Nirish saw me before I could see myself.

What a workshop in 2021, a poster about whispers, and a leap of faith taught me about coming home to yourself.

In 2021, the company I used to work for brought in a consultant to run a design thinking workshop. There were a few of us in that room (maybe 7). I had just started therapy a few months earlier. I was at the very beginning of learning to see myself, and through that, to really notice the people around me.

And in that room, something happened that I had no words for back then. The consultant listened. Not the polite, waiting-for-his-turn kind of listening. He paid attention to each one of us as if we were the only person in the room. I walked out of that workshop carrying something I couldn’t name, and I carried it for five years.

This week, that consultant sat across from me in my studio. And by the end of our conversation, I finally found the words.

The man who helps people unthink

His name is Nirish Shakya. He is a designer, a coach, and an educator, the founder of Unthinking Space, where he helps people unthink the scripts they were taught to believe as facts, and the host of the Design Feeling podcast.

His path looks like a series of brave exits. The good student in Sydney who became an engineer because that was the script. The engineer who discovered human-centered design and couldn’t unknow it. The designer who left sunny Sydney for grey London because something in him wanted adventure more than comfort. And in 2021 the same year we met, the corporate consultant who quit without a job lined up, because he refused to look for work from a place of desperation.

Today he records from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he moved to spend time with his grandmother. When his coach asked him whether leaving London was a good idea, she gave him the answer that made the decision for him: it doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. Does it matter to you, in this moment of your life?

That question is the whole episode in one sentence. The universe doesn’t ask whether your plan is sensible. It asks whether you’re listening.

What stayed with me

1. Never negotiate from a place of desperation. Before Nirish quit, he built himself a runway. And because he wasn’t desperate, he could name a day rate that scared him and they said yes. “Whoever cares less in a negotiation wins,” he told me. People sense desperation, and they sense self-respect. But here is the part underneath the negotiation advice: you can only stop being desperate for external approval when you know who you are without it.

2. Don’t let the whisper become a scream. Nirish keeps a poster on his wall: don’t let the noise of your mind drown out the whispers of your soul. You can imagine what that sentence did to me. He also shared a thought from Brianna Wiest, the universe is always whispering to us, and most of us only listen once the whisper has turned into a scream. By then, sometimes, it is too late. His remedy is almost embarrassingly simple: two minutes every morning, pen on paper, writing whatever is in your head. No analysis. No judgment. Just getting the thoughts out where you can finally see them.

3. You can prototype your dream today. One of his clients dreamed of a motorbike trip around Europe with his wife. Nirish didn’t tell him to quit his job and buy a bike. He asked: what part of that dream can you live this week? The freedom? The adventure? The time together? You don’t have to wait three years for your vision. You can taste a small piece of it now and find out whether it is truly yours, or just a picture you borrowed from someone else’s life.

My reflections

Before we started recording, Nirish asked me a question I couldn’t answer: what exactly was it about his workshop that stayed with me all these years? My brain doesn’t work on demand. It needs to go deep first. But by the end of our conversation, I knew.

He saw me.

Not my job title. Not my performance in the workshop. Me. And here is what I understand now, in 2026, that I couldn’t have understood in 2021: I could only receive that gift because I had just started learning to see myself. Therapy had cracked the door open. Nirish walked through it. Being seen by someone else only lands when you are beginning to come home to yourself otherwise it passes right through you, unnoticed, like so many green lights do.

Then he told me why seeing people is his life’s work. Growing up, he only felt seen when he achieved something. A grade. A medal. Never for who he was. So he made it his mission to give people the thing he never got.

And the whisper on his wall? He found his sentence. I found mine and wrote a book around it. Two people, two continents, who never compared notes carrying the same philosophy. That is what I cannot stop thinking about since we talked. The whisper is universal. The only question is whether we hear it before it has to scream.

A question for you

Where in your life is a whisper getting louder and can you give it two minutes tomorrow morning, just you, a pen, and whatever wants to come out?

The green light might already be there.

If this conversation speaks to you, the full episode with Nirish is linked above on YouTube and Spotify. His story of quitting without a plan B, the Odyssey Plan exercise, and the tarot card that helped him move to Nepal. It is all in there, and he holds nothing back.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

Until next week,

Cris