How to be Happy and Confident with Nadim Saad

Hey everyone, hello, hello from Ibiza, or Ibiza, uh, uh, vein, um, I have a very special guest today for Tipping Point. Welcome to Tipping Point: The Power of Clarity. This podcast is dedicated to you, and what we do in every single episode is explore two things. First of all, how did my guests turn tragedy into triumph? How did they take their trials and tribulations and turn them into power? That's number one. And number two, what is the clarity that they got from the tipping point, and what changed them? So Every episode you're going to learn from thought leaders, luminaries, TEDx speakers, bestselling authors about their personal challenges and what they learned from it. And speaking of power, we have an incredible guest, Nadeem Saad. He's also a fellow relationship coach, owns a publishing company, written 7 books. Who's written— I don't know that many people that have written 7 books. To be honest with you, that's pretty epic. He owns this incredible company. It's his life's work. You'll learn all about it, so I'm not going to give it away. And of course, I'm Amina Zamani. I'm your host and guest. I'm an executive coach, and I work with individuals, executives, early-stage founders, and help them unlock their core limiting beliefs and turn them into power. Hence this podcast. Hence why we're here. So, okay, so without further ado, Nadim Saad, welcome to the show.

Hello, Mina. Thank you for inviting me. I love the energy. Love the energy.

Cool. Yeah, power. Um, so this is really cool because I'm, I'm in Europe for the next, uh, 6 months. And so I'm in Spain and Nadim's in, uh, the UK. So that's exciting. He has a company, his entire life's work in the UK. So Nadim, um, I think what you do is phenomenal. Like, it blew me away when I first heard about it. For context, can you share a bit about what you do, what your company is, and then go into your 7 books, um, and describe that a little bit just so we can all kind of get the lay of the land?

Sure. Well, so I've always been an entrepreneur, so mainly into business, and then I became a parent And it, I, you know, I was always sure I was going to be an amazing parent, but it came with a lot of challenges. What I realized is I was actually reenacting a lot of my, you know, what my parents did to me, didn't really like it so much. And, but it was, you know, it was just harder than me to actually change things. So I did, started a lot more self-development work at that point. And I realized how what was coming up is what we call the inner child. So, you know, I mean, whatever I didn't like in my childhood was coming up and bubbling up. And so I would get angry at my children, which I would rather not do. And it was quite challenging and it created a lot of challenge also in my relationship with my wife. And then there was a tipping point. So where I actually started discovering that there are a lot of parallels between leadership and parenting. So I realized actually that a lot of things that we learned about, you know, science of leadership can be applied at home. And, but it was not easy. So I had to create actually a whole— so I actually wrote a whole book about this. And one of my tipping points was going to a retreat called the Hoffman Process, which is quite a deep dive into our relationship with our parents, reparenting our inner child. And basically, it's actually getting rid of our negative beliefs. We call it like cut the ties, basically the ropes with the past. And coming out of this, I just realized, wow, how much impact I had, you know, I've had from my parents. And I'd go share stuff with my friends and no one would really be aware of like, of this impact. And therefore I decided to create a company that was about parenting. So how to better parent and how to better parent your inner child first, and then how to better parent your children. That's how I started writing books about it with my wife actually. And so we wrote Kids Don't Come with a Manual because I realized that we all need a manual. So we all say kids don't come with a manual, but is there a manual for kids? And actually it was really interesting to realize that when you look at the science of leadership and science of parenting, there are really great things. There are things that we can all do, and ultimately they're based on basic psychology, and personal development. So all the things that we learned when we're 30, 40, and, you know, and we— to, to be better human beings, we can actually apply also to children. So I started with that for several years, and then my child at 8 actually went through a tough patch, and really trying to figure out what it was, she was really like being very resistant. It was going into a negative cycle. So we, you know, we kind of think, well, we've got to stop this. So it was all getting quite negative, but thankfully being parenting coaches, we really sat down with her and really got to the gist of it. And she said, I hate myself. And that for me was the second tipping point because I realized that my very positive child, incredibly bubbly, like we were in French, we say she had la joie de vivre. And she had tipped. And actually, if we had not reacted negatively to it and not gotten to the origin of the behavior, she could have gotten very resentful and actually continued hating herself. So that's my second tipping point made me go from parenting into now the new company called the Happy Conflict Company, which is about training kids to actually learn these decades of research on personal development that we distill in easy-to-learn lessons for kids. So we focus on kids aged like 4 to 13. We're also going to do teen and earlier, but that's what we currently do. And we teach them, and I love your podcast for this, we teach them the powers. We teach them the 10 powers. Would you want me to summarize the powers? Just go through the 10? Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. So because, and we actually use adult language because it makes children very curious. So the first power is the power of introspection. So it's the importance of obviously the self-awareness and understanding ourselves. And it's really difficult for children because metacognition, you know, which is what differentiates us from animals, human beings from animals, and it's the fact that we can think of our own thoughts and analyze them. This only appears around the age of 5, 6. So what we try to achieve is actually for children to develop this power of introspection and this metacognition. So we start with that. So be self-aware, what makes you sad? What makes you happy? You know, what are the things that, you know, listening to music, whatever we help, what do people think about you? Children really find it difficult to appreciate themselves and what they're unique at, what they, So we really try and help them and we get others to participate, friends, family, and to tell them what they appreciate about them. So they come up, you can imagine, first class, boom.

