Neuroplasticity & Peak Performance with Amina Zamani

Jennifer Norman:
Hello beautiful humans. Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast, your source for hope, healing, happiness and humanity. My name is Jennifer Norman. I'm the founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. This podcast is here to guide you on your journey of self love, empowerment, soul alignment and joy. With each episode, I invite beautiful humans from all corners of the globe to join me for open conversations about their life lessons and the important work that they are doing to help heal humankind. Take a moment now to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. I'm so glad you're here, joining me for today's show.

Jennifer Norman:
So I cannot wait for you all to meet my next guest. Amina Zamani is a bold, beautiful force of nature who I met personally recently at the International Women's Day event at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. And I can tell you that her talk just blew everybody away. And so I absolutely had to have her come on to the show to speak to you all today. Amina is so much more than an executive coach. She is a visionary who combines neuroscience, biohacking and wellness to help individuals and teams reach their peak potential. She's graced the TEDx stage and earned acclaim for her innovative methods in guiding others toward self liberated growth. She specializes in coaching high potential executives and her approach blends traditional coaching with neuroscience and spiritual practices, fostering lasting change. So today we're going to talk about how we can attain peak performance by overcoming shame and shifting our perspective of self identity. Hello, Amina, welcome to the movement.

Amina Zamani:
Hello. Thank you for having me.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, you look gorgeous. Thank you so much for being here. I am so excited because you are just such a gem and a lightning bolt of energy. And so I would just, first of all, like to start by having you share your awesome background. What motivated you to pursue a career in the field?

Amina Zamani:
Yeah. Thank you so much. What a lovely introduction. It's Friday. Like, what a wonderful way to end my week with you. I feel like I've said this before, like, I'm an archaeologist of the mind. Like, I just try to figure out the root cause of everything. A lot of times people come to me when, like in twelve step recovery, they say, I found the last house on the block.

Amina Zamani:
And so people say, I tried therapy and I tried this and I tried that, and then I just, like, I still didn't know what I was pushing against. And so a lot of times people come to me when they're super frustrated that they've read XYZ book and they've tried XYZ therapeutic session. And they still don't know how to integrate their change or find the root cause. And my work has been root cause analysis. I got into this work largely because I grew up feeling so afraid and ashamed and alone. And I was just looking for ways to feel better. And through that process, I thought maybe I could help my mom heal because she had a lot of depression. And so very early in my twenties, I got into this work, and I found neuro linguistics.

Amina Zamani:
And neuro linguistics is like behavioral neuroscience and psychology, and it helps you understand the root of our limiting beliefs and how that impacts our body and how that impacts our behavior. And early on, I started working with addicts, people that really had hardcore challenges. And I just thought I'd start with a very rough sort of difficult audience. You kind of like, if you can work with that population, it might equip you. And then I met some leaders who were really involved in the entertainment industry and in tech. And then I sort of started getting catapulted up into working with people at very high levels with a lot of influence. And I realized, actually, it was very, very much the same thing as working with addicts. Like the trauma, the difficulty was all there.

Amina Zamani:
And so I've been doing this work for over 16 years. It's been my life's work. And the changes that I've seen in people are unbelievable, because if people can actually shift their brain pathways and start building neuroplasticity in the ways that I work with people, it's permanent change.

Jennifer Norman:
Exactly. You're an Afghani woman, correct. Is that the way that you say it? I don't know if I'm saying that correctly. Thank you. And I know that that had an impact on the cultural differences between being in Afghanistan versus being in Los Angeles, where we are right now. It's like night and day. And especially as a woman.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, well, the culture that I come from is one of the most controversial cultures in the world, most controversial countries in the world after 911. And I would say that as a woman from that culture, you're a third of a citizen, basically. I was at a conference today where they were talking about the divide and economic divide amongst women and different races and cultures. And they were saying that white women will make $0.84 to $0.89 on the dollar to a white male. African woman will make about like $0.70. Latin women will make around $0.46 to the dollar. So when a white male retires at 65, a Latin woman has to work until basically 115 to be able to get to the same level as a male retiring at 65. Women, you know, save a lot more and have less savings than men.

Amina Zamani:
Right. Investments are challenging. Women don't get incentives. So, like, even in the Western world, we're trapped, and there's a divide and we don't have a lot of opportunity. And when you add misogyny and you add, I think there's misogyny globally. But in my culture, there seems to be a tremendous hatred and a divide of women. When you come from that culture, the generational trauma that people carry, a generational epigenetic trauma, is that whatever trauma and shock my mom carried gets passed down to me, if not resolved. So the thing that we're not looking at when you come from cultures, I'm Central Asian, you're Asian, I'm assuming.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes, yes.

