Ep : 209 - The Resilience Mentor: Embracing Joy & Overcoming Challenges with Nina Aziz Justin
Show Notes
Wondered how to build resilience & live authentically amidst life's challenges?
Meet Nina Aziz Justin, the Resilience mentor, who shares her powerful journey of personal growth, curiosity, and self-awareness.
Discover how Nina balances joy and resilience through overcoming personal and professional hardships.
She recounts her experiences growing up as a Malay girl balancing tradition and modernity, her transformative stay at a silent ashram, and coping with her daughter's rare condition.
Nina emphasises the importance of showing up authentically, finding joy amidst adversity, and taking incremental actions towards growth.
Listeners will gain powerful reflections on curiosity, empowerment, and the significance of self-awareness, making this episode a must-listen for anyone seeking inspiration and actionable wisdom.
Connect with Nina :
💼 LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninajustin-business-advisor
🌐 Website: https://www.theresiliencementor.com
Here are the highlights from this episode:
00:19 Meet Nina Aziz Justin: The Resilience Mentor
02:11 The Importance of Showing Up
04:57 Finding Joy and Surrendering to Nature
16:27 Growing Up in Malaysia: Contradictions and Resilience
24:39 Harnessing Joy to Overcome Adversity
29:27 Embracing Freedom and Overcoming Mental Prisons
32:11 The Birth of the Resilience Mentor
34:07 The Resilience Equation and Its Impact
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Resources:
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About Me:
I help you lead with fearless authenticity by smashing the self-imposed heteronormative stereotypes that keep you playing small through emotional healing inner child and inherited intergenerational trauma. Create a purposeful life of your unique design by disrupting societal norms and expectations of who you should be. Explore mindfulness, fearless curiosity and loving kindness through the lens of Human Design to thrive as the person you are born to be.
Learn more about my coaching method and join my emotional healing, mindfulness, and music community at melissaindot.com.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] Melissa: Welcome to another episode of the Fearlessly Curious podcast. Today, I have a very interesting guest on a very interesting day, at a very different location, with a very different energy, everything is so different, I'm loving it. Drawing you in with more curiosity, listeners and viewers, today I have Nina Aziz Justin with me today, also known as the Resilience Mentor, all the way from grey, sultry, cloudy, very cold Amsterdam.
[00:00:30] And the beautiful story right now is that Nina and I can see Nina here
[00:00:34] Nina Aziz Justin: hi
[00:00:35] Melissa: Melissa.
[00:00:37] We are sitting in the same city of different locations. And I'm excited to have Nina here, and I met her on LinkedIn. She has this vivacious, powerful, transformational energy, you need her when you're drawn in, at least this is my experience.
[00:00:52] Drawn in immediately, and I just need to know this label. And just before we got on with prepping for this podcast today, she said to me, I'm tired today, Nina. And what I just want to say to you, Nina, is thank you. Still for showing up today to prepare this podcast, despite feeling low, for whatever the reasons are, because this is exactly why I needed to have someone like you in the podcast, you show up unashamedly, unapologetically, authentic, tired, not tired, low energy, you are more than your, the energy that you feel, you are literally the resonance, the vibration, the signature into your being, that goes beyond.
[00:01:34] Any words to describe. So I'm grateful that you're here with us today. I'm not going to ask you how you're feeling. I'm simply going to say it's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you. What's on your heart just to open this up to God. What's in your heart this morning?
[00:01:51] Nina Aziz Justin: First of all, thank you for having me and thank you for all those wonderful words.
[00:01:55] I don't even know how to respond to them because yeah, I think you're very generous with your words. Yeah, going to what you just said, like showing up, what's in my heart. I just need to show up every day and do my best from where I am, as I am that day. So today I am in Amsterdam.
[00:02:16] As you said, it's very cold here. It suddenly became quite cold in 24 hours. So I'm feeling a little bit under the weather. Nonetheless, that's what being human is about. We can't always be the same. We can't always be at 100%. So today I would say I'm at 80%. Hopefully that is. Going to show up as 80% but also as 80% perfect as at 80%, yeah, I don't know if that makes sense.
