Your Mind Can Heal Your Life with Mehdi Akbary

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:
Sometimes the universe brings you unexpected gifts. We go through hard times and adversities only to realize that they were put before us to help us build up resilience, discover our own inner strength, and inspire our desire to help those around us. My guest today is a living testament of those gifts. Mehdi Akbary is a humanitarian and a philanthropist. Mehdi was born in Afghanistan and was pronounced paralyzed from the waist down. People told his parents that his condition was God's will and any attempt to correct the problem would be blasphemy. But Mehdi learned how to walk by the age of seven. Despite his early tenacity, his challenges were far from over.

Jennifer Norman:
He lost his mother and five siblings while trying to escape the war when he was only eleven years old. Today, Mehdi lives in Toronto, Canada, where he is a speaker and he runs workshops to help Afghans realize their true potential. He also is the author of the book Five Laws of Interchange. It's my honor to welcome Mehdi to the show.

Mehdi Akbary:
Thank you very much, Jennifer. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak at your podcast and looking forward to this conversation.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes, thank you so much for being my guest today. Now, your early experience certainly had an impact on the man that you are today and the work that you do. Can you tell us some of the most powerful lessons that you've learned as children?

Mehdi Akbary:
I think up to seven years old. Whatever we learn at that short period of time stays with us for the rest of our lives. Those crucial moment actually determines our future. We're actually born twice. That's the way I usually tell everybody. We're born twice. Once we're born, we're born. That has nothing to do with us.

Mehdi Akbary:
And we grow up and we don't know what is right, what is wrong, and we're all taught what is right, what is wrong, what should we do? What should we not do? So there's the next stage in life where you actually very few people are born, born again. In this world, very few people actually realize. Wake up and realize that's not who they are. They're a lot more than what they believe or other people believe of them. That is when you really, truly born again. You realize your potentials, you realize how intelligent you are, you realize the opportunities that you can create in your life, but unfortunately, very few people do. When I was young, as you mentioned, I was pronounced paralyzed from the waist down. And when you live in a society, everything is predetermined.

Mehdi Akbary:
Going against that, in some cases suicide. For some reason, I did go against the societal norm. Why? I don't know. I believe that at the beginning when they said, I cannot walk anymore, and I believed them. They said that this is my destiny. I believed them. I was too young to know anything. All I was told to pray to God, and I did pray to God.

Mehdi Akbary:
Day and night, I prayed to God. I saw other children's play and why can I do that? Why can't I run? Why can't I walk? These are the questions constantly bothered me and. But without any answer. When I was about five years old, I got my answer. I was playing with the knife my brother left. My mom usually put me outside the house. We had a mud house. People are really poor in Afghanistan.

Mehdi Akbary:
And we lived in one of the poorest part of the country. Really isolated for a lot of people like me. We thought beyond the mountains that surrounded us. We thought there was no other world we didn't know. We thought, this is it. So my brother forgot the knife next to me. And I started playing with piece of wood, trying to make a toy out of it, and it slipped and I cut my index finger to the bone. And I was scared because my mom always told me to, just don't do anything, just stay there, don't move.

Mehdi Akbary:
I pressed it with my thumb and I cut piece of some clothes from blanket that my mom put me on. And I wrapped it around my finger, trying to hide it from my mom. After a couple of days, I realized that the bleeding stopped. And I kept watching it. It started healing itself. The wound just slowly got away. And after a week, it was almost back to normal. And I was mesmerized by it.

Mehdi Akbary:
I didn't know what fixed it before. When I had a fall or something happened, the only thing we had was Vaseline. My mom would bring the Vaseline and just rub it on our hand. Yeah, to cure it all. I thought that's what cured or healed everything. But I never put a Vaseline on this wound. What the hell happened? And my mom. I asked so many questions before from my parents.

Mehdi Akbary:
So afraid to ask them questions because my questions apparently was not normal. But I kind of dared to ask them one more question. I said, mom, who healed my finger? And my mom said, God. And I said, mom. But I never prayed to God. How did God know about my finger? I prayed to God all day long, all year long about my feet. Why doesn't he take care of my feet if it was God? Oh, she got mad because I questioned God. And she really got mad and warned me never ever to question God again.

Mehdi Akbary:
Especially outside this house. If you do, I'll break your hand as well. I was the child. I was so afraid. I only had my hands. But I did realize there was something inside me. There is something inside me that takes care of me, that heals my wounds. But if it can heal my wounds, I'm sure it can fix my legs.

Mehdi Akbary:
And that's when everything started. And from that day on, every time and anything in my life, any challenges that I have in my life, I look at this scar that I have in my index finger and I say, there's something inside me. I know it'll show me the way. That's the strongest or the best lesson I've learned in life. That whoever you are or your outside world is an exact reflection of your inside world. And if you want to change your outside world, stop trying to do stuff at the outside world. Change your inside world, the outside world to change by itself.

