Abdurraheem Green – Self Mastery – This will change you life!
AI: Summary ©
The concept of Self Mastery is a fundamental aspect of Islam, where individuals can change themselves and become conscious. The course on resistance strategies for children is also discussed, emphasizing the importance of learning how to teach oneself to resist temptation and achieve success in life. The course is flexible and lasts a minimum of 30 days to build a healthy habit, and is designed to help students understand the language and apply their willpower to their daily activities.
AI: Summary ©
As salam o aleikum, welcome to this live stream. Today I'm with Sheikh Abdul Rahim green, and we're going to be discussing Self Mastery willpower. Chef tell us about this course, which I'm sure many, many people have heard of now, they've been seeing in the emails, seeing posts, social media posts about it. So what's so special about this course?
I think yeah, I mean, I guess partly, it's a topic that is really close to my heart.
I've always been interested in psychology, and obviously,
for a long, but a huge part of my life. I've been very interested in Islam. And one of the things that, you know, I, one of the things that I have sort of realized, as I've sort of dive deeper into the spiritual dimensions, the whole dimension of tisski, till knifes, and I guess what it means to be a Muslim on a sort of deepest spiritual level. And it's not deeper in the sense that it's not accessible. This is accessible to everybody. And it's something that every Muslim should try to acquire, right? And meaning, what I really mean is, being a Muslim is not just about fasting, praying five times a day, all of these things have a significance that is way, way more important
than just the external aspects. It's, it's all about internal change. So I guess that's what it's all about. It's all about how do you change yourself, right? And I guess in order to change yourself, you first of all have to have some idea of who yourself or what your self actually is in the first place. Because you're going to change something which you have no idea about. And that's a whole different subjects of Orebro. Like knowing yourself, being honest with yourself, most of us struggle with self honesty. Right? And that is because, obviously, because our ego has constructed an image of who we think we are, and who we think we're supposed to be based on anyway, a whole
bunch of things.
And, you know, we all of us, I don't think anyone gets the end of that struggle, right? But But again, it's all tied in with a class sincerity, which is so important. Like what, what, what is anything you do in Islam if you don't have your floss, but then again, if you don't know yourself, if you don't know what motivates you, if you don't really, if you're not honest with yourself about why you do what you do, how are you ever going to be sincere? Right? So the whole subject of knowing yourself and then once you begin to know yourself, how do you master yourself? How do you control yourself? How do you get? How do you get your you know, that part of you that it's just your whims
and your passions and your desires? How do you control it and get yourself to do the things that you know that you have to do in order to get to Jannah the things that you know, that you have to do in order to be a better person and live a better life, right? It all comes down like you can have all of these you can talk all you like, you know, Tony Robbins, you can give you you know, the Awaken the Giant Within Well, I guess he's got the right idea. It's about the Giant Within. And to be fair to him, he's got the right idea. As well, in the senses, it's really about what's inside yourself. But you can read all the books about Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you know how to get How to Be a
Millionaire, how to be a billionaire, how to be this, how to be that, but it all, none of it means anything, if you don't know how to control yourself, if you don't have self discipline, if you don't have self mastery, if you can't build good habits and break bad habits, because that's another essential component of it, habit building, it's all actually part of the same thing, then what can you achieve in life? Almost nothing, right? So I sort of almost randomly came across, not randomly, just Wise, who it was from a last guess, you know, I started looking into this whole topic of willpower. And it was very fascinated by this, like now famous marshmallow experiment that was done
in in, you know, the University of Berkeley in California, which is this like hotbed of psychological research. And although there's been some questions around, you know, obviously, all scientific, you know, studies come up, quite rightly, because that's science, right? They come under scrutiny, and they come under question and things that will hold held to be, you know, completely true. Their question and like, Was that really true at all? But you know, not withstanding, right? There's some, you know, stuff that once you know, it makes so much sense. And then you had this famous marshmallow experiment, was really about basically what this guy was doing his professor
don't remember his name. He was trying to find out what strategies kids used to resist temptation. That's all he was really doing. And by the way, ultimate, really, that's what my course is about. My course is literally about that. What and the funny thing is a lot of the strategies that kid the
Kids use other same strategies that I teach in my course. Right? Like, What strategies can you use in order to resist temptation in order in order to achieve a long term goal? And basically, that's the sort of definition of willpower willpower is not some mystical Jedi ability to levitate an object. Yeah. And get your lightsaber lightsaber to come to you. And, you know, like, that's what people think willpower is, it's some sort of like power that it's not, it's just a set set of tricks and strategies that you use with it within your own mind in order to not give into temptation, right, and actually achieve a goal that is more important in the long term. So they did this with
the marshmallow, they gave these kids one marshmallow, they put it right in front of them. Yeah. And then they said, If you don't eat that Marshmallow, you can have two or three or four or whatever it is. And then they didn't even give the time. They didn't even say how long they didn't say in five minutes, 10 minutes. They just said, If you resist that, you'll get more later, right? It was that simple, right? And then they were filming the kids to see like, what did they do? How did they some of them, some of them would look at it. Some of them were doing all these things, distracting, some touched it and sniffed it, and then put it back and some ate. It obviously works. So here's the
interesting thing, right? Is that the professor, his kids were at the same school, as these kids they had done the experiment with. And then the his kids kept telling him about what had happened to these kids, right? Oh, this one did this, this one that that. And you know, he started following them over. And he realized that there was a correlation between the kids who had been able to resist temptation and those who hadn't, and what you could call positive life outcomes. So the kids who had been able to resist temptation, who had basically developed techniques to resist temptation, they earn more money, they were healthier, they were less likely to become drug addicts, their marriages
were more successful, they had better income, they had better jobs, you know, they stuck with those jobs for longer, like, you know, basically all the things that benchmarks that you could put as you know, leading a successful life, whereas the kids who couldn't resist temptation, right, guess what, they they were drug addicts, they were alcoholics. They were criminals. They went to jail, right? They had bad jobs, their relationships didn't last, right. So this correlation that he found between the ability to resist temptation and successful life outcomes. I mean, the interesting thing was, it's the only thing they've really been able to identify as a factor that carries on from childhood
to adulthood, add on to actually sort of, kind of in some way predict how a person is going to be makes this extraordinary thing that may be child abuse, or being raped or being sexually abused would really define what sort of human being you're going to be? No, it doesn't. Right? poverty and wealth. No, it doesn't. Right? What does is your ability to resist temptation? Actually, really? And so I mean, for parents of all right, as a parent, you need to know this stuff, right? Even if you don't do the willpower course, for yourself. Right? You need to know how to teach your kids these techniques. Yeah.
So I when I came across this, I thought, you know, I just thought wow, this is like, you know, because obviously, as a Muslim, you know, the funny thing is, so I've never struggled a lot with big haram things. Right? Like, something is very haram. Yeah, it's a big sin. You know, I think most of like most of the ones with everyone consider Big Sur Hamdulillah. Allah saved me from it, you know, like, I'm a terrified of hellfire, afraid of Allah. Right. You know, but I do struggle with things that I know would, you know, I've always struggled with things that are lifestyle choices that should be better, right, that are still important. Islamically but they're just not big, right? It's
just like, it's not the sort of stuff that's gonna send you to *, right? But you know, you don't want to be fat in your life. You don't want to be unhealthy. You don't you know, like, I I'm you and me. We're the same right seafood. You know, we're on the seafood diet. We see food and we eat it. Yeah. And we probably don't exercise.
I really, I really love exercise, but I just don't exercise as much as I should. Right. I simply don't, right. And a lot of the time I have to force myself to exercise even when I enjoy it. It's crazy, right? So a lot of things that we know we should do in our life, good life choices. I don't make them because why? Because I entertain
temptation, right? So this is where I found this skill set really useful. Right? Because it's not like you can say to me Oh fear Allah. Right? I say what is haram is chocolate haram? Cebu is
not like, okay, so what are you talking about then?