[00:02:48] What's in my heart
[00:02:49] today? What's in my heart? What is in my heart? Gratefulness. I'm very grateful to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:02:57] Melissa: Pleasure. It's a sure treat for our listeners, for me. And for the community, and I love that you said that, you put a mark on how you're feeling, I think having clarity helps us to show up authentically when we can see ourselves, we can recognize and validate ourselves, it empowers us.
[00:03:14] So you say I'm 80 percent of it. But you know what? This is what I understood. You're showing up 100 percent of your 80 percent instead of going up. And that's all that matters. So I'm going to dive straight in, Nina. Go for it. Today, you set the tone perfectly because you said you're not feeling your usual 100 percent but you're feeling 100 percent of your 80%.
[00:03:37] So my question to you today is, I'm curious, in the course of your life, What has been the fun, what has been the underpinning quality or practice that you have to get you through these days when you're not at a hundred percent and perhaps especially on those days when maybe you're not, when you're even just at 50 percent what practice or belief or ritual or quality do you connect with to help you show up, continue to show up the way you do?
[00:04:10] Nina Aziz Justin: I am drawing the attention to the first part of your question, all my life. Okay. First of all, I am still a student of life. I believe I'm still learning a lot from life every day. So all my life is a big word, sins. I was, when I was little, I would not know consciously what I'm doing, but I, at now, even at my age now, I'm 52 years old.
[00:04:41] I am still not sure if I have it all figured out what is the underlying principle, philosophy, framework, model that I use to show up every day. But what is clear is that even when I was younger, I always felt like I need to enjoy whatever I'm doing. And I think this drive, this desire to enjoy whatever I'm doing has helped me show up, whatever, at whatever percentage I am at that day.
[00:05:22] I cannot do I'm, I have done and I have tried doing things that I don't enjoy. And then even 5%, 10 percent would be very difficult. So I've learned to surrender to this, I think, throughout my life. This is what I'm still learning, and I'm still studying as a student of life. How to surrender to my nature, my own nature, and be true to who I am without really actually trying to.
[00:05:57] Justify it to anyone else. So if I don't enjoy it, it's going to be very hard for me to show up. And all my life I've had various experiences when I've enjoyed things and when I haven't enjoyed things, tasks, responsibilities, duties, or whatever I have to do. I've always enjoyed school. For example, so it was very easy for me to do school because I like it.
[00:06:21] I've always enjoyed sports. Sports very important for me. It's very easy for me to do sports. I've always enjoyed arts, uh, doing things with my hands, creativity. But I haven't enjoyed other things and that's quite hard. There are the things that I found extremely hard. Yeah, you are, of course, welcome to ask me what those hard things are.
[00:06:42] But yeah, I think that there is no philosophy behind it, but all my life to this day, what I'm trying to learn is to respect my very own nature. Like a tree in a forest all grow differently. They all have their own bends and kinks and so do I. So I learned to go with that and not try to challenge too much of that.
[00:07:03] So self love, self acceptance.
[00:07:05] Melissa: I'm answering your question, Melissa. Absolutely answering my question. And it's, again, I realized why I was drawn to so much of what you said resonates with me. To live to learn to live in our nature. And I think there's an irony in this because when we are born, the minute we come through our mother's womb, channel where we are born and we take that step from sport to tangible reality, spiritual into human experience.
[00:07:33] We are already pure, 100 percent love and nurture, and until the age of seven, that nature is slowly being stripped away from us because of societal conditioning that stems from family, friends, school, and the systems that we plug into, and then ultimately we spend the rest of our lives, some of us, not all of us, some of us.
[00:07:57] The lucky ones,
[00:07:58] or perhaps not the lucky ones, it's all a matter of opinion, right? But I like to say, from what I consider to be my privileged position, I consider myself lucky to be spending my adult years finding my way back to my nature, just as you are. And that's why when I meet someone like you, I get excited because we are, you are a person who is, I believe, full of adventure, full of curiosity, and willing to take risks.
