Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Solving Systemic Problems
Feeling buried under patriarchy, debt, burnout, or a broken marriage market? We unpack why the brain loves dramatic, unsolvable questions and how a simple shift to better, smaller questions gives you leverage today. Instead of spiraling at the scale of the system, we move to the smallest useful unit of change: one thought, one boundary, one action. Along the way, we challenge the default brain’s obsession with efficiency that recycles fear, and we offer a faith-rooted, practical path back to agency.
We explore how financial literacy breaks scarcity loops, how small investments and savings strategies reduce emotional dependence on policy or news cycles, and how fear-based money choices keep us stuck. We examine healthcare’s treatment-over-prevention bias and outline how regulating your nervous system, protecting sleep, and honoring early body signals quietly undermine a sick-care economy. We reframe racism and sexism by asking questions that preserve dignity and safety...what response aligns with who I want to be, what boundary keeps me safe so your day-to-day experience changes even before the system does.
For those navigating marriage fears, we trade generalizations for criteria: clear red flags, green flags, emotional safety markers, and non-negotiables. We connect all of this with a simple engine of change: thoughts shape emotions, emotions drive actions, actions build outcomes. Leaders will recognize the same mechanics at scale: one decision, one team, one metric at a time. The theme stays steady...systems don’t shift because we obsess over them; they shift when we stop participating unknowingly and start acting with skill, clarity, and faith.
To leave a review on Apple Podcasts, open the app and go to the show's page by searching for it or finding it in your library. Scroll down to the "Ratings & Reviews" section, tap "Write a Review," then give it a star rating, write your title and review, and tap "Send"
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. Donald After.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I want to talk to you guys about a pattern that I see very commonly in my coaching that has to do with the hyperbole of the brain. Meaning the brain making elaborate stories around the unsolvable. Our default brain likes to present problems in an unsolvable way, which makes no sense if you think about it because neuroscience also says, and I also tell you guys, that it's the brain's primary job to solve problems and to make meaning. But the distinction I'm trying to make here is that the nupti self, the primal default self, is different than the higher primordial self, and this lower self likes to recycle problems in the same way in the name of efficiency. If you've ever faced a problem and ask yourself why can't I seem to get a grip on this? Then the lower brain will use this as permission and ask you the same unsolvable questions in a hyperbole. It will continue to create the problem bigger and bigger in your mind because you've given it permission to do so once. If you think about the motivational triad that the default brain operates from, one of the three pillars of the triad include conserving energy, meaning keeping things the same and as efficient as possible. That means if you're facing a problem and your brain once asked an unhelpful question and said why does this economy have to be so bad? Why can't I start a business? Or things like that, then it gets easier for the brain to ask the same or similar question the next time. Similar questions along those lines that the brain will present to you in the name of efficiency, in the name of it performing its job to the highest capacity, meaning we're talking about the default brain, and the highest capacity being efficiency. It will say things like why does this always happen to me? Why don't things work out for me? Why didn't my parents create financial independence? Default brain will continue to recycle the same old emotional patterns, making the problem bigger in the mind, without really offering any solutions. And this is nothing new, I've talked about this concept in my podcast in detail, but what I'm trying to allude to today is when I run workshops or when I'm doing my live trainings or Zoom webinars, one of the most common ways that this question gets asked is at the systemic level. Meaning women ask me, what am I supposed to do when patriarchy and misogyny is so common? How am I supposed to get out of debt when American economy is built on loans and interests? How are we supposed to create a healed nervous system when we have generational trauma? How am I supposed to feel safe in saying yes to a marriage when culture doesn't teach a woman how to be confident? Women asking these questions that are applied to the big systemic problem. The pattern behind these questions being the big systemic problems of patriarchy, American economy, generational trauma, culture, and on and on it goes. The question is being asked in a manner of hyperbole by the brain. Where for me to even start answering that question, I would have to start at the systemic level, which I can at the theoretical level, but systems are only in any one person's control at a time. So then how do we solve these big systemic problems? Children being addicted to screens these days, more and more Muslims being diagnosed with mental health problems. And the way you solve all of these systemic problems is at an individual level. And