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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 Abdur.
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Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today we're going to be talking about your identity and how a mismanaged mind offers you an identity that is not really yours. What does that even mean? A mismanaged mind is when you don't practice thinking about your thinking. You simply believe whatever your brain offers you first. The lower brain loves efficiency, so it gives you default thoughts that feel familiar. And when these default thoughts run on repeat, they start to sound like your identity. When you don't question these thoughts, you believe them, even if they're completely unhelpful. Your identity is not built from your DNA. It's mostly built from the thoughts you rehearse every day until they harden into your reality. Your identity is the literal sum of the thoughts you've been having on repeat. If the thoughts are I'm always the one holding this family together, then you will show up as the overfunctioning exhausted mother where that identity feels familiar. If your daily mental loop is my colleagues don't take me seriously, your brain will find evidence for that everywhere. If you constantly think to yourself I've been bad with money, you will hesitate to invest. You will undercharge for your work. Again, you'll be finding evidence to prove that correct. If you change this playlist, then the entire character of personality that you're playing in your life will change. But for you to change this playlist, you have to observe it. You have to be able to think about your thinking. Your default identity is created because you've stopped being the author of your life and you're becoming the narrator, especially the narrator of the primal brain thought, which is the brain that functions just for your survival, not for your growth, not for your evolution, not for your happiness. And these thoughts come to you in tiny microseconds where something is happening and your interpretation of it. These thoughts feel true, but they're just shortcuts that your brains gotten used to to save the energy. They're not necessarily the reflections of who you are, because with some practice and neuroplasticity, those reflections can be changed. If you want your brain to be wired for happiness in your marriage, but your brain defaults to that's not possible, he'll never change, I'm the only one trying. When you've believed these thoughts on marriage, then you become the woman who can't enjoy her marriage. You don't consciously choose this identity. That's what the brain offers you right out the gate. These thoughts are handed to you by your lower brain, by your default interpretation. Again, this is the brain that's more interested in keeping you safe rather than helping you create happiness. And when that identity is formed, then the brain will fiercely protect it. It will filter every single one of your experience to match it. If he forgets to text back, it will say, see, I told you if he's tired and quiet, you know that he's not interested in you. If he tries to help but forgets or does it clumsily, then you keep telling yourself this is never gonna work out. So suddenly, what is not so suddenly, your entire emotional experience looks like it's been curated to support your default identity. And if you choose to go by those sentences, you have to know that you're not consciously choosing your personality. The brain will go to work to prove the thoughts it's thinking, even if those are the thoughts that you're not consciously aware of. A default identity forms any time when you accept the first thought your brain offers, when it repeats it enough times, and you assume that these thoughts reflect the truth as it exists outside of you. And it happens in every arena. Money, I'm not good with finances, career, I'm not leadership material. Parenting, I'm too impatient to be a good mom. Faith, I'm having trouble with my spirituality. Friendships, I'm always the one left out. None of these are inherent genetically programmed identity. None of these are handed to you by nature. They are just thought habits running on a loop unchecked, and when left unchecked, they become your character. And this is where mind management becomes revolutionary. This is when you start to question the default thoughts and you start to replace them with something that actually helps you, the whole default identity collapses, and a self determined identity begins to form in its place. If you continue to identify with the behaviors that come from a mismanaged mind, then it's like you letting the glitchy part of your brain being the PR manager of your whole firm. And then you sit there wonder why your life feels like a chaotic mess. When you take your worst moment and you make them into your identity, you are handing your power to the lowest functioning version of yourself. That's the nafs, mostly nafs alarmara. Meaning if you yelled once and you suddenly a person with a bad temper, or if you freeze during conflict and you suddenly identify as a person who's weak, these are all identities created from a mismanaged mind. The danger is that through neuroplasticity all of these get wired into your brain, and then your brain goes to work in building more and more evidence in terms of neural pathways to support this identity. Your mind is a self-fulfilling prophecy generator by design. Any unexamined belief that you adopt in any micro moment about yourself, that is the first suggestion by your brain. If you decide to stop, question it, and rewrite that thought, then you're on your way to becoming a more evolved identity of yourself. So now I'm going to give you a few examples of what the contrast looks like between a default identity and a higher brain identity, something that you intentionally choose. Default identity can be I'm too emotional. The higher brain identity will be I feel overwhelmed today and I can learn to support myself better. Default identity is my marriage is broken. Higher brain identity says yes, we're struggling right now and I'm learning how to lead emotionally. Default identity says I'm just an angry person. Higher brain says I reacted from anger today and I have the option to practice a different response next time. Default says I'm bad with money. Higher brain says I haven't learned money skills yet and I'm ready to start shifting that. Default says there's always a problem. Higher brain says there's a pattern here I want to understand so that I can show up differently. Default says I'm an anxious person. Higher brain says my nervous system is activated and I'm learning how to regulate it. The evolved identity has range and depth. It expands your life and it allows you to grow. It elevates your entire experience of being alive. How your higher brain identity gets created is that you create a space between the stimulus and the response. And that's not created by force, that's not created by shaming yourself for being in the default identity. It's created by awareness and repetition. It is a bit of a delayed reaction, even if it's microseconds. But that microsecond gap where you pause and reflect, that is