[00:08:25] The risk actually that you're taking is staying where you are or really growing back into the person you were born to be. So we talk about following your joy. That's what I understood, right? Loving life and surrendering everything you think you know to literally follow what you love. And my question was going to be, how do we discern between life flowing through you and therefore following the things you love, doing what you love?
[00:08:53] Because why shouldn't we do what we love with sometimes having to do the hard things that take us towards the things that we love? How do we discern the difference? And maybe maybe, this segues into, because you said to me, I'm allowed to ask you this question. About those difficult moments in your life, would you be open to sharing with us a bit more of your compelling personal story about, in a way, how you ended up being, how you have become the resilience mentor and why you speak of resilience and this magical equation that we're going to get to at some point.
[00:09:28] So to reframe my thoughts, to recap my question, if the secret to life and resilience and joy is to love ourselves and to allow ourselves just to surrender to the flow of life and express ourselves in a way that's unique to us. Who's joy? How do we discern that sometimes we have to do some hard things?
[00:09:46] How did you learn that through your personal experiences?
[00:09:49] Nina Aziz Justin: Life will throw at you hard things, okay? No one gets out of life without anything hard. I think that is a guarantee. So definitely being the resilience mentor, I wouldn't call myself that if I have not had my fair share of suffering and pain and trauma and, um, loneliness. and sadness. I've had a lot of that.
[00:10:18] One thing I want to mention is what you said just now about us being born in the full glory of our nature. So at some point, if you look back, if you do spiritual healing work, inner child work. You were this child, right? You are loved. Somebody wanted you. That's why you're here. And then at some point as you're growing up, they rob you of all those things.
[00:10:48] I don't know if, I read a lot about different philosophies. I'm not inclined to one particular way of, Looking at life, I try to be curious in the sense that I would like to experience different things. Curiosity for me isn't just about knowledge gathering, but actually to try and experience and not make any form of moral judgment until I've experienced it myself.
[00:11:15] So one of the things I did A few years ago, when my daughter, I have two daughters, one of them is a special needs child with a very rare condition. When she was diagnosed, she was one in 21 in the world with her condition. So that threw me off. Before that, I was not What I call now the resilience mentor, which is the brand I use for my business consultancy.
[00:11:41] Before that, I was running other companies. I've run three startups. I've been scaling businesses around the world. Some are my own businesses. And then of course I also have had other clients. So I've started three companies in the past and I trained as a lawyer in England. I it's been a long winded journey.
[00:11:57] That's life. That's life. It's not a straight line. But going back to. What I was talking about being robbed of this beautiful qualities that when you're born, you are loved, you're wanted, and you are beautiful as you are. You're totally, perfectly lovable, right? And then at some point you're robbed of a lot of things.
[00:12:18] One is your creativity, two is your independence, three is your own nature, the way you should think. And I was in an ashram in India when my daughter was diagnosed. I wanted to have some space, quiet. I wanted some quiet. So I told my husband, I'm really sorry. This is what I need. And this is my nature. I've learned that through time, this is my nature.
[00:12:39] When I am in difficult moments, I actually have to go back to me. I can't be surrounded by other people. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to discuss it. I don't want other people to tell me what they think. I just want to hear my own voice. I want to take out all this noise. So I went to this silent ashram for 10 days in the Himalayas.
[00:13:00] And there, there is a session once a day. When you can talk, but other times you're not allowed to talk. It's a silent machine, but it's the satsang. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of satsang. So it's based on Patanjali Yoga Sutra. So they have the five yamas and yamas, and one of which is do not steal.
[00:13:20] You are not allowed to steal and for most people, the idea of stealing things is stealing objects, stealing material things. Oh, sorry. That's like my reminder thing. But actually the biggest robbery of our lives is someone stealing our nature, our beautiful nature of who we really are. Our way of looking at the world, our, Unique ways of loving our, our being just how we're supposed to be.
[00:13:52] That helped me a lot because I looked at my daughter, this is her way. I can't go against that. I can't say, Oh, you are now no longer perfect. You're now this difficult person. I must make you become different. But actually, I have to love her as she is. And that realization made me also look at myself.