Mehdi Akbary:
And that's what I've been practicing all my life.

Jennifer Norman:
Amazing. I had another guest on that was talking about locus of control and people who feel that they are responsible for their lives and their outcomes and then others who feel it's because of other things. Other things are at stake and other things are at work and causing your life to be the way that it is. And it almost seems like in that moment, at five years old you learned that the locus of control was within you and that God was a force of God, or whatever people might want to call it, was within you and had the power to heal and had the power to change and make things better.

Mehdi Akbary:
And Jennifer, I don't want to be rude or anything or make somebody upset, but it is, in a way, it is really insulting to our intelligence. Thinking that my mom make me mad. My friend was responsible for my stress. The economy is like that. My boss is like that. That is in a sense. But what you're basically saying to me is that your boss is in control of your life, your friend controls your emotions. Someone else controls your success or decides on your success or failure.

Mehdi Akbary:
That is, in a sense, pathetic, Jennifer. But unfortunately, that's how we've grown up. That's what they teach us. That's how we learn from a very young age. It is the outside world that decides. Your faith is your outside world that decides your destiny, which is the opposite, that notion by itself, believing that itself, you lose control. So why don't you just wait for the outside world to do something for you then? Why all this struggle then? It doesn't work. I tell I have two daughters, and I stole an idea from a talk show, a really good speaker.

Mehdi Akbary:
One day I played that trick on them, and I told them I lost my car key. I was looking for it outside, and I said, can you please help me? And they kept looking for it. And after a few minutes, they said, we can't find it. I said, keep looking, keep looking. And my wife came and we're looking up for this key. And after about ten minutes, everybody was frustrated. And finally my daughter said, are you sure you lost it here? I said, no, I lost it inside the house. And they were all pissed at me and angry at me.

Mehdi Akbary:
What the hell are you doing here then, Jennifer? That's exactly what we do in life. The reason most people are frustrated in life, stress in life, because they are looking for stuff in the wrong place. They're looking for success in the wrong place. They're looking for happiness in the wrong places. And you will be frustrated because it's not there. It's not there. I don't care how much you look for success. You go for success.

Mehdi Akbary:
It is not there. You have to look here. And that is hard for people to actually to absorb, because subconsciously we have learned no money brings happiness. Let me go after that. Happiness is just around the corner. Oh, I'll be happy if I pass my high school diploma. Oh, if I want. Once I graduate from university, oh, once I get a job, it's not there.

Mehdi Akbary:
Keep looking. And these are the stuff that, unfortunately, we never teach our children because nobody has taught us.

Jennifer Norman:
I feel like perhaps a long, long, long time ago, humanity must have known that we had more power than we feel like we do today. In many cases, I think that we have been conditioned. It's almost like society has created a conditioning where we forget. We forget that we have agency over our own lives. And so we end up very, very, almost stuck in this minutiae, stuck in these ruts where we feel like we can't go left. We can't go right because we have to. We have to. We have to.

Jennifer Norman:
Instead of the mindset of, we get to, we get to. So we get to. I get to choose. I get to choose my reaction. I get to decide if that's going to trigger me or not. And even recognizing that, oh, I lost my car keys, it's not that frustrated me, it's that I'm frustrating myself about losing the car keys.

Mehdi Akbary:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Jennifer, just if you observe any child, a person is life. When we are young, we're all encouraged. Come on, you can do anything and can imagine. Do whatever you want to do. We play all kind of games. We will make a horse out of a stick.

Mehdi Akbary:
We fly and do all that stuff. And our parents buy us stuff for us to help or create more imaginary world because it is possible. And all of a sudden, when we grow a little older, we go to school, they tell us the opposite, nah, you can't do that anymore. That was childish. Because when you were a child, you can't imagine anymore. Stick to the reality. Conform, conformity. Do this, do that.

Mehdi Akbary:
And unfortunately, we believe them again. And we believe them. And those create creative mind that we have. We kind of put them into use of very, very limited things. Okay, you can do this. You can do this. Only you can do that. Forgetting that we can do a lot better.

Mehdi Akbary:
We can do more than that. Because the society here is everything for human being. It's all about survival. It's all about survival. The mind operates like that. It's all about survival. The mind doesn't understand happiness. It doesn't understand sadness.

Mehdi Akbary:
It doesn't understand right from wrong. It doesn't know anything. It's only about survival. If you tell your mind that I hate my parents, the mind is not going to say, hey, hold on. Hold on. They're your parents. No. The mind says, oh, yeah.

Mehdi Akbary:
Remember that time when they did this to you? They did that to you. It will create stories for you, to force you or to force you into doing something against your parents. Because the mind thinks parents is a threat. So when they teach us something, when they tell us that you can or cannot do that, once we believe them that we can only do so much, the mind says, yeah, you can do so much. Why? Because nobody has done it around you. Your parents said, so. Could your parents do any better? No, you can't. So you have to be better.

