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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 Abdar.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm going to be building on my previous podcast, Importance of a CEO Mindset and How It Goes Beyond the Corporate Title and how it's different from that of a manager. One is not more important than the other or superior than the other, but the simple lack of being in a CEO mindset creates so many problems in your life that are otherwise very easily fixable. So today I'm going to be talking about the exact strategy to put in place to make this change practical. For that to happen, inshallah, you're going to be putting in four steps into place. These are the four steps that take the CEO mindset and transform them into practical real life change. Number one, identify the problem. Number two, get their buy-in. Number three, let mistakes happen. Number four, repeat. Okay, so now I'm gonna expand on each, let you know what this means. So for number one, you have to identify the problem to start being able to think like a CEO. Every transformation starts with an identification of a problem. Because this is to be treated as information, not necessarily dramatized into catastrophe from the beginning. When something isn't working in your life, as a CEO you step back and you ask, what is the issue? What is the problem that needs my attention? Instead of reacting emotionally and drowning in guilt or continuing to create resentment, you as a CEO analyze the weak point and then you start to design structures around it. And don't worry, after I go through each step one by one in detail, I'm gonna give you plenty of examples that it's gonna make sense. Step number two is you get their buy-in. Because no one works towards upholding the structures that you envision if they don't think it's important. You cannot run a household without everyone's buy-in. You cannot have a fun outing with your friends without everyone agreeing that it's fun for everyone. Stakeholders are the people involved in your vision. It can be employees, your friends, children, community members. They only follow the systems that you put in place when they also believe in the outcome. Employees might show up for a paycheck or because they believe in their company's vision. Children might show up because the system connects them to personal benefit, a value they're learning. Maybe they do their laundry because otherwise nothing clean will magically appear in their closet. Maybe they participate because they're learning responsibility, hygiene, social connection, teamwork. Or because you're successfully teaching them how a family collaborative system works. And if you have a kid that genuinely does not care whether they wear their clothes dirty or clean, this is your reason to teach, not to punish. You teach values, you create meaning for them, you teach them around the basic concepts of cleanliness. Step number three is that you let mistakes happen because change in culture takes time. And this is what most Muslim women struggle with. At the first sign of mistake, you're gonna have a tendency to throw your hands up and say, Oh, this doesn't work. But mistakes are not forever failures, they're data points. They show you where the system needs tweaking. If you let your perfectionism run the show, you will burn out. Because it's gonna seem like nothing is moving, not even two inches. A CEO expects mistakes. She knows that culture change takes time. You're training a skill set into people, shaping new habits, building responsibility, teaching delayed gratification. Mistakes or delays all mean that the system is changing at the pace of people's nervous systems. Step four is implementing the lather, rinse and repeat process. This is the most unglamorous part, the repetition, the consistency, the implementation again and again with calm leadership. If you roll out a system and you monitor it without micromanaging, your adjustment is going to take multiple repetitions. You revisit the buy-in from people, you re-explain, you reground yourself. And when I say it like this, it starts to sound like that this will be a forever cycle of work on your part. It's really not. When you repeat these steps with a very coherent and evolved energy, it takes a very short period of time to start to see the change in the culture. Over time, the new system becomes the new normal, and everyone within the unit starts to function inside the culture that you created. So let's start with some examples. If you identify the problem as you're doing all of the chores around the house and working inside and outside of the home, or you're a stay at home mom and you want to delegate more, step one is to identify the problem at hand. Then comes their buy-in. Making sure that everyone you're trying to get in on the system you're building actually wants to be there. If not, then how are you gonna get their buy-in? What's going to incentivize them? What's going to magnetize them? Let's say after all of that you've decided that child number one is gonna do laundry on Thursdays and child number two is gonna do dishes. Thursday arrives and child number one completely forgets. Your unregulated manager brain is gonna want to scream. See, this is why nothing works in this house. I should have just done it myself. It's so much faster. I don't have the bandwidth for everyone forgetting. This is the overfunctioning micromanager talking. A well grounded manager might say, Of course they forgot the laundry. Laundry is the least exciting task on planet Earth. Forgetting might be normal, nothing has gone wrong. And with that one thought, it's going to move you from frustration into leadership. As a CEO, you create the strategy, as a manager you implement it, and in the beginning, implementation will not look clean. It will not align with your CEO vision. It won't go the way you rehearsed it in your mind. This is not a sign of failure. This is literally the part of the process. If your brain immediately offers you dramatic conclusions about how irresponsible your children are or how bad you are as a mom or this whole process is useless, and if you believe those thoughts, you will stay trapped in constant micromanagement and overworking. And this right here makes or breaks your CEO mindset. When the strategy you envision does not go as planned, most women throw it out. Your job there is not to scrap the system, it's to refine it slowly, patiently, strategically. You're moving at the pace of the change of your own nervous system, going from let me fix everything myself to let me help the people in my life grow into their responsibilities. Asking these questions is leadership. This is how you build systems in real life, not systems that are working only in your fantasy, not constantly rescuing them, not constantly rebuking them, just focusing on building capacity, both theirs and yours. In this case, what will come into your vision that the irresponsibility wasn't an issue at all? Maybe the child didn't actually know how to do the laundry and you assumed that it was common sense because let's say they're thirteen. Your mismanaged mind offers that they should know. How is that possible that a teenager doesn't know how to do laundry? Step out of the dramatic internal monologue. As a CEO, you put the drama into silent mode and come into a more evolved self of okay, my child doesn't actually know how to do the laundry. This is the missing skill. This is the gap that I realized after