That's really important actually what you just said. Children are praised like good girl, good little boy, but that actually doesn't teach them metacognition. What you're suggesting is almost like a coaching strategy of evoking inside of them You know, helping them understand and be introspective, that's critical. I was, I was doing some research ahead of our show and what I learned, just according to CDC in the United States, 6 million children, um, struggle with behavioral problems and 75% of that 6 million have anxiety. And typically anxiety and depression go together. If you're a very anxious person and it's not treated over time, you will also develop depression, right? Because there's shame associated to having this anxiety and not knowing how to sort of address it. So, um, I think that's really— I want to hear about all of the, um, the traits and powers, but I think it'd be good to distill each one and kind of chat about it. Like, the number one is, it sounds like it's the in the right flow. Specifically, what exercises do you use to bring that out for people?

Yeah, well, that might be a bit long, but I'll try to summarize all of that. And actually, I forgot to mention that I co-wrote this with a top UK psychologist, a celebrity psychologist in the UK called Linda Papadopoulos. And so we wrote all of these obviously based on other research, but also our knowledge of 40 years of her experience too. And so power of introspection. I mean, you're so right. I'm going to talk actually exactly about what you said because this whole praising is actually can be a challenge. And so the second one is power of optimism. And power of optimism is actually about positive thinking because all the research shows that when you think more positively, you're going to create more positive in your life. And so we really try and get children to realize that they have like everyone else, you know, that they develop around age 5, 6, what we call the inner critic. And for children, we call it actually the inner bully. And so, yeah, because it's constantly, there is this, you know, voice that's telling them you're not good enough, you're not, you know, and often it comes from the parents, but it can also come from a teacher, it can come from friends. So what we teach them is how to stand up to this inner bully. So we ask them, is this voice kind? Is this voice, and then we help them to make that cognition is about realizing that this voice might not be true and therefore how to stand up to it and just realize, no, this is, I don't wanna hear that and transform it. We also teach them about flipping their lids. So how important it is to regulate the feelings. So, you know, once it gets bubble, they bubble up, actually name it to tame it. So name the feeling so you can then, it reduces the intensity in the brain. That's what neuroscience shows. And therefore you can feel more in control and regulate how you express this feeling. So all feelings are okay, but it's how we express them that are not so good. Then we go into the power of interoception. And that is our sixth sense. So a lot of people don't know we have 8 senses. So I'll go— I'm not going to go through all of this, but the sixth sense is interoception. Seventh sense is the vestibular sense, and the eighth is proprioception. We focus particularly on interoception because it's something that we all need to develop. And actually, that's where I come from. I've really shut down my feelings when I was a child, which is why I had to do so much self-development work after. Because I didn't really understand what was happening. And when anger could come, I didn't really realize it until it was kind of already, you know, not expressed in the best way. So the power of interoception is about feeling our feelings in our body, feeling, you know, where we feel them and how. So basically start identifying these, naming them so that we can better regulate them. Then we have the power of mindset. That's the fourth power. And that's a really important one. And it's linked to what you were saying about what Carol Dweck proved out after, you know, decades of research.

Yeah.

Because she wrote this famous book called Mindset, is that when you focus too much on praise and you're good, you're great, what happens is you can actually be afraid of failure, of not standing up, living up to this, right? All this praise. And therefore it can be counterproductive. So it either creates a narcissist Or it can create a child who's not very confident. Much better to praise on things that you can control, which is effort, progress, strategies. Therefore, it's really important. Yeah.

