My story
Before I helped anyone else hear themselves, I had to learn to hear my own voice. This is where that began.
I arrived in Australia from Pakistan at 18, with $1,000 I had borrowed from my family and a mountain of debt. I did not know anyone, and I did not know who I was going to become. For a long time I believed I had to earn the right to want more. That a bigger life was something other people were allowed to reach for, and I was not.
The pressure built quietly. The debt, the long days, the distance from everyone I loved. It grew into something I could not see my way out of, and for a while, I was not sure I wanted to keep going. That was the lowest I have ever been.
Then I found coaching. Not the title of coach, but the meaning behind the work. For the first time, I heard myself clearly, above the noise and the opinions and the version of me I had learned to perform for the world. It was the first time in a long time that I felt something worth fighting for.
So I fought for it. I worked long hours in restaurants and whatever else paid the bills, and put everything I earned back into myself. My training, my growth, every course, book, and mentor that could make me better. While everyone else was out, I was at my computer, studying, up until late, and going again the next morning. I did not spend on things I did not need. Every dollar and every hour went into becoming the person I already sensed I could be.
Slowly, it started to work. I trained, I practised, and I kept showing up long after the hard days told me to stop. The student who once sat quietly at the back of the room became one of the trainers standing at the front, guiding others through the very work that had saved me.
And then came the moment I never could have imagined on that first day. I became a Co-Founder of the International Coaching Institute, the school that had changed my life, now helping to shape the next generation of coaches who walk through its doors.
I know, from the inside out, what it takes to go from surviving to truly living. And I know it is possible for anyone willing to fight for it.
Everything I do now, the training, the podcast, all of it, is one thing: holding that same door open for the next person.