No, but you and me know that there's better choices we can make in our life about what we eat, how we exercise, how we live. And it even goes down to things like, you know, one of the things I found that Subhanallah, since I did this willpower course, bro, since I, you know, developed it, my relationship with my wife improved, hugely huge improvement, because I found that these techniques, you know, work in places that you never even imagined, right, like, you may take this course thinking that, yeah, I'm gonna lose weight. But what you find is, it really, really helps you in your relationship with your wife, or your parents or at work all sorts of things, because it's very,
very wide application. You've done it support, isn't it, bro? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I just want you to add to the mix education, you need a
product like that. He said seafood diet. I mean, I said this to you before that, you know, I was just like a pig. I think honestly, someone brought food to me, I'd be like, oh, yeah, just delete the food. There was no thinking you've seen how far I yield over the years. And it's done that but yeah, yeah. I think, you know, doing your course, taught me simple strategies, right? Like the 10 Minute Rule, we're gonna go over this right, we can go over it later. But things which allowed me to go from the seafood diet, to actually being able to not eat food for 36 hours? Well, not finding that difficult, like currently, I'm also fasting right after my last meal. So during 20 hours is a
joke is nothing for me now, previously. Oh, you know what? A pizza. Yeah, sure. Okay, this guy bought chocolate. And I was just ballooning. Right? And you know, it affects your mood affects your relationship affects your concentration. You feel lethargic around this time of the day?
Yeah, it's nearly eight o'clock, I'd normally be just count, I'd beat the * out of it. But yeah, what I would say is it changes your entire life. It's not just, you know, wait.
Yeah. And that, just for anyone listening, if you're interested already, if you're thinking like, I need this in my life, you can go to mastery, mastery. classes.com. So the way it works is that you sign up and you you sign up to a mini course, it's three, you get three emails over three days, basically. And it's like a mini course. It's like a mini introduction, covering some of the stuff that we're going to be covering today and some other stuff. If you're able to get your way through those three days, then you will be given an offer right to buy the course. Yeah.
So you sort of have to get through stage one. If you don't get through
the second and third emails, right? That's it, you don't get to join. It's like, you can't just sign up, right? You have to go through. Because, you know, to be honest, one of the funny thing is, and one of the guys working on this project, he used to joke he said, In order to do you need willpower to do the willpower, right. And it's actually true, just in order to be able to do the course, you either need to be really, really, really desperate, right? You know, like, you know, when it's someone's so desperate, they'll do anything. Yeah, yeah. Or you need to have a bit of willpower. But I, you know, I literally constructed it to make it as easy as possible, right? I've tried to make it
so easy. Like, I don't I think you watch a video a day for two weeks. That's how it goes. And so each video like it's not more than what, five minutes, 10 minutes, maximum, 10 minutes per video, you literally could do it in the morning. I think even with the program, there's not the specific course there's an app, even I think Kajabi has an app because it's on the Kajabi platform.
And literally what you do is you listen to one talk, right? And I give you an exercise to practice every day, right? Because willpower, it's a willpower exercise, right? It's not a physical exercise to have to do any stretching or yoga. But you do have to do some breathing, right? One of the things we teach is how to breathe properly. Like a lot of people don't know how to breathe, right? So we teach some breathing techniques, but we also just this little like, it's just like today, practice this today, see if you can, you know, spot this or that right. And so by the by the time you've gone through two weeks, you know you've practiced, you know, 14 different strategies, at least for a day.
Right? And you know, that's it at the end of the day. You know, you can get back to it as many times as you want.
because it's yours, you know, so as long as it's there, you can keep going back to it.
And but but to be honest, even I think you've gone through the course, once you've practiced, you know, you've developed hopefully you've broken one your break, it takes more than 14 days to break a bad habit or to build a new one, it takes probably a minimum of 30 days, it can take to be honest, up to six months, or even a year. Like they say, 4030 days to build a new habit, it's not no 30 days is just to start really, right. It's very rare that you'll be able to do it in 30 days, I think. But you know, 30 days will give you a really good feeling of what it might be like to live like, the way you want to live. So I mean, that's basically the structure of the course is really super easy. You
know, I think, honestly, I think the main obstacle between you know, any one of you, and doing the course is literally shaytaan. Because, like I used to say shaitan does not want you to do this course, because this is like, this is really going to make his job a lot lot harder.
Which is a good thing, right? Yeah. And definitely, and I remember you actually, speaking to me about this a few years ago, you said, bro, I actually think she thought doesn't want this to go out. It's actually one of his strategies, right. And you related it to actually, in one of your earlier videos to the narration of Salam about Jana and Jahannam, and hardship and ease, not so hardship and pleasure. So maybe, maybe if you go over that, yeah, well, I mean, I mentioned that in the mini course, you know, I talk about that, you know, the Jibreel you know, the Allah sent Gibreel to look at Paradise and hellfire. And you know, obviously, Paradise was surrounded by, you know,
difficulties and hardships and challenges and hellfire was surrounded by temptations and luxury and ease. So, like literally literally getting to hellfire means, you know, avoiding temptation. And going to paradise literally means waiting your way through challenges and difficulties. How are you going to do that? If you don't have willpower? How are you going to achieve that without willpower, right? So you know, like, it's such a key ingredient. Willpower is such an important thing for you to build right. Now I've you know, I have thought about this. And I definitely think obviously, taqwa, you know, like, to be honest, this course is really you even a non Muslim could do this
course, although I've really structured this course. And I had a big debate within myself, right? When I first did this, I thought, shall I make this a course for everybody? Right? You know, should I be the Muslim Tony Robbins, you know, have a right and just do a course that. And then I thought, You know what, at the end of the day, the people I'm really, you know, connect to the people who know me, it's the Muslim community, right. And there's a lot of, and what I also found suitable, bro is a lot of our brothers and sisters, unfortunately, they look at some of this witch stuff, which is really useful, which I wouldn't be afraid for you to look at it, for example. But there's other
people who are less knowledgeable, less insightful, haven't spent the time you know, building their foundation. And literally is what I found, you know, I've recommended books to people, and they've come back to me and say, Why did you recommend that book to me? You know, it's full of confidential look.
And it's like, yeah, what, you know, for a minute, I thought, for God's sake. And then I thought, no, actually, that's the reality. People want people like you and me, right? Like, would you tell everyone to go and read all those books on evolution that you've built? No, you wouldn't? You absolutely wouldn't, bro, you've gone and you've studied this philosophy of science, right? And before that, you've built a strong foundation with Hamza, right? With all the stuff that he's taught with your own knowledge base, right? Being firmly rooted in the Quran and Sunnah. And then with that, you with that filter in place, you can go right, it's the same thing with a lot of this
psychology stuff broke, a lot of it is highly influenced by Buddhism, by even atheism, you know, by by, you know, materialism, so you can get really derailed, right? And so I thought, no, actually, that's our job. Our job is to read this stuff, take out the stuff that is good. Put it in the Islamic context, right, and then represent it to our brothers and sisters so that they can benefit from it. And that's basically what I've done. I've basically taken this stuff and, you know, put it through the filter of the Quran and Sunnah. I've given examples that almost all are examples from the history and from the example of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam, from the history of
Islam. So it's a very Islamic course from that point of view as well. Right.
So yeah, mastery. classes.com Sign up. At least try doing the free course. It's totally free. You get three, you know, three videos one day after the other, and give it a try. And if you like it, you can take it further or not. It's up to you. Yeah,
And although it may not be up to you, it may be she.
She thought, interfere. It's quite funny one of the sisters wrote here shaytaan doesn't want you to like, subscribe and share. So yeah, don't do what shaytaan wants. Something I think everybody should be quite candid to admit, is that we all have a scrolling problem.
A scroll lism we're just continuously scrolling. The scrolling system is designed like gambling, right? You get the dopamine hit, and you're, like dopamine a lot. And I have I mean, actually, it's called The Seven. The original course was called The Seven Pillars of willpower. And one of the pillars of understanding willpower is understanding dopamine is like literally one of the pillars. It's probably like, once you once you know about dopamine, just knowing about it. It's like a penny drops. It's like, Oh, my God, that's what's happening. That's what's going on inside me when you literally feel you're possessed. Right? And you're reaching for that slice of pizza, even though
you're not you don't even want to you're not even hungry. You don't even what you're feeling sick already, like you've had five bars of chocolate and you're reaching for another one why?
