Vicki
Today's conversation is with Rashid Mubashir who in 2014 joined a coaching school as a way to create income to support his family back in Pakistan. This year, he bought the school. He's now the owner and Co-founder of the International Coaching Institute in Melbourne, Australia, previously known as the Coaching Institute. It's one of the largest coaching schools in the world. It's home to tens of thousands of students and it focuses and excels in personal development, coaching skills and business education. When you hear Rashid's story of overcoming personal challenges, I suspect you'll never look the same way again at your excuses for not growing your business. Rashid, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs.
Rashid Mubashir
Welcome, hi Vicki and Laura, thank you for having me. What a wonderful welcome, thank you for that.
Laura
Thank you so much. We've been looking forward to this conversation. So you've got an interesting story. So we need to start at the beginning and so much of who we become is shaped by those childhood experiences. So can we start there?
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, absolutely. So I love going to childhood because I think our fondest memories, but also our greatest struggles are all embedded in our childhood and that's one of the things that I love sharing as well whenever we talk about how to become resilient as a human being. And so I'd love to share that. I actually grew up in the near slums of Karachi. We used to live only a kilometre away from a really high crime and poor slum. Where you would say an average income in that slum was about a dollar a day, which is absolutely unheard of when it comes to Western countries. And so I grew up in that environment. I was born luckily in a slightly better economic family where we had, when I say slightly economic, our monthly income only 15 years ago was 300 US dollars. So it wasn't anything big, but we were able to survive. My mom and dad were able to put food on table. They were able to have a roof on our head.
But we did live quite a lot of our life as a borrowed life. And what I mean by that is there was a real tribal culture that we lived in.
There were all these challenges that I couldn't have fathomed of growing up as a child. And there were emotional challenges, mental challenges, financial challenges. But the thing I think that mattered most was that it impacted me as a human being as a child was the scarcity that we grew up with and the political turmoil that we grew up with. I'll describe a typical month or a year in my life in my memory. I remember this one time we were at a shop that sells curtains and blinds. And I remember we used to do a lot of shopping, but it was always window shopping. And in Pakistan, you just go and look at stuff that you wish you can buy, but of course you don't have money to buy. So I remember being with my mom and my younger brother we went to the shop, sort of couple of streets down from where we lived which used to sell curtain and blinds and we were there it was about 8:30 pm in the night and suddenly five people with guns walked in and that was sort of like a once a year occurrence for people within our family, so I went through something like that two or three times in different times, but that's the kind of environment we grew up in. But the interesting thing was that as we grew up in that environment, the lack of security, financially, physically, and all these things.
I think now that I look back and particularly over my own journey over the last five years, I've noticed that no matter how challenging those moments are, they are the most defining moments. They are the moments where you develop. A lot of people say to me, you're really tough skinned. And now I look back and I say, yeah, that was a very tough moment and that makes you very tough skinned and resilient for the lack of a better word. And then as I was growing up, there was also, I remember moments where my mom would cook something and they'll make typical Pakistani chicken curry and we'll only have enough money for my mom to be able to cook maybe two pieces of chicken in the curry instead of four. We were a household of four people. So my mom will self-sacrifice and my dad would self-sacrifice so me and my brother could eat. So those were some of the fondest, yet most challenging memories of our childhood amongst the many. I would say very humble beginnings.
Vicki
I can sense the memory and the feeling with that. When you look back at your life from where you are now, what do you believe is the core thing that got you through from such humble beginnings to today?
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, what a wonderful question. I think a huge part of that is learning how to not let our stories define us and learning how to, if anything, leverage our stories, learning how to view our lives as on the way rather than in the way. And it sounds really simple when I say it, it's really profound. It's the one word that I think a lot of us already know of, which is the difference that makes the difference is perspective. It's perspective because I have series and series and tens of events that I've experienced growing up from the age of probably four years, that's as early as my memory goes, up until 18 and a half years, which is when I came to Australia.
