Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Broken or Just Uncoached
Life coaching... the real, transformative kind, reveals these outdated narratives and offers something profoundly powerful that other healing approaches sometimes miss. As both a physician and a life coach, I've witnessed how coaching unveils the truth that you're not broken; you're simply loyal to thoughts that once kept you safe but no longer serve you. While therapy, self-help books, and spiritual practices provide valuable language for your struggles, coaching delivers the transformation you actually need.
Your brain, designed for efficiency, repeats familiar thoughts even when they hurt you. It whispers constant danger signals, keeping your body in fight-or-flight mode. But when coaching helps you recognize and rewrite these stories, your nervous system finally relaxes.
For Muslim women specifically, I've created a sacred coaching container that combines life coaching principles with Islamic teachings, addressing the unique emotional and generational complexities we carry. This space,Wisdom Wednesdays and the Empowered Muslim Women program, helps women repair relationships, heal from shame, and rise into versions of themselves that feel whole and worthy.
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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 Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:An idea came to my head when I sat down to record this podcast, and it had to do with how much people don't actually know how powerful coaching is. You just don't know how powerful it is, so I felt a sudden urge to let you know how powerful it is. There are people who try to impose their thoughts of inferiority on me, their thoughts of how coaches are inferior or not skilled enough just because I choose to call myself a life coach. When they judge me, what they don't know is how powerful life coaching is, and call it judgment on their part, call it ignorance. Either way, if you think life coaching should be beneath me just because I have a doctorate degree, you have never experienced real transformation through coaching.
Speaker 1:I am someone who chose one of the highest barrier to entry profession, which is medicine, and also one of the lowest barrier to entry professions, which is life coaching. One came with 10 to 12 years of schooling and six figures of debt, multiple interviews, entrance exams, board exams. The other one came with a certificate and a lot of times not even recognized by authorities. This profession came with a lot of raised eyebrows, although it was still enough to cost me almost an undergraduate degree. And still I chose both, not because one wasn't enough, but because healing takes more than one modality and because somewhere along the way, after the medical training, I was the one who needed to be saved. What if the life coaching the real kind, the one that I practice is that it shows you exactly where you've been living inside a story and the story that isn't true anymore, a story that might have been true once, maybe? Life coaching is about inside a story and the story that isn't true anymore, a story that might have been true once. Maybe life coaching is about revealing a story to you that was once true, that helped you survive, a story that was your armor, your justification, your map, your whole entire life. But it's not the map of your current life, and this is what no one tells you that your brain needs to be constantly upgrading based on the life you envision. Healing through life coaching makes it about realizing you've been rehearsing the same old story for years, that your brain has not upgraded for years and the story becomes exhausting, not to state that it's actually untrue and not even yours anymore, but your nervous system still thinks that's real because it's what you've been narrating on a loop.
Speaker 1:Every single healing modality EMDR, ifs, somatic therapy, hypnosis, talk therapy, spiritual retreats, inner child work, shadow work they are all walking you towards one destination a different narrative, a different way to explain what happened without drowning in it. They're all trying to help you create, hold your past without handing it to your future, and all of them help. I love all of these modalities. They have saved people, they have helped me. But no matter what method you use, the end game is the same, and that's what I'm trying to tell you.
Speaker 1:You're learning to tell a new story. You're learning to recognize and reorganize the memory. You're learning to quiet your body's alarm system by realizing that it's reacting to a thought that feels like a threat. If you're unaware that the story itself is what's keeping your body in survival, you'll keep thinking that whatever modality of healing you're choosing isn't working. But your brain is what's keeping the memory alive. And this is where coaching becomes the missing piece, not because it's better, not because it's the only modality, but because, specifically for me, coaching told me the truth nobody else dared to say out loud, which is you are not broken. You're just deeply loyal to a truth that hurts. That is not helpful, and it's not because you're uneducated or not intelligent enough. It's not even because you're stubborn. It's because when a thought feels safe, familiar, the brain repeats it in the name of efficiency. Once it helped you predict danger and saved your life, the brain says this must be repeated, because this method actually works. And in the name of safety, the brain keeps you from healing. And while feeling safe is part of the healing, sometimes it takes courage to heal completely.
Speaker 1:Coaching is about choosing freedom, even when it feels risky, and what coaching gave me is ownership without shame. It's my thought, I inherited it, I practiced it, I repeated it and I can also change it. Coaching gave me creation without delusion, and this is not toxic positivity. I'm not slapping affirmations over grief without recognizing it. I'm choosing a story that serves my soul, not just my survival, as it once did. Coaching gave me a nervous system that is finally allowed to rest, because when your thoughts stop whispering, you're not safe constantly. Your body stops constantly running from danger, it stops living in survival mode the whole time.
Speaker 1:I did try therapy and I devoured self-help books, I journaled, I reflected, I prayed with deep conviction and I think coaching was the answer to my prayers. But none of the other modalities truly helped completely, not in a way that I needed, not at the level my soul was quietly begging for. Everything gave me language but nothing gave me transformation. And that didn't come until I entered this particular school of thought in life coaching that I now choose to practice and I chose to cert life coaching that I now choose to practice and I chose to certify in that program. And since then I've upgraded my skill level a lot more.
