Category: Life Coaching

  • Does your therapist stroke your ego?

    Does your therapist stroke your ego?

    You know that old adage about ‘practice what you preach’?

    At some point someone replaced it with ‘those who can’t do, coach’.

    And the world has been worse off since then.

    Yes, I know I identify as a coach, but it would be opportunistic of me to ignore the large number of charlatans using the profession to project their world view on others.

    Too many people are ready to tell the world how to be better, but only so many who try to be better than they were the day before.

    Authenticity is not about the spoken word, it’s about action.

    Everyone has a nugget of wisdom to throw around, but only so many have the conviction to give it life.

    Most often, people already know what they need to change about their lives to be in a better space, but their lack of understanding in how they may be counter productive in their efforts is what holds them back.

    So when you tell them what to change, you’re effectively making them dependent on you for solutions rather than improving their understanding of how life works.

    Good intentions are never enough.

    Understanding the effectiveness of the methods that we adopt is what determines how successful we are at creating the life that we want.

    And because you don’t know what you don’t know, it becomes that much more important to choose your advisors carefully or else you risk getting advice that makes you feel better about your contribution towards the struggles of your life while blaming others for it.

    Are you sure you’re choosing advisors to help you grow, or do your advisors make you feel better about your faults?

    Don’t just preach your philosophy about life, live it.

  • Feeling triggered?

    Feeling triggered?

    ⚠️ Trigger warning ⚠️ archive post.

    Blaming chemicals for your emotional state is like blaming the overflowing rivers for the rain.

    Smile, and you generate feel good hormones even if you don’t have a good reason to smile.

    That’s science, not conjecture. If you don’t believe me, Google the science of a smile. And while you’re at it, Google neuroplasticity to see how your brain REACTS to new information and experiences, and does not create those perspectives.

    Don’t dehumanise the human experience by labelling it as an illness.

    Take back your agency by understanding why you may feel the way that you do.

    Stop judging yourself or others harshly for being human.

    I wish we’d realise that by defining the human experience as an illness, we effectively dehumanise the human experiencing it.

    Think about that the next time you convince yourself or others that their reasons for experiencing an intensity of emotions is due to chemicals and not because their life experiences and perspectives warrant such a reaction.

    It’s time to start understanding, instead of judging harshly, or abdicating responsibility for who we are.

    Every emotional experience has a legitimate basis within the context of our life.

    Whether we’re correct or incorrect about why we feel that way doesn’t change the fact that we, in our mind, have reason to feel that way.

    Understand that, connect the dots to your experiences, and suddenly an overwhelming emotion becomes a source of information to work with rather than to fear or to suppress it.

    Own your life before it owns you.



  • Break the stigma

    Break the stigma

    I think it was Dr Wayne Dyer who said that if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

    This is true both positively and negatively.

    Do you know someone who has a problem for every solution? Who sees doom and gloom at the happiest of moments? Who is preempting a negative outcome despite things going in their favour?

    Do you think they have a mental illness, or have they just been hurt so many times before, that they are afraid to hope for a positive outcome? Are they simply protecting themselves from being let down again?

    This is how we experience life when we finally give up hope about the future, or we give up hope about being appreciated.

    That absence of hope is what causes us to feel depressed. Depression is a legitimate experience of human emotions after we’ve taken one too many hard knocks from life about something important to us.

    The same is true for every other emotional experience.

    Emotions are not deficiencies. They’re the essence of what makes us human.

    If we ever hope to win this battle against a consistently declining quality of life, we need to stop referring to emotions as mental health, and we need to stop defining the duress that we experience in life as a mental illness.

    We need to reconnect with the human behind the pain, instead of dehumanising them by denying the legitimacy of their emotional experience.

    Break the stigma. Stop the labelling. Embrace the humanness.

  • Procrastination is not a mental illness

    Procrastination is not a mental illness

    For the sake of your sanity, do not buy into this extremely flawed way of thinking.

    If you were to believe the mainstream tripe about mental health, you’d be running back to your childhood for everything and blaming your parents for all your failures in life.

    The irony of this claim about procrastination and laziness is that they both have a very simple, yet easy to overcome root cause.

    You either believe in the value of what you’re doing, or you don’t.

    If you don’t, the only reason you will do it is because there will be unpleasant consequences if you don’t do it. That’s why we leave things until we have no choice but to do it when we approach it as if it’s a punishment for living.

    It’s this same reason that inspires us to look forward to our day, or to drag ourselves out of bed, regardless of how much sleep we got the night before.

    The reasons for struggling to see the value in doing something requires self awareness and mindfulness.

    But given that both are lost when we blame our past for our present failings, we further sabotage our efforts to connect with life in a more meaningful way.

    Please, for the love of sanity and common sense, stop buying into the mindless crap presented as research about mental health.

    Give yourself a fighting chance by simply understanding why you have good reason in your own mind to be averse to doing things that you know will be beneficial for you.