So I actually came to Australia in 2013 as an 18 and a half year old with a thousand dollars in my pocket and one semester of fees paid by my mother from the money she had saved over 30 years and that's all we had. That's all we had. In 30 years, she was only able to save $15,000 and then there was money that we had lent and borrowed as well. And that's what I meant when I said we lived a lot on borrowed lives. For example, the apartment we used to live in was actually bought by my uncle for us to live. It was a really small apartment.
And so in 2013, when I came here with $1,000 in my pocket, my perspective was that I am the victim of my circumstances and now I have an opportunity to come out of that victimhood. And what I mean by victim is that in Pakistan, I didn't have a broader perspective of how I can live my life more than my circumstances, how the whisper inside of me is possible and how I can be more than my circumstances. And that's a perspective I think a lot of people spend their entire lives living in, thinking that we don't have agency, we don't have control over what's happening in our lives and we live at this side effect of life as if we are a happenstance and this life is something that is just happening as we go along and we just tread along the line as our heart continues to beat every day. So I think the thing that matters most is, and that really helped me was the growth that I experience in the way I look at things. It's the perspective that you have.
So I'll give you an example. I remember when I was about 13 years old. No, sorry, I was 15. I was 15. I was in school. And my family belongs to a community, a religious minority. I'm not particularly myself that religious anymore, but my family actually belongs to a religious minority in Pakistan, which was subjected to a lot of persecution constitutionally. So effectively the constitution of the country says that if you do ABC and you're part of this minority, you can be jailed. So really high levels of discrimination. And then as a result of that, as a teenager, my life was under threat because when I was 15, as you would know, rebellious, outspoken teenager.
I used to very openly talk about my beliefs that I wasn't allowed to constitutionally effectively.
And I remember I got into this really heated debate with someone, one of my friends at the time, who happened to be the brother of a well-known cleric and a cleric effectively equivalent of a father in the church, but they were a cleric in the Muslim community. And so very extremist in their ideology. And so unfortunately that turned into a whole heap of saga where that argument then turned into the friend of mine going to his brother and telling him, hey, I've got this friend who belongs to this community and they're saying this, this, this. And then there was a whole saga. And effectively, within a couple of weeks, my life was under threat. And it was like, either you convert to this religion or this philosophy that we follow, or we're going to kill you. And so, that's life threatening, that's endangering, I think that could shock any nervous system on planet Earth to hear effectively the words, if you don't do this, we will chop your head off with a sword. Those were the words that I was hearing as a 15, 16 year old.
Now, for many people that could, I think for anyone and everyone, including me, that would create this deep seated fear of losing your life and that did happen for me as well and I experienced that and that played a role in how I viewed the world significantly particularly in terms of how the moment I see someone with a rigid ideology as a young teenager I would immediately unconsciously go into the space of, “this could turn into something much worse than what it is”, and of course that was just our mind catastrophising the situation so I developed this catastrophisation strategy as a result of that experience that prolonged over a few months. Now, I got out of the country at about 18 and part of the reason why I left Pakistan and I came to Australia was that particular incident because that dragged on and became a life-threatening event. And even to date when I go back, I visited a couple of times, but it's not a pleasant experience because there's always this thing that your life may not be safe over there.
However, that event could have, and it did influence how I viewed the world. The whole pattern of catastrophization then led to me unconsciously wanting to play really safe in my life, me wanting to not take risks, me looking for a lot more certainty, which I think it's all valid.
However, the shift in perspective, the ability to be able to see that one moment in many ways fueled my drive for a better life, fueled my ambition to be able to educate people and teach people how to think differently, how to think independently effectively so that we don't buy into extremities, sort of became the cornerstone of my philosophy, which is autonomy.