Mehdi Akbary:
Listen to your parents. So they teach us. They try. The parents teach us how to make a living, not how to live. Nobody teaches us how to live, everybody teach us how to make a living, and that's what we learn. And it is for us in any human life. Unfortunately, in this day and age, that's what we're all about, making a living, having the bigger car, having the bigger house, having the next million dollars, not the quality of life. We have thrown that out of the door a long time ago, and there is no, I'm not seeing anybody or anywhere that actually will try to reverse it.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, I know that you say that you feel like a lot of people forget that their mind can create happiness in their lives, and I think you're touching on that right now. Can you say a little bit more about that? The mind sometimes keeps us boxed in because we are learning and being conditioned to follow rules, to conform, to make a living. That's the way to be successful. Gold stars, brass rings, all of these things, the blue ribbons, those are outward signs of making it or of success. Yet you're saying that there is a different way. There is a different way to get to a place of happiness or inherently be happy. And the mind can help you say more about that.

Mehdi Akbary:
Happiness is obviously, happiness is a chemical, right? It's a chemical in our body. That's when we have that chemical. That's how we feel. Let's say dopamine is the source of happiness. And a dopamine comes from achieving goal. So when you achieve a goal, you're happy. And when you don't achieve a goal, you're sad because you have a lot of cortisol now in your body. So let's stick to the happiness.

Mehdi Akbary:
To dopamine. This chemical is created inside you. This has nothing to do with the outside world. It has created inside you. Let's say, if I say, make it better to understand this one. Let's go back. Let's say 40,000, 20,000 years ago, we lived in Africa, for example. Dopamine was happiness, or dopamine was very crucial to our survival.

Mehdi Akbary:
We wanted to hunt. That's all we wanted. We wanted to go hunt, bring food. That's exactly what we were all about. But if we just sit at home thinking about food, nothing would happen. The mind had to create a goal for you. Okay, what's the goal? Okay, let's go get ready. Let's go get ready to go hunt.

Mehdi Akbary:
Go for a hunt. And when you get ready, you talk to your friends. You're so happy. I'm going to see my friend. I'm going to talk to my friend. That's the goal. You go talk to your friend. You're happy.

Mehdi Akbary:
Okay, we're going to go hunting now, and all of you go together. Let's say you have a hunting ground, and when your goal is to get to the hunting ground and your mind is, the closer you get to the hunting ground, the happier you get. Okay, we're going to hunt. We're going to hunt. The minute you're there, you get another shot of dopamine. You're so happy you're there. Now, the next goal is to look for the prey, and you keep looking for it. And let's say you can't find it.

Mehdi Akbary:
You keep looking for prey, and you can't find it. All of a sudden, the effect of the dopamine that you had is gone. Now you're. You're not happy anymore. You're worried about it, but all of a sudden, somebody sees a prey. Now, the goal is achieved because you wanted to see a prey, and now you achieve the goal. Your body is full of dopamine. Now you're happy.

Mehdi Akbary:
Oh, my God. Okay, what can we do now? What's the next goal? The next goal. Go get closer to it. The closer you get to it, the more dopamine you get. The closer you get to the prey, the more dopamine you get. Let's say when you go till you hunt. When you hunt, that you reach your goal. The dopamine.

Mehdi Akbary:
The thing about the dopamine, happiness, it doesn't stay long. The effects wears out. That's a good thing. When we used to pray, and then we're all excited, we're happy, and then we take that home and to our family, and the next day, the effect of the dopamine is gone. How do we get dopamine again? Or go hunting again? That's how life was, go hunting again. But now here, coming back to today, the mind works exactly the same. It cannot distinguish between a car or a prey, which is for your survival. It cannot distinguish between iPhone or a prey.

Mehdi Akbary:
It cannot. When you tell your mind that you need to get a car, your mind believes that, ah, it's the prey. It has to get it. Without it, this person will die, maybe will die. That's how he's going to treat it. Now, if I say I want a car, my mind will do anything for me to get that car. It forces me to get a better job. It forces me to get a loan.

Mehdi Akbary:
It forces me to do anything to go get that car. And when we get the car, we're happy. Oh, my God, I'm so happy. And we wrongly assume that because of the car, I got happy. No, it's because what you told yourself, that I need to achieve that goal. The goal that you achieved. The goal could be just a car. The goal could be hugging your children, anything.

Mehdi Akbary:
So that's how happiness is created, by achieving goals. But our goals are all outward. That's why it never ends.

