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No one has it all figured out. And anyone who says they do? Well, they’re lying.
This is for the women who are trying. Trying to juggle all the things. Trying to make sense of what they actually want. Trying to keep their heads above water without losing themselves in the process.
Career. Money. Relationships. The pressure to do it all. The pressure to want it all. And the moments you secretly wonder, is it just me?
Here we speak openly, laugh through chaos, and ask questions instead of pretending to have all the answers.
Because we’re all a work in progress.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (00:00):
I feel like you have to work for the job that you want. This goes for dress for success. You dress for the job that you want, but you also work for the one you want. And so that was also my gut. It just led me on this path to be like, put yourself out there. You have got this.
Gayle Kalvert (00:16):
This is Work in Progress. I'm your host, Gayle Kalvert, and yes, I'm a work in progress. Hey guys, have you ever really trusted your gut and decided to do something that maybe seemed a little bit crazy to everybody else? Well, that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode. My guest, Kanika Chadda-Gupta, is a former CNN anchor, digital marketer, mother of three and an all-around badass. She's juggling a lot and she's making decisions guided by her intuition, which she calls "mom sense" now that she is a mom of three and has a podcast with the same name. Today, Kanika is going to share with us her stories, how she's made decisions guided by her gut, and her honesty and advice really helped me, and I know they will help many of you. So Kanika, thank you for being here and let's get into it.
Gayle Kalvert (01:11):
I use my gut, it is always right. There are oftentimes when I haven't listened to it and I've regretted it, and I know we have that in common, but it would be great for our listeners if you could take us back to your early career and where you were headed and what kind of decisions you made along the way that have shaped your life from a career and family standpoint.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (01:36):
Yes, thank you, Gayle. I love that we share this in common. I trust my intuition wholeheartedly. It's my north star and I always have, and looking back, it's amazing how it's just kind of been there for me through various seasons of my life. Now, I call it mom sense, but it was active well before I was a mom. When I chose to even pursue journalism, that was my first aha moment. I went to Boston University and was doing an international management track because my parents, coming from an immigrant background and traditional South Asian parents were like, what are you going to do with your life? Is it engineering? Is it law? Medicine? And I thought, well, international management is great. And so I decided to go down that path and absolutely hated it. I wasn't doing well in my business classes, financial and managerial accounting, and I was like, what am I doing?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (02:44):
I'm a straight A student. And that was my first kind of gut reflex to be like, I have to change majors or something. It was too late to make that decision as a junior, and so I took the minor in management and ended up doing international relations and then decided to go to grad school. So I went to University of Miami, pursued a master's degree in broadcast journalism, and I'm so glad I did that. It was a very comprehensive program. And the head of the broadcast department at the School of Communication was Professor Sam Roberts. He was the executive producer to Walter Cronkite for 30 years at CBS, and he is where I learned everything I know. We had a simulated newsroom where we had to wear every single hat. So one day you're out in the field and you're a correspondent or a reporter, another, you're in studio as an anchor. We were manning the cameras, we were keying in the CGs, the character generators in the tech or control room. We had to know everything. And it was such a great holistic bird's eye view of what happens in a newsroom. And so yeah, it was amazing how I was like, Nope, I'm going to double down on this calm thing. This is where my strengths are, and my gut told me to do it.