How do I empower people? How do I get to contribute in this world where I can help people be more autonomous and be way more self-empowered so they don't get caught up in extreme ideologies, which are not necessarily right or wrong, but more so they may not be a reflection of who they truly are and as long as they are connected with who they are and as long as they know themselves and they're authentic to themselves and then they decide to follow a philosophy or an ideology in the world then that's okay. But we find, and I wonder if people listening to this also find that there are a lot of people out there in the world who don't have a sense of self and they're looking for this externalised sense of self and the way they find that is in different political ideologies, or religious ideologies, or social ideologies, which I think is okay.
It's okay to find that as long as it's coming from a place of authenticity and not as a replacement for the void of who I am as a human being.
And so as I developed this perspective that wow, because one of the curiosities I developed from that kind of experience was, well, why do people become like this? Why do people act in this way? What is going on in their minds? I've always been a really curious person. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, my mom used to say, you ask too many questions. You need to ask less questions. She’s actually sitting here with me as I do this interview!
So I used to ask a lot of questions. So what happened was, as a result of that event, the perspective I initially developed was that the world is a dangerous place and I need to protect myself and have certainty and so on and so forth, which I think is valid. But with the growth of my perspective, I started to see how that event actually was the catalyst for the very worldview I developed in terms of empowering people.
And that's what then led me on to my own path for personal development partly because I became suicidal at about 19 and a half, 20 years of age because of all the traumas I was carrying from the first 18 years in Pakistan. And then through that again, that the bottom of the barrel moment, bottom of the depths of the ocean of misery and suffering, I chose to then, of course, develop and grow myself.
And then as my perspective grew, I started to see, my God, all these events that I experienced, all these traumas that I'm carrying, all this hurt that I'm carrying, it's not necessarily a one-sided reality that I experienced at that time. I can view it differently. I can see the effects of it. I can see the negativities in it and the positive charges in it as well now as I grew my perspective. So that's what I really mean when I say perspective. It's being able to see how whatever feels like is in the way, is really in the way in that moment, but it's taking us into moments which we would love and you know, that can almost put us on a trajectory of our ultimate mission in our lives sometimes, which to me was becoming an entrepreneur and then sharing this message with people through the school that we're in and by being a coach and a speaker as well. That was a long-ended answer, wasn't it?
Laura
We love long answers because they bring up so many good things. And what just resonated with me with what you just said was what was in the way was almost the thing that was guiding you along the way, if you listen to it. And I think it sounds like you could have taken so many different paths and a lot of young men in a position or women in a position similarly as you, even with half the amount of trauma, may have taken a very extreme different path and many have and many will. So what was it for you that was the guide that got you where you really needed to be to get to where you are today? Like you went into coaching quite soon after arriving in Australia. Tell us about that because that sounds like that's the thing maybe that helped really turn the dial in your life.
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, I really love that. I think it sounds a little bit cheeky, also cheesy, I think when I say this and I think that's okay, which is that it's really listening to the whisper inside. That's what it really is. I think most people spend their lives, because the whisper inside is the song that your being wants to express and sing on planet Earth. But most people spend their life not listening to the whisper inside because they're too scared to act on their dreams because of the need for certainty and security. And I think that need is valid, of course. However, when you listen to that whisper on the inside, it doesn't mean that you let go of the needs that you must fulfil as human being. What that means is though, you can start taking one step at a time, one small step at a time. Because the compound effect of you continuing to take one small step at a time now today in this moment, hearing that whisper on the inside is it's incalculable in this moment, but it's profound in five and 10 years.
And so I'll take you to a moment, for example, when I was 19 and a half, I used to, I was very depressed and I used to live in a, one of those small rooms under, I can't remember what it's called, you know, when you have a double story house and there's a stairway that goes up and then there's like a small storage room underneath? There was a small room in this house that I was living in, it was a shared housing and I was very depressed, a very small two and a half by two and a half metre room. And I was laying on my bed in that room one day and I was thinking about how do I take my life and I was planning in my head, do I buy a rope or do I hang it with the stairs? And I was thinking of all these strategies of how can I make that happen? And then there was a part of me in that moment that was going, do you really want to do this? Maybe there is more to life because I was feeling depressed and sad and anxious and hopeless, really, frankly speaking, and feeling like I'm suffering in life because I was by myself, no family, no community, no friends that I would resonate with. And feeling really lonely and purposeless in life doing what I was doing at that time. I had also withdrawn from a job at that time. So it was a really tough time.