[00:14:18] Deeper that the fact that I wanted, of course, like every parent, when you're told, or everyone who has loved someone, when they're told something unexpected is going to happen in your life, like the person is ill, or there is something permanent, like they, they lose something. You want to fix that.
[00:14:37] You don't want to have this discomfort. Do you want to fix that? Fit into the larger picture where everybody can understand. But in my daughter's case, she has a raw, rare medical condition. It's difficult even for me to understand. The doctors didn't understand. No one could help us, but I had to surrender.
[00:14:54] This is her nature. There is nothing wrong with her. This is how she is born. And she is beautiful as she is. She deserves to be loved. As she is, and that's also a learning curve for me. Am I loving myself as I am? And being able to love her as she is has helped me to love myself as I am. And I'm aware of all the other things that had been robbed from me too.
[00:15:19] Because of the process, because of the silence I had, for 10 days, just sitting with myself and not being able to say a word. And then realizing that most of the words that we use, and we talk a lot with each other every day, but are we actually using these faculties to say things which are meaningful and things which are helpful and things which are actually nourishing for another person, right?
[00:15:42] Yeah, so go, I think your question was like, how do you how do you digest all this and how do you make it beneficial for yourself, I think. And how do you what was your exact question again? It was something to do with how do you deal with things that you
[00:15:59] Melissa: don't want to deal with.
[00:16:00] Yeah. Yeah. How do we discern between following our joy, doing what we love and sometimes doing the stuff we don't love because it also leads to what we love, like doing the hard stuff.
[00:16:13] Nina Aziz Justin: Yeah, as I said the universe, God, however you want to call it, will give you joy. Hard times. That's just part of growing, part of life, right?
[00:16:24] From my experience growing up in Malaysia, I have had quite a few difficult moments. I think when we first spoke to each other, I explained to you that I went to boarding school. in Malaysia. My parents divorced. My mom found it really difficult to mother us at home. She's a working woman. She's always worked all her life.
[00:16:45] She has a lot of pride in her work. So I have her as my role model. And she decided that we both must go to boarding schools. I was raised in a sort of a I would say quite modern Malay family. I was sent to swimming lessons lessons, I was allowed to wear bikini or, um, we would be sent to learn the Quran, but, we were also sent to to do other things, which some may not consider as very, Islamic in the sense, we, we had a very modern
[00:17:14] Melissa: Nina, as you share this, as you share this, Yeah.
[00:17:18] I just want to pause for a moment because it's a bit of a segue, I just want to acknowledge what you just shared with your story about you and your daughter, give that and give our listeners and viewers a space to really receive that wisdom with such tenderness and power and love and humility, how humbling life is, this concept of accepting, actually it's beyond accepting, it's acknowledging.
[00:17:47] Nature. Acknowledging what is in the present moment without this thriving desire, which often comes from the ego of wanting to fix. Oh, this is not what I want. How can I change it to make it what I want? And a lot of that is framed from conditioning. I just wanted to honor how powerful. You will experience this with your daughter.
[00:18:11] What a blessing to have you again here sharing that with us. And to encourage our viewers again to pause if you need this episode. Sit with that, rewind it, listen back again to what Nina's just shared. Really allow that to percolate, to wash in your heart. Deeply listen to this, not as Nina's story. But how this relates to you, how you can take this away, this wisdom to Lina's life experience and apply it, implement it into your own.
[00:18:43] This is why we have the podcast. This is why we have amazing people like Lina here, so you can learn through her experiences and with her, especially on this day when you're 100 percent of your 80%, Lina, thank you for sharing that part of your story. Sorry, just to bring us back where we are, going back to how you were brought up as a Malay, young Malay girl with your family, fairly conventional, but modern aspects also.
[00:19:06] And I'd just like you, as you're sharing it, to also share what patterns or stereotypes while you were growing up, did you shake up? And what risks did you take in your journey of growing up in Malaysia as a Malay girl with modern traditional Malay heritage and family? Let us know what were some of these stereotypes that you smashed.
[00:19:31] Nina Aziz Justin: Looking back, all I can say is that, what I was trying to get at was that I grew up with a lot of contradiction. So while I was sent to, to read the Quran and pray at the madrasah, which I was always slightly slacking because I, as I said, I'm the kind of person who, I surrendered to my joy.