Amina Zamani:
Right. So we have generational trauma, stuck emotions from our grandmothers and parents that travel down into our bodies that we're not even aware of. Right. This is what all the science is showing.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Amina Zamani:
So it's a lot harder for us Asian women to then normalize the shame and pain that we feel...

Jennifer Norman:
No wonder that we feel shame. It's no wonder that we feel like we're never good enough, because for centuries, we hadn't been. We've been told that we weren't exactly.

Amina Zamani:
And the system, the inherent systemic issue, becomes a distraction. If a woman can be more distracted on her beauty and her weight and looking proper and being punished for speaking up and being rewarded for doing more and being a workaholic, then we don't actually have to. We don't have time to fucking talk about our empowerment or equal wages or take a breath for creativity or creation. I mean, that's really what the biggest gaslight is for women in the United States and globally is that our nervous system is so fucked. Everybody just wants to have a glass of wine and not think because we're so overloaded. But creation, manifestation, moving the needle, comes from somewhat of a regulated nervous system for us. We actually have to have space and bandwidth to create. And when we're so distracted, we cannot.

Amina Zamani:
And so when working more and earning less, it's. Now, some people may say, well, if you're in a profession like sales or whatever, you're. It's not. It's even, but it's not. Because for women between the ages of 25 to 45, that's when the age and the economic divide gets really big. So you can start out equal, but men are getting promoted faster, women are doing more. And so it's problematic. And the solution that I have to this is let's be aware of the data, let's be aware of the information.

Amina Zamani:
I think it would be ignorant of me to say, well, I'm not going to address this because I don't want to be negative. That's toxic positivity. But in my opinion, it's like, well, let's look at the psychology that promotes us to hold on to these limitations. Right. What do I believe about myself in the world? Well, I believe that I have to do it alone, that I can't ask for help. And if I do ask for help, and it's never right. So I'm not supported. If we can start to dismantle the support barriers and structures that we've put in place out of our trauma, we can actually start to break these sort of universal norms that we have.

Amina Zamani:
But I think the answer is truly having the courage and bravery to not shut down and watch love is blind and drink wine, which is nothing wrong. I'm on season three of love is blind. Like, no problem, no problem, whatever. Do that. But then also make sure to address your own well being. And it's not taking a bath or getting a massage. It's the mental hygiene.

Jennifer Norman:
I was going to say, that's why the work you do is so critical, because there is all this pre existing wiring notwithstanding childhood trauma and all the stuff that happens to us and yada, yada, yada, all the stories that we replay in our minds, but we haven't really had the tools. We hadn't learned the tools to say, okay, this is time for a shift and I'm gonna really start creating a new life for myself. And this is how I do it. That is a skill that is not really taught in school.

Amina Zamani:
No, it's not taught in school. And a lot of times we think it's too fucking late. I'm over 25. Fuck it. Like, it's done.

Jennifer Norman:
I can't teach an old dog new tricks. Yeah, yeah.

Amina Zamani:
But it's almost like, what did you know by the time you were 25? Other than like, Andrew Huberman or whatever, like, I don't know, who I love...

Jennifer Norman:
Who I love, who has taught me that neuroplasticity, even though it's robust when you're young, you're still still neuroplastic even until old age. So it's never too late. Thank you, Andrew.

Amina Zamani:
Thank you for the Andrew Hubermans that were getting their PhDs in this, right? Like, he is an incredible inspiration. But like a lot of us, we think it's too late, and it's just not. It's just not. And the latest research and brain changes and rewiring your brain shows that positivity and saying nice things to yourself can make a massive difference. Massive difference.

Jennifer Norman:
Isn't it first, more important to erase the negative self talk.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Before you get to the positive?

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's done concurrently. Obviously, there's a lot of. Well, not rhetoric, but content around, only focus on the positive stuff. But then you can't really let it in unless you excavate the negativity. I'm a firm believer of that. But the way that the rewiring process even works is that we have these neuropathways that are sort of like a little dirt road when we're kids and we develop these negative belief systems, that those little dirt roads of negative belief structures become superhighways and they become automatic in our brain. And so something happens to us, and we think, I'm not good enough.

Amina Zamani:
I'm bad, I'm ugly, I'm stupid. How could I not be stupid? Why would they treat me that way? Why would they talk?

Jennifer Norman:
It's funny, because even hearing you say those words, I can almost feel, like, conscious. Like, jarring. Like, it gets into your body. Like, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, no, you tighten up. You constrict your whole, like, even thinking those things and hearing somebody say that about themselves, or even if it's just conjecture, and in a conversation like this, it's still. There's something there that's very triggering for so many, including myself. Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to erase those feelings once we have paved those super highways.