And I remember laying in bed and thinking about these things. And then there is part of me that saying, there's no point to living life anymore.
And then there was a part of me that is also going, but maybe there is more. And then it's also thinking about, well, you know, what about your family? Your mom sent you here, your family sent you here. Perhaps, you have some responsibility over there and things like that, which I think is the other part of it. It's like whispering the inside alongside taking responsibility. Because it was in that moment, that I realised, okay, well, I do have a little bit of responsibility here and I've agreed to this, although it was out of enmeshment and tribal commitments. But in that moment, it felt like responsibility and that was good and helpful.
So I remember, I actually ended up calling Suicide Helpline and I was talking to them and it was really wonderful when I look back for the hour that at that time, it was just lots of validation and acknowledgement from this person on the phone. But I got off the phone after the hour and I felt calmer and I went online and I was just scrolling through YouTube and I came across this video by Tony Robbins, a TEDx talk he did, it's called, Why Do We Do What We Do?
And I watched that, it was like a 21-minute talk, I really recommend anyone to watch it, it's an old TED talk. And he talked about the core human needs. And then I watched that and the first time I watched it, I felt an emotional shift within 20 minutes, felt goosebumps from my body because I was starting to see, my God, I'm feeling like I don't want to live. I feel like I want to die because I'm not growing, I'm not pursuing contribution, I'm not doing things that I must do to be able to feel what I want to feel instead of the suffering that I'm going through. So I watched it again and again, and I watched it three times in a matter of an hour or so. And by the third time there was a whisper inside of me going, I feel so different right now and I want to help someone else feel what I'm feeling right now.
I want someone else to go from hopeless to hopeful. I want to help someone else go from suffering and misery to possibilities of a better life. And so was in that moment, that whisper inside of me that really became the guide, the guiding light amidst all the chaos of the hurt and the trauma in the past that I had.
And I think that could be sometimes the most powerful message. Our intuitive self, our inner being is already, I think most people know what they need to do. That's what I truly believe. Particularly after having worked with thousands of people now in the coaching space. We know what we need to do. Most people don't follow through with the whisper inside. They don't listen to it enough. And some do, but then don't take responsibility. But then those who listen to the whisper on the inside and then take responsibility and take one step at a time, that can become a really wonderful path to liberation, a wonderful path to redemption from the hurt that we carry over our lives.
Vicki
And when you talk about the whisper inside, and thank you, by the way, for being so vulnerable and sharing such a personal journey on a very public podcast. I really believe you are, your story and your ability to share it so personally will help, will impact others. And we really appreciate you for that.
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, I'd hope so. Yeah, thank you so much. Well, that's the mission. That's what I've been working on over the last 10 years. And that became part of the whisper on the inside, right? Because the next question was, well, I want to help someone go from hopeless to hopeful and from misery to possibilities. How do I do that? And that's where the one step at a time comes. I'm sure we've heard the saying, overnight success takes 10 years. So we are here 10 years later.
Vicki
Literally and that was going to be my next question, tell us about the whisper inside that called you to be entrepreneurial, to even get into the business realm versus going to get another job.
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, I love that question. I love that question because I think every question that we get to explore from our past has wisdom in it and beauty in it, no matter how tough it has been, no matter how challenging it has been and how traumatic it has been. And that's why I think perspective is really powerful because when we have the right perspective, a broader perspective, we can see in our lives and look at things from a really different lens. So that's a really good question because I remember when I came to Australia, initially I worked as a waiter, actually my first job was at a bakery overnight, then a waiter, as a security guard. That was my sort of first three, four years while I changed six different universities because I couldn't find what I enjoyed. Ultimately, I went down the path of coaching and leadership and working with people because I think it was a combination of things.