It's something is dopamine. Dopamine has literally taken over your brain. Yeah, it is. And that's actually what it does it, it literally cuts off the access to the thinking, pausing planning willpower part. So the part of your brain that actually is involved in willpower, which is pausing, planning, thinking, is the prefrontal cortex, right? Dopamine cuts off access to your prefrontal cortex, right. So it becomes really hard to think clearly. And it's there, it literally causes you to act impulsively. That's what it does. It's it that's the job of it. It creates an irritation, an urge in you, that's what dopamine is. It's not a pleasure chemical. If you find someone saying
dopamine, dopamine is the pleasure chemical, you can like this guy is just, he hasn't read properly, right? Dopamine is not a pleasure chemical, it drives you towards pleasure, right? But itself is not pleasurable. Actually, dopamine is an it's an adjutant it agitates you, right? It motivates you. That's why, for example, people who have outside of disease, they the problem is their dopamine, they're not really their dopamine receptors are not working properly, and they're not motivated. And because they're not feeling motivated. That's it, they they it so dopamine is actually really important. It's hugely important. It's not a bad thing. Right. What is obviously really essential is
for us is to learn to control it is to understand it and control it and regulate it and not, and not allow it to derail
you know, the behaviors that we want to have in our life. Right? Yeah. So yeah, so these mobile phones, these, these things are designed on purpose to be addictive, they fire our dopamine. And then what does it do this whole scrolling? Right, it's all to do with pleasure. So what are we on this little screen here? What am I seeing things that I think are going to give me pleasure? Maybe in this email is a course that is going to change my life, like, mastery. classes.com. But seriously, actually, that's what it will do you think, oh, you know, maybe there's, you know, maybe there's a you know, maybe I'm gonna get something from some person that's going to change my life,
right? Maybe I'm gonna see some meme that is going to, and a lot of it may be good, right? A lot of it may be stuff that you really, you know, is good, or I mean, obviously, you know, I find myself I do find myself scrolling through Instagram feeds for hours, and just giggling and laughing and sometimes I'm just reading and sometimes I'm in total or about something and Allah's creation is this whole river of, you know, various experiences, right? That by the way, the algorithms are tuned, like, the more you use it, the more it knows what works for you. So the more addictive it gets, because it's literally feeding into your particular addictions, right? It's quite scary. But
it's all dopamine. That's what it does. And dopamine really is cutting off that pausing planning, thinking, like, do I really want to spend this much time doing that? Yeah. And the whole thing is designed not to let you think, but to make you act. And then obviously as a platform for selling things. It's very powerful. Because, you know, if you're in that state of being disconnected, of being in a dopamine, dopamine, it's I don't know what the term is, though.
supervised state, that's probably a, you know, dopamine state, then obviously, if something is presented to you that subtractive, you're going to buy it, you'll just buy it intuitively, like you won't be thinking about buying it, you won't pause and plan, you'll just press that. And of course, everything is set up to make it super easy for you just to purchase it like that, you know, one click, and you know, it's on your credit card. Right? Yeah. So it's all designed just to make you into this sort of thoughtless machine of dopamine addiction. And so yeah, it's, again, the course will, you know, mastery. classes.com, sign up for that. But yeah, it will help me to deal with that
a little bit, you know, it will help you. But the point is,
if you want to deal with, I mean, like, I guess both you and me, maybe we should, you know, get together and set ourselves a target, it will be quite a good idea, right? Since we have a scrolling problem, self confessed, rolling problem.
Would you like to cut down in your scrolling time support? Okay. So, I mean, that the first thing we do is, that's what you decide, you have yourself some smart goals, right? So your goals need to be specific, they need to be measurable, they need to be achievable, they need to be realistic, and they need to be timely. So basically, what you need to do is set yourself a goal, right? That is something you can realistically achieve within a timeframe. And you can measure it. Yeah. So you can say, I am not going to allow myself, you know, on, I'm not going to allow myself to go on that mobile phone at all, for more than two hours a day. Right? Or whatever it is. Yeah. Because you I
guess even on a laptop, you can do some scrolling. Right. But
yeah, yeah, I mean, that this, like you mentioned, willpower is a set of strategies. So not limited to certain number to stop yourself from temptation, some very simple things like, you know, I was I had this addiction of scrolling through Twitter. And a friend said, Well, why don't you just delete it from your phone, and try and use it on your laptop? And I just stopped using Twitter? Like,
a good strategy. And I've done that with apps. You know, there's quite a few apps that I've just deleted.
Because partly because I thought, yeah, I mean, I realized this is a waste of time. Yeah. But I could easily see myself wasting a lot of time, but I just deleted it. Because I thought like, tick tock I deleted after two weeks, I thought this was a real waste of time. But people have tried since then, to tell me actually, you can find good tick tock, but I hardly use it. Twitter, I never got into using Twitter, partly again, because I can see how really, really addictive it can it can be.
So you're right, though, there are little simple strategies that you can employ. And those are obvious ones. So like, just removing yourself from temptation is a simple strategy. Right? So a lot of the things is, you know, we talk about that in the course. Right? I talk about that in the course that the environment that you're in the impact the environment has the impact that friends have other important things stress, stress has a really, you know, negative effect on your willpower. That's one of the Seven Pillars actually, is the effect of stress. So, yeah, so yep.
Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things which we have to keep in mind, while we hope everybody is keeping in mind is that Ramadan is just around the corner. And Ramadan is a time in which we are forced by a deadline to actually employ these willpower studies. Because it's in our mind, okay, we will absolutely not, you know, eat during this period, and, you know, drink and so on and so forth. And we'll, for example, spend more time with the Quran we'll do this, we'll do that. No, no, we have it within us. But that's an external imposition. Yeah. Which is forcing us to do it. And the power of this course is it teaches you how you can impose from within you can give deadlines, then you can
set goals within. I think that's the key thing because we all know we have it. People say I don't really have willpower. That's not true at all. Anyone To be honest, anyone who fasted Ramadan is exerting an incredible amount of self restraint. And, and, and basically willpower, yeah, they're practicing self discipline, self mastery. But the question is, is that unless you understand the strategies in like, that's the interesting thing. Like why are we releasing so basically, the course is literally only open for a week. Yeah. So basically on Monday, it's shut you won't be able to and we do open it maybe twice a year. Yeah. So only gets open for a very short time.
Yeah, why are we doing it before Ramadan? Right? Well, there's no better time to practice these strategies than during Ramadan. Right. And like I said, it's not going to take a huge amount of time. It's 10 minutes. Yeah. And you will definitely find yourself practicing these strategies in the Ramadan anyway, right. And literally, there's no better time to do this course than, you know, than in than in Ramadan. Mashallah. And like you said, you know, Ramadan is an external factor. But, you know, a lot of the time this is the thing I'm saying is that a lot of the time we do things in Islam, right, but we don't really necessarily understand why we're doing them. You know, like, what
is the actual reason? You're right, this boy, you just this was just disappeared off the screen? I don't know. He was fiddling around. I think maybe there was a crocodile snapping at his feet.
He's disconnected the cables or something like that. Yeah. So brothers and sisters, you know, it's mastery. classes.com, mastery. classes.com. Sign up, you'll get a mini free course that is just like three emails that you'll get over three days. And then you're invited to join the main course, which, like I said, closes on Monday. So it's open.
Until Monday. Oh, change. Suddenly, your background has changed. Wow. Absolutely. And that's, that's the power of this course. You have the willpower
work? Well, that's one of the things bro, change your state. Right. That's actually one of the strategies and counter cat counter ambush training? Yeah, that's actually one of the strategies, you know. So interesting.
You go on mute, bro. I can't hear you're muted.
