Niti Nadarajah is a phenomenal personality who truly believes in creating an impact in women’s lives through her coaching and her way of living. She has been a multi-talented person deeply committed to her work as a lawyer until she felt STUCK in the process and led herself to clarity by finding her purpose and inclination towards women empowerment. There-after she has been an active founder and a revolutionary in helping women get UNSTUCK and finding their inner compass. Her achievements are listed as she has truly become magnetic when work fuses with passion.
Founder and Coach at Coaching by Niti
🔥 Freelance General Counsel at Legal by Niti
🔥 DEI consultant and advocate
🔥 The Pink Elephants Support Network Peer Support Companion
🔥 Adviser to The Creative Co-Operative
🔥 Angel Investor & Nobody at Nobody Studios
🔥 Founding Member at Human Leaders
🔥 LinkedIn Top Voice 2022 (Gender Equity)
🔥 Speaker and podcast guest
🔥 Writer for various publications
🔥 Mentor, including through Future Women
Let us read more about her while she is been a strong personal brand for women to look upto.
According to you what are the essential qualities that women should possess to excel in their career?
I think the essential qualities that anyone should possess to excel in their career (whatever their gender) are empathy, active listening skills, grit and resilience, curiosity, kindness, vulnerability, and confidence. We need to have more of a balance between what we typically refer to as masculine energy and feminine energy in the workforce as it has for all too long been weighted toward masculine energy.
What advice would you like to give to all aspiring women entrepreneurs?
Firstly, in order to tune into your internal compass and find out what you value and what your strengths, gifts, and passions are. The more you can tune in to who you are and what gives you energy, the easier it will be to anchor into your vision and purpose and make your dreams a reality. I would also encourage women who aspire to become entrepreneurs to build their personal brand by engaging on platforms like LinkedIn in an authentic and real way and to find a tribe of people who they can turn for support and guidance. And be prepared for a huge learning curve and challenging your own mindset and deeply held values on things like money, certainty, flexibility, and time.
We all encounter days where we lose hope and don’t feel ourselves. What keeps you going on such days?
You’re right, we do indeed all have these days. Sometimes, I need to lean into these feelings and just sit with them without trying to fight them. On other days, I find myself turning to rest and practices like yoga and meditation or journaling to try and bring myself out of the funk. The reality is that we don’t show up every day feeling amazing – the law of averages is far more important, and remember that that’s what matters. Giving ourselves some self-compassion.
What are the various obstacles that you faced while building your personal brand when you started your journey?
I didn’t intentionally set out to build a personal brand. Instead, writing on LinkedIn was a way for me to form connections with other people at a time when the world felt so disconnected (when Covid started). As I leaned into the platform more and more and started to have meaningful conversations with people on the issues I care deeply about, I found that I had started to build a personal brand.
Not everyone understood what I was doing though and there were murmurings about why I was spending so much time on the platform and whether this was detracting from my day-to-day job. What those people did not understand was that these conversations were a huge source of my energy at the time and what kept me going. By the stage, these murmurings started to show up though, I had enough conviction and confidence in what I was doing and why I was doing it to not let those voices impact my personal branding efforts.
At times, I also felt imposter syndrome creep in and wondered whether my thoughts really mattered. I started to doubt whether anyone wanted to listen to me speak about issues I cared about. Leaning into my “why” kept me going through these periods of self-doubt.
Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
For the first time in my life, I’m not planning the future but let it unfold. I feel driven by a deep sense of purpose and mission and am letting the universe guide me to different opportunities and paths. At a broad level though, I see myself operating quite deeply in the coaching and female empowerment and gender equity space, but with an intersectional lens. These conversations give me a deep sense of fulfillment.
Why have you also opted for legal freelancing?
One of the issues that I was grappling with when deciding whether to leave my job and pursue my purpose and passions was financial security. Having a steady flow of income and being able to pay my mortgage and look after my kids have always been important to me and I didn’t want to jump into something completely new without a buffer. Legal freelancing fits that need perfectly. I have always enjoyed the strategic problem-solving that comes with being an in-house lawyer and can continue to do that, whilst also having a steady foundational income and the space to experiment and pivot in my passion space.
What did you discover about yourself in the whole process while you were working as a lawyer?
There are many things I love about being a lawyer, including strategic problem-solving and analytical thinking. Many of the skills required of a lawyer are innate to the way I operate in the world on a daily basis. What I had however lost sight of was why I enjoyed law at university, i.e. the social justice and human rights aspects of law and regulation. The last few years have allowed me to dig into that underlying core desire to help make the world a better, more equitable place.
Your step of leaving a full-time career and taking a break in between was a bold one. How did you get the courage for making this transition?
Firstly, by getting to know me from the inside out and trusting that this was what I truly wanted to, and needed to, do.
Secondly, by recognizing that I would never lose my past professional experiences and that I would never know what entrepreneurship is like unless I gave it a go and that I would always regret it if I didn’t.
And thirdly, by embarking on a portfolio career and going slowly rather than putting all my eggs into one basket.
You have always been vocal about issues like mental health, gender equality, and vulnerability.Do you think that the legal industry still has a long way to go when it comes to these areas?
Absolutely! When I started law school, we had an equal number of female students and male students for the first time in the school’s long history. That translated into more female graduates in my articled clerkship intake than male graduates. And yet, we still don’t see those numbers translating at the partnership level. There are systemic and structural issues that relate to the very foundations on which law firms are built that prevent real change at the gender equity level, and even more so when you then take an intersectional lens to the industry. Law firms (in particular) need to go beyond the rhetoric on their D&I website pages and brochures to really examine their underlying structures.
Similarly, mental health and vulnerability have not been topics that have been commonly discussed in the profession until more recently. I hope that Covid has changed things on this front, but we do need to again examine some of the more structural issues that prevent real change. The focus on billable hours and resulting presenteeism and burnout culture, hierarchy, and the focus on getting things perfect… There are so many issues that we need to examine at a closer level and it will take time and conscious effort to shift these things in a meaningful way.
What is that one quality of yours that differentiates you from other coaches?
I believe my experience as a lawyer and the deep analytical and critical thinking skills that go along with being in that profession differentiate me as a coach, alongside my NLP skills. I bring a wide range of perspectives with me into everything I do.
Being both a parent and a working mother, how do you maintain a work-life balance?
I prefer to call it work-life integration versus balance as I’m not sure balance exists in this space. It’s not always possible and there are definitely times I struggle with this, but what I like to try and do as much as possible is set my own boundaries. I tend, for example, to not work between the hours of 5 and 8pm as that is my family time. After 8pm, I try and spend some time tending to me or being with my husband. And Friday nights are sacred for me. The more boundaries I have and maintain effectively, the easier I find it is to integrate work and life in a way that works for me.
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You can get to know more about Niti Nadarajah through her Linkedin Profile.
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