So one is definitely the ripple effect of life itself, which is where when you put yourself out there, opportunities show up to you. But I think more fundamentally and at the heart of it all was this deep seated desire to, which I think is very common for most entrepreneurs, is to have freedom in being able to do what you want to do. I think there are some common experiential values that a lot of entrepreneurs share and one of them is freedom. Not just the freedom to be able to do what you want in terms of a lifestyle, but also freedom in terms of expressing ourselves and expressing our own creativity and our own desire to make a difference in the world. In the way that we deem is of high value and contribution to the world. And I think that was definitely a part of who I was.
And then the other part of which I also think a lot of entrepreneurs share is that deep seated, sometimes unhealthy, but hopefully most times healthy rebellion in terms of wanting to do things unconventionally, wanting to do things differently, not settling for the status quo. I think that plays a big role. And that's where I was kind of was, which very quickly I realised and I think that's where pain is really powerful in life. A lot of people spend their lives going through pain but don't do anything about it and I think that's the saddest part of life if we do that because when we don't do anything about the pain we're experiencing what we're really saying is it's okay to go through that pain and spend our entire lives through that pain. I think entrepreneurs do something different which is fantastic, which is that we never settle for pain because we know pain is a constant but suffering doesn't have to be a constant.
I think that was a key distinction for me very early on in my journey, probably in 2016, as I was going through some personal development, that pain is going to be a constant. If I am working jobs and if I'm working for someone else and I'm doing things that I have to do to make an income and to pay the bills and to look after my family, I'm going to continue feeling all these emotions because I'm a human being and emotions are never going to escape us. I'm going to go through all that pain and suffering. I want to take that constant and use it for something that I actually want to be able to create and give to the world.
So I think again its perspective and so that perspective really helped me make the courageous decision of one small step at a time, one small step at a time. Because my story is really interesting in the sense that as well my journey is also it was never I got lucky with a one big boom of outcomes it was never like hey, I created a product. I'm not a tech startup that I created a product and it went, you might say ballistic or it went viral. It's never that, it's always small steps, small steps, which I think is the story of the ordinary person in the world. Most of us don't get to go through those viral moments. Some of us do and I think that's wonderful. Most of the entrepreneurs are hardworking, ethical, integral men and women who are focusing their time, effort, energy on building something that will make a difference in the world, but also elevate their lives. And that's where I think I shared this commonality that it was always more building blocks to get to where I am.
And I'm very grateful for the people and all the opportunities that life presented on the way, which became part of the ripple effect as well. But I think essentially, it was the perspective that pain is a constant - but suffering and misery doesn't have to be.
I can use that pain to create a life that I love as well. My relationship with pain changed completely. And as a result of that, my relationship with my choices changed completely. And that's where I chose that if I'm going to use all this time, effort, energy into working for someone else's mission, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that, I think there is, of course, everybody has a place and employment has a place and people working for other people has a place too. But I think it felt aligned for me more to pursue the calling of my heart
Laura
Yeah, and thank goodness you did because what a difference you're making. So you talked about the pain. Do you think failure is a part of pain? And what's your attitude towards failure?
Rashid Mubashir
Well, it's a really, really good question because I don't think that failure actually exists. I don't believe that. I think failure is an incomplete perception. It's an incomplete perception because failure can only exist in a narrow, contextual environment. Hopefully, it's ok if I go a little bit geeky and unpack this. Hopefully, our listeners are going to enjoy this.
So failure is only a comparative outcome. And what I mean by that is you can only fail if you have a benchmark for success. And of course, in that context, you may say, hey, I've failed. So for example, if I set a goal and I say, look, I want to launch this product in, say I'm an entrepreneur, and I want to develop a product or a service, and I want to launch this in the next 90 days, and then I want to get funding around it, and I want to test it in the market, so on and so forth.
