Youth wellbeing guru: Sanjay Desai

Desai (centre): wellbeing through self-awareness and self-empowerment

Sanjay Desai is founder-CEO of ConsciousLeap Insights Pvt. Ltd (estb.2013), a Mumbai-based company that offers holistic, mental well-being and life skills programmes to schools.

Its flagship programmes are the Make YOU Happen Program and WellSpire for students as also its Teacher Wellbeing Program. Thus far the company’s programmes have been provided to more than 16,000 students and 200 teachers in over 70 education institutions countrywide.

Newspeg. ConsciousLeap’s latest initiative — the Teacher Wellbeing Program — was launched late last year (2024) to “reduce teacher burnout and turnover rates, ensuring continuity and stability in education delivery”.

History. A qualified chartered accountant and alum of the top-ranked IIM-Bangalore, Desai began his career at Citibank (1987-2000) followed by a 13-year stint as an entrepreneur during which he co-founded several start-ups including Mphasis Incubation, Aurionpro Solutions and Kairoleaf Analytics. However in 2013 after 25 years in the corporate sector and following a “spiritual experience and awakening,” he conceptualised the Make YOU Happen program “to enable people to realise their dreams embedded in the unconscious by triggering their consciousness.”

Initially, experiential Make YOU Happen workshops were restricted to corporates. But over time, with school principals and leaders expressing interest in equipping children with sustainable wellbeing and SEL (social and emotional learning) skills, Desai resolved to address the issue of infusing spirituality and mental well-being into the “pedantic education system”.

“The idea was to highlight the importance of children’s mental and emotional well-being by awakening their positivity and spirituality. During this time when I was designing content for holistic education, I realised it was also important to equip people with SEL skill-sets to succeed in life and workplaces. That’s when we diversified into the education sector,” recalls Desai, who has authored a graphic novel Jasmine Builds on Shifting Sands (2015).

Desai recalls the Make YOU Happen program was piloted in 2018 in the Riverside School, Ahmedabad, and Springdale College, Lucknow with 250 secondary students signing up for it. This program, specially customised for 15-18-year-olds, “inspires young minds to rise above self-defeating tendencies and supports them with an actionable roadmap towards their goal of success”. Four years later in 2022, Desai ideated the WellSpire curriculum for 10-14 year-olds and last year, the Teacher Wellbeing Program.

Direct talk. “WellSpire is the North Star of ConsciousLeap’s programs. It integrates SEL and life skills within the Make YOU Happen framework. This three-year online program awakens wellbeing in young children through self-awareness and self-empowerment. Well-trained counselors and coaches have contributed to design a journaling-based curriculum to enable early teens to understand themselves better through balanced introspection, and develop key life skills to strengthen aspects of their personality, and guide them to create practical and effective roadmaps to achieve set goals. Over 50 schools with 11,000 children have already signed up for WellSpire,” says Desai, who recently (2023) registered the ConsciousLeap Wellbeing Foundation to take the company’s programmes to under-privileged children and youth.

Future plans. With ConsciousLeap’s experiential wellbeing programmes being enthusiastically welcomed by schools, Desai has drawn up future expansion plans. “We hope to expand our reach to a substantially larger number of schools this year. We also plan to invest in AI-powered chatbots to provide wellbeing counseling and training to youth and teachers. In an increasingly complex world, it’s imperative to provide children and youth the skills to develop SEL and well-being to achieve personal and professional goals. That’s our objective at ConsciousLeap,” says Desai.

Wind beneath your wings!

Mansi Shah (Mumbai)