Nidhika Bahl on being the ‘Queen of Comeback’ and invincible in this game of life

The job of a life coach is to guide people who have lost their sense of purpose in life. This requires focus, a calm demeanour, and an in-depth understanding of life. Mumbai-based Dr Nidhika Bahl professes to have these in spades and has mentored a number of athletes, entrepreneurs, high-performing business leaders, corporate professionals, educators and celebrities, including Manushi Chhillar, who was crowned Miss World in 2017.

“Throughout my career, I have mentored tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and other global achievers through private programs, mastermind groups, and one-on-one coaching. I have integrated my insights into a well-structured learning system called The Game Of Life® and Health Talk World. I believe I provide value to my clients by sharing actionable and result-oriented content, in a witty and engaging style, and this is what appeals to my audience across the globe,” shares Nidhika as she joins YS Weekender for a chat.

Edited excerpts from an interview:

YS Weekender (YSW): You don many professional hats. How do you maintain this balance?

Nidhika Bahl (NB): Everything I do gives me immense pleasure! I am an international bestselling author of two books – ‘The Queen of the Comeback’ and ‘Successonomics’ which I co-authored with Jack Canfield. I’m also a leading life and success coach, a TEDx speaker, PhD (Gold Medallist) in holistic health and healing, integrative nutritionist, strategic interventionist, and mental-switch specialist.

I host two popular web series – ‘India’s Biggest Comebacks’ and ‘Invincibles with Dr Nidhika Bahl’ – and a podcast series called the Mental-Switch on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts. I have also been awarded numerous times for excellence in Training, Coaching, and Consulting.

I have reached this phenomenal growth because I have been trained and mentored by some of the great teacher leaders of the 21st century including Anthony Robbins, T. Harv Eker, Blair Singer, Robert Kiyosaki, Les Brown, and many others.

My focus has always been to inspire people to move out of mediocrity and take a front-row seat in their lives, living life to their highest potential. This sense of purpose is the driving force that allows me to do everything.

YSW: What are your most popular services?

NB: I help people navigate life’s most challenging transitions through workshops, group coaching, one-on-one coaching / counselling, and healing sessions.

My most popular service is ‘Healing for Holistic Health’ because it takes account of the entire person and all the internal and external factors affecting them. It emphasizes the interconnected nature of the mind, body, spirit and emotions and allows for different types of healing interventions for easy and permanent transitions.

Unlike most therapists and counsellors, I believe in equipping people fast so they can get back to life, rather than remain stuck in time, becoming emotionally dependant on their therapist / counsellor.

In the last two years, the most requested services have been:

a.    Emotional healing sessions / counselling services

b.    Integrative Nutrition Health Coaching for immunity boosting and weight loss

YSW: When did you first feel the call of spirituality?

NB: I believe I have been spiritual since birth, but I felt a serious call in 2008. I kept seeing 1:11, 11:11 every time I looked at a clock and 111 or 1111 on number plates of vehicles. First I thought this was purely coincidental, but eventually realised it was a call to take on the work for which I was born - to be a lightworker - to guide people from darkness to light, from pain to power, from fear to freedom, from self-hate and self-doubt to self-love and self-belief.

I felt like a superwoman on the surface, but underneath, I was a lost girl who needed help desperately. Within nine months, I had lost my father, marriage, career, health, a sense of purpose, and self-esteem. Grieving and in denial, I became a loner, a prisoner in my own home. I avoided all social contact and could not do the simplest of tasks. For months I believed there was nothing I could do about the way I felt.

That’s when I made the mental-switch! In the fourth year of my fight against depression, I was introduced to self-help books. Despite never having been a reader, I read nearly 300 books that year.

Finally, Joyce Meyer showed me the way in a YouTube session when she responded to a similar plight of another woman by saying, “You hurt, you heal, you help.” She explained that God has a plan for our lives. He has faith in our ability to bounce back from any adversity, and when we do, we can be his channel to help others do the same.

Those words from Joyce changed the whole trajectory of my life. Looking back, I genuinely believe that depression was the best thing that happened to me. It made me fearless. I would never have been who I am today without having gone through that experience.

YSW: What is integrative nutrition and how should one incorporate it in their lifestyle?

NB: I am one of few practitioners in India certified by the world’s largest nutrition school – the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, IIN in New York, USA. To help my clients create personalized, real, and lasting change, I also completed several courses in India and abroad from the world’s leading NLP, EFT and Mental-Switch experts. Integrative nutrition health coaching is a 12-week program that educates and empowers you to become your own health coach for life.

It allows you to embrace your bio-individuality and create a healthy lifestyle that is tailor made for you. You learn how to identify the foods that work for you, create your own diet, overcome emotional eating, learn to manage cravings, integrate nutrition into your food plate, design your own exercise regime, and make other lifestyle changes that you can sustain for years to come. This program covers both primary and secondary foods.

My own weight loss journey is the biggest testimony of the success of my methods. I was 35 kilos overweight in my early 30s. I was also diagnosed with some popular obesity related lifestyle diseases. The key word being ‘lifestyle’! I became a classic yo-yo dieter, where I went up and down the weight-loss roller coaster with every fad diet I followed. Every time I lost weight on a diet, I gained it all back along with a few extra kilos, the moment I stopped.

Caught in the grip of compulsive eating, I was left emotionally overwhelmed with guilt, shame, and self-loathing. Then the lockdown happened! I had a choice, I could either kill time and loneliness with binge eating, or use this ‘downtime’ to finally take charge of my health. I decided to rise above all excuses (fat genes, low metabolism etc.) and take responsibility for my body.

I enrolled for an internationally acclaimed integrative nutrition course so I would be better equipped to help myself. As the course progressed, I became aware of how my body felt and focussed less on how it looked. By embracing a whole new way of relating to my body, weight loss finally became fun, and my excess weight melted away as a natural side-effect.

I shed 35 kilos over a year and have been able to successfully keep it off for more than a year, without being on a diet! The principles I learnt during this journey are what I have used to build my 12-week body transformation program.