[00:19:52] So I found it very stifling since I was little, since I was a little girl. So it's not. Now that I live in Europe for over 30 years that I've become this kind of a bit more liberal person, but mentally liberal person, but it's always been like that. So that's my nature. I've accepted that. I don't think I'm a bad person.
[00:20:13] And even then, I didn't think, but other people were trying to mal me, making me fit into the idea of what a good Muslim Malay girl should be like. My mother did not because she was very busy with her. I guess she was busy with herself too because, she was a single mom. She worked, she had two, the two of us.
[00:20:32] So she sent us to boarding schools, both my brother and I. So I went first and I went to a very Malay dominated boarding school and many of the girls there are definitely better Malay girls than me. And you know that I found it very difficult. It was probably the most difficult five years of my life.
[00:20:55] Why was it difficult? Because I had to go all the time against my own inner Voices, my joy. So I was still very good at school. I was doing a lot of sports. Sports was definitely an outlet for me. And I'm still a very big advocate on sports. And I believe young girls should do sports. It gives you confidence.
[00:21:18] It teaches you discipline. And, there's a lot of. Ways of developing your character through sports. So that has helped me a lot during my boarding school years. Of course, I was dark because I played a lot of sports outside under the sun. So I was definitely picked on. I was told repeatedly how ugly I was because I'm dark.
[00:21:38] They make fun of me. They would sing songs like Kudahitam in Malay, like the black horse, blah, blah, blah. Every time I would pass a group of boys, they would pick on me because I wasn't one of the pretty girls. So talk about how do I manage hardship. I don't know. Actually Now, as an older person, you can look back and say, Oh, this is how I do things, blah, blah, blah.
[00:22:01] But actually as a younger person probably your, my survival instinct was the tool that I have. And I think we all have that. And that's not only in me. And that's also what I say about resilience. It's not only in me. It's in everyone. So your survival instinct will always be there to help you.
[00:22:23] How it will help you really is depending on how you how much you deal with your inner dialogue. I think at a younger age, I, and now I appreciate this nature, but at the time I had so much conflict inside of me on one hand, I didn't want them to take the piss. To call me this or that, and because I didn't wear the scarf, most girls were wearing scarves already.
[00:22:51] Then I turned up at school in a pinafore and everyone was wearing baju kurung, the full Malay traditional outfit. So eventually I did not wear my pinafore anymore, but I did not wear a scarf. And then of course as I have never been quite good at following This whole idea of you have to be in a certain way, they would try to shame me call me names ostracize me or make me feel bad about being me.
[00:23:21] So that was five years of boarding, my boarding school. But what I also learned through that and how I survived that was, as I said, I played a lot of sports. I was very good at what I have to do. So I was very good at school. I was very good in sports. So I had my trump card. So you can't beat me at this, you can say whatever you want, but I'm always going to come on top when it comes to performance.
[00:23:42] So I did that. And that was my survival instinct. And also because I like it. So it was easier for me. Secondly, I have very good friends. Very good friends. Maybe I didn't have many friends throughout my whole boarding school years. I had maybe two good friends and I stuck with them. So I think that's still the lessons that I hold very dearly to this day.
[00:24:05] Having very good people around you is super important. You don't need many, but you need, you always need. Some people, you can't do this alone. These friends are still in my life to this day. There are certain things that happened to me, which were really personal. Like it's really my thing. But I also learned that as humans, we are pretty good at blocking this.
[00:24:29] That our survival instinct is strong, we can deal with quite a lot of things. Now, unless you choose to dwell, you can surmount anything. So I focus on where my strengths were I've always been that way inclined. And I think everyone has his or her own strengths. And if you focus on that and keep doing what gives you joy, you can harness that power from what gives you joy to surmount those small things and everything passes.
[00:25:04] Yeah. You, I was not supposed to stay at my boarding school forever. So eventually I left my boarding school, which was the best day of my life to this day. I can always look back and say, I went through that and I would never want to relive it. And then life gave me new challenges and new joys, so that is also the nature of life.
