I have created the Islamic Life Coach School, and this podcast in efforts for you to achieve any and ALL of your goals through high level of self awareness, mind management and emotional intelligence. It is my mission to provide you with the tools that you can use to make your life unrecognizably successful.How do I define success? Success is what you want it to be. These tools can be applied to create success in life, religion, relationships, career etc. YOU define your success and I will teach you the tool to get it.
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Success can look “mature” on paper and still feel crushing in real life. When we treat integrity as never changing our mind, we end up trapped in routines and commitments that no longer match our capacity, our family needs, or the reality in front of us. I unpack why that rigid definition creates shame, procrastination, and burnout, especially for high achieving women who are used to planning well and doing what they said they would do.
We work with a different definition that makes success sustainable: success is responsiveness. That means staying awake to the data your life gives you, then recalibrating without turning it into an identity crisis. We talk through why sustainability is not a straight line, why “temporary intensity” does not automatically mean you designed your life wrong, and how miscalculations are often the price of building a life that is big enough to enjoy. We also name the hidden trap of sunk cost thinking, where you keep paying for a decision long after reality has changed just to avoid admitting you were wrong.
From there, we get practical about course correction and self-trust. I share how to notice the lower brain’s panic response, separate facts from self-blame, and choose responses like renegotiating, canceling, apologizing, resting, or changing strategy. We connect it to an Islamic framework too: using your intellect, seeking counsel, making istikhara, committing with excellence, then letting what unfolds teach you with humility. Capacity is information, not a moral score, and real integrity is returning to alignment with your highest values again and again.
If this helped, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s carrying too much, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. What commitment do you need to update based on today’s reality?
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Welcome to Islamic Life Code School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Donald Abdur.
SPEAKER_01
Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon
all of you. Today we're going to be talking about how success is responsiveness. And there's a version of success that sounds very mature on paper, but is very oppressive when you actually try to live the success. You might be making decisions, building routines and committing to them and being very dedicated, but during this process of success building, your brain in the background decides that the evidence that you made a good decision will be your ability to sustain it exactly as the way you originally imagined it. If let's say three months later your capacity changes, your children need more from you, or there's the project that you are working on all of a sudden requires twice as much work as you expected. This is your way of simply learning something that you could not have possibly predicted before you began or during the process. At this point, your brain doesn't say, oh interesting, we have new information. It says, see, I told you, this is why you cannot be trusted with your success. This is why you can't be successful. So the primal brain comes on full swing while you're trying to maintain the success. And this is one of the most expensive misunderstandings high achieving women have about self-trust. We think that self-trust means making such intelligent decisions in advance that we never have to revise them, we never have to rethink them. We're constantly wanting to think about things sustainably, meaning wanting a perfect outcome through a perfect process, finding that perfect pace and remaining there indefinitely. High achieving women think integrity means doing what we said we would do even after the conditions underneath or commitments have changed. Then when reality eventually forces a sort of a recalculation, I don't want you to use this recalculation as evidence of your failure. This is evidence of your ongoing maturity. This is evidence of you building character.
So for success I want to offer you a different definition, which is success is responsiveness. Your life does not need you to perfectly predict reality. It needs you to remain responsive to reality. Responsive enough that you can keep bringing your life back into alignment with your values and you recalibrate. You measure it against your capacity, your different responsibilities, and ultimately you put the step forward that is with excellence, with Isan, with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in mind. So in this case scenario where success is responsiveness, you no longer have the burden to maintain this forever. You just have to respond to things in real time as they're changing. So at this level, it's much easier to sustain because whatever is not working, you just notice it and you work your way around it. This helps you understand that sustainability is not a straight line. You do not achieve success through a linear process, and you definitely don't maintain it like that. It's never gonna be like, oh, I have ten units of energy at this point, and this project requires seven and my family requires three. Wonderful, we have achieved sustainability and success. Human beings have so many more variables acting on them. Seasons change, health changes, money dynamics change, other personalities change, your children change. Your responsibilities expand and contract. Your understanding deepens through all of this, especially if you're defining success as responsiveness. Something that required enormous effort when you were learning it may become almost effortless later, while something you assumed would be easy may reveal a ton of complexity that you weren't able to anticipate. A life that is genuinely sustainable will by default contain periods that don't look sustainable at all, and that's okay. There will be months where you're building something and you're working more than you intend to work long term. There will be other seasons in which your family requires more from you. There will be seasons where you have to sit back, relax, rejuvenate, and give yourself the time that you didn't. There will be times where you'll be exceptionally productive in the productive sense of word, and other times your body will force you to recovery. Although I hope it doesn't come down to your body forcing you into recovery. I hope and pray that you're able to give it the recovery time that it needs. Do not make the mistake of assuming that temporary intensity automatically means that you've designed your life incorrectly. Sustainability is not sameness. Sustainable life is capable of adjustment. It's responsiveness, especially sustainability of success. Anyone living a sufficiently interesting life will occasionally miscalculate. That's a part of the process. And I want you to hear the freedom inside that sentence. If you are raising children, if you're developing your faith, if you're growing wealth, if you're caring for your body, if you're recovering from a diagnosis, if you're serving your community, if you're leading, whatever it is that you're doing, you will occasionally underestimate something or overestimate