I started to implement this strategy. Maybe they've never been shown the cycle settings. Maybe they've never even touched the washing machine. Maybe they don't even know where the laundry detergent is or what it looks like. All of this is just data. So now you implement a micro strategy that supports your long-term vision. You teach them. Not once, not angrily, not huffing and puffing, just consistently and patiently. It's like you're onboarding a new employee into their first week of training. In their little laundry internship, if you will, and suddenly the system's gonna start to make more sense, it's gonna become stronger. Or as an example, in your friendships, you have a close friend and you genuinely love spending time with her. But every time the two of you try to make plans, either one of you forgets, or the other one double books, or someone is running late, the restaurant is too noisy, and everything just feels unsatisfactory. The manager mindset reacts to every misstep. But pulling back and coming into the CEO mindset, you're gonna start to recognize the patterns that are the weak links. You're going to ask yourself what system can I put into place that makes this whole interaction smoother? Maybe you both agree on a standing day each month, so you're not planning everything last minute and you're not forgetting it. Maybe you agree to FaceTime until you can meet in person. Maybe you switch from long dinners to a quick catch up coffee break. Maybe you set a shared reminder twenty four hours before. In any of this, you're not controlling your friendship or your friend. You're creating a structure. And because this is a system that you both built together with both of your shared visions of having fun together, any mistake that might have felt personal in the past is going to become neutral, and suddenly the friendship goals are gonna become clearer and stronger and more achievable. This is your CEO mindset and friendship. Or let's just say you're an actual manager in your professional job. You have a real team, a schedule, deliverables, and your responsibility is to manage day to day rules of the company. You make sure people show up to the meeting, submitting their reports, they follow the policies, and you are good at this. You know how to manage tasks. But even in that case, you can step into your CEO mindset that is still available to you. If you see a problem, you voice it out. You ask questions like why are we always scrambling at the last minute? What is the missing piece here? Maybe the team is always late to meetings, and as a manager you have to keep sending reminders, keep taking attendance like kindergarten. The CEO mindset in your manager position is going to look deeper. Is the meeting time unrealistic? Is the agenda unclear? Does everyone have the buy-in to be able to attend the meeting with the same enthusiasm? Do people understand why this meeting matters? You're shifting from reaction to inquiry. And enough of that is going to change the entire culture. You are working as a manager, being paid as a manager, but your CEO mindset is gonna ask, where is the bottleneck? Where is the workflow broken? And in that case also, you're going to bring the same four-step framework into your professional world. You're gonna start seeing the problem, you're gonna define it clearly, you're gonna involve the people who are affected by it, you're gonna allow the mistakes to show you where the system is weak, and you will keep refining the structure until it works. Your CEO mindset is never limited to your job title or the life's function that you're performing. It is available to you all the time. Now let's bring the CEO mindset to your relationship with your husband, because that's one of the places where it becomes very, very transformative. No matter how loving your marriage is, most of you are defaulting to the manager mode with your husband. You manage the schedule, the emotional temperature of the house, the dentist's appointments, the in-law expectations, everything and anything. And when you're mostly in that mode, you start to manage your husband also. Did you call the plumber? Did you remember to pick up the kids? How many reminders do I have to send you in order for you to remember to pick up the kids? Did you remember to call your mom for her birthday? All of this is a mental to-do list, a managerial mindset. A CEO mindset invites you to step out of this exhausted posture because even in marriage, and maybe especially in marriage, the CEO mindset is available to you. The manager focuses on the chore chart of the relationship, the CEO focuses on the culture of the relationship. The manager asks why didn't he do what I asked him to do? The CEO asks what are the expectations that I set in place and what conversation is missing? Maybe he does forget things. A manager's gonna nag. A CEO is gonna look at the route and find out what she can do to support him. Is it timing? Is it mental load imbalances? Is it his executive functioning? Is it his lack of buy-in into the plan? He doesn't even care what you think is very important. A CEO asks what structure do we need to place to have better conversations? Is it weekly check-ins? Is it less check-ins? Is it clearer expectations and then releasing yourself from those expectations? What environment is going to help your connection grow? All of these questions make you very intentional. It take you out of micromanaging your husband and into leadership positions where you believe in his capacity and you lead with compassion and long-term vision. Honestly, the truth is most husbands don't resist responsibility. The only thing they're resisting is your inner chaos, the forced expectations that you place on them. And they resist a system if they had no part in creating it. If you tell him and show him how the current system is affecting you, more than likely he will opt in to help you. This is exactly why the CEO framework works here as well. You identify the issue without pointing fingers or without creating blame. You create the plan with him, you don't throw it at him. This is you getting the buy-in. You allow the mistakes and the bumps to be the part of the process without making it mean that your marriage is doomed to fail, or without falling into any other catastrophizing language. And you continue to refine, refine it together, calmly, lovingly, consistently. This is how marriage is a partnership and not a project. This is how you shift from I have to carry everything and do everything in this house to we built this life together. So Inshallah, by now you've been able to see that leaders are women that practice their CEO mindset and put infrastructures into place. And you can choose any goal in your life to practice the CEO mindset on. It can be outings, family trips, play dates. It could be your role in the corporate world, it could be your role as a community leader. The four steps to take the CEO mindset to strategy is identifying the problem, getting buy-in, letting mistakes happen, and repeating the process without drama. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, Ya Allah, guide me and all of us towards wise decisions and clear systems. Bless our efforts with sincerity. Help me lead my life with calm purpose and spaciousness. Ya Allah, let every challenge become an insight. Make my leadership a form of worship, and create my clarity a source of mercy for people around me. Amin Yarabul Amin. Please keep me in your du'as. I will talk to you guys next time.
