The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Kanika Vasudeva had sixteen years of corporate excellence behind her. Engineer by training. MBA by discipline. Projects at BHP, PwC, ING Bank with price tags in the tens of millions. By every external marker, she had built exactly what success was supposed to look like. And she was calling her friends in her mid-thirties asking them quietly whether they were okay, whether this was actually happiness, because if it was, she was not sure it was worth getting up for.

Then she found out she was going to have a daughter. The pregnancy was going well. Her doctor was not concerned about anything. One morning she woke up and did not feel any movement. She went to the hospital and found out she had lost her. Everything the warrior in her knew how to do, find the problem, fix it, move forward, was useless here. There was nothing to power through. There was nothing to give her attention. There was just the loss and a two-year-old son at home who needed her to be fully present while she wanted to be anywhere but inside herself.

That little boy became the mirror she did not know she needed. He would look at crinkled paper and smile. He would watch water moving and be completely fascinated. And Kanika sat there watching him and thought: I must have been born like that too. What happened to me? The question cracked open a decade of doing life on autopilot, people-pleasing her way through a marriage that was not working, checking every box society handed her, and building a success she could not feel from the inside.

She walked out of the marriage. She walked out of the corporate world. She started over from zero in Perth, Australia, with a four-year-old son and a growing certainty that the same fire that had made her a top performer for sixteen years could be redirected at something that actually mattered. Today she runs the Art of Life Center, helping coaches and experts scale their businesses through content, conversations, and the kind of inner clarity that no metric can manufacture. She records this episode at ten-thirty at night Perth time because she loves every minute of it.

This episode is for anyone who has been successful by every measure except the one that matters: do you feel it?