Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Are You Using Friends as Crutches?
Female friendships provide irreplaceable support as our cheerleaders, therapists, and comedy specials rolled into one, but they can subtly transform from empowering sisterhoods into dependency cycles that erode self-trust. The danger lies in constantly seeking validation from others instead of trusting our own judgment, slowly outsourcing our decision-making and disconnecting from our inner guidance.
• The difference between seeking advice versus seeking permission
• How dependency on external validation chips away at self-respect
• Why constantly polling friends for decisions teaches us our judgment isn't enough
• Common subconscious lies we tell ourselves about friendship and decision-making
• Reframing discomfort as an invitation to reconnect with yourself
• The paradox that less approval-seeking creates deeper connections
• Practical steps to rebuild self-trust while maintaining meaningful friendships
• Why true friendships reflect your power back to you instead of replacing it
May our relationships be sources of love, growth, and peace, with our confidence always rooted in Allah alone.
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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 Asr. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you, inshallah. This podcast is being published around the time of Eid and you guys must have enjoyed or are enjoying with your family, with ongoing celebrations.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk about how your best friends being your girlfriend, is the best experience about being a woman and I'm talking beyond self-help books. Nothing beats a deep, soul-nourishing conversation with a woman that just gets you. They're the one who hype you up when life is feeling down, or they lovingly drag you out of making a questionable life choice. They're the only people who can decode your vague texts, send you unhinged memes, and they are your real-life emergency contacts, maybe not on official forms, but like real emergencies, like bad hair days that nobody gets. Whatever is important to you is important to them, while it might appear vain to the rest of the world, but beyond the laughs and the inside jokes, having solid girlfriends is a superpower. They remind you of your worth when you forget it. They're the ones who sit in the mess with you without rushing to clean it up or fix you. They're either your ride or die forever. And even when the relationship is over, there's no breakup. Talk like we need to figure things out. We need to know where things are going, or having the uncomfortable silences when you haven't talked for a while. There's a certain ongoing communication in an empty space, even if you're not directly communicating with them. There's a certain ongoing communication in an empty space, even if you're not directly communicating with them. There's a certain understanding about yourself and the relationship.
Speaker 1:As a Muslim woman, having other women as friends is incredible. They're your cheerleaders, your therapists, your comedy specials all rolled in one. But the plot twist, which is what this podcast is about, is they can also become a crutch. It becomes easy to blur the line between support and dependency, between genuine sisterhood and constantly outsourcing your decision-making because you don't trust yourself enough to make them alone own. This podcast is your invite to notice when a tough choice about career, marriage or even what to wear is being brought to the group chat for approval.
Speaker 1:If you're slowly starting to lose connection with your own intuition and what it looks like when an empowering sisterhood morphs into an accidental safety net, don't use that safety net above yours. Don't let this sisterhood get in the way at a chance to truly stand on your own and always be on the lookout for the friends that you love the most. How are they unknowingly reinforcing a dependency cycle If, out of their care, they're always having an opinion as well? How it might look to you is at first it will feel reassuring. You have people to turn to, people who get it. But then, when you start noticing you're going to be second-guessing yourself more than ever, you're going to be second-guessing yourself more than you're trusting yourself. You'll start to notice that before making any choice, you will want to see if someone else can validate them, and you will need at least one or two other people to agree with you before you feel like your decision is legitimate. And slowly, without realizing it, you will start handing over your autonomy in small, tiny, seemingly harmless ways.
Speaker 1:The difference is that seeking advice is different from seeking permission. True sisterhood reflects your strength back to you. It does not make you dependent on borrowed confidence. If your friendships leave you feeling like you can't trust anyone, it's not a sisterhood, it's a crutch. It's just another way that women are taught to play small, stay uncertain and doubt their own brilliance. Your girlfriends should be the ones reminding you what you already know to do or not to do. This is you abusing your friendships as a mirror, reflecting the power back to you that you forgot that you had all along.
