I want you to picture the woman you are trying to become. Maybe she’s successful in her career. Maybe she’s an incredible wife or mother. Maybe she’s built a business. Maybe she’s serving her community. But go a little deeper than that.
What is she like?
How does she carry herself when things don’t go her way? How does she make people feel? What is her relationship with Allah like? What is her relationship with herself like? When I picture that woman, I don’t picture somebody frantically running from one achievement to another. I picture a woman who is grounded.
Focused. Dignified. Calm. She has goals. She has ambition. She wants to do things well.
But she isn’t constantly fighting herself.
She isn’t completely drained by the life she has built. She has clarity about what matters to her. Her modesty doesn’t prevent her from having influence. Her gentleness doesn’t prevent her from being formidable. And her ambition doesn’t cost her her peace. So how do we become that woman?
And what is actually getting in the way?
Why do we feel so stuck?
When women come to work with me, it’s usually because they want change. They feel stuck. And what’s interesting is that the problem is very rarely that they’re doing nothing. If anything, they’re doing too much. Too much thinking. Too much ideation. Too many possibilities. Too much going around in circles.
Their minds are full of ideas and they have absolutely no idea which one deserves their energy. Some of them even have the idea. They start. They get excited. They make dua for Allah to make it possible. They start building the posters, the systems, the content. People tell them it sounds amazing.
Maybe they even make some money. And then… Nothing. So eventually: “Maybe this isn’t where my passions lie.” “It was only a side project anyway.” “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.” “There are too many people doing it better than me.” And they move on. But what if the idea wasn’t useless?
What if what happened was actually giving you information? Because one of the biggest things I have learnt through this work is this:
Sometimes we don’t need another idea. We need to understand what our existing ideas have been trying to tell us.
Sometimes the idea isn’t the problem. The strategy is.
One sister came to me convinced that what she needed was passive income. She was shy, she told me. She would never stand up and speak in front of people she didn’t know. So the dream was simple: Create something once. Put it online. Let it continue making money in the background.
And let’s be fair — if you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’ve probably been sold some version of that dream too. But she kept starting. And stopping. Starting. And stopping. Nothing ever really went anywhere. She thought perhaps she lacked discipline. Maybe she wasn’t confident enough.
Maybe she just didn’t know how. Maybe she needed to push herself harder. But then we started looking at her actual life. And her whole story was relational. Everything she spoke about with warmth involved other people. Volunteering at a food bank with a friend. Helping at an event.
Working with an organisation she deeply cared about. Even the ordinary morning catch-ups she used to have with her team at work. Every experience that seemed to bring her alive involved:
People.
A shared purpose.
A team.
Connection.
Yet the future she had designed for herself involved sitting alone, quietly building something in the background with almost no human interaction. Then she wondered why she couldn’t make herself do it. The idea itself wasn’t necessarily bad.
But the way she was trying to achieve it was fighting almost everything her life had already told us about her.
That matters. Because sometimes the answer isn’t: “I need to become more disciplined.” It might be:
“I need to stop building in a way that requires me to fight who I naturally am.”
Think about your own life. What experiences made you feel really alive? What have you done where you thought: I would happily do that again. Maybe even: I would do that for free. Who were you with? What role were you playing? What were you actually doing? Those memories are giving you information.
They are showing you the conditions in which you come alive.
Being capable of something doesn’t mean it belongs in your life
Another sister had already built a successful one-to-one business. She could do the work. She could get clients. She had already proven she was capable. From the outside you could easily think:
There. That’s the answer.
Except she realised she didn’t actually want to spend her working life operating on her own. She missed being part of something. She missed the team. The camaraderie. The shared purpose. By the time she came to me she said:
“Everything in my life feels like it’s up for review.”
She had ideas everywhere. Everything felt like it could be the answer. And nothing felt clear. I remember speaking to her quite early on and telling her what I thought she might eventually build. Her response was basically:
Absolutely not. That sounds exhausting.
Which was fair. Because at that point it was just another idea somebody else had given her. So we went backwards. We looked at her life. Her experiences. The things she repeatedly did. The roles she naturally took. What gave her energy. What people relied on her for.
And over the next few weeks she reached almost exactly the same conclusion herself. The difference?
This time she had evidence.
Her own life had been pointing towards it. And we uncovered something else. She had always described herself as a little bland. Boring. Nothing particularly special. But that wasn’t what the evidence showed at all. When she felt passionate about something, she created that passion in other people too.
She created enthusiasm. She drew people in. She built camaraderie. She created community around the things she believed in. Suddenly even the business she had walked away from made sense. The lesson wasn't:
“You can’t run a business.”
She clearly could. It was:
“Whatever you build has to contain the conditions that bring you alive.”
