Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
CEO of Your Life Part 1: Mindset
We explore a powerful shift from managing chaos to designing calm by adopting a CEO mindset for everyday life. Instead of living in the noise of tasks, we focus on the vision, values, and simple structures that make tomorrow easier than today.
We start by unpacking the difference between manager and CEO energy. A manager reacts and maintains; a CEO designs and prevents. That change in altitude turns endless to-do lists into clear frameworks that actually hold. We translate this into real life: setting a family culture with shared responsibilities, rotating chores that kids can own, and routines that don’t collapse when someone forgets. The goal is not control; it’s clarity and compassion, so the right action becomes the easy actions.
Throughout, we ground the approach in purpose and faith, letting values like patience, accountability, and excellence guide the systems we build. You’ll leave with three starting questions: identify one draining problem, imagine what would prevent it long term, and design the simplest system to make it stick. Press play to begin leading with intention, reducing daily friction, and creating a life that organizes around your calm, clear vision.
If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs relief from constant urgency, and leave a review with one system you plan to try next.
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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. Donald After.
SPEAKER_01:Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. The idea for today's podcast came to me a long time ago during a coaching program that I took with Dr. Hala Sabri. She's one of those rare women who is multidimensional, brilliant, an entrepreneur, community builder, a mother, a friend, and she is all wrapped up in one powerhouse of a human being, mashallah. If you're not in the physician world, it's gonna be hard to imagine the scope of her influence. But she created Physicians Mom's Group, or PMG, which is now has around 85,000 women. They're all physicians, they live across the globe. When I first joined there were only around three to four thousand of us. Dr. Sabri has created an incredible support system through all of her services, including this Facebook group. And over the years I've had a chance to attend two of the PMG retreats. And Alhamdulillah, they've been one of my best investments that I've made. During one of these retreats or a group coaching session with her, someone brought up a topic for coaching and then she brought up the idea of being a CEO of your life. And I don't remember if it was me or somebody else being coached, and I don't remember when it was. But the whole idea landed very deep in my body, and I've been massaging this concept in my head all this time. I've implemented it and I've seen amazing results, and I do think it's extremely replicable because I teach it to my clients and they see results too. So today I'm gonna break this concept down. I'm gonna be creating two episodes for this podcast series being a CEO of your life. Today I will tell you about the importance of the mindset, and in the next one I will tell you about the step by step framework for how to practice and use it. So first starting with some basic definitions. There are managers and then there are CEOs. Managers are the guardians of the schedules, the deadlines, the reminders. They put procedures in. They're like the tiny gears that keep the machine running. Managers respond to whatever lands in front of them, a crisis, a delay, a mistake, or any task that needs to be carried out. The mindset of a manager is anchored in the immediate and here, making sure everything functions as it is now. And this is not an insult by any mean, I'm not trying to talk down these responsibilities. It's just a different job, a different description. Managers maintain the order and CEOs create the order. Managers run the system, CEOs design the system. And when you live your life thinking like a manager, reacting, micromanaging, implementing, checking boxes, you start believing that this is the only way to live life. You forget that you can build an amazing life through leadership, strategy, and long term vision. So CEOs on the other hand, live through an entirely different attitude. They operate from vision, long term strategy, not from the noise of the daily tasks. And this is not to say that you're not going to be switching your hats and going from a manager to a CEO within seconds during the same day. You are going to be doing that. But the CEO is the one who defines the mission. She sets the direction and decides what goals are important and what are not for this company. As a CEO, you create the future, the culture, and create a vision that everyone follows. Managers worry about the mechanics, the deadlines, the to-do lists. The CEO shape the meaning behind it, and they create the frameworks. They design the systems that make these mechanics easier, faster, sustainable, and efficient. Your job as a CEO is to be focused on future growth. A CEO doesn't solve the problem today. She asks how do I prevent this problem from becoming tomorrow's problem? Enforcing procedures is a manager's mindset. Questioning