From barefoot luxury to mindful rebirth, the founder of Six Senses and Soneva reflects on his mother’s lack of love, letting go, healing, and creating again, in an interview with Yeoh Siew Hoon (Founder, WiT) on the HICAP stage in Singapore.
When I first met Sonu Shivdasani in the early 1990s to talk about the opening of Soneva Fushi (below), I could sense then he was a man with a mission to change hospitality. I felt there was a fire in his belly to change the idea of luxury travel.
Well, turns out that fire came from his mother.
When I asked him how the Sonu today is different from the Sonu then, he said, “As an individual, I’m slightly more patient. I think I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder because my mother, she wasn’t a very loving parent to her children.
“Unlike my father, we didn’t really get unconditional love from her. The opposite. I think she really tried to make us feel inadequate. So at 30, I wanted to prove a point, I was trying to prove something, but I think I got over that now.
“In a way, I’m grateful to her, because she stimulated me to take risks and do things I might not have done if I had unconditional love. But at the same time, I think it sort of undermined me on a few occasions where I just took too many risks because I kept on trying to prove a point.”
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