Jennifer Norman:
And certainly for those who are listening, Mehdi is talking about one aspect of what makes us feel happy, which is the satisfaction that you feel when you get a dopamine hit. And as many of you know, dopamine is something that does not last. It comes, you feel it, you feel great, you celebrate for a little bit, and then it goes away. And then you feel incumbent to make another goal or to achieve another success. And it's usually an outward type of success. There are three other important happiness chemicals, and I often call them dose. You might have heard me on this podcast talk about dose. And of course, dopamine is the first one, oxytocin is the second one, serotonin is the third, and then endorphins are the fourth.

Jennifer Norman:
And so there are certainly other ways to achieve happiness through a combination of natural sunlight, what you're eating, hugging, and feeling warmth from pet lover, things like that. So understanding how to adjust and regulate your own moods and emotions and knowing what your chemical imbalances might be is certainly one way to make sure that your emotional balance is in check. For sure.

Mehdi Akbary:
Definitely. And Jennifer, it's just the five laws of finger chain. The first law is law of complete. So that's where I talk about the happiness coming from when you complete a task. But that's not how we do stuff. We leave so much stuff incomplete in our life, which keeps haunting us for the rest of our lives because we leave them incomplete. So the law of complete says, first of all, you are a complete being. You are everything that you're looking for.

Mehdi Akbary:
You have ideas for everything. Your mind is everything. It'll do everything for you. You're a complete being. The next step is that if that's the case, that you're so intelligent, you're complete being, you're intelligent beyond imagination. And if the mind does all those amazing stuff to keep you alive, why do you think it doesn't have the ability to make you successful or keep you happy? It does, but you have to complete stuff if you want to be happy. Let's say you're going home today. If you're going home today, we just go home.

Mehdi Akbary:
We just go. Open the door. Hi, I'm home. Okay. Bring food and just bring food. We eat. We never think about it. We never actually say that.

Mehdi Akbary:
Okay. What is truly, what is a complete form of going home to my family? Just think about it. What is a complete form of going home to my family just before you go home, if you think about it. Oh, the complete form would be going home, seeing my family, my wife, my children. Give them a hug. Giving them a kiss. Oh, wow. I have children.

Mehdi Akbary:
I have family. Wow. I'm so grateful. That's a complete form of going home. Okay, what should I do when I go home? I'm going to give my wife a huck. Just imagine that. And then now you're actually so eager to go home. When you go home, you give your wife a hug because you missed her, because you told your mind that she's important for you in your life, and your mind will say, yes, remember, your wife did that for you, does this for you.

Mehdi Akbary:
Remember. And your mind will help you to promote that. And when you go home, you give your wife a hug. She feels it. And you give your children a hug. That's the complete form of it. Your children. You want to play with your children.

Mehdi Akbary:
What's the complete form of playing with your children? Being on your iPhone. Okay, hold on. I have a phone call from work. Oh, just a second. I saw. No, find it. What is the complete form of everything you do on a daily basis? Find the complete form of it and complete them. Once you do that, the satisfaction, the happiness, the dopamine that you get.

Mehdi Akbary:
Your mind is constantly creative. If you want to go do something outside, you are fresh, you are energized, you're creative just by completing stuff.

Jennifer Norman:
Interesting. I often will think about people who have short attention spans, let's say. And a lot of that is also conditioned in feeling that multitasking is getting a lot done. We are a society that likes to be busy or seem busy. And so we preoccupy ourselves with a lot of things that give us the impression that we're doing a lot, because it's almost like an ego check that we're such busy people that we don't have time for luxuriating or have time for vacations or have time to carve out some rest for yourself. But I understand and appreciate more and more the idea of being fully present, of being able to completely give yourself to somebody in a moment to say, I am absolutely listening. I'm putting the phone away. I'm staring you in the eye.

Jennifer Norman:
I understand what you're saying. I can repeat it back to you, because I've heard you, and I understand where you're coming from. I empathize with you, and interestingly enough, with children. I think that they, too, can tell when you are fully present and when you're not.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. I was listening to a podcast with Shonda Rhimes, and she was talking about her year of yeses, where even if she was on her way to an award show, could have been the Oscars, it could have been the Emmys, it could have been anything. But if her child, who was very young at the time, three years old, said, mommy, can you come play with me for a moment? She would stop what she was doing, didn't matter if she was late, and she would go get on her hands and knees and she would play with her child because it was important to her. Those are meaningful moments that will make a world of a difference in your life and in your fulfilling, in your satisfaction, and knowing that you were really there for somebody as well as with that other person, too.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly. Exactly. Jennifer, it's not easy. And I understand why people can't actually change. I talk to people. I have some clients, life coach. I'm a life coach as well. And I do have some client.

Mehdi Akbary:
And they tell me, I know. Oh, I know that. I say, well, yeah, I know you know. But there are two difference of knowing. There's one you do know. There's one actually. You physically go apply it in your life and then, you know. So we, unfortunately, we're knowledge base.

