I broke something last week. I told you the mindset and skill you built your life, career, and business on, however successful, has kept you in a loop and feeling stuck. And that’s triggering, of course. I’m already great at it. It works! I’ve had so much success doing it this way. Why would I change? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
The sunk cost mentality can keep you small.
Story time.
This one comes after Singapore, after the company and I parted ways. I was mid-second-pregnancy, taking my existential crises to the kitchen instead of firing on all cylinders in a company.
And yet, I started my own consultancy. Then coaching found me. Or I should say, I went into it kicking and screaming. My bestie insisted I was a natural and encouraged me to apply. So I asked Allah for the answer, and got a full-ride scholarship. So I told myself, okay, then this IS for me. Alhamdulillah.
I committed to coaching.
In class, in coach training, I went all in on learning. This wasn’t just theory. It required me to do the self-development work as I trained to become a coach.
Class probed who I actually was. Where I was. Who I might want to become.
Honestly? I didn’t know. I was just feeling my way around a dark room filled with furniture.
Meanwhile, and this happens to me constantly: whenever I set out to do one thing, something else pops up as a side story, then quietly becomes the main one. I was helping a Muslim business with strategy and marketing. Just helping, the way I always just help. And they loved what I brought so much, they wanted me to become their CEO.
Wait, what? Interesting.
I should mention, I’d already been COO and director of two startups at the same time, and brought in serious revenue. So it wasn’t a total surprise they’d ask.
What surprised me was my own reaction.
That exact week, coach training had us design our life’s purpose. My first internal response: I’m a Muslim. My life’s purpose is to serve Allah.
Obviously. But okay, let’s follow along, I thought.
The exercise was genuinely useful, useful enough that I built my own version of it afterward, one I think fits what Muslims actually need better:
Our ultimate purpose, as Muslims, is to serve Allah. We are each an Abd, a servant of Allah. And underneath that fixed purpose, we carry a dunia purpose, an earthly amanah, something entrusted to us specifically to cultivate and use in service of that purpose.
That felt better to me. I could get behind it. And it lines up with my clients too, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Shout out to the non-Muslims here, genuinely: thank you for staying open to a shift that isn’t always fully aligned with your own beliefs. We’ve witnessed it together, it still taps into something real in you.
So, back to the story. I sat down and did the exercise. I wrote my actual life purpose statement.
And nowhere, nowhere, in that statement was there anything pointing me toward becoming a CEO.
Bruh.
I was even surprised. Here’s what came out instead:
I am the cinnamon bun so that my people can become impactful, useful people, elevating the ummah.
Go ahead, read that twice. I did too. You’re probably thinking, wait, you’re a cinnamon bun?
The back story.
Here’s where that came from. Years before, pre-COVID, while raising my kids and running my Muslim women’s website, which at its peak had over 30 women writing for it from 15 countries, I also started something I called Souq Sunday, a tiny marketplace at my house. I wanted a space where women could gather and talk about work, life, career, whatever needed saying.
So I lured them with homemade cinnamon buns. Real ones, like Cinnabon. I’d proof the dough at night and bake them fresh at fajr. Women from every corner of the community would show up, eat, talk, sometimes stay for hours. People started bringing food to share too. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I just loved being around Muslim women, sharing my buns.
Over time it turned into a whole thing. Then the pandemic hit. Lol. No more in-person anything.
But it left an imprint.
Because when I sat with that life statement years later, I recognized exactly what I’d been doing at that table: bringing people together, creating a safe space, gently instigating a different way of thinking about work and life.
I was the cinnamon bun. Warm, familiar, the thing that actually got people to sit down and open up.
I guess I was a little ahead of my time. Most of the women who showed up were decades younger than me. I’m still in touch with a lot of them. They’re my kids now, my girls. They’ve gotten married, had children of their own. One passed away recently, may Allah have mercy on her.
I’m not the cinnamon bun anymore, because I’ve grown and evolved. I’d say I’m more like a well now, a source, a place where those who are ready can come untangle themselves from their loop.
Anyway, back to the story. When I wrote that statement and saw no CEO title, and weighed the impact that title would carry, it felt out of alignment with who I’d already become.
I declined the offer.
I left a lot of people gobsmacked, including myself, honestly. But I checked in with my heart, prayed istikhara, listened to what Allah was whispering underneath all that outside noise, and I knew.
PS: declining it didn’t mean everyone else accepted it. I needed to accept it for myself. And although the chatter hit me, Alhamdulillah, I could gracefully hold space for their concerns while gently pushing their ideas away.
Besides, Allah is the best of planners.
Here’s what happened after: my late mother was diagnosed with cancer. I spent months at a time away from my own family, on the other side of the world, to care for her. Had I taken that CEO role, I don’t believe I could have answered the honor Allah gave me in caring for her until she left this world. Alhamdulillah.
The statement worked. Not because it predicted the future. Because it reoriented me before I even needed it, so that when the real test showed up, I already knew which way was true.
So here’s what I want you to sit with this week: if you wrote your own life statement honestly, right now, what wouldn’t be in it? What opportunity, however good it looks from the outside, might actually be walling off the very thing you’re here to do?
I still find it funny, honestly, that mine involved baked goods. But girl, I get it. Sometimes the truest thing about you shows up in the strangest possible metaphor. What’s yours?
With you on becoming the person Allah will be proud of.
Coach Gemi, Leadership | Identity Coach
Learn more about me here.