Leadership & Renewal

– It’s not a goodbye. See you here again soon!

WHY I WROTE; AND WHY I AM PAUSING

This is the eighteenth edition of The Faith-Conscious Leader.

I began this newsletter dreaming of some vague end. (“Let me get to 52 weeks first!”)

I did start with why.

Earlier this year, I emerged from a medical tribulation that slowed me down physically and inwardly. Reclamation (read: recovery) has a way of stripping away urgency and excess. What provoked me was a recurring question:

How do we lead, work and decide while remaining anchored in faith across everyday professional life?

This newsletter became a place for me to explore that question in public. I wrote as a learning practitioner reflecting in real time, shaped by coaching conversations, lived experiences and ongoing self-examination.

Writing weekly required steadiness, consistency, not to mention consumption of time! It required showing up with sincerity even when clarity was still forming. Over time, the writing became a discipline of attention and intention. Alhamdulillah (all praise and thanks be to Allah).

This final edition before a pause is a moment of stocktaking.

THE ARC OF THE JOURNEY

Looking back, these eighteen editions followed a progression that only became clear in hindsight.

The early editions focused on orientation.

I began by reflecting on leadership of the heart, identity and inner coherence. I explored how productivity systems, strategic language and professional frameworks influence behaviour and decision-making. Several editions examined how secular assumptions surreptitiously shape how we work, measure success and define effectiveness.

I deliberately went into application.

I explored faith-conscious productivity, bureaucratic realities, mission-driven strategy and leadership under pressure. I reflected on adversity through prophetic examples and personal experience, focusing on resilience, realism and responsibility.

The focus toggled outward-inward.

Several editions centred on stillness, emotional intelligence, renewal and purification of the heart. These reflections were grounded in conversations with leaders, community dialogues and personal struggle. They examined how emotional maturity shapes leadership presence and judgment.

The more recent editions moved assuredly into practice and structure.

Stocktaking (muhasabah) was introduced as an inward leadership discipline. The Business Model Canvas was revisited through a faith-conscious perspective. Paradigm shifting was explored as a prerequisite for renewal. Most recently, Anchored Goals translated inner clarity into a one-year planning structure grounded in roles, focus and steady review.

That most recent edition forms an important part of this journey. It connected renewal of the heart with practical goal-setting and showed how clarity can be sustained across twelve months through simple, repeatable practices.

Taken together, the editions traced a movement:

• awareness
• responsibility
• reflection
• renewal
• structure

This sequence reflects how change unfolds in real leadership life.

– How inner awareness and heart purification shape leadership with excellence, fairness and compassion

PROPHETIC MODEL OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Leadership with ihsan (excellence) calls us to lead with beauty of conduct, fairness and compassion. It is outer excellence grounded in inner clarity. Technical skills help leaders perform, but with tension or uncertainty, what sustains leadership is emotional steadiness.

Emotional intelligence has become a central idea in modern leadership. Yet long before it was labelled, Prophet Muhammad ﷺ lived its highest form.

Recently I viewed a meaningful conversation on The Barakah Effect Podcast, hosted by Faisal Abdul Latif and his team, featuring guest Muhammad Javed, author of the book Nurturing Emotional Intelligence: The Prophetic Path to Inner Harmony and Personal Growth.

Javed describes emotional intelligence (I use the acronym EI here) as about controlling one’s feelings and emotions, placing them in the driver’s seat of decision-making and behaviour, rather than being controlled by them. It encompasses internal factors like self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-motivation, as well as external factors such as social skills and empathy.

What modern psychology teaches about EI is valuable. What our prophetic tradition teaches goes deeper.

The video excerpt below from the podcast episode exemplifies the heart of prophetic EI:

(If you can’t view the video above, click here.)

– Continuing reflections on prophetic resilience and modern leadership through hardship

..CONTINUED

In Part 1 we looked at the first three of the seven lessons extracted from Chapter 12 on adversity from the book Prophet Muhammad ﷺ – The Hallmark of Leadership by Dr. Azman Hussin, Dr. Rozhan Othman and Dr. Tareq Al-Suwaidan.

These were just the seven lessons I saw from the chapter. For more lessons from the rest of the book, I recommend you read the whole book to get an even wider perspective.

For now, we finish with remaining lessons ⓸ to ⓻.

– How silence and reflection restore focus in noisy leadership

THE MORNING QUIETNESS

In this edition, I begin with a sunrise, the serenity of morning quietness at a beach in Besut, Terengganu in 2022, recorded just after Fajr/Subuh (Break of dawn).

(If you can’t view the video above, click here.)

That early stillness carries a spiritual rhythm. It is the pause before my day’s activities, the space before my mind fills with noise. Remembering the beach sunrise, it is a moment when heart meets horizon.

Modern life rarely allows that silence. Actually as leaders, we need it a lot. The ability to pause, listen inwardly and find clarity amid noise is a difficult leadership discipline.

– Learning from the Prophet ﷺ and from our own journeys through challenge

THE PROPHET ﷺ AS THE HALLMARK OF LEADERSHIP

I chose Leadership in Adversity as this week’s article because this year had me face four months of adversity, i.e. my sickness, before I got out of it. View video excerpt below from The Bypass Files:

(If you can’t view the video above, click here.)

Then I wanted to check how our Prophet ﷺ dealt with adversity.

– From Setbacks to Sustainability Through Inner Mastery

LEARNING FROM SUFFERING

Leaders need to drive results, but how do they sustain? Without renewal, even the most talented leaders run out of clarity, resilience and purpose.

I experienced this truth first-hand through my (urgh…, major!) bypass surgery earlier this year. What seemed like a setback became a framework for rethinking leadership. Out of that personal journey, I shaped the HEART Framework, a way to build resilience, patience and clarity through inner mastery, which I offer as also applicable in the organisational setting.

Read More “Rewire, Refire, Renew: The HEART of Leadership”