Yeah, sorry, I just muted myself because some background speaking. So
you know, going back to this factor
of the counter ambush, right, I think this is one of the most powerful things about the course because it actually teaches you that you have triggers, they are environmental and social cues, which trigger this this mechanism of dopamine, which, which causes you to go towards that pleasure. So I think environment and just change environment. Incidentally, environment is something I think if you highlight a few points about this, because that's one of the powerful things about the course, you know, about how you know, so So basically, you know, counter ambush trading is what happens when you get hijacked ambushed by dopamine. Yeah. So now, the thing is, is that look, if you
join the Special Forces, or you join the army, or anything, which I don't recommend anyone does, but I'm just saying if you did, yeah, one of the things they will teach you, right, and they will drill into you is how to behave in an ambush, right? So like different, you know, you basically have a rock, you literally, the whole point is to train you until it becomes automatic, it becomes a habit, right. So what you need to do is when you get ambushed by dopamine, you need to train yourself to go through this process, right. And that's really what it's about. It's like, when you get ambushed by dopamine, you need to go through this protocol, you could say, so, but one of the things that even
before is understanding when, how, and why and in what places and circumstances you get ambushed by dopamine. So that's the first thing, right? It's exactly what you said. It's the A, so it's a B, C, D, right? Which is a is awareness, right? Being aware of when and how and in what circumstances dopamine hijacks you. So let's take the example of someone who's, you know, addicted to watching *, for example, right? That's something maybe a lot of the youth you know, struggle with, right? But you will find that okay, you know, It's haram. Hopefully you don't do it all the time. 24 hour? When? When does that happen? When do you find yourself watching *, right? Is it you know, when
you've just drank a bottle of Coke and ate a tub of ice cream and the lights are out and everyone's gone to sleep and it's dark, and you're feeling tired? And then you open the computer, and then it's almost compulsive. So literally, that's your triggers, right? You're beginning to think, Oh, my God, these are my triggers. You know, what if I don't eat lots of sugary stuff, I don't feel the same, right? Or if I don't open my computer at night when I'm tired. That's it. I'm not going to. It's like, you know you I mean, I'm giving some very, very superficial things, right. It could be anything it could be you had an argument with your mum, you could
have, you know, I don't know, whatever you didn't go out and you didn't walk in and take some exercise that day? I don't know, it could be hundreds of different things. But you will when you start looking. And when you start searching through all of the wait a minute, what happened? Right? What happened to me before everything, I'm talking about every environmental factor, even smell, you know, what did you smell? What did you see? What did you hear? So that's looking for your triggers, because you may be really shocked at what things trigger you, you know, to just for you to to, you know, release that dopamine and for it to take over? Right. So, that's a huge thing, the whole
environment. Now we talk about that in the course, you know, and that's like, one of the things you have to practice, right, one of the things you have to practice is, you know, what are your triggers? What triggers you? Yeah.
And what's interesting about this, this, this, if you like this flowchart, is that, like you rightly said, you know, dopamine is not a pleasure, chemical, right? Dopamine is there to lead you to pleasure. But it doesn't mean that it does actually do that. One of the things that I was really inspired after,
I had to write a article to get into a course, right, and I decided to write on the willpower course, decided to write on dopamine. And one of the fascinating things I came across was this study
about monkeys, which, in which you had a light switch, which used to flick and the monkey used to go and press it, and then some food used to come out. So the monkey used to eat the fruit. And as soon as the monkey saw that thing, you had this this huge spike in dopamine that he wanted that thing.
Every single time the light flashed, he could go press the bong eat the food, right? However, what happened is that when they introduce randomness into the equation, the dopamine actually increased the level of dopamine, right? So because there was no uncertainty about this thing, and how this ties into pleasure is that there is the law of diminishing returns. So people indulge, they go to a buffet or they regularly eat, how do they feel afterwards? They feel miserable. And how do you feel when you haven't asked for 20 Something hours in the summer when you're fasting? Date, that date, it's like, it's the best it felt out of place.
Even water tastes sweet and everything tastes good. Yeah. Yeah, it's so true. And you know, that's one of the things that one of the interesting strategies that I teach, which is really counterintuitive, right? Like, like, you wouldn't get this almost definitely you wouldn't get this outside the course. And, you know, I even when I was teaching it, I thought to myself, this maybe this is questionable. Islamically. Yeah, from some perspective, right. But it actually is just like, if you really want to indulge, then indulge, right? Do it. Right. However, do it mindfully, yeah, do it thoughtfully. Do it knowing it's a decision that yes, I've committed myself to something, but I'm
going to do it, I'm going to break it. And that's after, you know, you've set some barriers in your way. Now, my rationale is, look, if you've gone through the process that I've taught already, and you still are going to want to do it, write it, you are going to do it. It's just like there's no you're not going to be able to resist, right? The point here is, is that, but when you do indulge, you've got to be mindful, right? You've got to really think about every single bit of what you're doing. And actually examine yourself. Am I enjoying this? Because as you said somewhere, and this is so powerful, right? Dopamine drives you towards pleasure. But it doesn't mean that once you've
actually done that thing, it's going to be pleasurable, right? Because sometimes the expectation of rewards Yeah, is more powerful than the actual rewards. It's just the expectation. Right? Yeah. You understand and think about that generally in your life. Think about anything. Right? Any new iPhone? Anyone who got married? Yeah, I want you to remember all you brothers and sisters. Yeah. Who all your life. All you could think about was, I want to get married. I want to get married. I want to get married like it absurd. You are so obsessed with it. It's like literally the only thing that was on your brain. Now let me ask you a question. Is the reality of being married like what you were
expecting in your head when you were dreaming about it non stop every day for however many years it was.
It's probably not the most definitely is
No, I'm not saying that to this marriage. I'm just saying
My house is watching. But yes, no, nothing.
No, I'm just
I don't know what you said that bro. It sounded inflammatory. But I'm just saying that to prove my point, the expectation of rewards is not like what actually happens. And that's, and you know what the key to all of this thing, bro is another big topic, right that is like so in at the moment and it's the whole topic of mindfulness, right. And, and in a sense my whole course you could conclude it by, you know, almost by this topic of mindfulness. But that's a whole To be honest, in a sense, it's a whole nother topic. Because mindfulness as it's presented a lot now in the field of psychology as like, a lot of it's based on Buddhism and stuff like that. Right. And obviously, we
have Islamic, we do have the concept of mindfulness to double right, thinking deeply. And, you know, Shaka, and being truly grateful to Allah involves thinking deeply, right about Allah as bounties and blessings, right? So yeah, anyway, mastery, classes.com brothers, and so you haven't signed up already? What are you doing, you're probably scrolling through your,
yeah,
this is actually a good time, because there's going to be university students getting ready for exams.
You know, they're like, and this happens to a lot of students, you know, they like they won't prepare for the exam. Instead, they find themselves scrolling for hours. On Instagram, they're getting upset, why do I have this habit, and they can't focus as well, they can't focus on a particular task. The powerful thing about maintaining your dope, meaning away awareness about the dopamine triggers is that it will then allow you to make small changes, which can go very far. For example, you know, this is the culprit, right? This is the culprit owns the culprit. So you need to study for an exam that's coming up. So you take your phone, you go put it in another room, it's a
very simple thing. And that changes everything. Even having the the phone
with a screen, you know, towards the table as in, you can't see the notifications is still there, you can still reach it. And what you'll find that this happens to me, I'm not sure if it happens to other people. I'm sure it does, is that when you leave the phone next door, you still actually now and again, you just touched your pocket you touch your because
you just expect it to be there. The precious. The My precious lands, My precious. Yeah, it's tricky. But I mean, I mean, that's, you know, that's a simple, that's a simple strategy. But I guess the Course is teaching, you know, a wide a much wider range of things, right? Because look like this stuff that you know that like, okay, you can put your phone next door, right. But there's other things that you have to understand about why you find it so hard to resist temptation. And all of that will determine, like, you need to plan your day, if there's things that you're doing that is going to involve, you know, applying willpower, a lot of willpower, you actually need to plan your
day round it because you're going to be depleted, right? Because your brain like the the bottom line is, at the end of the day, you've only got so much energy to put into this, you know, this process of, you know, restraining yourself, right. Yeah. And so this is like, actually, that's literally
the first pillar, the first pillar of the first pillar of willpower is understand that your willpower is limited. Understand that your ability to restrain yourself is limited, right? It's not endless, you don't have endless amounts of energy to do that. Right.
And so yeah, you could put you know, you're, you're a student, you could put your, but you know, if you're a student, and you have a job, and if you're a student, and you know, you're living in a really stressful home environment, you're a student, and you know, whatever it any type of implementing any type of willpower strategy is going to become increasingly difficult. Why? Because you're stressed out. Right? So how do you deal with stress? That's another thing that I deal. I mean, how do you deal with stress and stress within the context of building your willpower? It's not like I don't have a whole how to deal with stress course. But I deal with like stress, that's
actually one of the pillars of willpower as well dealing with stress. Right. So
a phone strategy is a good idea. It's a good little strategy, but you really do need to understand the subject a bit more holistically, right. Yeah. Because things will come into play that it's only when you're not it's one of those things when you know, it's like, Oh, I know what's going on. Now. I
know what's happening, right? I know I, you know. So I think all of those things when you when you have that knowledge when you're armed with that knowledge just becomes a lot easier, right? The same with diet, how many people, like just eat because of stress? Not because they're hungry, because it's just the mechanism that they resort to when they're stressed out. It's called comfort eating, you know, for example, right?
