Interview With Seema Malji | #NatterwithNaffy

Seema is a mind coach. Her mission is to help her clients remove mental barriers so they can lead the life they want. I had the pleasure of working with Seema and can confirm she is one of the people who helped me regain my confidence after years of self-loathing and self-depreciation.

What is a mind coach and how did you get into coaching?

 A mind coach is someone that will help you to create the results in your life that you want using your thinking. By using coaching tools and models, a mind coach makes it easy for you to break invisible mental barriers that are stopping you from creating your dream life and creates clarity with how to get there.

I guess it’s like any other coach, I always explain it like, footballers have coaches, entrepreneurs have coaches, boxers have coaches. It’s not because they’re bad at football, in fact, Lionel Messi and Elon Musk are pretty flipping great at what they do but by having a coach they can see where they need to put their attention, focus on what will make them the best and always have someone they can go to that will dedicate themselves when they want to make progress. 

 I got into coaching from my studies in therapy. One of my lecturers was a coach and a lot of what I would hear her speak about would resonate with me. I’ve always read and studied other coaches and it changed my life in the best way, so I finally got trained and uncovered the secrets.

I’ve always had friends say to me they think I’m like their life coach, but I used to laugh it off, thinking it was like some airy-fairy sensitive stuff. Boy was I wrong. We help make amazing things happen as life coaches and when clients create results that they’ve never expected before in their lives, it’s the best feeling.

 What are some of the common misconceptions people have about coaching?

1. That it’s for people that might have something wrong in their life, 
2. That it’s just for really rich people, 
3. That it’s some woo woo rub crystals fantasy stuff, 
4. That you can get coaching from self-help books, 
5. That it’s just like therapy,
6. That they’ll do better without one, haha.

What is the difference between a life coach and a counsellor? 

A counsellor helps to bring awareness to thoughts and feelings and this can be really useful if you are struggling with functioning at the baseline in your daily life.

Coaching helps to create that awareness of what is going on in your mind and teaches you how to use it to your own benefit, to optimise you and move your life up to the next level.

 During your studies, you also touched on Islamic Psychology. Why did you feel this is important and can you delve into the links between Islam and Psychology? 

 There’s a massive misconception that religion and science can’t mix, whereas in Islam, science is massively relevant and where psychology is concerned, so much of the advice and teaching we’ve had modelled ties into psychology. It’s often just not explained that way.

A lot of psychology talks about the study of self and the ego, which is a massive part to play in Islamic Psychology too. The reason I thought it was so important to study Islamic psychology was that people love to have a good and bad narrative where religion is concerned, very black and white which I’ve seen lead to a lot of people disconnecting from religion completely. 

Interestingly Islamic psychology promotes therapeutic behaviours as normal human behaviours amongst peers, which I absolutely love, and share with all my clients Muslim or not. I think that it’s a big piece of what is missing in our world nowadays. 

You co-host the Funny Tinged podcast which has become a little community. What made you start the show and how do you see it developing? 

Funny-tinged started with me and Naima (co-host) having deep conversations that we wanted other people to be able to join in on. As South Asian Muslim women, it wasn’t often we got to hear about or discuss colourism and inequalities the way we deal with them in this country. A lot of the topics we discuss are debatable but the point of the podcast is that difficult conversations are spoken about and opened up so we can grow as a society. Now we have listeners across the globe, so that’s super nice.

 You talk a lot about mindset, Why is it important to develop a growth mindset? 

 When we’re young we’re told things like ‘oh, you’re so clever’ and ‘oh you’re not very good at sports’. These then become internal limitations. Hearing ideas like that in our foundational years creates wiring (neural pathways) in the brain that makes us believe that those things are true. A growth mindset helps us to break and rebuild new pathways in the brain so we can actually become whatever we want and not just what our surroundings have taught us. It means we can continually get better. 

The alternative is to stay the same, a fixed mindset. Most of my clients can tell you, life is much more fully lived when we grow our minds and create more in the world beyond just ourselves.

 Do you have any tips for someone wanting to create a growth mindset within themselves?

1.  Dive into failure- most people don’t want to deal with failure so end up doing nothing instead of something. The best growth and education is always in failure so DIVE IN.
2. Give up on dwelling, if you direct your mind constantly into your past, you can’t grow and will stay stuck. Often our mind’s are in a past timeline within the present moment. So come back to now.
3. Be willing to put in the work- Being intelligent is useless if you have a fixed mindset. ‘Clever’ and being ‘gifted’ has a limit to how far it will take you in life. A growth mindset is limitless, so seek education and take new uncomfortable paths. Plenty of geniuses win game shows from their sofa, plenty of dropouts make global change.

 You can follow Seema on Instagram here.