    We’ve overcomplicated life and then reframed that complexity to be mental health.

    We need to reclaim our humanness and the very real human experiences that give us reason to feel emotional duress from time to time.

    It’s all part of being human.

  • Save your sanity

    Here are a few highlights from my long overdue pilot episode of my podcast titled Tough Discussions.

    If you don’t question what you take from the mainstream mental health mill, you could lose your sanity thinking that you’re trying to find it.

    If the mainstream approach to mental health was so effective, why is it that we are experiencing a worsening global mental health crisis rather than becoming better humans?

    Everyone has good intentions, but that doesn’t mean that our methods or our understanding that informs how we act on those good intentions will be beneficial. In fact, a poorly informed decision is more often harmful than it is beneficial.

    Question what the pervasive ignorance teaches us about the human experience if you hope to salvage what little sanity remains in this world.

    You can find my podcast on Substack or YouTube under the handle @coachzaidismail.

  • Don’t forget the human

    Don’t forget the human

    Did you know that there is zero science to support the above beliefs about what we call mental health?

    Instead, there is research that confirms that new neural pathways are formed in response to new information or new experiences. It’s called neuroplasticity.

    Other research confirms that the physical gesture of a smile, regardless of your emotional disposition, releases feel-good hormones into your brain which uplifts your mood. Try it. Smile at yourself in the mirror without having any reason to smile.

    When we try to rationalise life through the lens of science, we discover technically fascinating facts about the functioning of the human body, but we lose sight of the human in that body.

    Feelings of anxiety, depression, rage and more, including observing others to behave in a narcissistic or bipolar manner is very real.

    But it’s critical to understand that it is simply what we observe regarding their response to very real emotional experiences for them.

    Depression is the absence of hope, anxiety is the fear of not being able to cope with potential outcomes that we are facing, and emotional duress about the stressors of life is what we call mental illness.

    We describe what we experience in others or in ourselves as bipolar, or narcissistic behaviour, not because that is who we/they are, but because that’s how we experience that part of life.

    It doesn’t mean that we’re not dealing with very real fears or duress that causes us to behave in that way.

    However, when we label behaviour, we lose sight of the legitimate human experience behind that behaviour.

    No one ever behaves badly when they feel appreciated, significant, or understood.

    Bad behaviour or emotional duress simply means that as a human, we’re struggling to reconcile the experiences of life with our efforts to create a good life for ourselves, or others.

    Medication, affirmations, supplements, and deliberate exercises to cope with such emotional duress will only ever provide interim relief.

    If we don’t resolve the root cause of that duress, those interim measures become lifelong chronic crutches.

  • The magic of accountability

    The magic of accountability

    Many people struggle with authenticity and finding a healthy balance in relationships because they are unaware of the impact of how they show up for themselves and for others. That lack of self-awareness is in a very huge way impacted by how we hold ourselves accountable for who we are.

    In this interview with Haafidha Rayhaanah, I unpack the little known dynamics of the far reaching consequences of accountability in our relationship with ourselves, and with those around us.

    Remember, without accountability, you have absolutely nothing of substance in your relationship with anyone, including with life itself. Give yourself a fair chance to unlearn what has been holding you back for so long.

  • Why envy is not good for you

    Why envy is not good for you

    The Japanese have a proverb that says that a bitter heart eats its owner.

    Envy or bitterness begins with how you see yourself before you find reason for it in what others have or do.

    When we’re cautioned about the negative effects of these traits, we often focus on the punishment and the harm to others.

    Remember, we cannot give what we don’t have. Therefore, the envious or bitter one is consumed with such thoughts about their inadequacies, but from a position of blaming others for it.

    Whether they have a legitimate gripe or not doesn’t change that reality, nor does it reduce the impact that it has on them and their health.

    Trying to pacify them or trying to excuse them because of their difficult experiences (even in childhood) does nothing to uplift them.

    Nor does it help us if we’re the ones struggling with such feelings of envy or bitterness towards others.

    First, we must be willing to be unpopular before we are able to assist, because not validating someone’s emotional disposition often results in a negative response from that person.

    Nonetheless, being told what we need to hear and not what we want to hear is the beginning of planting the seeds that will eventually grow into self-awareness and understanding.

    You cannot uplift if you protect yourself or others from the truth just to spare them their feelings.

    Similarly, we make it impossible for others to assist or advise us sincerely if we lash out each time we’re not supported in our views about life or about others.

    To grow, you must be willing to be corrected.

    Ideally, such correction should be gentle and reassuring, with empathy and compassion.

    But that doesn’t mean that we should reject it if the tone is not what we want.

    We must be more invested in wanting to learn than in how we want to be taught, otherwise we will go through life blaming others for not treating us the way that we want to be treated.

    It always starts with you.

    #mentalhealth#selfworth#lifecoaching#zaidismail#ownyourlife#mentalhealthawareness#narcissist