For her, that meant passion. People. Community. Camaraderie. A shared experience. She is now on the journey towards building something completely different from the work she spent most of her career doing. And yet strangely enough… it looks much more like her. Because being capable of building something is not the same as wanting to spend your life sustaining it.
The woman you are trying to become isn't simply capable of achieving things.
She is building a life she can actually inhabit.
Sometimes we diagnose the wrong problem
Another sister had convinced herself she was a procrastinator. Except when we looked at her life and achievements, the evidence didn’t really support that. She had also convinced herself that she needed to work with young people. Why? Because she loved growth. She found it difficult being around people who were closed off to new ideas, settled in their ways or uninterested in improving.
So she assumed: The opposite of that must be young people. She tried different things. Youth work. Different projects. Different directions. And every attempt that didn’t quite work became another piece of evidence against herself. Maybe I don't follow through. Maybe I'm not capable. Maybe I don't know what I want.
But the actual pattern wasn't young people. It was growth. She loved growing. She loved people who wanted to improve. She loved encouraging people forward. She loved community. And she hated watching communities become closed off and exclusionary. Age had never been the defining factor.
Orientation was.
Did the people around her actually want to grow? Once we stopped forcing the “youth” idea and started looking at what she genuinely cared about, a completely different direction started to emerge. She didn't need another idea.
She needed to understand the thread running through the ideas she already had.
Sometimes what you dismiss as ordinary is actually incredibly valuable
I'll give you one more. A sister described one of her strengths to me as:
“I'm a good listener.”
And she was. People came to her. They opened up. She genuinely enjoyed listening. So naturally she assumed that was her contribution. But something didn't fit. Because when family members came to her with the same problem again… and again… and again… with absolutely no intention of doing anything differently…
she found it exhausting. She became frustrated. So listening itself couldn't be the whole thing. What she loved was somebody coming to her confused or overwhelmed and leaving with: a clearer way forward, a practical step, a solution, something they could actually do. That gave her energy. She wasn't simply a listener.
She helped people solve real problems.
Listening was one of the tools she used to do it. Then something else appeared. She noticed a problem amongst women who wanted to homeschool their children. They were asking: What should I teach? What order should I teach it in? How do I know whether my child is progressing?
What outcomes am I actually working towards? And this sister happened to work professionally in curriculum and assessment development. She knew how to structure progression. She knew how to create learning outcomes. She knew how to think about what someone should know by the end of a period of learning.
Suddenly something that had always felt completely ordinary to her had a very practical application. She could combine her ability to understand people with a professional skill she'd spent years developing. Before that, she kept telling me: “I just like listening.” There was so much more sitting underneath that sentence.
And I think this is why sometimes we need somebody else to look at our lives with us.
We are standing too close to them.
The things that feel completely ordinary to you may actually be incredibly valuable.
The clues were already there
If you look at all of these women, none of them needed me to invent a completely new person for them to become.
The clues were already there.
One was trying to work alone when her whole life showed that she came alive around people. One was perfectly capable of building a business — but had built one without the passion, people and community she needed. One thought she needed a completely different audience when she actually needed people who shared her appetite for growth.
One thought her contribution was listening when the deeper pattern was helping people move from confusion to practical action. And I think that's the bit we miss. We are constantly asking:
What should I do?
What business should I start? What career should I move into? What qualification should I do? What should I build? Maybe there is another question that has to come first.
What has my life already been showing me?
What patterns keep appearing? What naturally brings me alive? What drains me? What problems do I repeatedly notice? What do people already come to me for? What value am I creating without even thinking about it? And I want to make something really clear. Not every answer needs to become a business.
I think the online world has conditioned us into believing every gift needs to become an income stream. It doesn't. Maybe it becomes a business. Maybe it becomes a charity. Maybe it becomes something you build in your masjid. Maybe it changes how you raise your children. Maybe you create something for your extended family.
Maybe you help three neighbours. Maybe you mentor one younger sister. Maybe nobody ever knows your name. That doesn't mean you didn't create value. The real question isn't:
“How do I monetise my strengths?”
It's:
“What has Allah given me, and how can I use it well?”
Maybe you're not as stuck as you think
Come back to the woman at the beginning. Grounded. Focused. Dignified. Calm. She has ambition. She wants to create value. She wants to contribute. She wants to do good.
But she isn't constantly fighting herself.
She isn't building another life that leaves her exhausted. She knows what matters to her. She knows herself. She recognises what Allah has placed in her hands. And she doesn't need every mile of the road mapped out before she begins.
She has direction.
And she takes the next step. Perhaps that's how we become that woman. Not by finding one perfect idea. Not by endlessly adding more to ourselves. Not by copying somebody else's route. But by understanding ourselves better. Learning from what hasn't worked. Recognising what Allah has already given us.
And taking the next sincere step. Because the value may not be something you need to invent. You're already creating it. You're already solving problems. You're already contributing.
You may simply need to learn how to read the evidence.
Aysha
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