So what an example of that would be, rather than saying good job, for example, one can say your commitment to this project is beautiful. Wow, I can really see your effort, right? Like to actually talk about their process rather than you're good, right? Because the opposite is obviously bad.

Exactly. And very importantly for kids, because they hear us evaluate them all the time, is actually help them to self-evaluate. So ask them questions such as, are you proud of yourself? Is there anything you could do better?

Oh my God.

What is another way to do it? So this way you actually can, you help them realize that instead of becoming people pleasers, oh, I'm doing it because it's all good and it pleases other people. It's like, oh, what do I think about myself? What do I, am I too demanding? Basically you can also identify children who are already too demanding versus children who are not, you know, being, challenged enough, and then you can adapt things to that. And obviously, this— what's great about this is it can be applied to all adults as well. So I hope that people who don't have children here are realizing that all of these powers we actually need as human beings, because the growth mindset is applicable to everything, the power of optimism, the power of interest. And so what's interesting is, as I write my books, I realize, oh my God, I'm creating exercises that I need to do every day.

Yeah, exactly. You're like, I basically wrote this for myself. Kids can use it or not. But no, but I hope that we're not having a delay, but I think what you're saying can absolutely be applied to anybody. Absolutely.

And listen to what's coming and you'll see even more because the fifth is actually The power of failure. And that's something that, for example, in the US is better dealt with than in Europe. I mean, for example, in France or other countries, like failure is a really big thing. And actually failure is the best thing that can happen. So what do we teach kids is to see that a lot of the bigger, you know, the celebrities, the big like sports stars, all of them, they've actually went through more failures than the average human being. And if they had to learn through these failures, so it's actually about finding the gift in every mistake. We also get them to get their family involved so that their parents can tell them what mistakes they made and what they learned from them. So it's a really great loop where everyone learns about mistakes are okay. And actually it's good to fail and that there is power in it because you learn from it. And then the sixth is the power of resilience. And perseverance. So it's about bouncing back from events. What we want ultimately, if there was actually one gift, you know, when we sat down with Linda and we were writing the book, we thought, what would be the one thing we'd like kids to get out of this? And we thought actually it would be for every human being. It's just this belief that whatever challenge comes our way, that we can deal with it, that we've got, you know, we've got it. We've got, you know, we've got the emotional resilience, the mindset to just go, you know what, it's horrible, but it's okay, I can deal with that. Because then you can go through any of life's challenges and just recover. That's the whole power of resilience. Yeah. So that's what we're trying to teach kids. Seventh power is the power of creativity. And what we— it's interesting because until about just a few years ago, I was already writing books and I didn't think I was a creative guy. I was launching companies and I still thought I've never called myself creative. And it's just people had to tell me over and over again, you know, look at it. But it's actually when I started doing children's books, you know, and it's like kind of more creative that people like, I started realizing actually I'm creative. Although obviously I work with an illustrator, I'm not the one who's creating this, but I started realizing that creativity is not just about drawing and painting or singing or whatever. Actually, creativity is creative problem solving. It's thinking outside of the box. It's creating new, having a vision about something, a slightly different vision than that. So, and I realized that it's often, and I don't know if you've heard of Ken Robinson, basically the most watched TEDx talk is from Ken Robinson. It's basically about how schools kill creativity. And so what we want is instill again, you know, because it's all black and white, it's not really creative, it's just like you solve a problem in this way, you don't really think so much outside the box. Obviously things are changing thankfully, but that's what we want to bring in the education system, more creativity. So power creativity, super important we get children to do things, think in a different way, think about themselves in different ways, compare themselves to an object or to, you know, What would they be? You know, we really get them thinking differently. Then we've got the power, so that's the seventh. The eighth power is the power of mindfulness. And that's obviously something that's so broad and also so useful and interesting, and everyone talks about mindfulness. We try and limit it to something that's super simple that actually if children can realize that, it can be life-changing, and obviously for parents too, for them, for adults, all adults. It's what's important, what you can control is what you pay attention to and how you pay attention to it. And once you realize that, it's obviously, you know, where you focus is obviously your life is where you put your energy into, therefore focus on the right thing, which is why obviously it's linked to the power of optimism as well. So we link all the power through everything, obviously, because everything's linked. Ultimately, it's about being a better human being. And so, and how you pay attention to it is very much about obviously our perspective on life. And so if we see things more positively, if we see failures and mistakes as an opportunity to learn and grow, you know, so we relate to all the powers, well, therefore we're, you know, much better. So this is very much about focusing on the present and in every present moment, think about what you pay attention to, how you pay attention to it. Then there's the power of compassion. So it's how to just, you know, bring more kindness and empathy to everything children do and adults, because what we show is actually how research shows that compassion and kindness is very contagious. So if you're kind to others, they tend to be kinder to others. So you've got the loop, you can become, you can create this beautiful boomerang of kindness that, you know, and just expand and have a better world. And the final one, and obviously most powerful one, is the power of humanity. And power of humanity is actually about acceptance of ourselves and all parts of ourselves, as well as acceptance of others. And because it's all about ultimately creating a better world and create a better humanity. So that's That's what— and so now we do this in schools. So it's books that children can, you know, work through on their own. Teachers use the activities and use it at schools. A lot of care. I mean, basically it's really very happy that it's literally going across the board and we want to make it a holistic approach and systemic where social-emotional skills are learned at all ages.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everything that you just listed, I mean, like we've said before, is literally like the manual for living a happy life, a happy, confident life. Right.

