FOOD
for thought

We are an opinionated group. From time to time we publish articles & opinions on a variety of topics. You can see a collection of these writings in the Bento Blog.

The Bento Coach - Team | bentocoach.com

The Bento blog

Vikas Mehra in his kitchen and in the city

Tech Investment Not Paying Off? The Mindset REWIRE You Need

Remember that “IT Project” that was meant to solve all your problems? Months later, the system has gone live. The consultants have left, the money has been spent. But the problems still remain. What happened to you is not unique. Over the course of three decades working with organisations across industries, I began to notice a pattern. Teams invest in new technology and then, months later, are puzzled about why the promised gains hadn’t

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Pictures of Ripudaman Sujlana with his family

The Career REWIRE I Did Not See Coming

What if the most important career move you ever make is the one that has no title, no resignation letter, and no LinkedIn announcement? We are taught that career growth is about fighting your way into the right rooms. But this is the story of my career rewire and the deep transformation that happened when I willingly stepped out of those rooms. The Pause By most measures that matter in a corporate career, things

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Picture composite with skyline of Dubai, picture of old cars in Dushanbe, and Anjani Gandhi & Vishal Mehra

From Dubai to Dushanbe: My life REWIRED

If Dubai taught us what comfort looks like, Dushanbe taught us what comfort costs. And somewhere in that gap, I rewired my outlook on life. In 2008, I swapped the keys to a Jaguar for a pair of walking shoes. I went from a salary that gave me options to one that gave me very few. From a city that ran like clockwork, to one where the tap water was brown, the gas pipeline

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Picture composite of wild fires

A Personal Letter on Survival, Surrender and Becoming Antifragile

This blog is a record of my kidney transplant journey. I have attempted to journal the chaos of my sudden diagnosis, the surgery and recovery process. As I have learnt, rebuilding of resilience is a slow process, and I am cautiously learning what it means to become antifragile. During this process I have used the Antifragility framework by Anjani Gandhi, and was inspired by Dr. Nassim Taleb and his book Antifragile: Things That Gain

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The Leadership Paradox

Authenticity is not possible without embracing the “and” within us. Our minds like to categorize things into neatly labelled boxes. Am I right, or is she right? Let’s stretch our minds to I can be right and so can she. Embracing the “and” is like yoga for the brain. When we train ourselves to hold paradoxes by stretching ourselves out of the boxes our minds create, we stretch into new possibilities and adapt more

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Enabling GROWTH in a post pandemic world

If we are growing, we are always going to be out of our comfort zone. John C. Maxwell Tweet I don’t know about you, but the past two years have been anything but comfortable. In the past two years everything that we understood about organization culture, the role of technology, the importance of human connection, the meaning of growth, was upended. Let me explain. In traditional terms, when we talk about growth, we almost

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picture showing arrows pointing forward to 2022

A Journey From Flux to Flex

If the keyword for 2021 is FLUX, then let’s make the keyword for 2022 FLEX! Sabita Prakash Tweet Is it just me or do you agree that this year has flown by AND dragged on? As December rolls around and we get ready to wrap up this year, I was struck by what a strange year 2021 was. We started the year with so much hope and optimism that we were going to put

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Pictures with chalk on chalkboard spelling out RESPECT

The Flying Chalk

RESPECT: to have due regard for someone’s feelings, wishes, or rights. As a coach I often come across “how can I work with someone I don’t respect?”. Respect in a multi-generational workplace can be hard to navigate. Surprisingly, the answer comes from the most unexpected sources. Today morning my 9YO was in a virtual classroom. While waiting for the session to start, she was exchanging her email id with her classmates. This 5-minute cacophony

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How to Repurpose Your Career | bentocoach.com

How to Repurpose your CAREER

There’s a lot happening around us over the last few years when this word ‘repurpose’ surfaced and made us ask these questions: Why didn’t we think of it this way?Why did we not imagine it like this?What will happen if we try it for this? One of the biggest examples this pandemic has been the repurposing of drugs to counter the far-reaching impact of Covid treatment. As the rage of the pandemic hit the

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In Our HUMBLE Opinion