Gayle Kalvert (04:15):
That was a big change for you. How did your family react to that?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (04:19):
They understood. I think right after I graduated, I did have a job in hand. It was in El Paso, Texas. They needed a morning reporter, which in six months would've become the morning anchor of a morning segment similar to the Today Show. And they were like, okay, great. So you're really going to pursue this broadcast news path. I had bigger dreams though. I had an internship at NBC in Miami, and my mentor and who I was interning with, Willard Shepard, a very respected investigative journalist for the network, said, yes, you can go down this path and I'm glad you have a job in hand. That's great. But because you are bilingual and you go to India often, I would go there every summer to visit family. He said, consider working in an international market where you get to use that as your edge. And I spoke to friends that I had that were working in Mumbai, or Bombay as I call it, and media was burgeoning.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (05:30):
CNN was there, BBC, Times Now, which is owned by Reuters. And I talked to Willard and I said, should I just move out there and try my hand at it? And he said, absolutely you should, because the landscape of television is changing, and if you can find a burgeoning market, that too with a global audience, take it. So I moved out there, I gave myself a month and made sure to meet as many executives or I would go to networking events and parties and let everyone know that I'm on the market for a job in television. And I got led to the head of entertainment at CNN in Bombay, Rajeev Masand, did an interview, met the rest of the team, and then within a week was hired, and it was for a producer position. I wanted to be on air, but within six months, very fortuitously, the anchor of the show E Tonight that I was producing, it was a fun lifestyle show, quit.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (06:40):
And they said, we're doing auditions. And I put my name in the running and recorded my audition tape. And I also, I feel like you have to work for the job that you want. This goes for dress for success. You dress for the job that you want, but you also work for the one you want. And even though I was producing and I had to produce a rundown, it was basically the headlining stories and all the, they're called blocks. There's A, B, C, and D block. So the low hanging fruit stories are in the D block. I did all that and I knew what was expected of the anchors, especially when they were out on the field recording their anchor links is what it's called to tie a whole show together. And so I asked my boss, I'm happy to produce E Tonight, but I really want to be an anchor and a correspondent.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (07:35):
Can I record interviews and go out on the field during hours that aren't my shift? And he said, absolutely, absolutely. So my shift was, it started at around 2:00 PM and went till 10:00 PM. 10, 11 ish. And I just would record my interviews around eight, between eight to two. And they were like, okay, she's doing two jobs. So I already knew what it took to be correspondent and out on the field, and then I was already producing the show. So again, it's like I had this leg up where they were like, we choose Kanika to be our new host of E Tonight. She actually knows everything that goes into it from the frontend to the backend and what's going on behind the scenes. And so that was also my gut. It just led me on this path to be like, put yourself out there. You have got this. What's the worst that can happen? They're going to say no or you didn't get it. And it actually worked out in my favor in the end.
Gayle Kalvert (08:39):
So when was the next time that your gut led you to make a decision maybe slightly irrational by everyone's standards around you?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (08:48):
Yes. This one has to do with love. I think we kind of downplay it a little bit. It's important to trust your intuition when it comes to all things career. And we're all ambitious women and people. And so it's like, okay, we get how you want to strive and achieve success. When I was done with my time working for CNN in India, and as an aside, I covered the gamut of events from the 26 11 terror attacks to Slum Dog Millionaire's Oscar wins, to just weekly reports on all things fashion, lifestyle. So it was a great, great run that I had. I was talking to a guy I met a few years before I moved to India, and we just started chatting at first on Facebook. It started from birthday posts on a Facebook wall, turned it into email and then Skype. And he and I actually met at a photo shoot, it was a bridal wear photo shoot where I was chosen to be the Indian bride and he was the Indian groom.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (09:55):
And so we had these very candid and cute photos that were billboards all over New Jersey. And he said, so when are you moving back stateside? Are you planning to just live in Bombay? And I said, no, no, no. This is my international experience. I definitely want to move back home at some point. And when I had to decide that same thing, I just always have kind of flown by the seat of my pants. I was like, okay. I thought given that I've covered entertainment out here, I should be at a market like LA and CNN has a bureau in LA and they also have a bureau in New York. So I was very torn. I was like, if I'm going to stay in this beat that I'm covering, I should be in LA, but I want to take my chance on love. And he lives in New York.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (10:48):
And so I chose New York and things don't really work out as planned. They were just doing a round of layoffs and Jeff Super was taking over as president and there was just so much change going on at the network that I didn't have a job in hand this time in New York waiting for me. But I hustled and I ended up working as the head of programming for a cable network called ZTV. They're a global network. And so I made it work. And you can't connect the dots going forward. You can only connect them going back. And I'm glad I kind of acquired the skills that I did because I made the shift from traditional media like television into new media, and this was the path that led me there.
