her corporate job in January 2020. She decided to move to Goa for two years to minimise her lifestyle. 

“I had just finalised my apartment when the pandemic hit, and I was in a place where I knew no one. And I had no basic requirements because of the lockdown,” she recalls.

Mitra says that inner strength, resilience, courage and the conviction to strike out on her own stopped her from feeling despondent. She offered sessions and created content on LinkedIn. Siemens was her first corporate client; she conducted leadership workshops during the corporate firm’s annual off-site, using movement therapy as one of techniques.

In 2022, Mitra started working as an independent coach and consultant after moving to Bengaluru. She was selected as part of the LinkedIn creator accelerator programme–the platform’s first and only cohort in India. This gave her an opportunity to learn, grow and build a community on LinkedIn. This year, she started Move with Myah - a coaching and consulting brand offering an umbrella of services.

Mitra has delivered programmes for top organisations, including  Microsoft, Google, KPMG, Barclays, HDFC and Myntra, working with over 18,000 participants in over 30 countries through a combination of offline and online sessions. 

She explains, “MOVE is also an acronym; it means Move to Meet your fears, expectations, inhibitions, your past and future; O is to observe your feelings, emotions and current state, V is to visualise your future or desired state, and E is to Express your true feelings, thoughts and emotions.” 

Zero regrets in life

While the programmes are customised according to the requirements of clients, Move with Myah offers a trademark signature programme called the Workplace Rhythm Program–a multidisciplinary approach that borrows from dance movement therapy, art therapy, NLP,  transactional analysis, and allied creative expressive art forms.

The company offers leadership training and development, diversity and inclusion workshops, and employee workplace and wellbeing sessions. Other signature programmes include Leadership Agility Program – F.I.E.R.C.E Leadership and Unveiling Unconscious Bias – Building an Inclusive Workplace. 

As for challenges, Mitra believes rewiring herself from her own self-limiting beliefs was the biggest one. 

“There were niggling doubts. No one in my family had done this before. Was this a passing fad or was this something I wanted to fight for the rest of my life? Till the time I had the inner conviction that I was going to give it my all, it was a challenge,” she says.

Ultimately, Mitra believes in living a life of zero regrets.

“Instead of asking myself, what if I fail, I asked, ‘What if I fly?’ You will never know unless you try. Imposter syndrome may rear its head often. Having a supportive network and ecosystem is extremely important,” she advises.