So how do you build strategies around your willpower goals? And again, like, it's really important to have goals, we go back to that, where we like started a bit the importance of having goals and setting yourself targets. Yeah. And what's interesting is that people actually have goals. They just don't achieve them. Like there is. It's very hard to come across someone that have a goal, bro.
I want to be a millionaire. There's my goal, like Yeah, right. Okay. Like anyone can say that. Yeah, obviously, that goal setting I mean, that's why I go through, one of the things I go through in the course is, you know, a very, almost like, lots of people have heard of SMART goals. It's not going to be news to some people during the course. But it's a good refresher. Right? Just to understand, you know, like, first of all, like, don't just have goals, right. But I mean, goal setting, again, is a whole different subject, we could have a whole, we can have a whole course on,
you know, goal setting. And, I mean, you know, one of the, anyway, I don't want to get into that, but, you know, that's another thing.
Another thing I think we should touch upon, and this is for everybody to go to the link, mastery classes sign up, you'll, you'll never come across, I think a course where
there's an entry barrier. And that's what you actually have here. Because, you know, it's not like, click here. Yep. Pay sign up. It's actually like No, past this little exercise before we think you're worthy of doing the course.
Well, I realized, I, you know, to be honest, right? I only it only clicked to me that that's what we were doing a while ago. It's like literally we'd sort of done that we've created a barrier. Right? And I'm not sure that was necessarily the intention, but it solves a problem that we had discussed. You know, like I said, we discussed discussing with a beta exactly this problem, like you need willpower to do the willpower course, well, you know, why not have a mini course that everyone has to go through before they get to be able to sign up for it? You know, at the end of the day, we just don't wait, it's not we're not just here to take people's money. Yeah, that's not what it's about.
Right? Absolutely not. You know, and to be honest, giving it to you for free wouldn't do you any favors either. And I've given it to free I've given it free. Almost every single person I gave it to for free. I think it's set one never did the course didn't even get beyond lesson one. Yeah. And that's another thing, why do you have to pay for it, you have to pay for it, because that's part of what motivates you and forces you to actually do it and go through it. It's very interesting, you say that, because
not just this course, there's many other courses out there, which have that,
you know, mechanism that you have to pay to join. And they know if they gave it for free, people wouldn't actually do it. Information, which is available freely online, people bother looking it up, because you went for this course it took you a lot of time and energy, you know, go through all these articles and stuff. People just don't have that willpower. Just don't take time. And look, I mean, most of this stuff, you can read it in a book. But what I recommend people to pick up those books, like I said, No, I most people, I wouldn't recommend them to read it. Can you find all this stuff? Yeah, you could trawl through the internet and read articles and this than that. But what you
will never get is someone who's been through it, who's experienced it, who's taken this all of this information and then structured it in a way I don't think you will find especially as a Muslim, if you want something that is framed in an Islamic framework.
As far as I know, like it doesn't exist minds, the only course that I know about right, I haven't come I'd be interested. But I don't think anyone else has done it. Yeah. What's interesting is that,
you know, back when back in the school days, they used to roll out the old TV and showed this happening inside your body. And you don't know, okay, that's what's happening in my heart. That's what's happening in my lungs. So it's like seeing the inside view of addiction, the inside view of bad habits, because you get past the veneer you get to see actually, what's the weakest point and the weakest point is get rid of the queue or understand the 10 minute rule this thing. I mean, it's not going to last that long, right? All these types
and the
Good thing as well, that that I took away from the course like I was saying to you before the livestream started. Love it, bro martial law. I mean listening to you he did it six years ago, right? And there's bro the amount of stuff that you are remembering from it is quite impressive. So you definitely I mean, you didn't just watch it, you obviously did it, you practiced it. And you use those strategies again and again in your life in the last six years. Right. And you haven't done the course twice? Yeah. No, no, not the benefit. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why I say bro, I say if you do the course, right, if you actually do the course and apply the lessons, if you if it's no good
for you whole, give me your money back. No questions asked, I would just make sure you do it. That's all I want you to do. Yeah. Do it, do apply the strategies? And if you don't think it's worth it, you can have your money back. Yeah. You know, some something which you mentioned, I think during a I don't remember when you mentioned it was very interesting. It was essentially that civilizations are built by people who know how to have self control, who can look at long term vision and can not, you know, they can give up instant gratification. So essentially, you know, Islam as a system, it has these strategies to to get people okay, you cannot just find a you know, can you see alcohol, you
can't just drink it, that person's not your wife, you can't be with them. Like, it has these rules, right. And it has these particular things. But in order for us to develop not only in Islam, but also in terms of our personal development, we have to apply these rules at the most micro level. And the reason why I like the starting off with weight is because everybody has some issue with weight, especially during Crona. Like I put on 10 kg to be grown, like, Oh, that's a lot of weight, I think maybe patrols actually. And a lot of people like I met people when they came out COVID They look like the another person.
Maybe they didn't go out for shopping, and they decided to grab in the navy or something. Some people huge one of the brothers, I'm not going to name now, I mentioned to him when the livestream ends.
Because you know, you get environmental changes after you get married. Right. So when you get married, you know, the wife is trying to make you happy trying to make you eat more food and stuff. The brother, and you know, this brother, and I'm gonna tell you afterwards, who is put on 35 kg
God, II five kg. And, you know, in a way, like, at the time, he told me I could see it.
I could actually see the weight on him. Yeah. So 35 Yeah, and if you cannot control if you cannot control say that basic thing, like, you're the temptation of food? How can you control yourself from any other temptation? Like, how can you have any self control? Do you see like, it's the most basic thing? Yeah, I mean, and also, to be honest, it leads to other things, you know, when you when you indulge yourself by eating a lot,
you know, you'll sleep a lot. And you'll do a lot of other stuff as well. It's just like, in a sense, it's a very often the trigger to many, many other things as well. But look, I mean, the willpower courses, not definitely not a diet course. But
no, but having said that, you absolutely I mean, for me, that's what I use it for. For me, my I mean, that's actually what I used it for the first thing I used it was to lose a bucketload of weight. Yeah.
I just found a diet that worked for me. I applied all the techniques and strategies that I'd learned in the willpower course. And this is before I actually did the course, right. I learned I lost a lot of weight. I thought, wow, this is amazing. And like I said, I use those same willpower strategies in many other things. And realize that wait a minute, this is helping me in my private life. This is helping me in my working life. This is like it has. But I thought I have to do a course on this. Right? And literally wrote the board. I had done everything. I still have the notes, right? I written up all the notes. I'd even you know got to the stage where I had no idea. I literally read
how I don't know how many books I'd read. Blip you know me? Yeah, plenty of books. Yeah. I had all the notes. So the key now was to change those notes into an actual script. Right? That was the hard bit. Yeah. That was the bit where and I thought wait a minute. I know all these strategies. Let me apply the strategies I know right? To actually doing the willpower course. So I set my I went through the whole thing I set the SMART goals. I gave myself a goal. And I did Bri set my I set the bar
so low, right so low. It was ridiculous. I said to myself and what was between me and doing it, bro it was this Yeah, this flippin thing I was spending so much time scrolling through the internet and blah blah blah, right? I said I'm so this is what I said to myself. I will not allow myself to pick up this phone. Right? Until I have done how much do you think I set myself how much how much time I've actual script writing device by an hour 10 minutes? Why that's low
10 minutes, bro. Literally I had to negotiate with myself. Right? It was mean negotiate with myself. Right. And you know that that Nazi part of me was like, you know, was not like up for anything more than 10 minutes. It was like, It's only when I said 10 minutes. Is that okay? 10 minutes? I'll do 10 minutes. Yeah.