something. You might trust the wrong person. You might have said yes too quickly. You might end up spending money on something that does not work. That does not make you irresponsible. Sometimes all of this is just simply the admission price of having a life large enough that you enjoy living. A great deal of your emotional suffering comes from expecting that your past self should have known something that your current self knows. You might have hired somebody based on interviews and references, but six months later you know more. Maybe that wasn't the right choice. Maybe you signed up for a child's activity because you believed that it would be good for him, and three months later the whole schedule is damaging to the household and it's not sustainable. The reality will let you know what's going on if you become responsive to it. The reality answers. You are allowed to hypothesize about your life, but reality is the one that gets the vote. And of course there's also a bias in the brain that you sometimes get so invested in proving the original decision that it was correct that you keep paying for it long after the reality has changed. You keep manufacturing evidence for the previous reality to be real just so you don't have to admit to a mistake. It looks like continuing with the employee because firing her means that you admitted doing the wrong hiring work. You continue the program even though it's not sustainable or it's not helping you just because you paid for it. You do not have to remain in commitments that no longer serve their intended purpose. The lower brain's function here would be to protect you from the discomfort of being wrong. But being wrong was absolutely the right thing to do. That's what got you here. This is how you learn. This is what makes it a nonlinear process.
So for many women, the practical problem is not even the mistake itself. It is what the mistake activates internally. Let's say you overschedule yourself and you became exhausted, and your immediate internal voice is you always do this. Yes, you might have incorrectly calculated through the circumstance how much effort or time it's going to require for you to go through these many tasks during your day. The miscalculation and the mistake is not necessarily have to mean that you translate it into your own internal insecurity. The circumstance might be that the project required fifteen hours instead of the five that you expected. And if you think to yourself, I should have known this, I did too much again, I cannot trust myself. All of these meanings will create shame, fear, frustration, or resignation for you, which is going to halt the process. None of these emotions are going to fuel any meaningful action. So you're going to hide from the problem, you're going to procrastinate, you're going to continue to self-blame, and you're going to continue to remain committed longer than your higher wisdom requires. When if you came back to the drawing board and decided that you're going to make the situation mean something else, something more useful to yourself, then it's possible the overcommitment is going to teach you how to distribute the work, or it's going to ask you to withdraw from the commitment, or it's going to ask you to reposition yourself. In one case, if you continue to feed the low self-esteem, you become less trustworthy of yourself because there's no actionable steps that come out of feeling rejected. In another instance, the whole action plan comes forward bit by bit and you become successful over time. There is something incredibly powerful about becoming a woman who does not panic or give in to her lower brain tendencies when a plan stops working. This woman knows what her options are. Maybe you renegotiate, maybe you cancel, maybe you apologize, maybe you train harder for the upcoming adventure hike that you signed up for. Maybe you fire a person, maybe you hire somebody, you change the strategy, you learn, you rest, you restart. All of this is going to feel extremely different from the perfectionistic fantasy that every initial decision must work. Your definition of self-trust will become that you are going to choose correctly even if the data suggests otherwise, because you always have the capacity to readjust. When you work through the definition of success is responsiveness, you understand that whatever happens, you will work with the reality that you have. And that's going to release so much emotional burden because your nervous system is no longer required to predict certainty before you move forward. In these cases, the higher brain self-trust will tell you that you do not need to know exactly how things will turn out. You just need to know that you will continue to pay attention and you will continue to trust yourself. This level of responsiveness requires you to stop worshipping the original plan, what you might have originally envisioned. Sometimes the plan was simply supposed to be the bridge that you got enough information to create the next plan. And this adjustment process is difficult, especially for high achievers, because you are rewarded for preparation. You are very skilled at thinking ahead and anticipating and predicting the consequences. You're very advanced in your skills of organizing variables. And these abilities are absolutely valuable. I use them constantly. The problem begins when your planning turns into an expectation that the reality is obligated to cooperate with. It is not. Reality is reality. It will unfold through its own process. You can create the most thoughtful schedule and lesson plan possible, and your child can still struggle. You can do all of your due diligence and still hire poorly. You can make a decision and be genuinely wrong about it. None of this requires an identity crisis on your part. The mature response is simply what is true for me now and what do I need to do moving forward? This level of questioning requires humility because it removes your ego from the center of that calculation.