Now if I don't follow through that and I don't take the actions that I was going to take, I would fail in context to that moment and in context to that timeline and in context to the goal that I set. So failure is only a contextual occurrence, not a permanence in life. And I think that a lot of people try to escape it because they think that contextual failure equates to them as a failure. And I think that comes in the way of being resilient, but when we shift our perspective and go from failure being a contextual occurrence, failure being a permanence and from equating ourselves to the momentary failure, when we move away from that and go to let's view this failure as a contextual occurrence, we then start to see a bigger picture. Because if we understand the laws of the universe and if you go a little bit geeky and you understand the laws of physics, some call it Chinese philosophy as well, but now we know this through science that everything has a positive and a negative charge. So we can't escape that very reality of what the Chinese philosophy originally called or Taoist philosophy called duality. But now we know through science that it's positive and negative electric charges.
So what that means is in that moment where you perceived in context to your goal, a potential failure, that failure is the potentially perceived negative charge in that moment. But there is the other side to it, which we are not aware of, because we are only focusing and directionalising our mind to focus on the aspect of that situation that we wanted to have been a certain way, but it's not in that moment. So our mind is creating this directionalised, narrowed perception, incomplete perception that in context to A, B didn't happen and therefore B equals failure. So failure is the creation of the animalistic, narrow, one-sided thinking amygdala driven mind. And that's okay to have that because it then becomes a catalyst for other things. That's one thing.
The other thing is, the reason why I don't believe in failure, ultimate failure at all is because if we sit back and when we develop a broader perspective, we start to look at that moment and go, so say I had a product launch, what were the things that didn't do? What were the things I could do differently? What were the things that didn't work? And all of that becomes available to us if we don't get caught up by the word failure.
And the pain suddenly starts to decrease and dissipate, because all our pain is based on perception. Pain is based on perception. So the way I perceive this moment is how I'm going to experience pain. So if I'm perceiving that that failure on a product launch is somehow failure of my business and somehow failure of my ability as an entrepreneur, then my mind is going to create this equivalence of this momentary contextual failure equals to me as a failure, which I think is something that most entrepreneurs are great at. And I think the secret to resilience is also to be able to isolate that momentary failure and see that for what it is. And then also go almost into this observer state and be able to see that that moment of failure is not just what we wanted and it didn't happen. It's also what else happened that I'm not viewing in that moment. What else can I learn from that? What's the feedback for me? Because if I just learn what I need to learn from it, if I take the feedback from it, if I start to look for the positive charge around that and in that, my mind is now in a space where there is broader awareness perceptually, and I can actually take a lot out of that moment.
And I'll share with you an example. So when I was starting this entrepreneurial journey, one of the things, one of the ways that I got to actually buy the school that I now run is about two and a half, three years ago, I was looking at, I was still running my own coaching business. I used to do workshops and I was working with organisations and teams and so on and so forth across Australia and the school called, someone from the school called at that time and said, hey, we have an opportunity for someone to come along and do some training. And the money that I used to get paid to do the work in my own private practice versus the money I would get paid at the school would be very drastically different. It was like seven times less.
I had personal goals around wealth, which a lot of entrepreneurs do. And so in that moment, when I said yes, because the opportunity was amazing, but in three to four months time, it took so much of my time and I was looking at my bank account and I'm looking at my wealth goals and I'm going, my God, I'm spending so much time over here. I'm spending almost five to six days a month at the school and I'm generating five times less from that opportunity. And that now starts to feel like I'm not moving along on my wealth goals the way I want to move.
So that started to feel like, am I failing in context to my wealth goals? Because in six months, if this is my, X is my wealth goal, I'm not gonna get there if I am not creating the returns that I'm meant to create to get to that wealth in six months.
