Drishti Goenka – The Woman behind “Journey Matters”

We all know childhood is a blessing but do you know how much mental health education is needed in today’s generation. We all are facing many difficulties and we always wished that we wouldn’t get knowledge about it in our childhood, why don’t we? In our childhood, when we felt numb or anxious, our parents told us Don’t be like that, you have to be strong but they didn’t help us to become a strong person. Because in that time mental health was nothing but in today’s era we are perfectly aware of that. Getting proper knowledge at an early age is a must for today’s generation. Being a parent it is also important for us to educate our children about these things because it seems too small but it really matters in our life journey.

We are going to share an inspiring story of a woman who took the initiative and worked each and everyday for our generation. She’s the woman behind the “Journey matters” initiative. Journey matters is not just a mental health service. She is personally passionate about a lot of other things and she is trying to incorporate that into the different services and products that she can offer. For instance: social-emotional learning. She believe that students at a young age should be exposed to topics such as emotional awareness, being inclusive, being flexible, and coping mechanisms. 

Meet Mrs. Drishti Goenka, a woman with pure and kind soul took the initiative to make a change in our society and in our lives too and also planned to make change for our future generation. She was born and brought up in Hyderabad India. She is married and settled in Hyderabad, a city which she loves and can’t imagine living anywhere else in India. She is someone that finds something she strongly resonates with or is passionate about, she will go after it like a horse with blinkers on. When She realised being in the helping profession is something she really wanted to do, everything she had done, every decision she took, was keeping that goal in mind. She is crazy about animals and she is what some people would call an obsessive dog-mom. 

After she came back to India from her Masters training in 2015, She wanted to experience working with different age groups. After close to 6 years of being associated with different organisations. Now, she feels ready to set out on her own. “Doing something on your own is really scary and the process of setting it up can be overwhelming, however, when you see your efforts mounting to something, the amount of satisfaction you get is inexplicable” she shared this. 

The word journey is extremely close to her heart. As part of her counsellor training back in 2014, She attended personal therapy sessions to understand what a session feels like from a client perspective. In one of her sessions, her counsellor and she were trying to understand why she doesn’t feel a sense of achievement for anything she has accomplished so far. One hypothesis was that her life’s narrative almost sounded like she was running accordingly through her daily routine. As she reflected on it she realized that she learned more about herself while she was working towards a goal rather than the goal itself. This is where “focusing on the journey” became important to her. It was in those journeys where she developed resilience when things went downhill, she became adaptable when situations weren’t in her control, She learned to meander her way through circumstances to achieve her goals, it taught her how to prioritize, and most importantly, it taught her humility. This is where “Journey Matters” comes from. 

She successfully launched her first product which is “A-Z of You and Me” The idea is to introduce social emotional learning in early childhood through alphabets. It’s a learning design venture where she develops social emotional learning resources for children. The hope is that this resource can be very easily integrated into the existing literary curriculum, making it convenient for teachers to facilitate it. She started working on releasing the same in different regional languages and also working on building an interactive app of the same product.

Through her instagram page, she started out with trying to build awareness on the “process” of counselling. She feels like this bit is missing and not spoken about enough from all the advocacy pages and She has seen that people come into the counselling process without having much knowledge about what to expect. There’s a lot more she wants to accomplish from her page. She tried to stay away from generic motivational posts as she personally doesn’t find them very effective. She is always experimenting with different concepts, trying to give people different content. The Instagram algorithm can be very frustrating and she does struggle with being consistent in her posting. She has 2 lovely interns who help her stay on top of everything with respect to social media. 

She’s inspiring many people out there with her initiative and trying to change the world with her words. We must say she’s the perfect example of ” Every small initiative can make change into many lives”.

A special Message from Drishti 

Oh I have so many inspirational stories. My clients so far have inspired me the most! When I worked with students, they taught me a lot. Every day is a new day and I try to be in the present. There was a time where I had one leg in my past and one leg in my future but I’ve been working on being more in the present. It has helped me prioritize and have a clear picture about what I want to do. I’m definitely less anxious this way and more compassionate towards myself. This would be my message to everyone as well. 🙂