The long way to “step by step”

Passo a Passo means “step by step.” It is the only way I have ever changed anything in my life that mattered.

I came to wellbeing the long way around - through packaging cartons, a badly slept night before an Ironman, and eventually the Bhagavad Gita.

For 25 years I have run Yamir Packaging in Ahmedabad. I started on the machines and worked my way up to running the whole operation, moving the company from basic carton manufacturing into premium packaging - partly on technology, partly on training I picked up in Germany, mostly on the unglamorous habit of fixing one thing at a time. That habit is the first lesson this course is built on. Meaningful change is a sequence of small steps you are willing to repeat when no one is watching.

Somewhere in those years I started running, and then I could not stop. Ultra-marathons. Long-distance cycling brevets. Finally the IRONMAN triathlon in Austria - a 3.8 km swim, a 180 km ride, and a full marathon inside one brutal day. What carries a person through a day like that is structure: the same training, repeated for months. Motivation was a guest who turned up about twice a month. The training schedule was a habit that turned up every morning, including the mornings I wanted to quit. I became an IRONMAN-certified coach to teach exactly that - how to keep moving on the days the feeling is gone.

For a long time I believed discipline alone was enough. It carried my body across a finish line and still let me make some of the worst decisions of my life, usually the ones that looked most logical at the time. So I went looking for the other half. I studied the Bhagavad Gita as a leadership and decision-making framework at IIM Ahmedabad, and I began writing about it - about anger I regretted, about choices I got wrong, about what the old texts actually say once you strip away the incense and the jargon. I wanted philosophy I could use on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of a bad call.

Passo a Passo is where those two worlds meet: the training discipline of an endurance coach and the inner steadiness of practical philosophy, built into a structured, walking-based system you can actually follow. It rests on the same principle that carried me through the carton business and across that finish line. One honest step at a time.

I did not want to launch this on theory, so the first pilot ran where I could watch it closely - inside Yamir, with our senior managers. These are busy people with real workloads and a low tolerance for fluff, which is exactly why they were the right test. It ran longer and went deeper than the course you will take, and the headline is simple. Thirteen of them finished, and every one of them ran a 10K, for the first time in their lives.

You can read what they said in their own words in the participant reflections.

If you lead a company, or sit in an HR seat deciding what is worth your people’s time, I will say only this. I tried it on my own team before I offered it to anyone else’s. The same structure works for one person rebuilding a single routine and for a cohort rebuilding theirs together.

One thing I want to be honest about. I am not a doctor, a therapist, or a monk, and this course is not medical advice or a quick fix. I have never believed transformation is something you can buy, and I will not pretend otherwise. What this course gives you is a structure for rebuilding routine, energy, focus, and calm - slowly, and for real. The steps are yours to take.