Now in that moment it felt like a failure. But if somebody told me that three years later you will then be able to buy the school and run a business that generates eight figures a year, I would say that it's all worth it. But I couldn't see that, I didn't have that perception, I didn't have that awareness. What I did have awareness around was in six months when I got there ultimately and I saw my wealth goal was not achieved, there was a part of me that felt like it was a failure. But then there was a part of me that was also looking at the positive. Wow, I'm learning skills by being on the largest stage in the world on how to sell from stage. I'm learning skills around how to facilitate rooms of 200 people, 150 people at a time, which is something that I don't get the opportunity to do as much. So I'm sacrificing a little bit of the goal here. I have had to, and there is, I've taken a cut here and it feels like a failure because I love setting goals and achieving them.
So the more committed and driven you are as an entrepreneur to set a goal and achieve it, then when you don't achieve it, the more it hurts, the more it feels like, my God, I put in so much into it and this means so much to me, why didn't I get there? So when I arrived in that moment, I was thinking, well, this doesn't feel good. I've just spent six months and that's short -sightedness.
And so when you look at it from a broader perspective, the emotion started to shift. And that's how life also works. That something that might feel terrible in this moment might be terrific in three or five years. But it's developing that breadth of perspective to be able to see what other possibilities exist around that moment that is perceived as failure that can help us not only soften the blow you might feel from the failure, but also leverage that moment as a building block, rather than a block. And so that's sort of how I look at failure and how I have been able to move through, you might say, what people think are blocks. I think every block in an entrepreneurial journey is simply a building block.
Vicki
Gold, that is gold. What a beautiful way to sum up that response because yeah, who would ever think about a block being a building block? That is really a key takeaway, I think, for our listeners and viewers. And thank you for that masterclass on mindset. Really, you know, we just take that one chunk of what we've just been talking about, what you've shared. That truly is a masterclass on mindset.
And I also love Rashid that you raised the conversation about money. How can we have a conversation about entrepreneurship without having the conversation about money? And in your experience, having worked with thousands of clients in business at the corporate level and students who are learning to be coaches and running their own business, I'm going to ask you for, it might be an impossible question, so tell me if it is, your take on what the average mindset is around money. Understanding that every person is individual and comes from their own backgrounds, but if you were to just say, on average, the money mindset is...
Rashid Mubashir
Yeah, really good question. I actually love that question because I think that kind of helps us to understand why we have what we call poverty in the world and why a lot of people think that they're not financially well off. And I think that is a reality, particularly in today's time post COVID, economies are shifting across the world. There is almost a global crisis that is on the edge economically for a lot of people. I know we’ve been looking at America, which is almost on the verge of recession, and that's causing the markets to go up and down and all of these things happen. I think that there is, they are cyclical. We know that they are cyclical. They happen once every 10 to 15 years. But the way I want to look at this question is, what you've just asked is really fantastic is that, there is the big picture of what happens in the world. And so we've got a community, we've got a city, we've got a country, and we've got the world. And at all these levels, all these different things are happening every time people get affected by and spend their lives thinking that, well, I can't have X, Y, Z in my life because of A-B-C that is happening in the world.
But I think fundamentally what it comes down to when we think about the average mindset is who we are as human beings and learning how to transcend our biology to a certain degree. And what I mean by that is that the average mindset of a human being is that of scarcity when it comes to money. So there's not enough of it in the world. That's what our general person generally tends to think, there's not enough of it in the world. And we all do this in some way, some way, shape or form on a day-to-day basis as well.
So the moment you have to make a choice or a decision, because it is a resource that the more you have, it's a resource - the more you have, the more you can use it. But the less you have, the more choices you have to make between letting go of things. So because of the dilemma of choice, we go into this space of scarcity. But the thing is that scarcity is actually coming from this more deep seated biological phenomena that we call fear. So fear is such a natural occurrence. And when we experience fear and our relationship with fear is dysfunctional, and what I mean by dysfunctional is we think our fears will become true. We think our fears drive our decisions. We think we need to escape our fears. We think we need to not have the fear to be able to do something.
