“Life is not about me, it is about we”

— Anand Chulani, peak performance coach


DOHA ROUND: Anand Chulani at a recent EO Qatar event at Banana Island.     Photo by Umer Nangiana

By Umer Nangiana


He strictly practices what he truly believes. Each of his beliefs is a direct product of an experience in life. For instance, he believes “if you hold onto the failures of your past, you will not be able to receive the victories of your future.”
In 1994, he graduated from the Harrow School in England and was voted by teachers and peers as the kid “least likely to succeed.” Four years later, Anand Chulani graduated from Georgetown University with a double honours degree in History and English as well as double minor in Psychology and Theater as “one of the fifteen most prominent students.”
This once “least likely to succeed” young man went on to become the first Indian ever to write for hit shows like Goodness Gracious Me and Life on a Stick on BBC and FOX. He has toured with Russell Peters, a Canadian standup comedian, as one of the “Gurus of comedy” and acted in TV shows and Hollywood movies opposite stars like Jeff Goldblum and George Clooney.
For almost a decade now, he has been a certified peak performance coach, working with corporate, sports and youth leadership. He has worked with 50,000 youth leaders from 30 different countries so far.
As a strategic consultant and coach, Chulani has worked with CEOs and senior leadership of Fortune 500 companies and elite family businesses in India, UAE, Africa and Europe such as Google, Disney, Reliance, BBC, Nestle, Airtel, Exonn Mobil, and others besides organisations such as YPO International and the International Association of Hostage Negotiators.
Chulani was in Doha recently for one such interaction, with members of Entrepreneurs Organisation (Qatar chapter).
Following a lengthy session with businessmen at Doha’s newly-developed expansive Banana Island, in an exclusive interview to Community, Chulani opened up about how he manages to “help others realise their dreams on their own terms.”
From a performer helping himself to a coach helping others, how did the transition happen?
“I worked for a man named Anthony Robbins. At a seminar in US with 10, 000 in attendance, I saw him change people’s lives there and then. I was writing for a major TV show then, a comedy, and my life at that point was about distracting people from the truth, to make them laugh, rather than helping them find the truth,” an ever-energetic Chulani says in his trademark brisk speech.  
It was here that he realised he, too, wanted to help people find the truth. He wrote a letter to Robbins, expressing his wish and was subsequently, taken into mentorship. Robbins trained Chulani in tools and techniques on making people realise who they are and what they are really capable of. And this, he says, is what he lives for.
Chulani has established Youth Empowered Summit (YES) Camp, a first of its kind youth leadership programme in India for Grades 9 to 12. YES Camp, a series of leadership camps, enables children to “live up to their potential, maximise their performance, let their personality shine and create a life and career for themselves.”
“I don’t believe in thes question — what do you want to be when you are older. My question is what is your gift and how do you share it with the world,” says Chulani.
He realised his own gift of helping others long ago. He just needed skills to master it, and he got them during the time spent with Robbins. Now, he is equipping others with the same skills, training them as coaches with the belief that everyone should have access to it.
“I am trying to train people on how to master these tools themselves because life is not about ‘me’, it is about ‘we’,” says the motivational speaker and coach. If there is more happiness and joy in this world, he goes on to add in the same breath, people will have more success and thus there will be less war and conflict.
The greatest conflict today is the conflict within ourselves, he opines. “Dis-ease comes from the disease in the body; dis-ease with myself, my relationships and my business. If you can help people find ease, they walk away feeling happy. And when they do that, they have lived a life worth living,” says the man who has personally lifted many souls from deep depression, putting them up for a purposeful life.
Chulani believes feeling others’ pains comes through experiencing the same yourself. And only if you feel it, can you heal it. “I felt what it was like being unsuccessful, unhappy, being in a bad relationship and having a business which was going nowhere. And I pulled myself out of all of them. That is why I am sharing with people how to practically do it,” says the performance coach.
“I was bullied intensely when I was 12 or 13. I thought I was worthless, useless, was very depressed and that is why today when I walk into a room I can tell you within five minutes which of the children are bullied because I can feel that pain,” reveals Chulani.
Pain, he believes, is a gift. We are so scared of handling pain in our lives that we manage it with drugs and medicines. The key in life, however, is not to manage pain. It is to live through pain and find the gift it has given you.
Chulani has worked with all kinds of people from IPL (Indian Premier League) teams and sportsmen to corporate personalities and heads of Human Resource and he believes everyone needs coaching in life.
“We all need coaching. I mean players like Sachin Tendulkar had a coach. When he retired, the first person he thanked was his coach,” suggests Chulani, indicating that a coach is someone who can help find a path, mindset, strategy and access to resource.
Chulani advises people to set hard-to-achieve external goals in order to bring out the best in them. “My goal for people is not to achieve to become happy, but to happily achieve,” says Chulani.
He has worked on countless cases of people encountering suicidal behaviour, and he has brought them back to normal life. Suicide, he says, comes from one place; when a person is way too focused on himself, and nothing beyond.
Depression is heightened, you feel there is nothing that you can do to change the situation, and you feel what is called ‘learned helplessness’ and that is when you go into a suicidal place.
He saved a child in Mumbai, India, who was on the roof, about to end his life. Responding to a distress call from the child’s mother, Chulani went to his place at 11:30 in the night, spent an hour with him and was able to change his mind.
Chulai intends to bring his YES camps to Gulf region and has already initiated talks with people in Qatar, Oman and Dubai.
He already has a network of coaches in Dubai, Africa and India and he is training people to be coaches. He aims to build “a generation of mentally and emotionally fit, happy, successful and confident leaders” by giving them tools to achieve all this.
He is a very busy man. Yet he never lets his energy level sag. That is because he charges all his physical, emotional and spiritual batteries full, hesays. For readers of Community, Chulani is happy to share a tool — an audio, for achieving and maintaining maximum energy levels, available on his websitewww.anandchulani.com.