I want this to sink in, I want this to become a part of the fiber of your being. All systemic problems are solved at an individual level. The problems of economic greed, when the profit flows one way, tax breaks favor billionaires, structural inequities that you and I feel in our daily lives are always ultimately solved at an individual level. System is not going to become magically fair overnight, but I'm asking you to stop asking questions with the hyperbole of the lower brain, which it presents to you in an unsolvable manner. What we're doing by posing these questions at an individual level is we're making your nervous system strong enough so it doesn't collapse under the weight of this system, this huge problem. We expose the flaws at the systemic level, but we solve them at an individual level. When you as an individual gains enough clarity and confidence or enough economic intelligence and financial literacy, you will stop participating in the old pattern, even if it is huge and systemic. When you study financial literacy, when you build savings strategy, when you invest even fifty dollars a month, when you stop making fear based decisions, you break the profit cycle for the system. When you learn how money works, suddenly the same billionaire's tax break is no longer the center of your emotional life. When you build a second passive income stream, the one way profit flow that you were so worried about doesn't have the same grip on you. When you teach your child how to manage scarcity without internalizing it, you're disrupting the generational patterns that entire governments rely on. This is why I keep saying and I will keep saying throughout this podcast is you don't fix a systemic problem by obsessing over the system. Even though that's what your mind continues to insist on. You fix the systemic problem by strengthening the individual who is living inside the system. Your skill is the antidote to this big picture problem. And one emotionally regulated, financially literate woman has the power to shift the system. This is how change begins inside one nervous system at a time. Let's say it's the crisis of healthcare and there's burden of chronic disease and a complete omission of preventative care by your primary care providers. These are real systemic failures. Billions of dollars are poured into managing illness instead of preventing it. Entire industries are built on keeping people dependent on pharmaceuticals. But even these massive, deeply layered systemic problems get solved at an individual level. You as one individual person will strengthen their relationship with their own body. When you regulate your nervous system, when you understand your stress response, when you stop normalizing burnout, when you learn the early signals that body gives you that might hint illness, and when you start taking preventative care seriously, you are already working against the system that you thought was otherwise strong and so overwhelming. This way after identifying the systemic problem, you're gonna come out of complaining about it. Chronic disease thrives in dysregulated bodies. Illness accelerates when stress becomes a personality. So the more you reconnect with your own physiology, the more you sleep well, eat well, rest well, the more you're gonna think well, and the more your body is gonna respond well. And by extension, this way you're participating less and less in the system that benefits off of your illness. The system problem is not magically disappearing. All it's happening here is it's losing its power over you as an individual, who is becoming more self-attuned, more emotionally intelligent, more skilled at self-advocacy and preventative care. The system is no longer able to rely on your ignorance to sustain itself. This is what I mean when I say solution begins inside one individual mind and body. If you want to solve the problem of systemic racism, you might find yourself saying things like why are people like this? Why is a society so hateful? And while you might be thinking that you're posing harmless questions, your brain will go to work in answering these questions because again, it's the brain's primary job to answer questions. It will answer you by presenting the evidence of how hateful people are and how cruel the world is. But these questions and their answers will not move you forward. They will not help you come out of systemic racism. This will only reinforce your helplessness as a minority. But when you shift to your individual capacity, you ask questions in a powerful way. Things like how do I keep my dignity in the system? What response aligns with who I want to be? What boundaries will keep me safe? The way you answer these questions at an individual level, you access solutions that will change your day to day experience, and they will put you on a path to success with the same minority identity that you've always carried. You are not fixing racism itself. You're fixing its impact on your mind, on your heart, on your nervous system. And when enough individuals strengthen themselves at this level, racism will have no place to go. Racist systems only change with one emotionally empowered human being at a time. If you are worried that you're not going to be able to find a righteous spouse because of narcissism and how it feels like a systemic problem nowadays among Muslim men, then the way to come out of this fear is not asking bigger and impossible questions about the system. It's by asking higher quality questions about your