Mehdi Akbary:
We're all knowledge based. We just get knowledge. Do you know how to do this? Yes, I do. Oh, I heard that a million times. Are you applying it in your life? No, but I know that that's good enough for me. Let me read this book. Read the book. I already know this stuff.

Mehdi Akbary:
So now, actually, we're told that knowledge, what is a gold? Is that what we're told? Knowledge is gold. That's what I heard. Knowledge is gold. But now, knowledge by itself is not a commodity. It's not an asset. It's a liability. Is a liability. Knowledge by itself.

Mehdi Akbary:
Once you believe, you know, you're done. I read this book. I know how mine works. Great. Are you applying it? No, I know, but I know it is difficult, Jennifer, to apply because your mind has learned the opposite of what you're trying to do for years and years and years. Now, if you want to spend time with your children, your mind will automatically will go, hey, this is not important. Important stuff is just gonna on YouTube or just your sports watch. Your sports, your children, not important.

Mehdi Akbary:
That's what you have learned. But what you can do is when you're with your children, when your mind attacks you, then you as a conscious mind say, no, no. Okay, okay, mine, no, thank you very much. I'm with my children. You are the present for another minute or so. And then your mind again attacks you and says, hey, get up. And your mind takes you somewhere else. And it is your job to say, no, no, no, again, no, I'm here.

Mehdi Akbary:
You're there for another minute, another minute, you're out. Someone else constantly do that for days and months till your mind will realize, hey, this guy is different. He wants something else from me. Now that is the challenge because when it's difficult for the first few days, people quit because they believe that it's going to be difficult for the rest of my life. No, I do it for 30 days. And then when you're with your children, your mind will maybe now attacking you or trying to remind you every minute to go watch your football. It'll slowly increase. Maybe after every two minutes, after every three minutes, after every five minutes, maybe after an hour.

Mehdi Akbary:
But after about a month or so, the mind will start working with you. It's not going to be difficult anymore. But it is still that time. You have to consciously work. It's just like you ride a bicycle. When you learn a bicycle, see how difficult you consciously had to balance yourself. That was difficult. We would fall.

Mehdi Akbary:
We cannot do anything consciously. It has to be subconscious. Our subconscious mind has to do something if you want to be successful. At the beginning, when you're learning how to ride a bicycle, it was difficult because you're conscious all the time till it got subconscious, till your subconscious picked it up. You don't have to think about it anymore. That's exactly how everything works. It's okay. You will fall.

Mehdi Akbary:
It's okay. Get up again, try again, do it again, do it again, do it again. Till your mind will realize what you're trying to do.

Jennifer Norman:
Some people need accountability, buddies. And even sometimes that doesn't work. But it's not easy. And there is no judgment here. We know, being human, we get into our behaviors and it is hard to change behavior. It is hard to change habits. And everybody knows, magic of 21 days. Everybody knows, do it for a month.

Jennifer Norman:
But even still, there are so many temptations to fall back to your common denominator behaviors. And so the goals, if you do really truly wish to change, and certainly some of this has to do with like how bad does do things have to get before you actually feel like, okay, I have incentive enough to change my behavior. And sometimes people will get to that place, it'll be like, okay, my wife is about to leave me, okay, I'm gonna lose my job. Okay, I know. All right. Things are bad enough in my life now that I will finally try to change my evil ways.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly.

Jennifer Norman:
But how do you do that when things are going moderately well? It's not as easy. And so, yeah, for those things, for people who are like, I just wanna get to the gym more, I just wanna eat better more, I wanna kick this smoking habit or this drinking habit, or I wanna be able to wake up before the alarm at 530 in the morning and do my meditations or workout. It's like, ooh, there are a lot of things going on there. So little by little.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly. Jennifer, you mentioned about, let's say, fortunately we change or wake up till something is almost too late, right? Till it really hits us. The reason why we do that, why we change at that time.

Jennifer Norman:
Why do we change at that time?

Mehdi Akbary:
Okay. Because the mind doesn't understand what talk to it. It doesn't know anything. It doesn't have any language, it doesn't understand us, it doesn't hear us. It only feels us. The way we communicate with our mind by feeling. Let's say we have, say, somebody, even if somebody does something for 21 days or one month or even, let's say, for a year, it doesn't mean that subconsciously that person is going to change. Why? Because it depends how he did it.

Mehdi Akbary:
Let's say you say, I'm going to go for 21 days, I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to do this 121 days. When you wake up, say to yourself, oh, I have to go to the gym again. Your mind feels that, oh, my God, don't go to the gym. It's not going to work. But then you force yourself to go to the gym and then you force yourself to do the exercise. What kind of feeling do you have? Do you have a positive or negative? You obviously have a negative feeling. That's what your mind hears and that's what your mind will give you. It is impossible for you to work against your mind.

