The belief quietly running your career
- Cassandra Nadira Lee
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
LIFT Newsletter 058
For the past few weeks we have been doing quiet inner work together.
With the body, the work was learning to feel what is happening in you before your head rushes in to explain it away. With emotion, it was reading the mood you carry into a room, and the mood you meet when you arrive.
And last week we sat with a young woman who had been holding a story about her own worth after two rejections, and what shifted for her the moment she stopped believing it.
Underneath the body and the emotion, there is almost always a belief quietly running the show.
A story you never sat down and chose, that still decides how you speak, how much room you take, and how much of yourself you bring.
The one I meet more than any other is the belief that other people hold your future. That your manager decides your promotion, that the panel decides your worth, that the market decides where your life goes next.
It rarely arrives as a clear thought.
It creeps in as small sensible decisions instead, like the morning calculation about how much of yourself to bring, or the opinion you soften just so it lands more easily, until one day you notice you are speaking less in the very rooms where you used to speak first.
We do not call that fear.
We call it being realistic, being professional, playing the game.
And slowly, without ever agreeing to it, you start to live as though the people in the room are holding the pen to your story.
That belief costs you more than a slower year or a missed title, because the moment you quietly hand your future to a room, something in you begins to shrink, and you feel it long before anyone around you does.
Here is what I have watched happen again and again.
That room held far less power over your life than you handed it.
The promotion, the worth, the direction of where you are going, none of it was ever fully in those hands to begin with. And the day you stop believing it was is the day you start showing up differently, not louder, just far less afraid of the people in front of you.
Now, a word for the Muslim professionals reading this, because for you there is a layer underneath all of this that goes deeper than confidence.
When you believe the room holds your future, it does not just make you smaller.
It slowly moves something in your heart out of place.
The boss, the panel, the market, they quietly take up room that was only ever meant for the One who made every room and everyone sitting in it.
One person who joined us recently named it more honestly than I ever could. She realised she had started to live as though people decide her future, and not Allah. Said plainly like that, you feel how far the drift can carry you before you even notice you have moved.
If you are reading this and part of you flinched, thinking your connection with Allah SWT has gone quieter than you would like, that you feel distant, or that you are not sure you belong in a space with the word Muslim on the door, then I am speaking to you most of all.
This was never meant only for the one who prays on time and feels close right now.
Coming back to yourself is an open door, with no judgement waiting on the other side of it.
I am not saying any of this from above it.
These past weeks I have been learning to loosen my own grip on something I was holding far too tightly.
My team and I did every piece of work we knew how to do, and then I had to do the harder part, which was to hand the outcome over and trust that what is meant for me will reach me, after the effort, never instead of it.
We have a word for that trust, tawakkul, and I am still learning it slowly, like everyone else.
This Wednesday we are opening up our third LIFT webinar, made for Muslim professionals and entrepreneurs.
It is an honest ninety minutes where we sit with the beliefs quietly running our working lives and look at them with curiosity instead of judgement.
Not heavy, not preachy, just a real conversation about what becomes possible when you stop handing your future to rooms that were never meant to hold it.
LIFT Mastermind Webinar 3
📅Wednesday, 1 July
⏰9pm SG, 8pm WIB
And if you are reading this and you are not one of the Muslim professionals I just turned to, I hope it still served you, because the belief that somebody else holds your future is one we all carry, only in different words.
Wherever you are sitting, the work underneath is the same. Stop handing your life to rooms that were never built to hold it.
Lead Beyond Yourself. Rise Beyond Limits.
Saving a seat for those it is meant for,
Cassandra Nadira and the LIFT Team.
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