them, creating new ones, and learning strategies is the CEO. CEO does not micromanage the tiny details. So to understand this shift even better, we have to look at what makes the CEO be at a completely different altitude. What is the energy of that role? What is that mindset? What makes a CEO operate differently compared to everyone else? And I'm going to be talking about this as it relates to your daily life, not necessarily the corporate world. Although of course that mindset applies to the corporate world. That's where the term chief executive officer comes from. But I want you to see how it's applicable to your life without you ever carrying that title. Now elaborating on this comparison, you might see that your home is being run like a chaotic startup. No system, no onboarding, no clear roles, just you as an exhausted woman going from one task to another. The laundry, the dinner, the bedtime, they're all crises in management. And as a manager, you're not gonna have a chance to zoom out and see what solves this problem? How can I improve the company culture? If you stay in the manager's mindset, you're gonna continue to stay at the level of trying to put out daily fires. As a CEO, your responsibility is to ask questions like what does this household exactly need? What kind of organization and structure does it need? What will make it sustainable? And I'm gonna give you a lot more language around it because I'm not asking you to be giving orders or enforcing orders. I'm not asking you that people that you're trying to create these frameworks for follow you blindly. I'm asking you to be a visionary and become comfortable in that role. When you do that, you're gonna become a woman who leads with intention instead of adrenaline. Most of the women are operating as managers inside their homes. They're running on urgency, juggling tasks. Who didn't eat, who didn't shower, who packed their bags and how much stuff did they leave out? Who didn't flush the toilet? Who needs a ride next? Whose homework is due when? You as a manager are responding to everyone's needs in real time, like a walking customer service department, and that's very draining. Society overall trains you to believe that this is normal and even admirable, and if you're not burned out to this level as a mother, you might not even be a good mother. This is rather unfortunate because that's not what good motherhood means. If that was the case, you would constantly be feeling irritated and resentful. Now a woman who runs a household as a startup versus a multimillion dollar enterprise, she is going from the mindset of a middle manager to a mindset of a CEO. When you as a woman step into the CEO role of your own life, you rise above the constant noise of getting things done. You become the one who decides the culture of your home. And this is not done by controlling everyone, it's done by anchoring yourself in your own vision and clarity and purpose. That way you're gonna stop drowning in the daily mechanics of things, meals, laundry, bedtime, carpool. And from this mindset you're gonna start asking questions that are gonna change your life. What kind of home do I want? What values do I want my children to embody? What systems will support my sanity five years from now? And not just today. That way instead of reacting to every spill and every argument and running after your kids because of their forgotten assignments like a police officer, you anticipate this future and start solving for it. This is much more sustainable, this is much more strategic, this is where your authority has a completely different aura. You're much more coherent, much more magnetic. This way you're becoming a person who leads your life, not somebody who wants to control everyone and everything because she's always so frustrated. What I really want you to take from this is the mindset behind all of these roles. The manager and a CEO move through the world with two completely different internal postures. One is reactionary, one is directional. One is how do I handle what is in front of me, which has a time and a place, and the other one is how do I design what's ahead of me? This is a real multifaceted, multitasking Muslim woman. Someone who can juggle motherhood, marriage, career, community, herdeen, friendships, aging parents, everything with sustainability and joy. You are performing both roles of a manager and a CEO every day, but you're leaning into your manager mindset a lot more than the CEO mindset. You already do it all. As a manager, you're the scheduler, the cook, the crisis intervention team, the household therapist, the Uber driver. You're already doing the managerial tasks. What you're not doing or barely doing is tapping into the CEO mindset, and that is the part that will save you. That's the mindset that will pull you out of your burnout. This podcast is your invitation to step out of micromanagement, out of the endless cycles of putting out fires, and step more and more into the long-term vision of leadership. When you start to treat your life the way a CEO treats her company, the managers that carry out the routines, all of the people around you, they automatically start organizing themselves. The managers come into place. More and more people start to fill