How Sunaina Sinha Haldea Prioritizes Well-Being As A Woman In Finance

Sunaina Sinha Haldea, Global Head of Private Capital Advisory at Raymond James, prioritizes her mental and physical well-being in a role where the stakes are high and stress can’t always be avoided. According to Gallup, the benefits of incorporating well-being into your career can include improved mental health, increased purpose and cognition, resiliency, productivity and even better decision-making. Haldea began incorporating these habits over a decade ago through meditation. She shares how prioritizing her well-being has helped her accelerate her professional and personal life.

“I first began meditating well over a decade ago, coincidentally at the start of my entrepreneurial career when I founded Cebile Capital! I attended a ten-day meditation course called Vipassana meditation, which taught me the ability to reset my mental game at the beginning of each day. Just like starting out with anything new, I first practiced for five minutes a day. Then ten. Now, come what may, I carve out an hour to meditate daily and attend an annual Vipassana course. This really goes to show that even dedicating a small amount of time each day can compound over time. Where we spend our time and energy compounds for us – so if we’re doing that in productive pursuits like building mental resilience, it’ll pay off in spades over the years,” she explained.

Sinha Haldea emphasizes it’s important to find what works for you and that each person’s schedule is unique. “Whether it’s your favorite meditation app, praying, doing breath work, tapping, yoga, gratitude practice, consciousness coaching or anything that shows meaningful benefits for building the mental muscle, consistently carving out time to center your mental well-being will help you navigate the ups and downs that life throws at you,” she added. “The key here is regularity – nothing gets built overnight, especially when it concerns the mind and the body. You have to work on your chosen path on a daily and regular basis and that’s more important than the conduit.”

One of Sinha Haldea’s personal projects is championing preventative mental health. She spends her free time on advocacy with senior policymakers on easy wins at school or university to teach children and young adults some mental health hacks. “As a society, we don’t speak nearly enough about the daily practices that can help build strong and resilient minds. This is even more so in high-pressured, professional industries, especially for women in finance and business. I regularly attend conferences and appear on podcasts to speak about my journey and the habits I’ve developed for success in my professional life. Most recently, I was invited to the UK Houses of Parliament to speak on this subject.”

At Raymond James, having a growth mindset is ingrained in the DNA, seeing each challenge not as a setback, but as an opportunity to make the team stronger. Sinha Haldea also added that the team culture is worked on consciously, “Recently at our office, we immersed ourselves in the Enneagram to understand each other better and become more aware of our own preferences and blind spots. We followed that session with a deep gratitude session where each member of the team was invited to share some self-appreciation and share gratitude with two other members of the team. It was a powerful and moving session. What we appreciate, appreciates. That was evident to our team that day! These are just two recent examples but I am constantly seeking ways to offer growth opportunities to the team – and they are just that, opportunities and invitations for self-reflection and learning.”

For Sinha Hildea, meditation has been pivotal to her entrepreneurial career, especially in playing the long game. “In a society where we crave dopamine hits and quick results at the micro-level, as an entrepreneur, it becomes harder to decide what is right for you and the organization and to make decisions from the right place.

Over the years, I received countless offers to buy my business, Cebile Capital. What meditation provided was that clarity and vision on what Cebile Capital was and the values we stood for. In terms of diversity, we became the change that we wanted to see in the financial services industry, always being over 50% diverse and 100% female-led. Fast forward to 2021, when Raymond James approached, it became apparent that they were not only a fit from a business-case perspective, but also from a cultural standpoint. It’s a good case in point for playing the long game, building value for clients and focusing on making value-centric decisions.”