How I Went From Software Engineer to NLP Coach — And Why That Was the Bravest Thing I Ever Did
Blog post description.
People ask me: 'When did you decide to become an NLP coach?' And I always pause — because there was no single decision. There was a sequence of life that led me here. And it started not with ambition, but with love.
This is the honest version of my story. Not the LinkedIn-polished summary. The real one — with the uncertainty, the unexpected turns, and the slow realisation that every chapter was preparing me for the next one, even when I could not see it at the time.
The Career I Was Built For — On Paper
I graduated with a Computer Science degree from Valliammai Engineering College in 2008. Got placed at Cognizant. Then Mphasis. My parents were proud. I was proud. I had done the thing — the stable IT job, the salary, the career path that made sense to everyone around me.
And it did make sense. I was good at it. I learned discipline, systems thinking, how to work precisely inside structures that demanded exactness. Those years were not wasted. They built something in me that I carry to this day — the ability to think clearly, to execute, to not fall apart when things get complicated.
But something was always restless underneath. I could not name it then. I just knew that competence and aliveness are not the same thing. I was competent every single day. I was not always alive.
I Did Not Leave for a Dream. I Left for My Child.
Let me be clear about this because I think a lot of reinvention stories romanticise the leaving. Mine was not romantic. I did not wake up one morning with a vision board and a plan. I left my corporate career because I became a mother — and I knew, with everything in me, that I needed to be present for that season of life in a way the job would not allow.
That was the only reason. Not passion. Not a business idea. Not a calling I had heard and was finally answering. Just a child who needed their mother, and a mother who chose to show up.
And in that choosing — in that one quiet, unglamorous decision — everything else eventually became possible.
Because when you step off the path everyone expects you to stay on, you are suddenly standing in open ground. It is terrifying. It is also, if you let it be, the beginning of finding out who you actually are when no one is defining you by your job title.
The Rebuilding Began With Makeup and a Stage
I did not sit at home waiting for inspiration. I started moving — toward the things that had always pulled at me but that I had never had time or permission to fully explore.
I trained professionally as a makeup artist. Not as a hobby. As a craft. I took it seriously, studied it properly, and discovered in the process that I had a genuine eye for it — for the way light falls on a face, for the way transformation is possible when someone is truly seen.
And then came the pageants.
Mrs. Chennai Wit and Wisdom. Mrs. Congeniality Star. Mrs. India Super Globe. I walked into those arenas not as someone who needed a crown to feel validated, but as someone who needed to prove something to herself — that reinvention is real, that it is possible at any age and in any season, and that the woman who left the corporate world was not less than the one who had stayed. She was becoming more.
I won titles in all three. Not because I was the most polished person in the room. Because I showed up fully — with everything I had been through, everything I was still figuring out, and nothing to hide.
The Magazine Came From a Belief That South Indian Fashion Deserved a Voice
While I was rebuilding myself, I was also paying attention to the world around me. Fashion in South India — rich, layered, ancient, modern, complicated — had no dedicated space that treated it with the seriousness it deserved. Fashion Drift was born from that gap.
I launched the magazine in 2022. Built it from scratch — no investor, no roadmap, just a conviction that this part of the world and its women deserved to be seen in full colour.
Fashion Drift is still running. It is still growing. And the work of building it — the networking, the storytelling, the sitting across from designers and entrepreneurs and creatives across South India — taught me something I did not expect to learn from a fashion magazine.
The Books Were Born From What I Witnessed
When you build a media platform, you meet people. Hundreds of them. And when you are a woman who is genuinely paying attention, you start to notice patterns.
I kept meeting women who were extraordinary — talented, driven, intelligent — and yet somehow always slightly behind where they should have been. Not because of lack of skill. Because of everything else. The way they were spoken over in rooms. The way they apologised before they spoke. The way they had internalised a story about themselves that was smaller than the truth.
I knew that story. I had lived some version of it myself.
So I wrote about it. Not from a place of authority. From a place of recognition — woman to woman, one who had stumbled through the same terrain and wanted to leave a path for those who came after.
Then Dear Sister, Dear Brother: Letters of Freedom came first and then The Love You Deserve. Both books were born from what I faced personally and what I kept witnessing in the women around me — the silent struggles, the invisible weight, the things we carry that no one ever names out loud.
Writing them was not a career move. It was a necessity. Some things need to be said, and if you are the one who sees them clearly, the responsibility to say them falls to you.
NLP Was Not the Beginning. It Was the Tool That Made Everything Click.
By the time I pursued my NLP Trainer Certification through Indian Counselling Services in October 2025, I had already been doing the work for years — in the magazine, in the books, in the conversations I kept having with women who were stuck and could not find the door out.
NLP did not give me a new direction. It gave me a framework for the direction I was already moving in. It gave me language for what I had been witnessing intuitively — that our patterns run deep, that the stories we tell ourselves shape everything, that most of the walls holding women back are not out there in the world. They are built inside the mind.
And with the right tools, those walls come down.
That is what I do now. That is what all of this — the corporate years, the leaving, the makeup training, the pageants, the magazine, the books, the networking, the witnessing — was building toward. A practice that helps women come out of whatever situation is holding them back and reset themselves into who they were always capable of being.
What This Story Is Really About
It is not a story about leaving a job to follow a dream. It is a story about a woman who kept saying yes to life — to her child, to her curiosity, to the things that pulled at her, to the women whose struggles she could not look away from.
There was no master plan. There was just one honest choice after another, each one leading somewhere I could not have predicted from the previous step.
If you are somewhere in your own in-between — not sure what comes next, not sure if what you have done so far adds up to anything — I want to offer you this:
It adds up. Even when you cannot see the shape of it yet. Especially then.
Every chapter of your life is building something. Sometimes you only understand what it was building once you are standing inside the next one.
Trust the sequence. Keep moving. The version of you that will look back and understand it all is already on her way.
➡ Follow the journey on Instagram @shyamala_prabhakar | Visit shyamalaspeaks.com for coaching, books, and resources for women in reinvention.