Speaker 1:And, of course, the certification program I went through was led by and mostly designed for white, mostly secular female audience. There was minimal to no inclusion of someone like me, brown person, hijab wearing visibly a Muslim woman with a medical background, with cultural nuance and spiritual depth. So I did what any other person would naturally do as a next step and I created a program for women just like me. I took what was offered to me, I extracted immense value out of it, including the coaching, certification and my medical training, and I made it my own. Then I built what I couldn't find.
Speaker 1:This is how my coaching program was born. It goes from Wisdom Wednesdays and then into Empowered Muslim Women. They're both tiers of my coaching program that you can join. My overall coaching is rooted in life coaching principles, yes, but they're fully grounded in Islamic teachings, feminism, spirituality and the specific emotional and generational complexities that women currently carry. And it's not going to be a one-size-fits-all coaching, it's life-changing work for Muslim women. Wisdom Wednesdays is my sacred weekly group coaching container where I bring this coaching to Muslim women, and they bring multitude of topics how to repair relationships, how to cure shame, how to come out of silence and self-sacrifice. Women get coached on how to rise into a version of themselves that finally feels whole, worthy, successful.
Speaker 1:When I introduce myself to people as a physician life coach, sometimes they assume I added the coach for flair or, worse, that life coaching somehow stains or dilutes my credibility of medical training. But I did not add this work for flash. I pursued it because, even after everything I was taught about the mind and the body, it was this work coaching, and the way I practice it, that actually helped me heal. I train rigorously in both modalities, I honor both and I lead by example in both of these professions, though I don't always get it right because surprise, surprise, I am a human. But I will tell you what I never do. I never lay my head on the pillow at night and think I didn't do my best, and Alhamdulillah for that. Alhamdulillah for the healing, the work, the calling and the permission to show up imperfect and still be powerful.
Speaker 1:I personally believe that you have a healing intelligence inside of you, not because I read it in a textbook, not because it sounds poetic, but because I have witnessed it unfold in women time and time again. It's one of the most sacred things I've ever seen. This is what real coaching helps you become good at Learning to heal using the intelligence Allah already placed inside of you the knowing you were born with the fitrah that has been buried under noise, expectations and other people's opinions, because somewhere along the way you were trained to ignore that inner wisdom. You were taught to outsource your truth to the doctor, to the therapist, even the sheikh and your mother, your friends. You were conditioned to believe that someone else knows what's best for you. Even in spaces that are meant to heal you, it is rarely your voice that is heard. So why not give yourself a gift of that space. True coaching is not about giving you advice. It's not about any diagnosis, labeling or managing you. Coaching returns you to yourself, coaching the way it's meant to be done.
Speaker 1:I am not an expert on your life and I never want to be, because the most powerful healing doesn't happen when someone else hands you an answer. It happens when someone gives you a safe space to listen to your own answers. That's what I do. I don't walk in to fix you. I don't claim to know what's broken. I am not there to rewrite your story. I'm just here to hold it with reverence. While you decide what the next chapter will be, how it's going to be written, I'll ask the questions that bring you back to your own inner knowing. I will hold the light steady while you navigate the dark and, when ready, you will eventually walk into a version of yourself that feels true. I am not the expert. I'm the woman who holds space for you while you remember that you are the expert. At your life, you have mostly just been unheard. You have never been lost, just too far from your own voice. This inner healing intelligence is what coaching gets you good at Not just emotional awareness, not just better communication, not just boundaries Although, yes, all of that still happens. The intelligence that already lives inside of you comes alive through coaching, the intelligence that Allah created for you, the fitrah that you were born with.
Speaker 1:And if you've ever yourself or seen somebody else flinch at the word coach, let me gently invite you into a different paradigm. It's not a pyramid scheme. It's not a multi-level marketing pitch. It's not self-help jargon, definitely not a quick fix that you accidentally stumble on in your Instagram feed. I am talking about real, sacred, grounded, spiritual work. The kind of work that saves marriages quietly, without anyone needing to post about it. The kind of work that rewires trauma that's been living in your family for generations. There is no hype. I can provide this type of work because it's deep, intentional healing. It does not come from a title. It comes from witnessing. If you think life coaching is not good enough for you, you just don't know how powerful it actually is. And people ask me physician, life coach what even is that? And, honestly, it's a title I made up Because nothing else fit.
Speaker 1:While I spent years training really hard to become a physician, just two years into being an attending, I hit a wall, a wall of burnout. I did not think I could keep going. I felt like a fraud in my own scrubs. I believed I was a terrible mother and I was honestly quietly unraveling. I was not broken, turns out, I was just uncoached. Maybe that's the same for you. You were just uncoached With that, I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, let me see myself through your truth, not through the stories I inherited in fear. Ya Allah, if I've been calling myself broken, show me the strength that is buried beneath that facade. If I've forgotten how to hear my own voice, bring it back to me with clarity and grace. Heal the parts of me that are loyal to pain. Show me the modality that brings me closer to you through healing, and guide me towards the freedom of my inner knowing. Help me understand that I was never broken, just uncoached. Ameen, ya Rabbul Ameen, please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.