This college dropout teaches you to live life

Thanks to an exceptionally early marriage and pregnancy, Puja Gupta never managed to make it through college. But along the way she learnt a few lessons that she now shares with her students.

Puja Gupta runs an institute called Life by design. She helps you design your life. Many of us just wander through life reacting to the things that happen to us. We never plan anything but just drift with the situation.

How many times do we think of things that we wish to achieve but never make an effort to do it? Puja wants to change all that and teach you to perform at your best and achieve your maximum potential.

She studied under the man who wrote, Chicken soup for the Soul. It was a course to make people successful.

"There is so much to life, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually that we can learn about it our entire life and still not know everything".

Gupta was married while still a teenager and was studying her first year in college in her hometown. She studied the second year in Chennai and while she was still in the third year, she got pregnant. Thus she could not complete her graduation.

As she could not complete her graduation she always felt the thirst for knowledge and thus started reading books on self-improvement. She did a Montessori course and started a pre-school. It's called Alps.

She also did online courses on self-improvement. This led her to Jack Canfield author of the famous bestseller, Chicken soup for the Soul.

She studied under him for two years and got her certificate on October 22 this year.

She also was the best student of her batch and got a personal commendation from him, a one-minute video praising her.

"The course is a discussion on life and very vast. It is like discussing the universe," she said.

At the course, Puja Gupta learnt about the conscious mind and the sub conscious mind. She also studied intuition. She loves the subject so much that she says she'd like to study it all her life adding 'what better way to do it then teach it'!

Gupta says that not all her students are failures; some are extremely successful but still want to go to the next level and explore more vistas of their life. This course will be helpful to a Tiger Woods and to a new comer, she says.

The point of this course is that 'you cannot see your own blind spots'. "You need someone else to spot them for you. When you hire a coach you immediately take the game to the new level," she says.

The first step she takes with her students is to find where they stand now. Jack Canfield has been in the field for 40 years and he shares all his data with his students. This data helps her design people's lives depending on their personal goals.

"In half-an-hour I can tell you what your passions in life are. This is done by making the subject do a particular study.

It talks about your love life, your relationships and other facets of life. It is very detailed. It works very well.

I have done it with many people and know personally how good it is."

Gupta doesn't give her students targets or goals. They have to decide what they want to do in life. She tells them, actually guides them on how to go about it. Someone may want to bring up their kids and another may want to be the next superstar.

The course is customised for every student to suit his needs.

I am not here to give answers," she says, "The answers are with you; I just have to ask the right questions. I have a system and you have to plug into it. It's a 20-hour programme divided into three parts. Awareness, implementation, habits are the three parts."

You have to cultivate habits that will lead to success. After finishing the course they need to plug into the system for three more months.

They have to spare an hour a day to do this. She calls it the 'the hour of power'. Soon you will realise that it has made a huge difference to your life.

First you are empowered by learning what choices you can make and secondly you implement it by changing your habits keeping in mind your new goals.

It's been only a week and she already has 22 students. The courses will start in December.

Gupta first tried this course on the teachers who work in her pre-nursery school. They benefited a lot they later told her.

She exercises regularly and looks very smart. "I have to be a good example for my students," she says with a smile. For now she is the only teacher but for the future she is going to hire trainers.

Gupta also has a course for children and another one for women to teach them to employ themselves in a gain full way -- a kind of women empowerment initiative.

Her main course starts as a group exercise and ends with a one-on-one interaction. She is one of a kind in Chennai as there are no other teachers to tell you how to be a success in your chosen field irrespective of what that field is.

"Live your passion, don't worry about the money. Truly do what you really love to do," she said.