And as a Muslim woman, this humility matters a lot because you know that your plan was never sovereign to begin with. Your plan requires means. You use your intellect, you seek counsel, you make istighara, then you make decisions, then you commit. You use all of the resources available to you with excellence, and then Allah teaches you through what actually unfolds. Sometimes the answer to your dua is not going to look like that the plan is working, sometimes it's going to look like what the plan is revealing to you. And your responsiveness to that reality reveals your capacity, especially when you do it with Allah in mind. That I did my part and the rest is up to Allah, in which case you can come to start questioning reality with humility so that you can readjust. Your capacity at any given moment is information. It does not have to be a moral judgment. And this is especially important when sustainability of success intersects with capacity. Women are programmed to use their capacity as a measure of their personal worth. If you can manage everything, if you're disciplined enough, if you never become overwhelmed, that means you have some personal worth. And that is, of course, extremely damaging enculturation. Your capacity is not a moral score. Therefore, fluctuation of capacity up and down does not reflect on your personal worth. Okay, imagine you planned a road trip, believing you could drive 600 miles on one tank of gas and halfway there the fuel light turns on. You would not glare at the dashboard and say this vehicle lacks commitment. You would respond to that information. And your response might be that you need to stop to refuel, you might change the route, you might stop overnight to get some rest. Overall, you would understand that the purpose of all of these changes is reaching the final destination. It's not proving that your original fuel calculation was spiritually superior and therefore now you've failed. Yet women do this to themselves constantly. If your body tells you that your schedule is too demanding and you call yourself lazy, this is the enculturation and the thought error that you need to heal from. Responsiveness to the situation is extremely important because it means that you allow information to become useful to you before it becomes catastrophic. Because it can get there if you let it. You don't have to wait until you hate the business before you change your workload or before you change your relationship with it. The earlier you respond to reality without dramatizing the data, the more sustainable your life actually
becomes. Develop a better relationship with course correction. In my coaching at Islamic Life Coach School, we love vision, we love ambition, we love expansion, we love all of these things. But most of the coaching comes around while you're trying to develop a love language of growth, especially when you need to use it for self-correction. So as a reality check, you should almost expect all the time that anything that's sufficiently ambitious will produce information requiring course correction. And this does not mean that you approach all of your commitments casually. I want you to care enormously about your commitments. And sometimes rigorous work is required in order for you to learn to tolerate boredom, difficulty, and repetition. So be discerning in your responsiveness. Are you changing the plan because reality has genuinely changed or because now you're uncomfortable? And these levels of high quality questions will come from your very foundational values because if you're constantly readjusting and thinking that you are responding to reality, you might feel like you're not making any progress towards the goal. And if your goal is valuable enough, it will continue to resurface, it will continue to knock on the door until you listen. I want you to stay in the highest form of integrity even if you have to admit that you might have made a mistake. Self-trust is built after you make the mistake, not before. So this is the exact opportunity you need in your life. If you ended up spending money unwisely, instead of refusing to look at your accounts, you calculate the damage and you recover. You respond to reality without drama, without internalizing the shame. I want you to trust yourself so much that you can stay with yourself even when reality becomes inconvenient. Your goal is realignment, not perfect sustainability. You know you are on the right definition of success when your success has remained responsive enough to keep returning towards the direction that you intended to travel. This is a much kinder and much more sustainable definition of success. Kinder because it does not require you to predict the future and more sustainable because you no longer use shame and perfectionism as an excuse to ignore what reality is telling you. This level of sustainability of success absolutely demands that you pay attention and that you tell the truth. And that is the woman I want you to become. I am not asking you to become a woman who never over or underestimates her capacity, because that is totally unrealistic. Over time you might get better at predicting your capacity, but as soon as your goals expand, so will the opportunity to make mistakes. That's why we have to return to this definition of success sustainability, which is that it is responsiveness. Success is you becoming the kind of woman who receives new information without turning it into an attack on herself. Your self-trust does not come from you getting everything always right. Your self-trust comes from your reality telling you something, and you adjust to it with confidence. This is what's going to make your life sustainable. It's not going to be linear, it's not going to be a perfect balance, it's going to depend on your ability to keep returning to alignment.
With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah, give us the wisdom to recognize when we need to preserve and when we need to change. Help us take responsibility without turning against ourselves. Keep our choices in alignment with our highest values, especially as it relates to your commands. Make us women who trust you and deeply respond to our lives with wisdom. Amin Yarabul Alameen. Please keep me in your draas. I will talk to you guys next time.