individual power. The lower brain is going to continue to love asking dramatic, unhelpful questions. Why are Muslim men like this? Why is the marriage market so broken? Why do women always have to suffer? Why can't men just be emotionally mature? These questions will only highlight more and more of the systemic, unsolvable problem that recycle fear. They will not move your life forward. Higher quality questions will put you back in the power, and these are questions like what signs do I need to look for that indicate emotional safety in someone else? What qualities matter most to me in the life I want to build? What are my non negotiable red flags? How do I strengthen my own emotional boundaries so I can stop normalizing unhealthy behavior? These questions give you answers that you can actually use today because they apply to you at an individual level. And maybe one of the answers to these questions is the two part podcast series that I did on narcissism. I literally give you the red flags, the green flags, the emotional patterns, and the self protection tools. That's how systemic fears become solvable at an individual level. The same pattern applies if you're worried about the cultural problem of sexism, where majority of people, including women, consider women is inferior. The lower brain immediately jumps to questions that will make you feel tiny in front of a giant system. Why is my culture so backwards? Why do women have to suffer for generations? Empowering questions will look completely different. Which will be how do I set boundaries in a way that honors my Deen and my dignity? What part of this cultural message is no longer aligning with my womanhood? How do I build confidence in myself as a woman? How do I strengthen my relationship with Allah Swanalah and the Deen so I feel supported while challenging all of these unhealthy norms? You are solving a systemic problem at your own individual level. You are asking questions that give you tools. At this point I want to shift gears a little bit. I want to tell you guys that the problem isn't that any of these questions are invalid. Both the primal default brain questions are valid as well as the higher quality questions. Every question that arises in your mind has truth to it, and your brain is designed to prove that truth back to you. Whatever question you ask, it will prove it. If you believe that the world is rigged against women trying to rise out of poverty, your brain will find fifty pieces of evidence before breakfast to support that exact claim. That is what your brain does. It confirms whatever lens you're already looking through. And the point isn't which question is true and which question isn't. All of them may carry certain truths. The point is that the part that actually changes your life, are you paying attention to that? And which question moves you towards your goal? Which question here will help you rise out of poverty? Which question here will help you raise righteous children? Which question will help you stay emotionally intelligent and connected to Allah? The difference between the Napsi self, which recycles the same dramatic questions in the name of efficiency, and the primordial self that is the Ruh that is directly from Allah Spanatala, which asks questions that build your capacity and guide you towards solutions. Your choice lies between these two, not between asking a more true question than any other. You're choosing between a question that keeps you stuck and a question that moves you forward, not a question that is alive versus the truth. Every expansive, overwhelming problem that your brain presents about the systemic problem is solved at an individual level. If your brain continues to present to you that the problem is big, then you will have no option but to come up with a big solution. Even people who operate at a higher, more influential level in a society, like the CEOs, politicians, principals, community leaders, business owners, if you're operating at that level, you're still solving individual problems. You're not solving the system. You are just solving the problem that is currently in front of you. You're solving the problem that is within your system. It might look like to an outsider that you're solving huge systemic issues because your scope of influence might be bigger than anyone else. Your decisions will affect more people in these powerful positions, just like your mistakes will affect more people, and your wins will affect more people. But the mechanics of how you are solving systemic problems is only at your individual level. You solve the individual issue that is right in front of you inside your immediate circle of control, inside your own capacity, inside the domain that you've been entrusted with and you've taken upon yourself. As a CEO, you don't solve the economy. You solve the question how do I keep my company as profitable as possible this quarter? As a school principal, you don't solve the education crisis. You solve the question how do I support teachers in this building so we can promote student learning? As a politician, you don't fix the entire nation. You make one decision at a time based on the information that you have in front of you, within your role. Even the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, who carried the greatest leadership role in history, changed the world through each individual problem, having conversations, individual corrections, personal acts of guidance. And if you're a leader in your industry, a