The story

Built from the inside out.

Shien is of Kashmiri and Punjabi heritage and was raised across cultures. She is fluent in English, French and Swedish, and understands Hindi and Punjabi. She has lived and worked across multiple continents. That cross-cultural fluency is not background colour. It is the architecture of how she thinks.

She built systems before she built a business. Co-founding Domino Swedish NGO, a language and integration platform for Arabic-speaking refugees in Scandinavia. Serving on the Advisory Council of a World Bank Group collaboration — evaluating systemic educational innovations across 150+ countries. Conducting fieldwork with NGO RHA across India, including designing and delivering technology integration programmes across Indian schools — embedding digital tools into classroom practice and institutional systems. Co-organising Yale-hosted Model UN. Supporting women-led ventures at the intersection of ambition, identity, and capital.

She also spent years as an interviewer — sitting across from CEOs, founders, and global thinkers at Collision and Elevate, in conversation with Dr. Shefali Tsabary, Bertrand Badré, and others operating at the edge of what is possible. And she curated rooms: intimate, intentional, art-led events for high-achieving professionals where something real could be said about ambition, identity, the immigrant journey, and the quiet cost of excellence.

She distilled all of it into her book, Anxious & Ambitious — a 243-page, clinically reviewed psychoeducational journal that named what most high-achievers had never been able to say out loud. She now practises as a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying) with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario, completing her Master of Arts in Counselling Psychotherapy at Yorkville University — Magna Cum Laude — with advanced training in CBT and Exposure & Response Prevention for anxiety disorders and OCD, somatic therapy for complex trauma, ACT, and polyvagal theory.

Equilibrium by Design exists because she kept meeting the same person in different rooms: high-achieving, privately exhausted, and unsure why success never quite felt like enough. The work is not soft. It is rigorous, evidence-informed, and built for people who expect more than platitudes.