[00:25:24] Yeah, we bend and kink.
[00:25:26] Melissa: I love that, Ena. I love how you shared that. I love the way you have such a different language, as well, to just First of all, share your experience and then deliver that knowledge in a way that is so accessible and understandable. At least for me, I'm listening to you.
[00:25:43] I'm like, I'm listening to you. I'm like listening to you as a person who's gone through this experience and somehow you manage to always bridge your experience. It's an experience I've had just by the analogies that you've had, so I really appreciate it.
[00:25:57] Nina Aziz Justin: I'm glad.
[00:25:58] Melissa: Yeah. Oh my goodness.
[00:26:00] Nina Aziz Justin: I'm so amazed.
[00:26:01] Melissa: Totally. Focusing on the good stuff, building our resilience is also, it's not just about how we get through the hard times, but the fact that we get through the hard times by focusing on what is natural to us, what is good for us in terms of what fuels us with joy, what nourishes us.
[00:26:19] And how you apply that at such a young age at school as a form of survival, because a lot of the time when I read about survival, what I understand survival is that it's fear based, which there's a part of it that is, right? Survival of the fittest, we're running for safety, we're surviving. But the way that you bring survival in a strategy for which is to focus on the nourishing and on the joy, it's such a perfect question.
[00:26:45] I wish I had. You could see more of this out there, this information about surviving through the good, surviving through our strengths, as opposed to surviving by running away from it. Do you see where I'm coming
[00:26:57] from?
[00:26:58] I love this approach that you bring to it.
[00:27:00] Nina Aziz Justin: I'm trying to think now, I'm trying to reflect on what you just said surviving through fear.
[00:27:06] Have I ever survived through fear? In my personal experience, fear tends to stay with you. tends to get me into worse places. Yeah. That's why I have fear. Okay. It's not like I don't have fear. I do. I have a lot of fear about many things, but because I have Believe that I don't get any, from my own experience, I don't get any joy from it and I'm really the kind of person that's really focused on joy because in, in Malay we say, bajoli, I like to bajoli, I love that.
[00:27:39] That's me, I can't have it, even in, In difficult moments, I would go and do something that gives me joy. If I'm stressed, I'm still going to go and do my yoga class. Oh, just chill, just lie down. And I'm like I'm chilling that too, that's as well. I can just relax that, but I feel like I, I need to do something.
[00:28:02] So being a doer helps a lot. Having a clear goal helps a lot. And yeah.
[00:28:09] Melissa: Okay. It sounds to me you have one of your, it sounds to me at least, and I think this resonates with me too. Maybe I'm projecting this on you, maybe you're mirroring a part of me, but I feel like one of your highest values is freedom choice will do.
[00:28:23] You will do what is best for you because, Hey, as they say, happy wife, happy life, happy mama, happy world and the truth. And I'm going to claim this. At least from my perspective, and I have a sense you might, this might be true for you too, or believe in you too, is that when women are happy, women those of us who identify as a woman, at least because the world is very different, so I want to be clearer with that.
[00:28:51] Those of us who identify as women who birth the life, when we are happy, and I mean having it at this point, we are happy when we take care of ourselves, not because we're dependent on anybody else. When we prioritize our self care and our self love that also means taking care of any toxic beliefs we have.
[00:29:09] When we are truly, the world is happy and that's because we birth life. We bring life into this world. Sisters out there, do your
[00:29:20] Nina Aziz Justin: thing.
[00:29:20] Melissa: My biggest
[00:29:23] Nina Aziz Justin: fear is definitely entrapment encagement any form of fixed boundaries. For me, boundaries have always been fluid. I don't, yeah, actually to put it in a very rudimental way, my biggest fear is to be in jail.
[00:29:42] To be in prison, right? And so I'm like, oh my goodness. It would be like the death of me if I'm ever in prison. I will never do anything wrong because I don't want to be in prison. That is to put it in a very simplistic way. But there are many prisons in our lives. And most of them are invisible and in your mind, right?