Speaker 1:The unspoken cost of always seeking validation and advice from others is the slow erosion of your own voice from someone else. Every time you hesitate to trust yourself and instead you look outward for permission, you chip away at your own self-respect, and this is not just about needing reassurance. This becomes about outsourcing your autonomy. This is when you're allowing other people's opinions to shape your reality more than your own intuition ever can, and the more you depend on other people for answers, the more unfamiliar you become with the sound of your own brilliance. Decision making becomes more and more of an external process, and, before you know it, your life will become about unfounded fears, doubts and limitations of those that are around you, and the worst part is the people that you're looking to for guidance aren't even the ones who will live with the consequences of your choices. You will be living with them. This is a quiet betrayal that most women don't realize they're committing against themselves, and it does not always have to be just girlfriends, it could be your spouse, it could be your family member, it could be siblings, it could be colleagues. When it comes to professional opinions, every time you poll the room for their opinion instead of making a choice based on what you already know. Deep down, you teach yourself that your judgment is not enough, and if you never let yourself be the authority of your life, you will never gain that skill. You will always feel like a guest in it. The cost of seeking constant validation is not just insecurity. Cost is forfeiting the life you're meant to live.
Speaker 1:Some of the subconscious lies that we're constantly telling ourselves about our friendships and decision making subconscious lies that we're constantly telling ourselves about our friendships and decision making. It goes something like if my friends don't agree, it's probably a bad idea. Sometimes your friends are just as scared as you are of big changes. Their disagreement with your decision does not necessarily mean a red flag. What if it's a reflection of their own limitations? What if it's a reflection of their own limitations? These friends, no matter how loving, are still human. They project, they worry. They see your risks through the lens of their own experiences. If they have never taken a leap, you're considering whether it's about moving cities, changing careers or choosing to get yourself out of a toxic relationship. They might caution you against it, not because it's wrong, but because it makes them uncomfortable. Sometimes the scariest, the most life-changing decisions aren't group decisions. Sometimes the scariest, most life-changing decisions aren't group decisions. You don't need a committee vote to validate what you already know in your gut your destiny is not a democracy. If your heart is pulled in one direction and the only thing stopping you is but I don't know if my friends will think this is a good idea then maybe you're listening to the wrong people in this scenario.
Speaker 1:The next unconscious belief that I want to point towards is a strong community means everyone thinks the same way. That's actually not the case. A strong community means everyone respects that you think differently. This is an unspoken pressure on female friendships the idea that if we're close, we should agree on everything. But sisterhood, along with any other relationship, is not about sameness. It's about respecting everyone's individuality. If your friendship space cannot hold different perspectives, then it's not a friendship. It's an echo chamber. If you're trying to agree with your friends 100% of the time, or the other way around, are you thinking for yourself or you're just reinforcing what's comfortable for the group. The strongest community is not built on uniformity, but it's built on an unshakable respect for each other's autonomy.
Speaker 1:Real friends do not guilt you for thinking differently. They make you feel like they hold space for your individuality, even if, and especially if, it challenges their own beliefs. The next unspoken belief could be that good friends always tell you what to do, when actually good friends help you see for yourself clearly what you can decide for yourself. Good friends help you see for yourself clearly what you can decide for yourself. While friendships can be a helpline and I want you to use them as such when you need it, you can call someone and they tell you the correct answer, or they guide you through life problems when your own brain might not be functioning as well. But I invite you to not make your decisions just based on this helpline. A great friend doesn't just hand you the answer. She helps you see the answer, she asks the hard questions, she reminds you of your own strengths.
Speaker 1:If you're feeling lonely, that is not a sign that you need more people. It might be a sign that you need more of yourself. You might assume that the empty social calendar or a quiet night means something's wrong, but real loneliness is not a lack of company. It's being disconnected from yourself. You can be surrounded by people who love you and still feel alone if you don't actually know who you are beyond their reflections. And you could be alone and in silence and feel completely held and nourished just because you have a very powerful self-image created after you've been listening to your own inner guidance. What if discomfort is not isolation but an invitation for you to reconnect with yourself? Because what happens is the less you need approval, the more deeply you connect with the right people. When your choices depend on validation, you will mold yourself to fit expectations of others and this will subtly silence your own opinion, instinct and desires. It feels safe, but this is a slow erasure of who you are and, paradoxically, counterintuitively, the moment you stop chasing approval, you become magnetic to people who align with you. With you, you no longer attract people who need you to stay small.