You know, so it sort of gave in, bro, obviously. But once you get into it, right? Once you get in it, I would sit for two hours. I wouldn't even look at my phone. I wouldn't even eat I wouldn't even have a cup of coffee. I'm just like, just just on it. Right? So but you know, and I just applied the strategies they did the 10 Minute, well, it's 10 minutes, because it's in a 10 minute rule. Isn't it broke? But, you know, it's like, yeah, I applied all those strategies that I learned and Subhanallah I think within you know, within a month you know, not only had I done scripted film the course and and you know did it all released it all myself as well. Like I didn't even I don't even have any now
there's a whole team you know, helping but before it was just like, just meet I just did it and I put it on LinkedIn. And you know, I don't think there were that many people on my Facebook either that, so yeah, but and hamdulillah wasn't bad. How much weight did you lose in that? Row? I lost a lot.
I don't I don't I never You see, I never really calculate. I didn't really weigh myself. Right. It's more like how did my trousers like, none of my houses fit me anymore? Like really? They did? Like, bro, you're talking about inches? Yeah, you're talking about inches on my trousers, right? Like, I had to literally get a new wardrobe. So I but I didn't weigh myself because it's not about weight. You know, obviously, if you're doing gym work, and you're building muscle, you can actually put on weight you can actually write but you'll actually be slimmer, because muscle is heavier than fat, right? So I don't think anyone should be concerned with weight loss, you should be concerned with
fat loss, right? And being you know, healthy and stuff like that. Obviously, weight can sometimes be you know, the way to to measure it, but the stuff you really want to lose is the flap that you want to lose the flap you want to use lose the belly, you know?
Yeah, I actually remember we did a course in Oxford around 2013. And that's when your way I remember was, I think the biggest day been.
And then within a short period of time, since you started going. I think it was the Paleo diet. Yeah, just eating these things. It's quite funny because I think you were also like, with, like, you wouldn't need none. You just go to a wedding or talk and just eat the curry. Yeah, literally Korean salad.
I mean, I have a little bit now I'm not quite so strict. But yeah, basically. Yeah.
super strict. Yeah. I remember I used to. I got you a GI from an Asian shop.
Is that way most awkward present? You can give someone here's some GI you can't get in Shropshire.
Yeah, no, you can get everything now.
Yeah, and yeah, I remember. I mean,
it must have been something close to 15 kg. At least. Bro. I was old bro. No, I'm probably 15 kg now. I was like 1819 At my worst. You didn't even know me when I was at my worst, bro. My worst year on my worst. I must have been 19 kg.
No 19 You mean stone? 19? Stone stone? Yeah, and 19 style. Okay, we have 15. So I'm probably about 15 Now 15 and a half, maybe 16 stone, but then I was like 90 stone.
And then when we had the campaign, what's your goal? By that time you actually a lot slimmer. I remember that. Because of the T shirts. You can tell by the T shirts, how they further expands or shrink. Overall, some of those T shirts My wife used to complain so much. I'm just looking for.
Yeah, I've got some pictures here. Yeah. So here's a picture of me. Yeah. Yeah. Can if you can see that. Right. Yeah, I can see a picture of me on my bike. Oh, I was still pretty fit. Right? I mean, yeah, I was overweight.
I was still pretty fit. Yeah, I would still biking a lot. But that's it. That was my belly. Yeah. And that was me not even sticking it out. I mean, I can sit even, you know, I could stick it out now and it could look pretty bad. Right? And then, and look at that, bro.
Marshall. Yeah, that's me not even holding it in. It's just me standing straight. So that was. Yeah. I mean, that was literally, you know? Yeah. Laughter You know, and it was wasn't it wasn't like a special diet. Yeah, I suppose paleo was is a special diet, which I sort of, it's a sort of my diet. Now. It's just I tried to live like that. I don't, I'm not super strict with it. And it's funny, like the degree to which I'm strict with it. Sort of my weight fluctuates. So but yeah, because for a bit, I went off paleo. I started eating bread again, I borrow it just flipping just went downhill. I just blew up again. You know, I think that's one of the hard things. Maintenance is always a hard
thing. Like I don't think relatively easy. It's relatively easy to lose weight. And I say relatively, what is quite hard and challenging is maintenance. And, you know, although I discussed that in the willpower course, to be honest, it's not. You know, it's probably it is one of the hardest things that's changes. That's done. Yeah, just on that point. And we haven't plugged it in a while, please go to the website.
Because history classes, master classes. Yep. What's your classes? The link is in the description. And I think this is a good segue for you to actually summarize, what are the seven pillars of willpower? The seven, you're gonna that I knew you landed me in it now, bro, isn't it? So the first pillar is willpower is limited. That's the first pillar.
And let's start off with, you know, Allah being the ultimate willpower. How you normally Yeah, yeah, obviously, you know, the ultimate will is Allah. I mean, that's what I guess we think, you know, Allah confiar. Could that's it with Allah just being it is that's the ultimate willpower, you just say something, and it happens. And so I think a lot of people misunderstand and they think that that's what willpower is, it's a sort of some sort of magical ability to think something into existence, but it's not. Right. That's that's not what we mean by willpower psychologically. So, you know, I find a lot of a lot of works a lot of things that criticize willpower.
Often they don't understand it, they don't even you can tell when they're the way they're writing about it is that you're not writing about something that exists or anyone think thinks exists. Yeah, it's it's your some methodology you have in your head. And then they go on to describe No, what you really need is this, this this, which is actually willpower, they're just describing the various strategies and techniques, which is that's all willpower is just being good. Like people who are naturally like that, they're just, you know, they make it fun. I guess that's what they found about kids is they don't find it difficult to resist temptation, and probably because they found it fun
ways of, you know, of resisting, you know,
so yeah, so the first the first pillar is,
yeah, we'll put no, the willpower is limited. There's the
Yeah, just on that point, I think you should elaborate on something.
Having an argument, right? Is one of the, I think you use this analogy. If you didn't, then or you think of it like an energy bar, right? So the energy bar goes down as you are, you're depleting your willpower throughout the day. And you know, it goes down. It's a in a gradual way. This is maybe perhaps why people like Steve Jobs and others didn't even bother, like spending time thinking about what they need to wear, because they'll wear the same clothes every day. No, because, like, yeah, they just want to make simple decisions, right? But then if you have an argument with someone, you actually have this Supercharged drop, it just drops like half or whatever. And you will find people
indulge, or they fall into a bad habit or whatever. After that. I'm an argument. So
I've, I've been having these types of stress. I mean, stress, again, is one of those things that can also deplete your willpower. So I think willpower being limited. I, I think you also use the example of judges in Israel once. Yeah. Now that's a very interesting, I mean, one of the things that I did this and one of the things I avoided and this is, I did this on purpose, I could have put a lot of scientific experiments in it, like some of them are so fast, and to be honest, when I was reading the literature, this is the stuff that I found really fascinating. You know, the some of the experiments they did with mice and experiments they did with humans and stuff. I mean, I find that
stuff really fascinating, but it's not practical.
All right, I just wanted to make the course short and practical. But I found this stuff fascinating. So yeah, the judges in Israel basic very simply is that, that when judges were given these a parole, this is the parole board in Israel. Basically, when criminals came in front of them looking for parole, they basically who if you came in front of the judges in the morning, you got parole, and if you came to the judges in the afternoon, you didn't.
And the reason is, because the judges in the afternoon were tired. And when they were tired, they just defaulted to what they thought was the safest choice, which was just let them go back to prison, right? Because they were just too exhausted from examining everybody's circumstances and thinking about it, right. So they just defaulted to what they thought was the safest option. Right. So whole thing, you know, like a whole thing in Islam about when you should make decisions as a judge, right, and very important for, you know, any future CEO for an organization also to think about when they are making decisions, right? Don't make decisions, when you're tired, don't make
decisions when you're exhausted, you know, go away and sleep about it, give it a day, right? Make his day higher. This is one of the things I teach in the course, go and pray to make us the hoarder. Right? You don't need to give it 10 minutes, just go and pray to a cup. Right? Even better.
I think the main thing is like don't make decisions when you're tired and exhausted because your ability to make good decisions just depletes. Right.
And that's what that's what they call willpower depletion. That's what it is basically, yeah, that your ability to make good decisions is going to decrease over time. And especially, it's compounded by, like you said, things like stress and all those type of things just compounds the depletion of your willpower. And just on that point,
so was that last point, you mentioned just before this, because there's something very interesting
so that you mentioned the judges, and then making decisions, right? So very interesting. I was watching a video of the Amazon guy, Jeff Bezos, and he is quite funny.