physician, a coach, a school board member, an entrepreneur, and your brain still gets stuck because you're trying to solve a systemic problem through unhelpful, dramatic questions, just come to this awareness that you might be asking questions in a way that collapse your capacity instead of expanding it. Just gently remind yourself that the system is always solved through one regulated human being at a time, through one empowered decision at a time. When you shift your focus from the overwhelming systemic problem to one actionable individual item that you can do, your capacity opens. You will suddenly have access to solutions that were otherwise invisible to you under the weight of the bigger question. So when my brain asks an enormous question like how do I fix the mental health crisis in our community? Or how do I stop the burnout culture that everyone seems to be trapped in? Or how do I protect my children when the entire digital world feels unsafe? My default brain just like any other functions very well at bringing up the systemic issues. It tries to convince me that the problem is too big, the world is too messy, and my role as an individual is too small. But my highest self knows I only need an individual solution. I only need to ask one right question about my life. I only need to address what supports my mental health today. How can I make a change in one woman's life? What do I need to do to pull myself out of burnout? What loving boundaries do I need to create to protect my children from the harms of the internet? You also only need to make your standards clear. You need to choose how you will lead your home, your day, your society. Your entire contribution to the system comes from how you show up at the micro level of your own decisions. And there is nothing more powerful than that, not even the systems. Shame based religious education is a cultural and systemic problem. Expectations of overworking in the corporate and the healthcare world is a systemic problem. Lack of minority representation in leadership positions is a systemic problem. Scarcity of resources available for mothers towards childcare, multigenerational enmeshment, wage gap and underpayment of women, screen addiction and overstimulation due to digital media, stigmatization around therapy, inflation that's outpacing the income. These are all systemic problems. And your brain is going to want to focus on the hyperbole of these big, overwhelming issues. It will keep presenting them to you in a way that feels unsolvable. Your responsibility after listening to this podcast is just to be curious about where your influence lies. Be curious about what you can do from inside these systems that help you today. When you make the problem manageable at an individual level, your power will come into focus, the power that you've always had. And this power is exerted through your thoughts. Your thoughts are in your control, they shape your emotions. Your emotions drive your actions, your actions create your life. So by extension, every systemic problem that you're worried about is solved the same way, one thought at a time, one boundary at a time, one decision at a time. That is how you not only rise inside a flawed system, you fix it. That is how the system eventually changes through your courage as an individual who stop being weighed down by the weight of the unsolvable systemic problem. And I'm not even saying that you have to take responsibility of fixing anything. I'm not saying you have to become the spokesperson for the economic reform of the entire generation or the savior of the marriage crisis. I'm not even suggesting that you even make changes. I'm simply showing you the mechanism of change in case you do identify a problem that affects your life and that you want to influence. If you feel a pull and an inclination towards something that you want to change, I'm just showing you how that change actually happens. Because when you understand this mechanism, you're gonna stop waiting for the system to change. You're gonna stop waiting for the economy to get better. You will create success in this very economy. You will stop waiting for the healthcare system to prioritize prevention, for your community to suddenly become more open to topics around mental health. You will stop waiting for the world to shift before you allow yourself to shift. If something matters to you, if something touches your life, limits you, frustrates you, hurts you, your path forward will begin inside your own mind. Your thoughts that create your emotional capacity that will shape your actions that solve the problem. The reason I'm teaching you this is because when you understand that change starts with one thought, you will stop feeling powerless immediately and you will immediately feel better about where your influence lies. All of this not because you're aiming to fix the system, or maybe you are, but my point is the system will invariably change because you're no longer letting the system determine your possibility. With that I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, O Allah, guide my mind towards the thoughts that strengthen me. Show me the next step that are within my control and protect me from feeling overwhelmed by the problems of the world. Ya Allah, anchor me in the small actions that you have placed within my capacity and grant me steadiness towards them. Grant me through my thoughts one powerful solution at a time. Amin Ya Rabul Alameen. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.