[00:30:02] And your mind is a powerful thing. Prisoners of war survive war camps and tortures because their minds have been freed because they read books or They calm their minds. Your mind is really powerful. So whatever it takes, do something that frees your mind. Do something that empowers your mind and gives you the feeling that you can.
[00:30:26] There are things within your control. Of course, when I speak about this, it sounds Oh my goodness, I'm teaching people things that they already know. True. I have nothing to teach. I'm still a student of life. I started this conversation with I'm still learning. So I'm just sharing. And it's also not always consistent for me.
[00:30:43] There are days when I find it very difficult too. But then I go and do something that I enjoy. Do something you enjoy. Small things. You don't need to have grand gestures and heroic acts, just do small things. And that's what, how I endured my boarding school days. When they call me black and ugly and horrible and whatever, because that's what they see.
[00:31:05] But I, I didn't think of myself as that. I thought I was cool. . A bit of self concealment is not bad. You need to love yourself. You need to be your biggest fan. Yeah. So I've always been my own fan. I guess that's, that helps.
[00:31:20] Melissa: Thank you, Nina. So I know I had so much to pack into this short episode.
[00:31:25] You've already shared so much with us, I'm not sure for you, very intimate personal story with your daughter and then growing up, tenderness and bullying and your resilience and your take on focusing on what brings you joy to get you through the hard times. I'd love to know, because you haven't shared yet with everybody, what is, all this, the culmination of your life experiences, how has it led to your purpose today?
[00:31:53] How you run your business and what your business is, what you bring into the world. Can you tell us a little bit about that before we close for the day?
[00:32:00] Nina Aziz Justin: Why you do what you do why I do what I do and what it is you do. Okay.
[00:32:07] My, my company is called the Resilience Mentor.
[00:32:10] Basically, I am an attraction expert. What I say by what I mean by that. Is that I help companies make money hopefully make a lot of money. It sounds very materialistic, but this is what I love doing. And this is what I'm good at doing. I've been doing this for years. This is something that comes naturally to me because I understand mechanics.
[00:32:31] I've practiced this myself. I've built my own companies. I've been a jury for startup awards. I've been scaling other businesses and not just my own for many years. And then my daughter came. my small daughter. So I have a big daughter and a small daughter. And when my small daughter came obviously she was unexpectedly born with her condition, which is a rare permanent condition.
[00:32:56] And Nobody knows what's going to happen to her. And my reaction was like, how am I going to do my work? How am I going to continue being me? Now some people might consider me very selfish, but for me, not working is not an option because I do not work only for money. I work because I love my work. My work gives me a lot of power.
[00:33:17] I have tremendous amount of joy from helping also other companies. I like the people that I work with. I found. My habitat, my work habitat, very creative and energizing and full of courageous people who take risks and people who dare to be different people who most people think are just nuts.
[00:33:35] Okay. I love them all. So how can I suddenly be a stay at home mom with my kid who I don't know. If she'll ever walk, ever talk, ever jump, ever read, ever write. No one knows. But I'm her mom. I'm her mom. I was in such a pickle. It was the death of the old me and the rebirth of the new me. I learned not over time, of course, not at a time, because at the time I was just like, how do I fix this?
[00:34:03] So there were a lot of lessons from this, and this is also the content of my TED talk, like what I learned from this experience. And that's the birth of what I now call the resilience equation. So the TED talk is based on a mathematical equation based on my experiences. And also others, and I have tested it to make sure that it works.
[00:34:21] So it's basically to, to help other people maneuver, gain knowledge or perspective on how to face the unknown and how to grow stronger from it. Based on my experience when my daughter was diagnosed with her condition, my husband being a man, obviously reacted in his own way. And this is grief. This is just like death, but no one died.
[00:34:44] Our dreams died, our old lives died, everything died. We have to start again. But we didn't know how to do that. And also, we can't change our environment, we can't change our setup, we can't change everything else. We just had to change ourselves. So how, when, it was difficult to do this. So this is a process.
[00:35:02] So I've learned that I've got to give it time now, but at the time, of course, I wanted to give it as little time as possible so that I can go back to my old life and regain my good feeling about my work and so on. So to answer your question, the Resilience Mentor is a new company I have set up after I My daughter was diagnosed it gave me a different purpose, but I can do the same thing as I did before.
