Sahiba Singh Dhupar is a 30-year-old coach, mentor, and body positivist who has been making efforts to guide and empower many people to change their perspective towards the body for the past 6.5 years.
When we open our eyes, they open the view of the world for us. With ears, we listen. It’s due to our tongue that we can enjoy sizzling recipes. Our hands and feet enable a variety of activities that we do in our day-to-day lives. And, it is our body due to which we know that we are alive.
Isn’t this a precious treasure we’ve got? How can we define our existence without this body? Our body is not just about us, but it is a community of trillions of living cells. It’s said to be a temple of God. But over time, we formed our ideas about a so-called perfect body, a so-called imperfect body.
We kept on attaching these labels onto ourselves, and in the pursuit of becoming attractive, we lost our true essence of beauty. This idealization and attitude have led to a lot of suffering. Thankfully, people are gradually beginning to realize this folly, and some are even making efforts to empower and guide those who have faced its negative consequences. From a teenager who battled a life-threatening disease at 16, a body-shamed lady at 22, she transformed into a fearless, confident woman at 30. She is an inspiration to those who shamed her a few years ago. Today we bring you the story of Coach Sahiba Singh Dhupar.
Sahiba Singh Dhupar – My Story
In my life, I have broken several stereotypes. I fought for my life at age 17 and faced a lot of shaming before I could start to value myself and eventually help my mentees increase their worthiness. I didn’t know what job satisfaction, passion being a profession, etc., actually meant before I entered this profession.
I was in the HR department for a reputed firm and was terrible at my job. Lucky enough for me, my seniors were too caring of me, so I never got to resent my lack of ability in that domain. I got married at 23 and left my job instantaneously. Within four months, I felt a void but didn’t want to go back and hire people.
Hence, I started an online semi-precious jewelry business. In October 2014, a friend who worked with a Canadian training company referred me there, and I got associated with them as a freelance senior trainer. My first stint without any training certification and just raw talent became the most beautiful accident helping me realize my passion!
Back then, a credit into my account every month was my definition of satisfaction. Only when training came into my life did I realize how immersed I was into it, how effortlessly it came to me, and how my proficiency in the job wasn’t a task at all. I was a natural. Working extra hours came with a smile, and my clients became my assets. That’s when I witnessed the most significant change in my outlook towards the term “Passion” and “profession.”
Coming together with my passion and profession was indeed a jackpot for me. As a body positivist, I feel I have constantly broken stereotypes and fought body shaming in my personal life. Still, as a mission to help others, it came as a leap of faith when appearance management became a part of my repertoire of training deliverables in 2017.
Throughout my journey, many people inspired me and became my role model. I want to mention my parents and grandfather for investing so much into my upbringing, so personality Development was normalcy in my case. Most of the things people search for, I was brought up with them. Also, my father and grandfather have powerful and charismatic personalities owing to which I have always had a benchmark to follow.
Then my husband taught me that working on yourself needs a zeal that matches no other, and if you do it for the right reasons, it gives you benefits manifolds. Self-discipline and keenness to grow are what I emulate him for. Finally, I would like to mention Princess Diana, the lady who taught me that empathy makes you human. How you treat others and make them feel in your presence makes you unique and not your status.
In today’s world, just having a human body doesn’t seem enough to be treated as a human. The root cause of body shaming is social conditioning. Also, there is nobody who wants to break the circuit. We all want to either be a part of it because everybody goes through it, or we want to endure it silently. As a culture, we don’t teach our kids the ability to stand out. We teach them fitting in is more important. So, nobody takes the plunge to say, “I’m not a part of this. I choose not to.”
If our generation breaks the circuit, the next generation is taught self-acceptance, simple! It is rightly said that we teach others how to treat us, but society and those who contribute to our self-image teach us how we see ourselves. Regressive and standardized parameters have taught boys and girls what makes them attractive and what not. Media and cinema have a great hand at that too. We all have been fed with a pre-decided checklist from career to being liked or deemed beautiful/handsome.
Getting rid of that and embracing one’s uniqueness is imperative. It is easier said than done, but we must unlearn and relearn these perspectives drilled into us. Seeking validation outside is another reason why we bully ourselves. I pity those who are still confined to that thought process, and it is the only way it helps one cope and moves on. These people will never define you. You will. Health and beauty are different in size, and it’s unnecessary to equate them. We need to respectfully unlearn what we have been taught and relearn what we wish for the world to be.
