Have you ever felt like you're constantly putting out fires in your life, only to find that the embers of stress and anxiety keep reigniting?
This episode offers a profound shift—a transition from reactivity to proactive self-reflection. Here, we peel back the layers of emotional regulation as I share how embracing challenges with strategic thought and emotional intelligence revolutionized my approach to life's hurdles. .
I invite you to consider SQ soulful intelligence as a transformative approach to crisis management, one that can help you extinguish potential life fires before they ignite. No matter what fires you might be facing, this episode aims to equip you with the insights to move from firefighting to fireproofing your life, enabling a journey enriched with personal growth and spirituality.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
Have you ever felt like you're constantly putting out fires in your life, only to find that the embers of stress and anxiety keep reigniting?
This episode offers a profound shift—a transition from reactivity to proactive self-reflection. Here, we peel back the layers of emotional regulation as I share how embracing challenges with strategic thought and emotional intelligence revolutionized my approach to life's hurdles. .
I invite you to consider SQ soulful intelligence as a transformative approach to crisis management, one that can help you extinguish potential life fires before they ignite. No matter what fires you might be facing, this episode aims to equip you with the insights to move from firefighting to fireproofing your life, enabling a journey enriched with personal growth and spirituality.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If this podcast has benefited you, imagine the value of a one-on-one meeting with me! Click below to schedule your FREE consultation. Discover solutions with no obligation.
Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:
Today I want to share insights into a natural repair mechanism that we all have. This mechanism is aimed at healing from burnout, stress and the prolonged effects of the fight and flight response. Many of us live under constant stress because we haven't learned to detach from the fear-driven response system. So to better explain that response, I'm going to describe it with the term of firefighting and how constant firefighting for us as humans is a complete loss. Firefighting is a metaphorical term which I'm using here to refer to you dealing with life's crisis, like major disagreements, professional setbacks, parenting challenges and the like.
Speaker 1:
These situations demand a heightened emotional and mental engagement. A lot of times, these situations trigger our primal fight-or-flight response. So firefighting is our internal reactive mode of handling these immediate crises. These firefighting episodes carry intense emotions, such as anger, defensiveness, and, while this may be appropriate temporarily, what becomes unsustainable is if it's continued. When you react strongly during an argument, your mind will later keep replaying the event, leading to ongoing feelings of guilt, remorse or anger. This mental replay causes prolonged reactive stress where the body continues to suffer under the strain long after the initial event is over. Such repeated stress severely impacts your emotional and physical health. So for those of you who are new at emotional regulation, while your initial reactions may be automatic, you can learn to control your ongoing responses. Emotions naturally dissipate quickly, lasting only about 30 to 90 seconds. But when we continually revisit each moment with our thoughts, we are recreating these difficult emotions in the future moments. We're keeping the stress alive. Understanding this alone will help you manage and eventually reduce the emotional turmoil from your past events, because when you catch yourself in the rumination phase, just a dental redirection to the current moment or future possibilities is going to help immensely. This rumination is what recreates the quote-unquote fire in your body, because what you recreate with your mind is very real to your body. The emotional response is proportionate to the thoughts that you're carrying and sometimes even stronger when you constantly revisit the situation, depending on how intensely you're thinking about it.
Speaker 1:
Constant firefighting is unsustainable. You simply do not have an endless supply of emotional energy to keep fueling this firefighting response. Being in a perpetual state of firefighting leads to burnout. That's what creates a lack of personal growth and ongoing stress. My invite to you in this podcast is a proactive approach to each fire in your life. Invite to you in this podcast is a proactive approach to each fire in your life.
Speaker 1:
If you're facing an undesirable situation and you do react with a heightened response, then once the situation is over, I want you to spend time learning from it. Your healing will come from developing strategies to manage or prevent future crises. Evolving beyond the reactive firefighting to a more reflective and strategic handling of life's challenges only comes from learning from your past. If you are living in a prolonged stress response, constantly firefighting because you lost your job once, or currently haven't gotten any interviews, or have a disengaged spouse or an angry teenager, or you didn't get accepted in the college of your choice, not only is your body under stress during the event, it's under stress with the constant reimagination of the event. So, while the firefighting moment of an argument or receiving hard news absolutely calls for a higher emotional engagement or receiving hard news absolutely calls for a higher emotional engagement, either anger or some other defense mechanism engagement, which is the appropriate response, which is what this podcast is calling the firefighting response. What I'm telling you that it is not appropriate for this high emotional engagement to be ongoing, because that's what's not sustainable. So I can accept and understand your heightened response to a challenging situation, but what I will not accept is your passive re-engagement and mental reenactment of the situation, because all you're doing is recreating the stress response without having any beneficial outcome of actually finding answers or solutions to your problem. Even if the situation in your life requires an increased emotional response and calls for more of your mental resources to be delegated with attention, it absolutely does not require your rumination.