where your higher brain wakes up and offers you an alternative to the very first default thought that came to your mind. So the first step is you create the space between the stimulus and the response. The second step is you notice the first thought your brain throws at you and you don't just accept it at face value. The next step is you ask a question to wake up your higher brain. What's the full truth here? Who do I want to be right now? And then you choose a thought that aligns with your higher identity, something and someone that you want to be, and you go to practice it. That way your brain is going to start to rewire itself through neuroplasticity with your higher, most evolved self, and then your entire identity shifts. And this is how you train your lower napsy self to become the intern, and your higher brain becomes the main boss, the narrator of your life. And this is the appropriate hierarchy how you're supposed to live your life. And this is the process of the skia to naps. And the identity you start to live from after that is that you're no longer a woman that is shaped by fear or conditioned by culture or her past experiences. You become a woman who is shaped by intention, values, faith, self-leadership. Okay, so now allow me to present a scenario, and this might or might not have been true. As a physician, when your nurse disappears for a full week without notice and then stroll back in next week, your lower brain identities will fire instantly. It will hand you a whole narrative before you even have a chance to slow down. How can she do this? She doesn't care. She's unprofessional. This is dangerous. I had to do double of the work because of her, and the identity becomes somebody who's always cleaning up after others. Now, honestly speaking, these aren't right and wrong thoughts. They will feel justifiable, meaning a physician would feel a surge of anger if she was left alone in the clinic to handle patients and the clinical duties all by herself. The problem begins when the lower brain identity decides that it is justifiable that this anger automatically means that you act unprofessionally towards her. This is the version of you that reacts. You're not in a leadership position in that moment. If you yell, if you shame, if you can't discipline from calm, then you become the physician who loses it on her staff. Not because that's who you are, but because that's the default identity your unmanaged mind created. Now, the higher brain identity does not silence this anger. It sees the same facts and feels the same frustration, but it slows down enough to choose a response instead of reacting to the situation. The higher brain says, My anger makes sense and my job is accountability for my staff. The way I respond teaches her how to show up, and you can totally fire her if that's within your jurisdiction, because she broke the stipulations of the contract. But you're going to do that from an identity of a professional grounded physician. Not to punish her, not so that she can learn a lesson, but so that you create clear boundaries and expectations, especially when it comes to expectations at your work and safety of your patients. You address any unprofessionalism without becoming unprofessional yourself. You express the seriousness of the situation without making it personal. So the arc here is simple and life changing. The lower brain says I'm furious, so I react and therefore risk being unprofessional. Higher brain says I'm furious and I lead, and I channel that energy in doing the right thing. Default identities are born in a split second when you believe the first interpretation your mind throws at you. This is dangerous, spiritually, mentally, emotionally dangerous, because all of this depends on your primal survival system doing what it does best, reacting, predicting danger, labeling you in the most limiting way possible. Your highest soulful intelligence does not create sentences about you or about the situation that keep you small, and this takes a microsecond longer to kick into place. Your evolved identity, the identity that comes from your higher brain, speaks from your values and your highest version of yourself. This is the version of you that is always seeking the truth with the capital T. And that truth happens to be Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. This is why you must dedicate yourself to identifying what default behaviors are you calling your personality. That default behavior is just your nervous system doing the bare minimum to protect you. It's not the fullest expression of who you are. If you mistake your default identity for your destiny, you will live your entire life as a constricted, under-resourced version of yourself. Your higher brain is the voice of your soul. It's guiding you towards becoming the best version of yourself. And all you have to do is slow down enough to listen to it and then adapt it as your true identity. The unexamined default identity will seem to leak into every corner of your life. And this does not happen because you're flawed. This happens because you've never thought to zoom out and challenge the default thought. You've never given yourself the permission because you've never been taught that you can give your evolved internal lens a chance to narrate your life. And this is the entire work of mind management. Reclaiming the power to question and reinterpret, and therefore rebuilding an identity that is not running your life on autopilot. Your higher brain identity, those are the thoughts that expand you. They're the emotions that guide you, and your actions become strategic. Your marriage, your work, your faith, your sense of self all shift towards empowerment. When you can believe your higher brain identity that says I'm capable of creating emotional safety in my marriage, your brain will rise to meet that identity. It will scan for moments of possibility. It will regulate you and it will create microbehaviors that support healing, like intentional communication or alternative interpretations, or clearer, firmer, respectful boundaries. Your whole life experience will shift because now your brain is tasked with completing a different assignment, to live as a woman who's capable of living a peaceful life. And this is why healing in my coaching program is so profound. We are never out to change the circumstances. We are just changing the identity that interpret the circumstances. When you shift from your default identity to your higher brain identity, your entire life reorganizes around the new version of you. You not only start feeling better, which is a huge win in itself, you become a woman who is closer to her faith and closer to her truest identity. That is seeking Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. With that I pray to Allah, O Allah, guide me to see myself with truth and replace my default thoughts with wisdom. Strengthen my higher self so I choose who I am with intention. Let my identity be rooted in the soul you created, and make me a woman who rises above old stories. Ya Allah, let every shift I make be a step towards a version of me that is closest to you. Amin Yarabul Amin. Please keep me in your du'as, I will talk to you guys next time.