the role of managers. Everything from your home to any other single one of your goals start to fall into structure. The husband becomes more accountable, the kids become more responsible, the friends become more responsive. When you shift into the CEO energy, the mechanics of your life fall into place automatically. So then you don't have to worry about micromanagement because that automatically starts to happen. At this point I've given you multiple household examples. And all this time you might already be a CEO of a corporation and not even acting like one. You may or may not have that title in the most commonly understood sense of things, but you can act like one. Where are the possibilities for you to exist as a CEO in your life, but you're not really tapping into that? Is it your workplace? Is it your voluntary organization? Is it your education? Is it your spiritual journey? What I'm trying to do here is show you that CEO has nothing to do with a job that you interview for or you get accepted for. It's just a mindset. Where in your life are you applying the CEO mindset? As a CEO, you're gonna be coming into a problem with solution mode. You're gonna lock in at the problem in front of you and you're gonna put systems into place that help you solve that problem. Not only once, but over and over so that the problem doesn't even exist anymore. And the system stop the problem from recurring. Maybe you have a title in the formal linkeded approved sense, but even without that title, you have the option to function like a CEO in so many places. This also begs the question, where in your life are you a CEO and have the opportunity to do so, but still continuing to show up as a manager? Your responsibility is gonna start to shift. You're gonna start asking questions like what systems do I need to put in place for this household to run smoothly? What will make this sustainable for me and everyone else? What structure supports the kind of family culture I want to raise my kids in? When you start asking these questions then your CEO brain is gonna start creating frameworks. Maybe it's gonna look like the one child is fully responsible for the laundry, while the other one handles dishes, or maybe it looks like that each child is gonna do their own laundry and their own dishes, or they're gonna rotate each responsibility weekly, or you're gonna assign days. Or you're working on creating a system where everyone shares a task. The point is the CEO does not cling to one right way. The CEO designs the way that works. And the more and more you lean into this, the more you allow this, the CEO mindset will show you that the inspiration for your system can come from anywhere. Something that you read in a parenting book, something that you heard on this podcast, something that a friend mentioned in passing and suddenly it made a lot of sense to you. Or something that is entirely your own, unique and custom tailored to your family's personality and your goals. The origin of where the inspiration or where the framework came from doesn't even matter. What matter is that you intentionally chose that strategy that solves the problem and prevents it from repeating. In a friendship, this might look like looking forward to a fun outing, but it turns out that there are scheduling conflicts and everyone's very busy. Instead of trying to micromanage things or silently resenting that you can't hang out with your girlfriends, you create a simple structure that works for everyone and starts by asking if your friends share your vision with you. And if someone forgets or shows up late, you let that be a part of the learning curve instead of taking it personally. In business, it might look like finally recognizing that your burnout isn't coming from the work itself, but from the lack of systems. So you clarify your vision, you reorganize the workflow, and you allow the mistakes to sharpen a stronger and stronger future structure. In community spaces it might look like seeing the same problem repeat for years, and instead of complaining about the people, you shift the culture at your own level, you invite others into the vision, and you understand that consistency is what transforms the group. I'm going to be breaking down this strategy in much more detail in the next episode, but this is all about keeping it simple. The framework I give you in the next podcast is going to take you step by step and make it very applicable and easy to follow. This week you're going to put into practice being the CEO of your life without being rigid about having a title or a corner office. Having this mindset, this inner position that lets you lead all aspects of your life, your relationships, your work, your friendships, or whatever you want to succeed in. You're becoming a person who's designing systems that support your own well-being, and everything starts to reorganize itself around your leadership. With that, I pray to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. O Allah, grant me and all of us the clarity to see our life with vision, the strength to lead it with wisdom. Ya Allah, open our hearts to your guidance and make us a leader of our lives with your mercy alone. Amin Ya Rabul Al Amin. Please keep me in your draas. I'll talk to you guys next time.