About Pausetive Inc.
At Pausetive, we believe mental wellness begins long before a crisis. This page shares our journey—from the vision that drives us to the turning points that shaped our philosophy.
Vision: Reimagining Mental Health
We plan to establish at least one Mental Empowerment Center in every district of Maharashtra by 2030.
These centers will shift the agenda from:
The Challenge We’re Addressing
In the current mental health landscape, interventions primarily begin only after issues have escalated—through therapy, counselling, or crisis management. While these are essential, they are inherently reactive—similar to locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.
This reactive model often fails to address the growing, silent psychological stress that individuals—especially adolescents and young adults—experience until it reaches a breaking point.
Our Solution
Our goal is to change this paradigm. We are building Mental Empowerment Centers—spaces designed not for treating mental illness, but for fostering resilience, achieving goals, and sustaining progress.
🧠 Emotional Intelligence
Strengthening emotional awareness and regulation
🎯 Self-Awareness
Developing deeper understanding of personal patterns
🔍 Focus
Enhancing concentration and mental clarity
💪 Belief Systems
Building empowering and adaptive mindsets
Just like physical fitness can reduce the risk of lifestyle diseases, mental fitness can lessen the burden on healthcare, help individuals better handle stress and uncertainty, and promote long-term psychological wellbeing.
Origin Story: Why We Started Pausetive
The Beginning
1996-2007This journey began with one founder: Sanjiv. While consulting with firms across industries—Banking, Logistics, Chemicals, Electrical—he noticed a recurring pattern.
🔍 Key Observation
Graduates from top institutions like IITs and IIMs began their careers with promise but soon plateaued. Others struggled for years before finding their stride. Some sacrificed personal relationships for professional success, while others remained unfulfilled despite material achievements.
Only a handful managed to consistently grow, adapt, and evolve over time.
Sanjiv’s first tool in unraveling this puzzle was Systems Thinking. To truly understand the complexity of achievers’ challenges, he took a five-year sabbatical (2002–2007) to study the dynamic nature of emotions and beliefs.
Key Realization: While we have mastered objective systems—leading to airplanes and space travel—we continue to struggle with subjective experiences like emotions, beliefs, and biases.
This exploration laid the groundwork for what would later become Pausetive’s core philosophy. It also led to the publication of his book, The Five Great Myths of Career Building, by Macmillan.
Corporate Leadership Phase
2007-2012In 2007, Sanjiv joined a Tier 1 software company as Head of Learning and Development (North). Tasked with launching leadership development programs, he soon recognized how central emotions are to effective leadership.
⚠️ The Challenge
While leadership theories often reference emotional intelligence—values, purpose, meaning—most programs failed to meaningfully incorporate these emotional elements.
By 2012, even though Sanjiv understood the importance of emotions, he lacked clarity on how to use them constructively. This prompted his next career pivot.
💡 The Solution
He relocated to Bengaluru—a city with over 500 Montessori schools and a strong culture of emotional pedagogy.
Montessori education, pioneered by Dr. Maria Montessori, is one of the few systems that intentionally incorporates emotions into learning.
Intrigued, Sanjiv formally trained in the Montessori method, seeking practical understanding of emotional processing as a learning tool.
Meanwhile, emerging neuroscience research began framing emotions as useful data in decision-making. This shift reinforced the role of “mind skills” as essential in leadership and professional growth.
Collaboration & Application Phase
2012-2020This phase marked the beginning of Sanjiv’s collaboration with Mahesh.
They applied emotional awareness and systems thinking to career guidance in high schools and vocational training in partnership with a major NGO.
🔑 Major Discovery
Beliefs are key to mental fitness. Unlike emotional responses—which are automatic and reactive—beliefs enable us to pause, imagine alternatives, and make conscious choices.
⚠️ Important Caveat
Not all beliefs are beneficial. Dysfunctional beliefs can misguide decisions, so they must be questioned and verified before being put into practice.
Integration & Synthesis Phase
2020-PresentA breakthrough insight crystallized in 2021, during a training session the founders conducted at a large orphanage in Ahmednagar, India. It was here that the idea of "Pause" was born—leading to the name Pausetive.
💡 The Breakthrough
Beliefs, emotions, and attention operate largely at the unconscious level. To respond rather than react, we must pause these processes long enough to bring them into awareness.
Pausing alone isn't sufficient. Once these unconscious patterns surface, they must be integrated with deliberate, conscious thinking.
Systems Thinking became the bridge for this integration.
Our journey continues as we work toward creating a world where mental empowerment is accessible to all, starting with Maharashtra and expanding beyond.