Beyond Work-Life Balance: What I Learned About Energy & Success

Hi, my name is Anup Dhingra. I’m based in Mumbai. I’m here with my wife, Puja. We’ve been associated with the Brahma Kumaris for the last one year. The whole introduction happened through serendipity, and it was the start of a beautiful journey. So, if I were to give you a quick sense—I’ve been trying to do a DIY kind of thing for my spiritual journey. I tried Vipassana, tried Transcendental Meditation, tried Reiki, tried many other forms of spiritual self-reading—Vedanta, Gita, and many other things. I’ve been meditating for the last 15 years as well.

But this whole combination—through getting associated with the Brahma Kumaris—the knowledge part, the experiential part, the meditation part, and most importantly, how you can pay it forward, how you can bring other people into the fold—that whole combination has been such an eye-opening and inspiring thing for me. So, that’s just me, with this very limited 12-month kind of experience that I’ve had with the Brahma Kumaris. I think my biggest takeaway is that everyone has 24 hours in their life.

Conventional logic and conventional wisdom, whatever I hear from other speakers, say that you have to do work-life balance, which kind of means you have to divide your day into 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 hours of “me time.” What I’m taking away from the Brahma Kumaris is that the game is not about 8-8-8. The game is not about balancing your time. The whole thing is—how do you balance your energy?

If your vessel is full, if your battery is full, then you’re able to not only do better in whatever duties you have to discharge, but you’re also able to charge other people as well.

This is something I’ve only heard before—that CEOs or the Prime Minister of India also have 24 hours in a day, just like I do. Everyone gets the same canvas to play with. What you paint on the canvas is up to you. So, my biggest takeaway is energy versus the time footprint. The other thing is that we all pursue wealth, we all want material success, we all want professional success, and we all want success that gets validated through external factors—whether it’s our job title, our child’s school, the car we drive, or the house we own in a certain pin code.

But there’s more to life than that. I’m middle-aged, as you can see, but there’s more to life than that. Spending time with other people who have been through this journey—people who are, from an age or experience perspective, a few steps ahead of me—has given me a lot of insight. Listening to and talking to people who have walked this path before me has been very inspiring. Their words carry a lot of gravitas. But when I speak to every single person—the person who served me food, the person who helped arrange transport to come here—the moments are many, but the recurring theme is that everyone is trying to pursue not just self-realization or self-improvement, but also to create an impact in the larger society.

What I hear from everyone here is that they may not be very well-educated, they may not be very well-read, but the recurrent theme is that there is a bigger agenda. And even if I’m a small minion, a small cog in the whole machinery, I can still play a meaningful part.

I am making an impact. And that takeaway is something that is so impactful for me. That is something I would like to take back to my work. That is something I would like to take back to my family.

That is something I would like to impart to my kid as well—as a value system.

Thank you.

Anup Dhingra
Managing Director
Marsh India