[00:35:29] One of the things that I'm doing now more than before, of course I'm doing the same job, is I'm helping other people. I come from a different angle. The intention is to give and to share. Of course I'm paid my fees, but my reason, my why, is different. My why is I'm here, I'm open to give. And to share, okay.
[00:35:50] So that's what the resilience mentor is about. And on my work is about making other people successful because they are resilient, not because they are smart business people and knows nothing is sustainable without this additional layer of understanding the power of a few things. First of all, time, the power of time.
[00:36:12] You need time. Second is you need to change your approach, the mindset that you have. to learn again, to be a student of life. And the third part is, of course, incremental actions. So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. And that's, that's where I am today. And I've been running this business now.
[00:36:30] My daughter is 10. I've been running this business now for close to eight years. And I'm still helping a lot of new companies, entrepreneurs all around the world. So I get to do what I love. I'm still working with people from all around the world. I'm still working with very brave founders, people with different energies, people who take a lot of risks and.
[00:36:49] People want to learn because life is full of surprises, right? So that's why I'm where I am today.
[00:36:56] Melissa: Wow. Thank you for sharing the origin story of the Resilience Mentor as a business. And how the intent for the way that you approach business has shifted. In terms of, yeah that nuance is powerful.
[00:37:12] And I'm so excited for this podcast. to take up a little bit of that journey by simply having, simply from you saying yes to be on it. I'm so grateful for that. And look forward to seeing or hearing more about what we can make you do through the Resilience Center. Of course, you have a TED Talk coming up, upcoming.
[00:37:32] When is the date of that?
[00:37:34] Nina Aziz Justin: The TED Talk is going to be on the 5th of November. In rot.
[00:37:38] Melissa: All the best for that. For all of you watching, all of you watching the podcast know that we got Nina first. . Yeah, I'm what a privilege, first feeling. The tea. I'm spill the tea here. Not too much, but a little bit. A little bit.
[00:37:52] And also for those of you who are in the community, spilling the tea Nina is going to give us a bit of an insight into an aspect of the resilience operation she's talking about. It's that she's created, it's all hers and you can get that within the community and that's upcoming next.
[00:38:08] So if you're watching the podcast or listening to the podcast, you need to head into the comments to see how to watch this. Exclusive masterclass with the community on the power of the small, the power of incremental actions, which is one aspect that Nina's going to share with us. Nina, to wrap up this episode.
[00:38:25] If you share with us, if you were a song, what song would you be? Oh my goodness,
[00:38:29] Nina Aziz Justin: you actually asked me that question. And I gave you a song and then later I thought, oh no, I should have said another song. So now it's my, now it's my opportunity to take the second chance. I would be the kiss of life by Sade.
[00:38:46] Oh my goodness. Yes. I always learn a lot to love about that song, especially because Shadow is in it.
[00:38:54] Yeah, she's
[00:38:54] amazing. Every time I feel, actually it's a it's a three moment song for me. If I'm happy, I listen to it. If I'm sad,
[00:39:03] I can listen to it. It's good. It's just,
[00:39:07] Melissa: I like it. It has depth. It has sensuality.
[00:39:10] It has seduction. It has desire.
[00:39:13] Full, thank you for bringing your full spectrum of emotion. Hundred percent of you're 80% today. I could have you for a three hour podcast episode. Oh, just have you talking be awesome. You'll be bored. You'd be like, stop
[00:39:26] Nina Aziz Justin: it now. , thank you for having,
[00:39:29] Melissa: it's been a privilege to have you on the podcast.
[00:39:31] There's one thing you'd like to leave the listeners with today, run through. What would you like to hear from me?
[00:39:37] Nina Aziz Justin: Show up. There's the power of showing up, consistently.
[00:39:44] Thank you, Nina. You are welcome. I'll see you again soon. See you soon. Bye bye. Bye bye. See you in the next episode, guys. Take it easy. Thanks. Bye bye. Bye bye. Bye bye.