Jennifer Norman:
It's almost like trying to get rid of the super highway and create a new road is like starting over again. But obviously, it's worth it.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, it's obviously worth it. But it was a lot easier to build the negative pathways as kids because our brain were like sponges. Like, it just. We have what's called myelin. We have a lot of myelinated neurons in our brain. So you want to figure out people's neuroses and what gets, why they're so negative. Like, you can see how their brains are structured. They have a lot of myelinated neurons of those that negative self talk.

Amina Zamani:
When you have a myelinated neuron. Neuron is a brain cell. Myelin is just like, basically, look at it like a gel that wraps around a neuron that accelerates velocity by 1600 percent. And so a lot of us when we were kids picked up on what happened to us, and then it just got like. Imagine it like clay. You have, like, all these little bubbles running around in your brain of, like, these brain cells, and then clay just jumps all over them and hardens them, right? And so it's like these ideas of, I'm bad. Clay wraps around it, ugly brain, clay wraps around it, and then they're just like these hard bubbles that just keep fighting each other until you stop. You figure out what this clay is, and you start reversing it, and it's possible to reverse.

Amina Zamani:
The critical piece is to actually figure out what the root of it is. If you can do that and begin to affirm the opposite, it's the simplest way to do it. Over time, it can make a difference. Now, what I do with people is I figure out that root cause, and I have a four step belief change process that I do with them that fundamentally shifts their brain pathways. And then when they start saying the new positive belief, it's like an open canvas, so it's absorbed faster.

Jennifer Norman:
I've had some sessions with folks that do tapping. It reminds me of that as well, where you can actually help to create on pulse points and whatnot, different scripts that get into your system more somatically and help to rewrite certain pathways. So that's another avenue of doing it, which I think is pretty cool. Seems to have some impact on people who have tried that as well.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, I think the tapping is really powerful, too. This sort of gets into. It's like this four step leave change process. It's so funny because it's basically like a psychedelic experience in that you get to the root of what it is, and then you start to figure out all the reasons that you held onto this negativity. And then you do these things called perceptual positions, which Bill and Hillary Clinton used to do. They used to. It's like you float into somebody that could be a mentor for you, and they give you advice, and you look through the eyes of them channeling, and it starts reframing your brain, and then you do a bunch of other things that actually helps you, like, fully change your perspective. And The Course In Miracles says a change in perception is a miracle, and you can't unsee what you've opened up your purview.

Amina Zamani:
So when you have a limiting belief and you open up and you start to change it, now you have more access.

Jennifer Norman:
It's so true. It's like we create these mental boxes where we're supposed to like, stay in your lane or stay in your place, it's not appropriate for you to go venture out. Who do you think you are? All of these things that we think, you know, the voices inside our head that keep us small, that keep us staying on this course, which is not as productive or constructive or fulfilling as being able to make a dollar on the dollar. It's kind of like, well, I'm a woman, and so you're stuck rather than saying, like, a woman and I can make as much as I want to is because it doesn't have to be that way.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah. I mean, if somebody. Right, like, there are cultural belief systems that are true. Like, if they're. If you're in a racist society and someone that's from a different culture with darker skin, like, I consider myself a woman of color. As much positive affirmations as I say, I might still receive the racism, for example, but how it impacts me, how it gets to my soul, does it prevent me from doing the thing that I want to do? That's what we have control over. So I can't change. When someone looks at me and they think I'm Arab or Greek or Italian and may make an assessment about me, I can't change that.

Amina Zamani:
But what I can change is, do I let them into my inner circle? Do I allow their judgment, their toxicity, their negativity to impact my worth, my actions, my fucking efficacy of what I want to do? But we do. We don't realize that we do, but we do.

Jennifer Norman:
It's so true. And one of the things that I think that this exercise helps with is partly in knowing when to pause before you act. I think that a lot of times, because we have these initial impulses, because the road is so paved, then it becomes habitual for us to either think a certain way or to act or react in a certain way without taking that mind moment to step back and say, okay, is this in my best interest? Is this how my higher self would be reacting? Is this going to lead me down a path which is love and light? Or is it just going to be retaliation, bitterness and fuckery? And so you can do that every time you get on social media and you see a comment and you're just pissed off about it. I mean, you can engage every single time and it'll just build up cortisol and anger and animosity and piss and vinegar inside you. Or you can let it go and you can be like, you know what? Put it away. I don't want to live this way. I don't want feel this way. I got better things to do and I am an empowered person and I'm going to choose how I react and when I react, and if I do, it's going to be inspired action, not a reaction.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Inspired action, not a reaction. You know, I think sometimes people think that I know that I will have reached some kind of enlightenment when I can react differently in toxic situations. And what I've learned over time is actually, just don't put yourself in those toxic situations. Protect yourself. Protecting yourself is way better than expecting you to be different. Like, that's so, so critical because, yes, maybe a form of my well being is that I didn't react to XYZ person or I didn't yell at them or I just was calmer.

