“Life is not easy. Life is not fair. Life is a struggle.” — Nishita Mantry
This is the exact belief Nishita opened our conversation with, and it turned out to be the thread that ran through everything she said next. Not a complaint, more like a starting point. She spoke about the unfairness of life as something everyone carries in some form, and about how the real difference lies in what you choose to do with it.
At Decoding Draupadi, we aim to push forward more female voices and share stories of women who are rewriting their stories.
Nishita Mantry is a Business Coach and Co-Founder of Peach Collar, a community built for women entrepreneurs across India. She spent close to a decade teaching marketing, branding, and advertising at some of Mumbai’s top business schools, authored textbooks still used by University of Mumbai students, and eventually built her own coaching practice around a simple belief, that business should feel effortless. We sat down with her to talk about the CFA she dropped, the pricing mistakes she made early on, and the gap years life kept handing her, whether she asked for them or not.
Here are our key takeaways from our chat:
1. Follow what actually comes naturally to you, even if it means walking away from what’s expected.
Nishita studied for the CFA foundation exam for six months, sixteen hours a day, only to come home after the exam and realize she could not understand the questions, let alone the answers. That was the moment she knew accounting and finance were never going to be her path, no matter how many hours she put in. Instead of forcing it further, she turned around and asked her closest friends a much simpler question: what would you actually hire me for. Their answers kept circling the same thing, her ability to communicate, connect, and pull people into a conversation, and that became the foundation for everything she built after.
At Decoding Draupadi, we think about this often too, in our own work and in the stories we hear from the women we talk to. The work that actually holds up over years is rarely the work someone else told you to do, or the path that looked most respectable on paper. It’s usually the thing that was already sitting there, quietly waiting to be noticed, long before anyone gave it permission to matter. That kind of pivot, walking away from the “sensible” choice, is often the most strategic decision a person can make.
2. Discipline and consistency actually separate the people who build from the people who just plan.
Understanding why a business wasn’t where it needed to be came down to two answers, not one big idea, but two very ordinary habits that had quietly gone missing: discipline, and consistency. Naming that gap changed everything, not because the advice itself was new or surprising, but because it finally got applied daily instead of only on the days that felt motivated. It’s a small distinction that ends up mattering enormously over time.
This lines up with what most research on discipline and motivation tends to find, that motivation gets you started, but it’s the daily, unglamorous repetition that actually gets you anywhere worth going. Plans are cheap and everyone has one; what separates the people who build something real from the people who just talk about building it is usually nothing more exciting than showing up on the boring days too.
3. There is real power in saying no to underpricing yourself.
Underpricing rarely starts as a deliberate strategy, it usually starts as desperation dressed up as flexibility. A client was once quoted thirty percent of the actual asking rate before a meeting had even started, purely out of fear that asking for more would cost the deal entirely. It took four months of consistently saying no to every client who wouldn’t meet a fair price before that pattern finally broke, and before the fear underneath it stopped running the show.
What emerged from that experience is something a lot of pricing research backs up too, that undercharging is rarely about the market and almost always about self-worth dressed up as a business decision. At Decoding Draupadi, this is a conversation that comes up often inside our own team as well. The fastest way to devalue your own work is to price it like you’re still trying to convince yourself it’s worth something in the first place.
4. Business becomes effortless when you build it around what already comes naturally to you.
The core belief here is refreshingly simple: business does not have to be a constant grind if you stop trying to be good at absolutely everything. Coaches who refuse to be on camera are told, fine, then write instead, or record an audio podcast, because the channel can change without the underlying effort needing to change at all. Effortless, in this framing, doesn’t mean easy, it means built around what already comes naturally instead of what looks impressive on paper.
This mirrors what strengths-based career research has shown for years, that your weaknesses rarely develop no matter how hard you push them, but your strengths can develop infinitely if you actually invest in them. Most people spend years trying to fix what they’re bad at instead of doubling down on what already works, and that one shift in focus tends to be the difference between a business that feels like a grind and one that doesn’t.
5. Personal branding isn’t optional anymore, because people buy people, not products.
The reasoning behind personal branding is fairly straightforward once it’s laid out. In a market with limited choices, distribution alone used to be enough to win. Today, with a hundred versions of nearly every product available at once, distinction is what actually wins, and personal branding is one of the highest-touch, hardest-to-copy ways to build that distinction over time.
This isn’t just personal opinion either, research on founder-led branding consistently shows that most first customers, first investors, and first hires come through relationships with actual people, not cold impressions of a company or a logo. People buy people first, and everything else, the product, the pricing, the positioning, tends to follow from that initial trust.
6. Gap years are a pause, never a stop.
Nishita has taken three gap years across her life so far: one after realizing the CFA path wasn’t hers, one after getting married, and one after losing her husband two years ago. Each one arrived at a completely different stage of life and for a completely different reason, yet all three ended up getting treated the same way, as a mindful pause rather than an exit from anything. She came back from the most recent one with more clarity than she had going in, not less.
This tracks closely with what a growing body of reporting on professional sabbaticals has found too, that stepping away to grieve, heal, or simply reset is increasingly seen not as a career risk but as one of the most strategic moves a person can make. A pause, taken deliberately, is not the same thing as falling behind, even though the two get confused constantly.
That’s everything we took away from our conversation with Nishita, though there was so much more in the hour we spent with her. What stayed with us most is her belief that every hard moment in life is really just a question waiting to be asked, what can I do to make this work. It’s a simple thought, and maybe that’s exactly why it works.
And on that note, we want to sit back and reflect on all the connections and relationships we have had the honor of building through Decoding Draupadi ♥️
Until next time
Team Decoding Draupadi