He, you would think he's going to be working harder at a desk all the time. Stress does as for our stress, and this and that, but he looks like an extremely selfish person, if that's even a word, like if you is the human embodiment of a sloth. Like he says, Look, I sleep well, I sleep like that. He gave this, I think, eight hours or something right?
For CEO of such a busy company, and he said, all I need to do is make a few good decisions a day. And I'm done. Like, that's all I gotta do. I gotta read. I got to have a clear mind. And I got to think about two or three decisions a day. And that's it. Like that's what he's boiled down his business day to you would think going crazy calling people this that. But actually, that's what he does. And he's, I think the richest man before the divorce. I think Elon Musk is who did did work is
really odd. But that was a different circumstance. And I'm like, I'm definitely from the
law lot. You work when you have to bro like, I don't think Elon Musk works works, because he had to he didn't have a choice. His back was against the wall. And he does no one else to do what he could, you know, he couldn't like he said, I was looking for good, or, you know, Space Engineers, and I couldn't find them. So I had to do it myself. He literally took the job. If he did all the studying took the job himself. But yeah, I mean, that's, you know, you're, anyway, the bottom line is, you're right, it's way better to be in the right frame of mind to make a few good decisions. And all of that is about willpower, being in the right frame of mind being in the right situation, you know,
and that's an you compound it, that's the other thing, bro. You know, it sounds like nothing three good decisions a day. Right. But, you know, that's 21 good decisions, you know, a week. Right? That compounds itself pretty well. Right. 64 good decisions. Yeah. 84 good decisions a month, right? I mean, when a good decision is, you know, makes you you know, 20 million bucks, 30 million bucks, right? Boom.
You know, it builds up. And that's the whole thing. I mean, I don't really cover that. But that's a whole topic of atomic habits, right? It's not just building habits, but these little habits, these little changes. And this is another thing, don't, you know, we often don't, one of the things I tell everyone to do. I don't want to sort of give it away, to be honest, you know, first thing I tell everyone to do, but I give everyone the first task I give everyone to do is a very small little habit by way which I still do until today. Do you remember what it is? The first habit I tell everyone to start
Start your day with something. But anyway, don't say what it is. Oh, yeah, I don't say what it is. But I do it until now until today, Rob before I pray Fudger I do it. But anyway, so I'm very good habit. Yeah. Yeah.
So yeah, so second word. second pillar is know your triggers. Yeah. The second pillar is know your triggers. We talked about that already. The third is understanding dopamine, we've already touched on that. We've talked about that. The fourth trigger is counter ambush training, which is like a go through what is how do you prepare yourself? I go through the whole thing, which is like ABCD, you know, four or five points, I think. Yeah.
And then there's the infection effect, which we talked about as well. Right. So we literally covered the whole course today roll, like the effect of your environment, the effects of your friends, your family, stuff like that. I talked about stress management, which is the sixth pillar, manage your stress, right? How can you manage stress, because it's the single biggest killer of your willpower is stress, the less stress you have in your life, the better and the better decisions you're gonna make. And you know, the seventh one is surf the urge, right? So when you get this little, yeah, it's one of my favorite ones.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to interrupt you there. Sorry. I have to interrupt you there. That is the best, like the best thing ever. Cuz it's like, you almost indulge, but you don't. Yeah. Yeah. In the beautiful thing is, like, it's not it's not competitive. It's not It's like go rat. Yeah, it's not a it's not a combat system. Right? Go rat works with the best part of people, which is the upper right. So the same thing with Surf The urge is just like saying, Yeah, I know, you want that chocolate, right? You say to yourself, I know you want to eat it. And you know, it's beautiful. It's good. And thing. But you know, let's just, let's not do that. Now. Let's not make that and like so
that the urge is like, imagine like, it's a big wave, right? Instead of trying to fight the wave and trying to hold the wave back, which you can't you literally get on your surfboard, and you surf the you just go with, just go with it. And you let it sweep over you and you just let it go. And what some people say it's like clouds, you know, just let clouds pass over. Right? Or the other one that I really liked the example I don't really use it. But I think different techniques work for different people. It's like the bus, you're sitting in a bus and there's all these people, people talking, talking, talking. Yeah. And then basically, one by one, they get off the bus, right? And
then you're just left in peace and quiet. Right? So they're different techniques. But it's the same thing. The whole thing is just to allow yourself that urge that you get, and this is something that we talk about is that old habits never die, right? Because one of the things you find is that if you have a bad habit, it actually apparently never leaves you it's ingrained in your brain forever. Right? All you can do is right over it stronger habits. But that also explains sometimes, which is not a dopamine thing. But it's just that sometimes suddenly, you you just get this urge or you thought you'd killed it. Right? You thought it had gone. Right? So surfing the edge is really useful
for for dealing with that.
Yeah, it's the best. It's like
I'm not sure where it fits in. Actually, there's not it doesn't fit in surf the edge. There's another thing that you mentioned in between somewhere. And I found this really like about you apply in the last couple of days because I started messing up on my own ads one meal a day. It's a setback is not a reset. Yeah. Where does that fit that I'm not sure under which because obviously that as this there's more than five, I just narrowed it down to seven pillars. But within those seven pillars, there are many, many other really important things like older fight hillbillies the older fight app, because you very rarely, you know, we don't we're not good at long term thinking,
basically, we're not good at long term decisions, right? So you know, we don't even think of ourselves. When we're older as ourself, we think of ourselves. And it's shown again, it's shown through brain scans. But when we think of ourselves, you know, in 20 years time, we don't think of that as ourselves, we think of it as a totally different person. The things you do right now is actually going to affect what you're going to be like in 20 years. So yeah, now the other thing you were saying, yeah, that a setback. So this is the hardest thing of all, the hardest thing in willpower is maintenance is keeping, keeping it going. Right. Yeah. And the key to this, yeah, is
it? It doesn't matter. It's human being it's human to fail. You are going to fall you are going to fail. You are going to get to this point.
So you're going to fall down in your face again, it doesn't matter. You just keep on getting up. Like they say, you know, you're a kid. Like when you were a baby, if you fell over twice when you were learning to walk, that's it. You'd still be crawling around. Right? But you don't you get up and you keep trying because you want to do it. And that's it. The main thing is just because you had a setback, it doesn't mean you just give up because it's called the What the * effects. That's what it's
what the *, man, I've just eaten one chocolate. I might as well eat 10 That's it. I don't think like that. It's okay to eat some chocolate. If you're, you know, say that you decide I'm not going to eat. I'm not going to have sugar anymore ever. Oh, guess you had some? It doesn't matter. Don't allow that. What the *? That's it. I've done it. I'm not gonna bother anymore. This is a big mistake. This is shaytaan big trick of shaytaan. Yeah. It's like, and that's why sometimes you allow yourself to indulge, you give yourself 10 minutes. If you really want to do it, you do it. And don't think that yeah, just because you've, you know, you've had a setback. It's not a reset. You know,
and even with me, it happened. Like I handled, I lost weight really well. And then I just went down this path of I don't know what happened. And even looking back now, I don't know what happened. It's just bit by bit by bit. I allowed it to get out of control. And I reached that stage when I realized I really did realize it's just a sugar is the sugar is the bread. Yeah, is the refined carbs is just firing off all that addiction in my head and I just, and bro you just want to eat more and more and more. You just want more and you can never get enough of it. You insatiable? insatiable. So I just realized that you know what, that that diet that paleo diet that this for me, it's not for
everybody, right?
You know, so it worked for me. And I thought, no, I need to go back to that, you know, it's never too late. It doesn't mean just because you've done this, whatever. So that's it. You know, that's, that's also very, very, there's a lot of powerful stuff in there, bro. And Marshall, I have to say, the fact that you remember so much of it. It's like more than I did the course. And I build the course. And it's like, now now that you're saying it's like, oh, yeah, I remember that. And I remember this. And of course, to be honest, though, I remember all of these things that you know, these strategies constantly, you know, I use them all the time.
I use them all the time.
Yeah, sounds like *, I don't know how long we've been talking. But mashallah, we've covered so much stuff. One hour, 30 minutes nearly? And that's probably to be honest, that's probably the length of all the videos together in the course. Yeah.