Mehdi Akbary:
So you give your mind, you tell your mind by your feeling that you don't want to go and you go against it. It's not going to work. Even if you go a million, a hundred years, nothing is going to change. This is the trick, Jennifer. When you wake up in the morning, you have to make a goal for yourself. So what is the complete form? Why am I going to the gym? I want to go to the gym because I want to be healthy. Okay. Why do I want to be healthy? I want to be healthy for my children.

Mehdi Akbary:
I want my children to see me healthy so that they could be healthy. Why? Wow. This is going to affect their life. Yes. Not just their life is going to help. It's going to change the life of generations to come. Really? Yes. Okay.

Mehdi Akbary:
When you wake up in the morning, you have to tell your mind, oh, my God. For me to wake up in the morning, just to wake up in the morning is going to change the life of my children, the future. Oh, wow. This is a big thing. This is my goal. Waking up in the morning, getting ready to go to gym. When you wake up in the morning, you tell yourself, oh, my God, I woke up. I am changing the life of my children.

Mehdi Akbary:
The most important goal for me right now is to get ready to go to the gym. And when you're ready and to go to the gym, what's the next goal? I want to go to the gym. I want to drive to the gym. And that's my goal. Just be there. The most important goal in my life that will change the life of my children and for generations to come is for me to go to the gym. And when you go to the gym, you have to talk to, you have to feel it. Oh, my God, I'm here.

Mehdi Akbary:
I'm here. I did it. If I do 20 minutes of the treadmill, wow, that's going to change my life and the life of my children. Your mind has to feel what you're doing. And the way to do that one is for you to feel it is believe. And the vision that you've created without that, if you have a different vision, I don't want to go. I want to sleep in. There's not.

Mehdi Akbary:
Nothing is going to work. Is it difficult? Of course it is difficult. Difficult if you think it in a bigger picture, easy. If you break it down into tiny bits and doable, achievable goals. And one of the other things, Jennifer, the problem we have we do not change is because we confuse ourselves with the vision and goal. Unfortunately, we have been taught that your goal is somewhere out there. Your goal is to be a doctor. Your goal is to be a lawyer.

Mehdi Akbary:
Your goal is to be rich. That's the goal. No, that's a vision. That's a dream. All of us have it. That's not a goal. The goal has to be attainable, reachable.

Mehdi Akbary:
It has to be in your hand. It has to be now, not tomorrow, not tomorrow. If you learn how to create goals that you can achieve, you will be full of dopamine. You will get dopamine shots every day on a regular basis. That's the problem. What is, you know, what is your goal? My goal is to be a doctor. Okay, great. So basically you wait for a dopamine for the next eight years till you're a doctor.

Mehdi Akbary:
In between. Do you have a dopamine? No. How do you get your dopamine? Okay, let's go party. Let's drink, let's do this. Drugs, you know, let's do this. Let's do that. Because we need dopamine. So that's why life is hard for us, because we confuse ourselves between goal and vision.

Mehdi Akbary:
So your goal should always be today. Now, when I'm talking to you right now that this is my goal, I get excited talking here, and that's why I get dopamine. And many people are going to see it. That's a vision, that's a dream. I don't know.

Jennifer Norman:
Yes, I think that it's wonderful when people are able to recognize that the mind is powerful. But there are parts of the mind that are very primitive and almost reptilian in that it is used to behaving or being entrained in a certain way. Your emotions come into play in your feelings. And I've heard more people, and I often feel myself saying, like, well, how can I get enthusiastic about something that I just don't feel enthusiastic about? What? And they look for a life coach to tell them, how can I get enthusiasm? How can I change my attitude? Because I just, my inherent baseline is not excitement. It's not enthusiasm I don't like. And so there's a lot of negative that they're tackling in order to even get through a single day. And so when you're in that place, it really is important to just really start with where you're at. Start small, start with your breath, start with gratitude practice. Start with those little bites of positivity that can help to elevate your vibration into a place where you believe that you can achieve. Because what the mind believes, the mind can achieve.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly. Then the law of complete is really, really crucial and really important. Complete doesn't mean just you start here, you end there in between. You have to know, you have to see, you have to believe, you have to see the beauty of life. And it's not easy. It's something we have never learned. And the second law is law of belief. You have to believe in it.

Mehdi Akbary:
You have to believe that you're smart. You're intelligent. Just think about it, Jennifer. And they always tell us you're intelligent beyond imagination, right? Everybody tells us you're intelligent. You can do anything, but, oh, you can't do that. Oh, you can't be that person. You cannot be successful. What are you talking about? What do you mean? You just told me I'm the most intelligent person.