Speaker 1:
Firefighting involves actions to manage or resolve the crisis. It's a way of handling immediate, urgent issues that arise. But your short-sightedness lies in always being reactive to these fires. You can absolutely have a high emotional engagement during a challenge, but you don't always have to be reactive, because reactivity is only about the short term, focusing on dealing with the immediate problem. It does not let you address the underlying cause and it definitely does not let you learn from the experience to prevent future fires and is detrimental to your long-term outcome. The approach here is to learn from each of these fires and develop strategies to prevent or better manage future crises. That way, you move beyond the reactive phase into a more proactive and reflective way of handling challenges.
Speaker 1:
When you're dealing with each specific situation like arguments in a relationship, then, after things calm down, just set some time aside to analyze the situation. Now be very careful if you're doing this for the first time, because you might have a tendency to fall back into rumination to recreate the situation and reconstruct the heightened emotional response of guilt, regret or anger. That's not what I'm asking when I ask you to recreate the situation for learning purposes with your mind. I'm asking you to analyze and learn from it. I'm asking you to break it down and come to it with neutrality, and the best way to do it is to write about it Once you've released the emotional charge that's attached to your situation, by writing about it on paper, then come back to it and analyze it at another time.
Speaker 1:
The goal here is for thoughtful reflection post-conflict, because if you keep jumping from conflict to conflict, never having learned a lesson in between of how to respond effectively, there will be no harmony in between of how to respond effectively, there will be no harmony in your relationships, there will be no growth in your career, there will be no improvement in your financial independence goals. So this level of mind management requires reflection after reactivity. Let's say, if it's a professional setback, this is your invite to reassess so that you can respond to the situation in a more constructive manner. A non-judgmental self-reflection is called for. What can you do about it without being a victim of the situation or without internalizing the setback, without making it mean that you are the failure rather than you suffered from a failure?
Speaker 1:
We are shifting away from fear-based response in the post-firefighting phase. After you have self-regulated from the heightened emotional response to the stressful situation and you have de-escalated yourself to a more level-headed position, then it's time for you to go into a more forward-thinking approach. It's time for you to go into a more forward-thinking approach. This is where the healing lies. This is where your opportunity to minimize future occurrences lies. This is where you can optimize your response to the situation for a long-term benefit. This is where you actually get to design your life you envisioned.
Speaker 1:
If you're trying to be a more gentle and effective parent than always just reacting to your child's behaviors, then during the reflection time, develop future strategies for a calm, reflective response. Over time, this constant core correction through self-engagement will lead you to be a much more effective and empathic parent than constantly fighting fires. Constant firefighting in your life is a sure-shot way to create burnout. Coaching in that way is an extremely effective tool for you to move from reactive to proactive responses, which lets you handle crises effectively, focuses on your growth and sustainability. Successful management of a crisis situation does not mean minimizing its severity, nor does it mean that you don't do damage control. It just means learning and reflecting, developing proactive mindset that reduces the frequency and the future emotional impact of such situations on yourself, meaning future episodes don't derail you as much and you are less and less reactive each time, meaning you will have less cleaning up to do.
Speaker 1:
After the fact, your life is a curriculum that is handed to you specifically for your growth and development, specifically written for you by Allah SWT. This exact life that you're living is your opportunity to awaken your inner intelligence. Each crisis is a lesson in this textbook that is your life, and the successful passing of the lesson quiz comes from you learning how to respond differently each time in each future situation. I do believe that this is the whole point of us being alive. This level of personal and internal development is what our life is designed to do, especially when all of this work brings us closer to Allah SWT In an escalated situation.
Speaker 1:
With this method, you will learn to regulate yourself, to manage your emotional responses through your thoughts, and the point of change always lies with your thoughts. Restoring long-term harmony comes from dismantling the event and learning from it with a grounded presence, not while you're in a fight response. If you want your future life to be different than what's going on now, going from argument to argument, fire to fire then you will have to engage with each incident in a way where you can retroactively deconstruct the situation and learn from it for your own benefit. And that level of groundedness requires mind management. It requires for you to be able to think about your thinking and for you to be able to direct your mind in order to take charge of the situation.
Speaker 1:
If you're constantly firefighting, you're losing Life's quote-unquote. Fires require your engagement, but they don't need to consume your calm. Manage them, don't let them manage you. You're losing precious energy if you're using mental real estate constantly fighting fires. You can otherwise use this energy to build and construct your envisioned life. You will be losing your physical health because of a constant cortisol response in your body and stress hormone release.