Amina Zamani:
But we get to set limits and we get to set boundaries. I heard this saying that said, when you're around your family, you have 3 hours before you fall back into an old role.

Jennifer Norman:
Not three minutes?

Amina Zamani:
Then you have three days of being your adult self before you slide really hard back into any kind of young triggered age. And so a lot of times people come to me and say, I was doing great, I was fine for the first few days. I don't know what happened. Fourth day, fifth day, I just lost my cool with my father or my mother. And it's like, yeah, we need to guard and protect ourselves.

Jennifer Norman:
Ram Das, he was saying, if you think that you're enlightened, spend a weekend with your family. That's exactly it. So what are some approaches that people can take to break free from these negative habits, this negative self talk?

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, it's just so interesting. Right. Because this is such a topic. Right. We want to be free fast. We want to take the pill, we want to drink the thing. We want to try it once. It just takes time and a desire to change.

Amina Zamani:
I think a lot of us actually think we want to change, but only if it takes about ten minutes.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Amina Zamani:
And then we don't really want to put the work in. I do some work with my mom, some EFT, and I try to do other work with her and she'll be like, only if it's going to take like five minutes. But I'm tired. I don't feel like it because emotions are so scary, because it's so challenging and draining for us to face our stuff.

Jennifer Norman:
The vulnerability of it.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, the vulnerability of it. But the reason we do that is because we judge ourselves. We think I am bad or I made I am the mistake rather than I made a mistake. If we removed the actual judgment of the experience, I think it'd be a lot easier to focus. So I would say the first step is, like, how would you treat a friend or a child that you really loved? Something that Tim Halbaum actually taught me. He was one of my instructors when I was learning neuro linguistics. As he said, would you, whatever you're saying to yourself, whatever limitation you're saying to yourself, would you teach this to a five year old? It's like, oh, I feel stupid. I'm like a failure.

Amina Zamani:
And they're like, why? Because I made this mistake. And then, so would you go to a five year old and say, you're so, so stupid?

Jennifer Norman:
Some people would probably say yes, but.

Amina Zamani:
Other people, yeah, you're gonna make this one mistake, and then you should feel stupid every time you make a mistake for the rest of your life. Would you actually teach that to a five year old? No, you wouldn't, right. So why would we still treat ourselves this way? So I think, like, if I can think of the steps that would be, like, the first one is to actually have a desire and willingness to change. Like, truly?

Jennifer Norman:
Yes.

Amina Zamani:
Like, enough is enough. Like, I really deeply want to make a change. Yeah. And the second one is to just recognize, free from judgment, what it is that you are doing. What is the behavior? And then I would say, third is understand the secondary gain. What does this behavior allow you to do? What does it get for you? How is it protecting you? A lot of times people say, I want to exercise, but I also want my rest. I want to be in a relationship, but I don't want to feel like I have to do everything for the person. I want to travel, but I also want to save money.

Amina Zamani:
Like, we have all these conflicts.

Jennifer Norman:
And is that valid? I would think that those are valid statements.

Amina Zamani:
They're all very valid. But underneath, some of those, people might say, I really want to change, but I don't have the energy or I'm too tired or whatever it is. Like, we have to figure out the secondary gain, because people may say, I want to rest and not get up early, but really what it could be is that they are deeply afraid of being visible and seen. And so if they're exercising and they're feeling really good, then they get to do more of what they want. If they get to do more of what they want, they're visible. And if they're more visible, it's dangerous. So we tell ourselves, I want to rest and create this conflict. There's this noise of resistance that we have.

Amina Zamani:
That sounds so convincing.

Jennifer Norman:
Mm hmm. And sometimes it's like our conscious mind makes up these stories, but our subconscious mind is really. I mean, that's where all the magic is. That's where all the power is, is that, like, you don't even realize sometimes that you're rationalizing your behaviors or your actions or the way that you're thinking. It's really about what is really serving you. You're being served somehow. That's why you're not changing. What is that? And if you think that is the, like, the best that you can do, there's probably so much more psychology in it that I'm not really getting to, but it's like there's something in it that is making you feel comfortable rather than uncomfortable and growing and changing and making something because you might fear the change.