Gayle Kalvert (11:36):
Right, you're truly experiencing the change that we're all living through from TV to cable, to streaming to podcast media. So good for you. Your gut is sending you in the right direction always. But you didn't stop by meeting the man of your dreams and getting married. Did you think about having children? Did you make a plan? How did that look for you and your husband?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (12:02):
Yes. I think being type A, I always knew that I wanted to be a mom. I had two major objectives in life as a young girl. One was to be a television anchor like Oprah and Connie Chung, and two was to be a mom. And once I was married, then I was just like full speed ahead. Like, okay, got to shift into this role. Let's make this happen. And it took four years, and I think that's something that no one really prepares you for. Everyone has different issues that they encounter. I had what was called unexplained infertility, and so it just took longer than I wanted. I actually was prescribed on a medicine called Clomid to help with that process. And this is another instance where my gut saved my life. I did the round of Clomid and I did get pregnant, but something was awry and I came to find out that I was having an ectopic pregnancy, and that is actually when the fetus is growing in one of the fallopian tubes.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (13:15):
And my friend who was actually doing her rotations to become an OB, helped me diagnose that. I called her up in the middle of the night and had shooting pains in my left shoulder and I was like, I dunno what's going on? And she asked me for my HCG levels, which kind of tracks your pregnancy hormone. They were abnormally low. And then the muscle pain she explained were actually referral pains from my uterus because it was empty and this egg had implanted instead of the uterine lining and the wall in my fallopian tubes and just like you're experiencing a heart attack, you feel it in the left side. So I went into my OB the next day to get my routine blood work and I demanded to get an ultrasound. The nurses, my OB herself at the time, they just poo-pooed me and said, sweetie, it is too soon.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (14:15):
You're like seven weeks along. We don't do an ultrasound at this time. And I said, I'm having an ectopic, I just know it. She said, fine, let me squeeze you in. And took me into a room, did the sonogram, and lo and behold, my uterus was empty and it showed up on the screen. She was shocked herself. And it was like, okay, you're right. We have to treat this. And I went on a few rounds of methotrexate, which is a cancer drug that treats tumors any growing mass, and it expelled from the body. I didn't need to get surgery, and it literally saved my life. My gut instinct saved my life.
Gayle Kalvert (14:58):
It is incredible how often we hear those stories. I've experienced it myself, not with pregnancy, but where your gut is telling you something and your doctor is not hearing it, and you really have to push and advocate for yourself and thank goodness you did.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (15:14):
Thank you. Yeah.
Gayle Kalvert (15:15):
You have two healthy children.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (15:22):
Yes. Three.
Gayle Kalvert (15:18):
Now, right?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (15:24):
Yeah. Three, yes. This goes into manifesting, which I also am a firm believer in. I really do think that if you believe all your desires to be true, they will just present themselves to you. So I actually made a vision board and on it, I had a picture smack dab in the middle of two baby booties that I had cut from a parents' magazine. I was really just in this family planning mode. Lo and behold, a year after the ectopic, they were born January 24th, 2017, and I had the ectopic just the year before. I gave birth to two healthy, a boy and a girl, twins. So that photo came true, and then we had our oops baby just a year after that. It's such a blessing and God's gift because we did want to have a big family and we got that in a year and a half. And so now Christian, Sohanna are eight and Trey is six and a half.
Gayle Kalvert (16:29):
I love that. I am a practicing manifester. Is that even...? I'm a work in progress when it comes to manifesting.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (16:34):
I love it.
Gayle Kalvert (16:35):
I agree. It also I find to be really powerful. I'm practicing with manifesting one thing at a time.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (16:42):
Nice, nice. Yes.