Mehdi Akbary:
Or we're intelligent beyond imagination. This is one of the biggest problem we contradict when we teach our children. We tell them they're intelligent, and sooner or later, we tell them, you cannot do that. If you're intelligent, if you believe your intel, you have to believe in that. Then the mind that does all those stuff that healed, for example, this wound or that pumps blood and does all this amazing, remarkable stuff, how come it cannot make us happy? It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Why can I cannot be excited for something? Why? Oh, my mind cannot. Of course it can.

Mehdi Akbary:
So what does it mean? It means that you don't know how to use your mind. That's all. You don't know how to use it. If it does everything and it's not doing it for you just like anything else. You don't know how to use it. That's what we need to invest our time, not just for ourselves, for our children. They need to know how this thing works. This thing is responsible for our happiness, for our sadness, for our failure, for our success, for everything.

Mehdi Akbary:
But we don't know how to use it. Nobody teaches us how to use it. Isn't that crazy? Jennifer?

Jennifer Norman:
There's so much about the power of the mind that we have yet to uncover. And it's helpful to have information like what you're providing us, as well as thinking about life as a game really is. Here we are in human form. We get to have this opportunity to be alive and to make the most out of it. And a lot of people forget that. They were like, okay, here I am, and I being told what to do, I need to make a living. And they forget that. You are free.

Jennifer Norman:
You are free to be who and what and how you want. And there will be naysayers, but again, those are the external voices, external entities that are there to create that challenge for you to say, okay, how you do you really want to be. Let's play this game. Let's see how you can rise above and challenge yourself to think about life as being like I get to make this day anything that I want it to be. What would I choose to do with this precious time that I have? Do I want to be unhappy? Do I want to feel miserable? Do I want for this to, for the turkeys to get me down? Or do I want to, to make somebody else's day? It starts from us. Do we really can through my smile, through a positive compliment, through a nice act of love to somebody else, can we then, in turn, make ourselves feel a little bit better? Because that accomplishment, that goal of helping to make somebody else smile, might be all that you need to have a little bit of positivity flowing your way until that damn burst and you really see your life starting to change.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly. Well, Jennifer, the mind never says no to you. The mind never says no to you. It always says yes. It never says no. And it will do anything. Anything. Use all it is power to help you achieve your goal.

Mehdi Akbary:
So let me give you an example. It is the mind, his job to do that. When we were refugees in Pakistan and I was eleven years old, I lost my mom and my siblings. And one of the other events that actually changed my life is when my dad remarried. My dad was about 50 years old and he went on married to a 16 year old girl. And that kind of threw me off. And I believe that nobody loves me. If he did, he wouldn't do that.

Mehdi Akbary:
Okay, so. And he didn't wait long to do that anyway. So he just waited, I think, ten days or 20 days after we lost half or more than half our family. And then I said, I told my mind that, what should I do? What can I do? And I said, I want to travel the world. Just leave home. I want to travel the world. I'm an eleven years old, eleven year old boy refugee. No status, no money, no language.

Mehdi Akbary:
If I told that to anybody, they would laugh. And I did tell my brother, he laughed. I told my neighbor, they laughed. But I didn't know how the mind worked that time, but I believed in that one. How am I going to travel? I don't know. This thing will figure it out. And the minute you do that, your mind will keep looking for that thing. And I start seeing tourists that I didn't see before.

Mehdi Akbary:
There are a lot of tourists there. And I go talk, try to talk to them. How do you guys travel? And then I found a library and I found books, videos, videotapes on different countries. My mind was busy trying to help me to travel, encourage me to travel, show me the world. You go out there, you can do that. How? My mind found me. The way how. And it's a long, long story, but I started traveling when I was 16 years old.

Mehdi Akbary:
By the time I was 25, I probably traveled to three dozen countries.

Jennifer Norman:
Amazing.

Mehdi Akbary:
The how. This is the problem with us because we have learned from a very young age. Don't do this one. Why? Because you have to figure out the how. What do you mean? You figure out the how. How can you figure out the how by sitting here? You can't. But that's what we need to do. That's what we have learned.

Mehdi Akbary:
We. You need to find out first how you're going to do that, and then you can do that. Impossible. It's impossible. That's not how life works. That's not how mine works. Go take your first step. Then your mind will look around and find other ways.

Mehdi Akbary:
Take the next step. Your mind will look, find other ways. But unfortunately, we've learned that, okay. No, you have figured out the how before you do anything and when we can't, because it's impossible to find the how, and then we say, okay, good, where are you going then? Stay put. And that's exactly what we do. I want a big house. How? I don't know. I'm going to get a better job.

Mehdi Akbary:
How? I don't know. Okay, well, then stay put. Just. This is your job. This is. You stay in this apartment. That's good enough for you, but you have no idea. If you say, okay, I want a bigger house, let's say, I want a bigger house.