Speaker 1:
People who are only used to putting up fires will wait for a crisis before acting or they will create conflicts and fires because their mind craves stimulation a lot of times, subconsciously. This is a rather ineffective way of living, to say the least, but for sure it's a way to create burnout, because high constant energy mode is not sustainable. Because high constant energy mode is not sustainable, in medical terms it's called the activation of hypothalamus, pituitary adrenal axis arousal or HPA axis arousal. If you're always putting out fires, you're not letting yourself recover. You are not letting yourself heal. Firefighting is a temporary response, not a sustainable lifestyle. You know you have successfully curved your habit of firefighting if you learn and grow from each crisis and develop a proactive mindset. That way these crises become more infrequent and are manageable if they do happen. Now you can get coached to put fires out. But most importantly, you do that so you can have well-being, so you're not going through your life just dealing with crisis.
Speaker 1:
A lot of people come to me for coaching in an acute firefighting phase. A lot of women come to coaching in an exhaustion burnout phase. Each confrontation, each challenge in life teaches a lesson. Miss the lesson and the cycle will repeat. If you're not sure whether you're firefighting in your life or not, then here are some examples.
Speaker 1:
You might find yourself saying things like why does this keep happening to me? Why is my child growing up to be disrespectful? No matter what I do, nothing makes a difference. I always have to clean up after everyone else's mistakes. No matter how much I plan, something always goes wrong. Why does every conversation with my husband turn into an argument? Why am I the only one trying to fix things? Or, if you're like me, you lose your mind when the landscaper cuts the wires to your Ramadan holiday decoration in the front of your house. I mean two years in a row. Firefighting for me is blaming him for how irresponsible he is for doing that. I want to let him go of his landscaping responsibilities. When I'm in the recovery phase, I can see that I didn't tell him to be careful. I didn't even warn him that there are going to be wires outside, because he trims the hedges during the day when the decorative lights are not on.
Speaker 1:
So during my reconstruction phase, I come up with ideas of how to handle the situation differently next time. That's the power of coaching. I didn't always used to be that way. The problem isn't the crisis. It's in you, not learning from the experience. It's about management. Failing to evolve is where you've missed the opportunity. This involves employing a level of intelligence that is hidden from most people, but everyone carries it. This is a form of whole brain intelligence, or what I call SQ soulful intelligence. I teach a method of waking up your inner intelligence that Allah gave you so that you can deal with the exact life that you've been given. As a coach, I help you through guided discussions, reflective exercises, supportive encouragement. I facilitate a process of exploring and developing this inner resource.
Speaker 1:
Coaching for well-being, not just for crisis management. You get a lot of support until you've learned how to be your own authority in your life, but eventually the biggest outcomes is that you prevent fires, and if there are fires, they're few and far between. They don't leave you consumed and you deal with them in a way that you don't later regret, so that you're not constantly burning the candle from both ends. There is a noticeable difference in the demeanor and energy of someone who has benefited from coaching. There's something palpable but really yet indescribable about them. Other people around them feel it when such a woman who's been coached and manages her mind and self-regulates when she enters a room, her evolved presence is immediately apparent to everyone, even if they can't put their finger on it. Women who have engaged with deep personal development treat each crisis like a lesson to be mastered. In a moment that demands a firefighting response, they act decisively to protect themselves and limit the damage. But she also recognizes that resolving the immediate issue is just the beginning. But she also recognizes that resolving the immediate issue is just the beginning. The true lesson is in the learning from these experiences.
Speaker 1:
Unresolved crises lead to a life of firefighting rather than fireproofing. So what we've learned so far is a chronic state of stress that stems from the unrelenting firefighting response, often triggered by life's quote-unquote, metaphorical fires, challenges like disputes, setbacks, failures. These situations prompt a response of heightened emotional reactions. But prolonged state of such reactions create burnout until life starts to look like the opposite of what you want it to be. The reason of a triggered state persisting beyond the immediate moment is that you mentally replay the confrontations, the failures, the mishaps, re-triggering the stress response. The emotions from the moment do not last that long. The heightened emotions are recreated in each moment with your thoughts.
Speaker 1:
I'm hoping that you will shift from reactive to a more proactive, reflective approach learning from each crisis to better manage your life, because constant firefighting is a loss and the aftermath of adversity lays the groundwork for a more intentional life. With that, I pray to Allah SWT for a more intentional life. With that, I pray to Allah SWT. O Allah the most merciful, please allow us to come across resources that give us a fulfilling life, one that we can live by being closer to you. O Allah, make this podcast a key to understanding and healing and make it a means to overcome stress and burnout. Make this podcast a wasila to enlighten and assist the listeners, guiding you guys away from relentless cycles of stress and towards a path of self-awareness and recovery. O Allah, provide us the tools needed to detach from a fear-driven response so that we can embrace our life of peace and proactive growth, especially in our spirituality. Ameen, ya Rabbul Ameen, please keep me in your draaz. I will talk to you guys next time.