After the Battle

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My NoSmalltalk session with Sachin Shah

by Albert Schiller

Forged by Loss

The most potent professional missions are often not born from a strategic market analysis, but from a desire to correct a past wrong or heal a personal wound. These endeavors are living tributes surpassing the concept of a chosen career. Sachin Shah’s work is an example of such a mission. His coaching practice, focused on empowering women, is inextricably linked to the memory of his mother and her struggle with depression. His journey is not about building a business. His mission is a personal campaign that poses a critical question: Is his desire to empower other women an attempt to win a battle his younger self witnessed to be ultimately lost?

The Pain of Silence

The specific nature of the inflicted wound Shah survived is crucial to understanding his methodology. The core of his mother's suffering, in his analysis, was not just the depression itself, but her inability to give it a voice. He describes a state of being trapped by a pain that was not easy to reveal, a silent, internal war fought without allies. This observation of severe silence became the central problem he would dedicate his life to solving. His mission is to equip women with the internal architecture to "speak out." He aims to help them voice what his mother couldn’t, by framing his work as a direct response to the specific pain of unspoken suffering.

Meaning in Death

Following his mother's death, a powerful psychological transference occurred. The immense pain of his loss couldn’t fester into despair. Instead, it was channeled and converted into an externalized, active purpose. This is evident in how he connects his present work to his past. He explicitly states that whenever he receives a blessing from a client whose life he changed, he thanks his mother, seeing her as the reason he is on his path. In this way, his clients become proxies in his ongoing relationship with his mother's memory. Each woman's victory seems to be a tribute to her, a way of bringing meaning to the loss and continuing a severed connection.

Unstoppable

This emotional origin story fuels what Shah calls his "unstoppable" drive. His resilience in the face of the rejections and failures inherent in building a coaching practice is not derived from professional ambition. It is anchored in his personal "why." When confronted with setbacks, he returns to the foundational question of why he started his journey in the first place. The memory of his mother and the mission that arose from it serves as an unwavering source of motivation. This connection transforms his work from a job into an imperative, explaining his capacity to persist through difficulties that might cause career professionals to quit.

A Battle Without End

This brings the narrative to a final, philosophical question. While his mission provides him with a profound sense of fulfillment and demonstrably helps his clients, can it provide closure for the original wound? The past remains immutable. By its nature, the retroactive battle he is fighting is a continuous act of honoring, a process without a final victory condition. It is a war waged in the present to bring meaning to the past. This suggests that the most powerful and enduring motivations are often not aimed at a finite goal, but are a constant, living expression of a pain that has evolved to purpose.

5 Lessons with practical values-

Open Questions

1. Shah’s mission is to give others the voice his mother lacked. Think of a challenge you witnessed but could not change in your past. How has that experience, consciously or unconsciously, shaped the "battles" you choose to fight in your professional life today?

2. His fulfillment comes from a "retroactive battle" that is continuous rather than finite. How does this idea of a permanent, process-oriented mission contrast with the conventional, goal-oriented view of success in your own field?