Gayle Kalvert (16:44):
I need to start. I think I can expand. I think maybe I can expand.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (16:47):
So there was this one young girl who was explaining what manifesting is. She said that, think of it as you placing an order as you would at a restaurant and you give the waiter your order and you're not wondering, are they going to forget? Will they come back? Are they going to bring me the wrong thing? I hope they don't bring me the wrong thing. Say, may I have such and such, and just leave it to the world to have it show up for you. And that's the exact same kind of logic and belief you should have in manifesting. I would say that I see myself with this big happy family, and I also, I would pray on it and just sit with the fact that it's like, okay, this has already happened. I did this with our house too. So I took a picture of this dream home that I had discovered by these builders that we worked with later on, and I put that photo up. I got a physical photo that I went to CVS and developed and stuck it on the board, and I would pretend that I was sipping my tea out on the back porch, and I was in this dream home. Just today I sip my tea and I was on the back porch looking over the dream home.
Gayle Kalvert (18:11):
So one of the things that I find about manifesting is that it's also be open or be flexible and open to the ways that what you're wanting manifests itself.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (18:22):
Yes, yes.
Gayle Kalvert (18:23):
So I'm curious what your experience is when you say, okay, so I put this picture up and you're focused on that. Manifesting to me feels a lot like goal planning, right? You've got a goal and then you make plans to get to that goal. And I'm wondering what your experience is as far as how purposeful are your actions to manifest what it is that you want versus this concept of I put a picture up and I really want it and it happens.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (18:52):
I feel like it's not something that you can obsess over because similar to when you're holding onto sand, if you squeeze the grains of sand in your hand, they will slip right through your fingers. So you can't obsess and be mired by, this doesn't happen. When is it happening? I need it now. It has to be a little bit more subliminal. There's a few things. One is the vision board I love because the photo of the twins, baby booties was just there in the background behind my laptop. I didn't look at it every single day or think about it every single day. It was just kind of floating around. And so when it happened, it caught me by surprise. So I think that's important. And then when you are meditating on it and just kind of tuning in to whatever that desire is, you should experience it sensorially, and this is the coolest thing.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (19:54):
So make sure that you tap into your five senses and assume that the thing has already happened. So with the home, if you're like, oh my God, I can't wait to move here and this is the exact home that I want, and I could picture my family there, this is exactly what I did. I had the actual photo on the vision board. Then use my senses. So sight, I saw it, I would go to that house or the site where the building was going to happen. So I would see it often enough. I would pretend that I had hear my kids playing outside riding bikes, and hear the laughter. I would smell the aroma of the tea that I'd make and pretend again that it's like I'm on the back porch and this is happening. Touch. Same thing. You have the physical photo in front of you.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (20:49):
I remember even just going to when we bought this plot of land, touching the dirt, and I put some wish coins into the big plot that was a hole that was dug up and made this wish that I hope that everything happens as I pray for it too, when this house gets built. And then taste. Same thing with the tea. It's like I'm just tasting the tea on my lips and I'm just enjoying this day as it passes. And so you take yourself to that moment and just use your visualizing. And if you meditate on it to take you there and transport you, you can write all this out, write how you're feeling as though it's happened. I love walking the halls of this house and I just put this frame up, pretend like you're already there, and then you have this deja vu moment because when I was putting the frames up, I was like, I already, I've been there already. I thought about this.
Gayle Kalvert (21:49):
I find that even the process of manifesting and being committed to it has allowed me to be a little more still. And as somebody who's like type A, like you mentioned, I never sat still, and now I find that those moments, I don't feel guilty about them. I feel that they are necessary and purposeful, and that leads us right to how do you handle everything. What do your life choices look like now? I mean, where is your intuition and your gut telling you to focus these days?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (22:23):
The juggle is real. I always say the juggle, the struggle, the snuggle. When you have kids, my intuition is a telling me to raise the kids the way I wanted to be. And my parents were amazing parents, and they did the best they could with what they had. Having immigrated here with literally just hopes and dreams, they were just hoping for the best when they moved from India to the US with me, just 2-year-old me in tow. But I think there were certain things that I culturally would do different. And so my intuition is telling me to talk to my kids more. We didn't have open discussions. I remember even when I got my period, it wasn't something that I could talk to my mom much about. I talk to my friends about it more, forget about sex and all of that.