Speaker 1:Self-trust is the foundation of real intimacy in any relationship. If you don't trust yourself, you cannot trust your connections. Real connections require vulnerability, but vulnerability without self-trust is just insecurity, looking for reassurance. Over and over again, women from very early age are conditioned to play it safe, choosing what's acceptable over what's authentic to them, to them. And the most dangerous cost of all of this is that every time you overwrite your gut feeling to avoid conflict or to maintain harmony, or just because other people aren't approving, you send yourself a message that their comfort matters more than your own truth. But this discomfort of not meeting your values does not disappear, it festers, it turns into resentment, it turns into exhaustion and burnout. If you're looking for what is missing and you don't quite see it, something is missing, and that is your voice, the voice that is meant to lead you, not a voice that's meant to be lost in other people's opinions.
Speaker 1:Don't infantilize yourself by always being hungry for somebody else to give you answers. Yes, it is very appealing to always want others to give you what the answer is, because that feels safe, that feels after the outcome of that decision you'll have somebody else to blame but yourself. But what if, after an outcome of a decision, you never blamed anybody, yourself or others? You made decisions based on whatever information was best available to you and you stay content with that? What if you take every outcome of a decision as a stage in life to navigate and learn lessons from? What if there was no such thing as a wrong decision. That is the principle that I act from. If I've made a decision, even if I take other people's opinion into account, the decision is always from me and I absolutely refuse to consider it a wrong decision, because I do do believe that Allah SWT does not put anybody in a position that they cannot handle, and that everything from Allah is for a cause and that everything from Allah is for a reason. So how are you going to start this path? You're going to start embracing the mess. Normalize being wrong.
Speaker 1:If you're afraid of making bad decisions, you'll never make great ones. Reframe discomfort as a sign of growth, because alternative is stagnation. Take small risks daily so your brain learns that uncertainty won't break you. Uncertainty can also build you if you let it. Ask yourself what would I do if no one else had an opinion on this? Then listen and if you do feel uncertain, don't run from it. Maybe set a timer for 10 minutes and come back to it.
Speaker 1:Do not run away from the decision, don't distract yourself. There are no quick fixes. Maybe you have to come back to it after istikhara. Maybe you pray on it, make dua about it. The right knowledge reveals itself in time. Your only job is to stay open long enough to hear it.
Speaker 1:Your best girlfriends aren't here to lead the life for you. They're here to reflect back the best parts of you. They do offer an emotional safety net, but it's not supposed to be an emotional prison where you're trapped in dependency. Supposed to be an emotional prison where you're trapped in dependency. A great friendship is a creative catalyst, making you dream bigger, see beyond what you thought was possible, and it challenges your own limitations. A great friendship also brings out pure, unfiltered joy. The kind that has no agenda, no expectation, just deep belly laughs over things that might not make any sense.
Speaker 1:True friendships don't smother you under the weight of expectations. They honor your autonomy. They remind you of your values without enforcing them on you. They are a soft place to land, but never a place to stay stuck. And if for all of that to happen, you have to let people know that you love advice, but you make the final call, do that. Do it verbally, explicitly, or just think about it and decide on it implicitly around your friendships. Stop explaining your every decision. People will adjust. Step into the arena and encourage mutual growth, because if you're the only one evolving, that's not a friendship. Choose friends that trust your judgment and you trust theirs, and practice saying I trust myself on this one and continue to love yourself through all of the outcomes.
Speaker 1:Best friendships are a catalyst to autonomy, not a replacement for it. If you don't trust yourself, no friendship can save you. If you do trust yourself, no friendship can break you. And among a sea of very good friends and a handful of great friends and even fewer best friends, there is a fine line between support and self-betrayal, and that line is your awareness. With that, I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, I am grateful for the friendships that uplift, challenge and reflect the best in me. Bless me and all of us with the wisdom to trust myself, the strength to stand firm in my choices and the clarity to seek guidance without losing my voice. Ya Allah, let my relationships be a source of love, growth, serenity and peace, and may my confidence always be rooted in you alone. Ameen, ya Rabbul Alameen, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.