Jennifer Norman:
You might fear the unknown. I had heard a statement where people are, like, people would rather cling to the suffering that they know rather than move to an unknown joy because it's scary.

Amina Zamani:
It's absolutely right. Yeah. I had a client that I worked with who was very, very beautiful. They were really, like, universally attractive, basically like a supermodel, just very, very stunning. And they believed that they were ugly, and it was like, that's impossible. Like, you can't believe that. How is that even true?

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, spend a minute in the modeling industry, and it will cut you down. There's. I mean, I'm surprised that anybody thinks that they're beautiful being a model, because you are nitpicking to the nth degree. It is insufferable.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, for sure. And so she had this belief, but it was just, like, unfathomable for me to even see. And so she was like, men just don't like me. They never approach me. And so we did some work, and we did a lot of work. And what we realized is that she had a repressed memory of being raped. When she was nine years old, she was raped by her father, and she couldn't comprehend that someone she really loved would actually ever do something so bad to her. I mean, at nine years old, to be raped, I can't imagine the physical pain, the emotional betrayal.

Amina Zamani:
And it was left, and she never talked about it with anybody. So she developed a belief in that moment. Is that I'm bad and ugly.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Amina Zamani:
Yeah, it was bad. Things are happening to me. I'm bad. So it makes sense that we as children would blame ourselves because it's a logical response. It's illogical for us to think, oh, my God, my parents are deficient.

Jennifer Norman:
You couldn't survive because I was such a perfect child. This happened. It's like it's in fathomable, and it's an irrational, you know, in a young person's child or in a young person's mind. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Amina Zamani:
So she made up that belief system to keep herself safe. So even though it was really hurting her and that it was impacting her relationship, it was safer for her to believe that it was her fault and she was ugly, because then she could control that. She could control the fact that she was ugly and dumb and stupid and unwanted than to control someone else's behavior. When she realized that she had that belief and she changed it, she started to feel safer in her body. She started to speak up for herself. If she felt that there was some kind of injustice or, you know, whatever, she started to do things that helped her see that she wasn't bad and ugly, and she changed her belief that to say, like, I'm safe inside of myself, I'm beautiful, I'm okay. And her life changed and her world changed.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, I love that. And I think that, I mean, this speaks so beautifully to the idea of shame and these secrets, because I had heard of a phrase which I think is so true. It's like, we're only as sick as the secrets that we keep. And so if we can eradicate secrets and the feeling of the shame that we're hiding and let it see the light of day, do the shadow work to be able to bring it into the sunlight and eradicate it, poof, just like bad fungus or bacteria want you to shine a light on it, and it cannot survive, then we start the healing process, and we're able to say, you know what? It happened, and it's terrible that it happens, but it's not going to define me any further. And you can start living your life forward. You can start feeling like, I don't have to hide this from any relationship that I've had, because they know, and it's out in the open, and they're okay with me, and they're okay with it, and they're okay. Everybody is okay. Rather than feeling like you have to be and pretend to be somebody that you're not, because that unto itself is energy is just sapped when you have to live, like, dualistically in that way.

Amina Zamani:
I know we have such a need to be right as human beings that sometimes we'll hurt ourselves just to prove our point, to be right.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it's so true. Oh, Amina darling, I could speak to you for days. I think about all of these topics because it's really so important. I feel like, yeah, I mean, we're just scratching the surface of the idea of the mind and how powerful it is and how a change in perspective, shifting away from limiting beliefs, getting away from shame and feeling like we can ultimately do that work to be okay with ourselves, to be empowered and to live our lives truly and richly in any way that we wish to. Very much in alignment with our personality and our purpose and doing the great things on this planet that we are really set out to do. And I thank you for being one of those people who have clearly found your purpose, you've clearly found your superpower, and you're helping so many people find theirs. And I just think that you are just a godsend to so many. How can people find you and work with you if they wish to?

Amina Zamani:
Oh, thank you. They can find me on Instagram, at @aminazamani and same with LinkedIn. Okay, those are the two avenues and my website, aminazamani.com. Those are good ways, you know, to get additional information. I post here and there. I need to, I think, be more active, but tips and tricks on vulnerability, the brain changing beliefs, finding positivity, that sort of thing.

Jennifer Norman:
Oh, I love it. Excellent. Well, more to come. Ladies and gents, this is Amina Zamani and she can help you on your neuroplasticity journey to more positivity and a more fulfilled life. Thank you so much, Amina, for joining me today. It was such a pleasure.

Amina Zamani:
Thank you. Oh my gosh, I feel like we're just getting started.

Jennifer Norman:
More to come. Thank you.

Amina Zamani:
Oh thank you.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.