I think this is super important for entrepreneurs because a lot of people who want to become entrepreneurs think that I will become an entrepreneur when I don't feel the fear. Whereas entrepreneurship is about taking the risk despite of the fear, in spite of the fear. It's about learning how to have that fear and do what you must do anyway.
So I think the same thing plays out in the average mindset, which is I'm afraid I've got this little bit of money and there's not enough of it in the world, so if I take risk, I am going to lose it. And I can't do that.
That's the average mindset that I normally notice in people that they hold on to instead of learning, which is the opposite, which I think is where we must go, which is where abundance and wealth is created, which is to learn that money is not, it's nothing more than a resource. It's an energetic phenomenon.
It's like your energy, the more you put your energy into things that will multiply your energy, the more energy you will have.
For example, if you go to the gym and you spend an hour in the gym in the morning, you will have multiplication of energy because that action that uses energy is going to multiply your energy through chemical reactions in your body. Same with food. A lot of people live in this scarcity mindset that I don't have enough money at the moment, so I can't eat organic, I can't eat well, I'm gonna go and eat the takeaway or I'm gonna take the cheapest path. And while it sounds really difficult to make that decision of spending an extra $50 on groceries, then that energetically takes away from them and then people spend their life feeling sluggish instead of feeling healthy. But now if you feel healthy, you've put money into your health and now you feel healthier, then you can do more with that health, to generate more of what we call energy or money.
So I think it's the shift in the mindset that is needed, which is how to look at money as a resource that can actually be used to generate more wealth, which is missing. And I think that's part of the message that I love to share as well with people. We've got to work on those patterns of scarcity and how we respond to fear. A lot of people spend money out of reactivity.
A lot of entrepreneurs avoid taking risk because it's never the loss of the money.
And this is the ultimate message for any entrepreneur in the world. We don't fear the loss of money. We fear how we are going to be when we lose the money. We fear whether we can handle that moment. We lack the trust in ourselves that we can still be okay if we are in that moment. And I think that's a really important part of being an entrepreneur is we're learning how to back yourself almost, in saying, hey you know, if you've got $50,000 or $20,000 or $100,000 that you're putting towards a venture, if it didn't work out, you're still gonna be okay. Particularly if you're in a Western country. Because I always say this, the greatest thing about the Western countries, the worst thing that's gonna happen is you're gonna get social security. Oh my God, what a tragedy!
So I think ultimately the average mindset is that of scarcity and fear and I think it's our role, I find it to be part of my mission and I think it's our role as a collective to raise that awareness that it's okay to have the fear but we can still make choices from a place of abundance and understand how money works like energy and that when we make decisions that are aligned with the whisper on the inside, we find ways to make money work for us.
And that's the resilience, right? The resilience comes into play where we want to, I really love your name of your podcast as well, which is 241. It's like, if you take something and you multiply it into something else, and that's where we wanna start going. And I'm sure we can talk about this all day. Hopefully that was a value.
Laura
Every word has been of value, Rashid, absolutely. It's been such an amazing conversation. It kind of sucks to wrap it up, to be honest, but I am conscious of time, of ours and our listeners' time, because there were so many beautiful topics covered during this conversation. And mindset really is the key. And I think that's where coaching helps so many people, is to figure out their mindset and to understand why they get stuck, where they get stuck, how to turn blocks into building blocks. A lot of these things that we talked about are really important. And coaches like you really do change the world. And I know you're building a legacy of many, many more coaches to then go out and be pebbles in their own oceans and really spread the word. And you never know how many millions of people you help worldwide. And that's so exciting and so incredible and I appreciate so much you coming on and having this conversation with us and sharing your message with the world.
Your story is incredible and so inspirational and your message of mindset and how people can really take control of their lives and their minds and their fear and feel it anyway.
I love what you said about pain is a constant, but suffering isn't. That's a really good one to leave on and to remember that even if you're struggling in your business and you're listening to this podcast, it's okay. It's normal. It's part of the process. You don't have to suffer through it. Get out there, get help and keep going. Take those one small steps at a time.