Mehdi Akbary:
I really want a bigger house. If you believe in that, you look at the house, you look at some houses on the market, and the mind will find, says, okay, wow, you cannot buy this house with this job. Okay, what do I need to do? What do I need to do? Do this course or that course, or go to this school and upgrade yourself to this. Oh, yeah, can I do that? Oh, yeah. Your mind will find you how to do that. But we don't because we want to find the how before we even begin. What if this happened? What if that happens? And then I say, okay, stay put.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. What I like to say is that a lot of times, the best things in life happen in a non linear way. And so we can try to map out the how as much as we can. And oftentimes, if we just released the how, if we know the why, if we have the why and our heart is in it, and it's something that we believe is going to bring us so much joy and we look forward to it, releasing the how is probably the best thing that we can do, because oftentimes, as Palaquela said, the universe will line up and it will conspire to make it happen. And the fascinating thing is, I've been a testament in my life. I've seen it happen over and over again where miracle upon miracle has happened. And I'm just, after a while, it becomes perplexing, like, I don't know how these things occur, all these good things always happen, but the real reason is, is that I believe down to the fiber of my soul, that everything always works out for me and everything always goes my way. And that is all I need to know that I'm going to live an amazing life.

Jennifer Norman:
And whatever I envision, because I'm enthusiastic about it and because I know that it's possible, you keep an open mind and watch what happens, it'll be surprising and amazing.

Mehdi Akbary:
Exactly. You are behind everything that is happening to you, Jennifer. It has nothing to do, trust me. It has nothing to do with the universe. It has nothing to do with, the whole universe is trying to help you. No, you are helping yourself. You are intelligent beyond your imagination, and your mind does everything for you. The way you described it, you're a positive person.

Mehdi Akbary:
So your mind is going to look for that positivity. Let's say you come up with an idea, and because you're a positive person and you believe in yourself, you bring a good thing will come out of this one. With that point of view, with that kind of mentality positivity. Failure doesn't exist because you don't see it as a failure. You see it as what it is. Okay, I'm going to learn from it. Oh, I learned. I'm so happy it happened because I'm learning from it, because that's who you are.

Mehdi Akbary:
Now imagine what most people do. Says, oh, my God, failure. What if I fail? Oh, I want to do. What if it doesn't happen? Okay, I'm going to try it anyways. 99% of the time, that person is going to fail, okay? Because they take failure as failure. Stop it. Don't do it anymore. You are the universe.

Mehdi Akbary:
You are everything. You are everything. Everything that happens to you, you make it happen. I have a daughter. I have a 21 year old daughter. She's a good golfer. She's on golf scholarship in the States. She's actually studying in Arkansas.

Mehdi Akbary:
I don't golf. I don't golf. She told me when she was young, I said, well, it's good to pick up sports. What sports would you like to pick. She said, well, you play squash, you play tennis. She told me if you teach me squash and tennis, that'll be great. I says, no, no, no. What would you like? She said, well, if I pick up a sports you don't play, then that's going to be hard.

Mehdi Akbary:
I says, no, no, no. Just pick up a sports. So she picked up golf. I don't know anything about golf, but I know once we get into this, we're gonna find a way how to do that one. And she's a great golfer because I know we can find a way. Imagine if I tell her, just like most of us. Oh, you have to be careful what sports you pick. Golf is really expensive sports.

Mehdi Akbary:
You can't do that one. Oh, it is an old man. Oh, you can't do. Imagine if I said that, then it wouldn't happen. It wouldn't happen. So we make everything happen. And also when we say how, there are two difference of hows. There are known hows that we have to find out about.

Mehdi Akbary:
If Im going from here from a to z, wheres the money? How am I going to get the money? That I have to think about it. What Im going to state that I have to figure it out because thats a known how, but its the unknown how that throws us off and we dont want to do that. The what ifs that we fall for. Dont fall for those stuff. Dont fall for those stuff. When I first went in Afghanistan in 2017, everybody told me, youre crazy. So it's one torn country. Why are you going there? What are you going to do? I said I don't know.

Mehdi Akbary:
Who are you going to meet? I don't know what's going to happen? I don't know. I really didn't know what I did know that my mind is going to figure out how to. And that's how life is. Really simple, Jennifer. It's really, really simple. We just made it so complicated.

Jennifer Norman:
We do. We do. And on that note, I have some final questions. These are my rapid fire parting thought questions for you. I will say a phrase and I want you to finish them just the top of your head. Head. Humans are incredible.

Mehdi Akbary:
Beauty is yourself.

Jennifer Norman:
I feel most alive when, when I.

Mehdi Akbary:
Look at everything around me, I believe in myself.

Jennifer Norman:
Beautiful, beautiful words. Thank you, Mehdi Akbary, for being my guest today on The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. What a compelling conversation.

Mehdi Akbary:
Thank you very much. I always enjoy talking about the mind. Thank you very much.

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.