Our aspirations need to begin from within. Expecting everybody around us to applaud us is delusional because one must take a lot of flak to come out of ages-old thought processes. Think about anyone who brought something new. He was made fun of! Did he stop? If he had, we wouldn’t have airplanes, iPad, phones, and electricity! Taking a stand doesn’t mean rebellion. It means that you choose to pave your path and choose to stick by it because your belief makes you.
Self-doubt is indeed a challenge everyone faces at one point or another. Self-doubt is essentially the voices that kept telling you that you were not good enough, now echoing in your head as your own. Overcoming it requires one to direct their kindness towards themselves, not bully oneself and bash oneself for not being expected. It is the ability to gauge that I have different battles to win, which is most certainly not one of them. I can work on myself while loving and believing in myself. It is a journey. It cannot happen overnight because one can not eradicate years of conditioning in an instant with help.
I remember asking myself, “What kind of trainer do you want to be?” And my answer was “one-stop solution,” “holistic Personality Development.” So, I worked on the domains that entail personality Development like communication, Etiquette, appearance management, self-esteem, and life skills. It took my years of complex work investment and education to call myself this term! My goal today is to help people realize that personality development is not a fancy term. It is as or sometimes more important than a report card. I wish we understood its importance, and awareness is a huge miss.
Society is significantly challenged in its approach towards personality development. Changing that distorted perspective along with lives will be my bonus. But as of now, most people who need it don’t feel they need it. That’s the gap! It’s not just about the uneducated, but the educated parents, corporates fail to understand what it means in the true sense and how personality development matters.
With time my work started getting recognition, and I am honored with several awards. I have been honored with Bharat Drishta Awards, Tip soft skills trainers award, Women excellence award, and a few more on the list. To me, my most significant achievement is the trust and love my clients give me. Seeing my mentees grow as individuals, pave their path into better directions, become tenacious towards their growth, and loving themselves, valuing themselves is my biggest fear that warms my heart with gratification.
Life hasn’t been an ever-smooth ride for me. After entering into mentoring, I realized that being an A-plus size image consultant was not an idea that tickled everybody’s fancy. Being fat meant being ugly for people who belong to a fat-phobic culture. Thus, to convince people through my work, confidence, and ability to portray my best self visually was a Herculean task and did give me the jitters at first.
Forming my brand and cracking my first few corporate training was challenging because I wasn’t aware of putting myself out there 3-4 years ago. I was able to turn things around with diligent research, hard work, personal branding, ensuring every customer is happy, organic social media marketing, etc. My greatest strength in these times was my belief in my abilities. The faith I carry regarding my talent and capability is always my best friend to push me through the darkest tunnels. Hard work plays a significant role there!
In the course of this lockdown, I have learned quite a few lessons. Firstly, there is nothing indispensable to us, and we can lead our lives without showing off. I also understood that simple living can give us as many happy moments to cherish as we seek in the lavish one and that relationships need breathing time. You can work on yourself anywhere and anyhow you want. All you need is an intention. Apart from that, I realized that I could train anyone despite being in other world regions.
Also, life had many lessons to offer to me. Most importantly, “we teach others how to treat us.” “The most toxic thing that we can give ourselves is the urge to keep pleasing others at our expense.” Another big life lesson for me is, “Being selfish is not bad. Being selfish that costs others are; Learn to know the difference.”
Then, “keeping yourself happy is as important as keeping others around you happy” and “being able to empathize with others is a gift we must keep paying forward as much as we can.” I would also like to mention that “treating others with respect speaks about us, not them, so do it for yourself.” And finally, “You are like technology. If you don’t keep yourself updated and cleaned from time to time, you will become obsolete. So, work on YOU, For YOU.”
Listening to music is my therapy. Despite being a millennial, I am ardently passionate about old Bollywood music. My admiration knows no bounds in Mohammed Rafi, Manna dey, Hemant Kumar, and Geeta Dutt, to name a few. I still play their songs in the background when I research or create content etc. Other than this, I have a fetish for jewelry and have a vast collection of it.
To encapsulate my message to every reader, whether 14 or 41 or beyond, I would say, take ownership of your life, decisions, growth, and yourself. Keep the keys to your happiness in your pockets only. Letting others decide what you’re worth is not what you must ever sign up for. Your body, color, or any of your physical attributes does not define how more or less good-looking you are. Your goals, ability to work for them and achieve them define who you are.
Your acceptance and resilience towards who you want to be, are the only two checkpoints you need to run between. “Never forget to have courage and be kind towards yourself and then the world.”
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