Gayle Kalvert (23:16):
We still don't talk about, yeah, we don't talk about those things.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (23:20):
Yeah, yeah. All our kids are just divine intervention. But yeah, we just don't go there. But I know that with my kids, I want them to have this safe space with me to talk about everything. One thing that I do with them is I have a journal with each child, and right now, because they're only eight and six, the journal consists of short messages, even pictures that we draw each other. But it is just the sweetest thing. And I found this out as I was just scrolling on Instagram. This lady said that she was leading an AA group, and this young girl brought her mom to a meeting, and this organizer was like, wow, I can't believe that this girl feels that close to her mom, bring her to AA and just have this open thing with her. So she's like, I got to talk to this mom.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (24:23):
So she talked to her after the meeting and was like, oh my goodness. How did you establish this trust with your adolescent daughter? She's like, we kept a journal and we kept it for many years, and we'd write it back and forth, slip it under their pillow, and she's like, there are sometimes things that she wrote in there where she poured her heart out that they actually hadn't spoken about in person. I was like, wow, if I can start this little tradition with them now, and even though right now it's fluff and there's no really heavy topics, when they are adolescents, I'm sure there's going to be many things that feel totally catastrophic. We've all been there, breakups, the heartbreak, friends, all of that. I want them to be able to write it in this diary we have going back and forth, and so I'm just setting myself up for a closeness that I didn't really have.
Gayle Kalvert (25:21):
Yeah. I love that you and I have very similar experience with immigrant parents.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (25:27):
Aw, yes.
Gayle Kalvert (25:28):
Yes. Yeah, I love that. So I have a few fun questions for you. The first one I think I know the answer to. I say coffee or tea?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (25:36):
Tea. Chai.
Gayle Kalvert (25:37):
Specifically Chai tea. Okay. Is it iced or hot?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (25:42):
That's my fave. Hot, piping hot, scalding hot.
Gayle Kalvert (25:46):
Okay. Excellent. Doesn't matter what season. Always hot.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (25:49):
Yeah, over the summer then I do the iced coffees. I'll go to Dunkin and get a big iced coffee.
Gayle Kalvert (26:58):
Yeah. Awesome. Okay. What is your guilty pleasure?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:03):
I don't know. Shopping for things I don't need, that I'm just like, ooh. Yeah, and I still like going to the mall. That's like I guess the Jersey girl in me.
Gayle Kalvert (26:14):
Yeah, island girl.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:15):
You don't need a reason to be there. Yes. I will find something like just walk into Banana or walk into one of the carts where they're selling jewelry. It's like, I'll find something I want.
Gayle Kalvert (26:28):
Yeah. One of the fun things you have to look forward to, my daughter is 16, so I go to the mall with her, and that's so fun.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:34):
Oh, that's so awesome.
Gayle Kalvert (26:35):
We have a routine. Yeah. Very fun.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:38):
That's great.
Gayle Kalvert (26:38):
Okay, last one is what is your favorite app right now?
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:44):
ChatGPT.
Gayle Kalvert (26:45):
Same.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (26:46):
Oh my God. Yeah. He's my bestie.
Gayle Kalvert (26:49):
Yes, exactly. Oh, thank you so much. We covered a lot. I would love to have you back because I think there's so much that we didn't even touch on, but tell us where our listeners can find you. You have a podcast, you have lots of fun stuff going on.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (27:04):
Thank you, Gayle. Thank you. Yes. You can find me on my website, thatstotalmomsense.com, and the show name is That's Total Mom Sense, so you can subscribe wherever you listen. Apple, Spotify, all the usual suspects. And on Instagram, my handle is @kanikachaddagupta.
Gayle Kalvert (27:25):
Excellent. Thank you so much, Kanika.
Kanika Chadda-Gupta (27:28):
You're so welcome, Gayle. This was such a treat. Thank you.
Gayle Kalvert (27:31):
To hear more stories like this one, drop a comment, send us a message, and don't forget to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes of Work in Progress. I hope that was helpful. If you know someone that you go to for this topic, send them my way. After all, we're just figuring this out together. See you next time.