Yeah, the difference is obviously the you can watch all the videos in one go, which is important, because
you really shouldn't
do that. And it's structured in a way to give you these little exercises and to build it into, you know, into build it. So you actually, you know, that's how I think you've probably retained it so well, because you followed the program, you, you know, did the exercises, you actually implemented it, you actually practiced it. And that's the huge differences, actually, you know, doing it. Yeah. And giving yourself a really small goals to do you remember, we were doing I mean, I had a bit of a advantage, but it like I was talking to you about the course while I was doing it, but it doesn't matter. Anybody that does it, they can actually, they can ask me questions they can take and write
in the comment section, and I get an email in my inbox. You know, and I reply, you know,
just on that point, share, how have people received this? Is there any people, the only people out there who have said, we did the course helped us and I mean, bro, people have called it literally life life. I mean, it's such a cliche, you know, but it literally life changing. You know, people have said, you know, people don't understand why everyone is not doing it.
People have said, This is phenomenal, right? Like, it's the some of the feedback is just been so, you know, it just hasn't been done by that many people. And sadly, there's people who have bought it, who I can see because I can see on my, you know, on the on the matrix thing I can actually see, you know, not that I spy on anything, but
I literally, I mean, I can't do I can say right, I'm gonna make sure you do this guys with a stick. And who knows, maybe I'll do a treat where, you know, literally, everyone's there and you've got no choice, you know?
Yeah, it would be good. I think it would be, but I can see a lot of people have not even looked at all the videos, or they do two or three. It's sad, you know? So even paying for it, it's not going to guarantee that you do it. You know, but people who have done it, I mean, I guess possibly the, I guess the one of the comments I'm most proud of is a sister who is actually you know, a trained, qualified and practicing psychologist, right. who basically said this course is so excellent. This is so good. She
of the way that I incorporated lots of Islamic values into it. It made it very special and unique. She said no one else that she knows of has done anything like this. And she just wishes that all the youngsters out there, especially, you know, the youth would would be able to do a course like this. So for me, it was like really affirming. It was like, okay, that's, that's, you know, that really is the sort of thing I wanted to hear from someone like that, because it's like, yeah, that's what I was trying to achieve. You know, I was trying to bring, you know, some of these insights that we've gained, and a lot of them are not new, to be honest. It's like stuff we know, in this novel already.
Right? Yeah. It's just that they've sort of reinforced it and discovered it, you know, from some type of scientific, you know, experimentation, rather than just some of it. It's just sort of intuitive guesswork, right. I'm not talking about the stuff that we know from Quran and Sunnah. But in the sense from our scholars and our own Ummah, yeah, they looked into these matters deeply. They had students, they, so they're talking from their experience, but you know, when scientists actually do stuff and experiments on mice, and I identify actual chemicals that affect your brain in a certain way that are released due to this, and that, it just gives it a whole different perspective.
Right? And it makes you think, wow, I mean, first of all, you think, wow, our scholars like what insight they had, you know, that they got a lot of this stuff.
But then, you know, obviously, some things you find out were not true, you know, that were actually you know, the actually caused by this or that, rather than, you know, what someone else thought it was, you know, which is also quite important to just try and get it right. And it shows as well that this whole field is constantly changing. It's, I think one of the main things of all as well, right, I'll be honest, is I think a lot of the language of what is called to sew off and to ski it on the foods and like, bro, it's like, old, I don't mean it in any. I don't mean it in a derogatory way.
And you'll know this from another book that I'm, you know, I don't want to mention it again. Well, I mean, I guess for your, for your audience, probably, they could handle it, right. But it's, you know, flow, you know, the book flow, the the classic study on happiness by Haley Chima, Haley, I can't remember how you pronounce his name, but absolutely amazing book. He's an atheist, by the way, if you read it, there's gonna be some coverage. Right. So, but that book, you know, again, he identifies some things, you know, really, really powerful and important things about what makes people happy.
And again, like, not everything that we you know, not everything that we understood intuitively was necessarily right. You know, some things were, you know, you find with experimentation, we're not quite right. But anyway, it's very interesting subject, huge subject. But, yeah, absolutely. And this is something which, you know, will help us develop in our Islam, because, essentially, a lot of
I mean, a lot of young people, and it's a very good trait, you know, they, they want to be students. So knowledge they want to, you know, have a structured way of learning Islam. And that requires a lot of willpower. And a lot of these types of strategies. Something that just came to my mind when I was thinking when you're speaking was that
she called Bonnie actually used to do these water fasts. Right? And you don't really say 30 days, some say 40 days, yes, you wrote about them, and actually check this with a scholar. He said, Yeah, he did. So the amount of willpower you need to have to not eat for like a month, like and just drink water for a month is incredible. And how did they have it? Well, generally, if somebody wants to be an Islamic scholar, or just, you know, even just a general academic, you have to have an incredible amount of willpower. So therefore, you can transfer to other parts of your life because you don't apply to education. Education requires a lot of willpower because you have to essentially do an
activity which is
going to induce a lower dopamine, a trigger a thread and something else than your phone or whatever. So you're, you're competing, you know, with with all these other things. The other thing which I found online, was, people go through these dopamine fasts, right? Unless you tried them, they're very interesting. It's where you lower your dopamine to a level such that you can do low level dopamine activities much easier. So some people do a week some people do a day. Some people do a few hours. And you can actually constant people have said that you can concentrate more, you feel better.
And actually that
Some people do some really weird things like, they'll watch a clock, go around for an entire hour, they won't do anything, they won't think about their friends and family get on the phone, or talk to anybody, or they'll read the back of a tooth. Toothpaste, you know, the ingredients, something really incredibly boring, the lower their dopamine threshold in order to have that willpower. So
in many, many ways, this is a pandemic, that people have problems with scroll ism, they have problems with addictions. And all of the internet, people are trying to find ways of solving this, this problem. And here we have a course which actually deals with it. So so it's a course which can actually,
rather than you spending countless hours looking at this video, this article summarizing it, and going through essentially, decision paralysis, because I think some stuff online contradicts other stuff. You just have a set structure that you can actually follow.
You're muted, you're muted.
You're still muted.
I'm not muted, you are muted. I can see you're muted. If you if you look at your name, next to it, you have the mute sign.
And I can't unmute you, because
you can only unmute yourself.
Maybe if I remove you and add you Nope.
No, no, sir.
I can, I can
remove you from the studio. And you can click on the link again.
I can remove you from the studio shake, and you can come back again.
Is that it? That's it done. So the reason I was looking up like that is because I have a monitor. So I have a camera set up here. And behind the camera, I have a monitor so I can see. So it looks as if I'm looking at you, rather than looking at my computer screen. So if I was trying to look at you, do you get what I'm saying? Yeah, like what I'm doing I
move my screen from my lap, my my,
from my my laptop onto that monitor. I can't see that I somehow I must have moved it and muted it. I don't know what I don't know what happened wrong. But anyway.
Yeah. What were you saying, bro? Because it was like really interesting. I thought I wanted to say something. What I was basically saying I was speaking about about people being able to concentrate and stuff like that. Again, look, we Yeah, you're right, the course covers a lot of that stuff.
And you know what, I've realized that I do need to probably do another two or three courses.
Not big ones. But you know, there'll be really great to have one of the things I wanted to do was just the sort of practical course on how do you use what you've learned in the course to control anger? How do you use what you've learned in the course to to actually lose weight. So it's like a packed practical, you know, like, it only needs to be a couple of videos long. But I thought it would be really good here that the strategies, here's how you apply it to anger management, here are the strategies, here's how you apply it to. But also, like you said, just maybe rearranging some of the things and,
for example, the whole topic of focus, a lot of the stuff is covered in my course, but it needs to be refocused For Focus, if you get what I'm saying it needs to be, in a sense presented in a different way. Yeah, in order to be able to, you know, develop your focus, but you just need to,
you know, rearrange it. And again, like, I guess most people are reasonably, you know, I don't want to say intelligent, but people who've got the time and energy can easily do that, right? They can they can say, okay, I get this information, I can use this information now to develop my focus. But for somebody where they don't have the time, you know, so you just need to spell it out for them plain and simple, right? You're doing like this, and this and this. clarity is power. Yeah. Yep. You know, in fact, clarity is part of having willpower. So, me and someone else so in this office right now, and if I had to go to the shop to get murdered or fruit or something, and I actually knew the
route to the shop and the other person had to get on their phone and find it. It's the same task but clarity in one would make it easier for me I'd be more motivated, which is why, again, with goal setting you have the chin chili