Thanks. I would totally agree. And I still have to learn a lot of it, by the way. So you often teach what you need to learn the most. So it's not like I'm there. But what's amazing is to be able to distill these things for everyone to use them. And Realizing that we're going to do it for parents too and for adults, because obviously, as you said, it's applicable to everyone. Therefore, you know, as a family, if you do it together, you've got, you know, you can speak the same language and everyone's motivated. And we've had amazing examples of children who do our stuff and then they go back at home and they go, "Mommy, you just flipped your lid today. You know, maybe you want to do a bit of PBS." It's like, "Oh, what's PBS?" It's Pause, Breathe, and Smile. So it's one of, so you got an 8-year-old child telling their parents to kind of use a bit of, you know, pause breathing and smiling. And it's just so amazing because obviously as a parent, it's difficult not to go, okay, you know what, maybe I can do that rather than get angry. You know, it's, it's, it can be more effective.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's interesting, you know, these powers, they're not obvious, but in a way it's like, it's kind of, human knowledge, especially people who've been following the personal development route, it, it works to be grateful. Resilience is power, right? The definition of resilience is literally to be able to get up and get through your process faster, um, right? It's to be resilient, it's to move forward. I mean, we all know that, but, um, what about people that are stuck um, in certain areas, you know. What about those leaders or parents that when they're not triggered, you know, they're fine and they can be grateful and happy and patient and confident, but something happens, something else happens, the child triggers them, and then all of a sudden they blow up, right? I think it's a very common thing for human beings to have their own tipping point of anger and then just blow up. What do you teach people at that point?

So the best— so obviously I, I, we focus a lot on prevention. So both for in early years prevention, but also prevention of this happening to the parents. So what can you do to have a different mindset about what's happening so that you don't blow up? So that's really focused. But I really love your question because particularly for someone like me who had to actually learn to still be able to make this mistake, but recover from it. And so the two key things is one, we call something called rewind. So for example, it's happened to me that I'll just blow up, but because I'm aware that when I blow up, I actually send my children to fight or flight and they become often crumbled, just so afraid. And basically what happens is then they release cortisol and they become less capable of doing what I want them to do because they become, you know, complete, like their brain, everything's stuck because they go from the prefrontal cortex into their limbic system. When I see that happening, because I realize it, I stop myself because I'm realizing that I'm doing the exact opposite of what I should be doing and it's making it more difficult for them.. And so I go rewind and I restart from just before I blew up. And then it's incredible. Thankfully cortisol is not there yet. They just suddenly are like, oh my God, wow, we prevented the worst. So we can actually deal with it in a more adult way. Well, in the case of me, I'm more adult in that, in their case, you know, be able to listen because they realize, well, we actually put them to the limit. And it enables you to recover. And then you don't have to say sorry immediately. Well, I do sometimes now, but sometimes you don't feel like you're sorry. But it enables you to really reconnect a lot better. And for example, in the evening, reconnect, say, oh, wow, I really got really angry earlier and I apologize. It's not very useful, but hey, what can we do next time so that it doesn't happen? And so you have a whole problem-solving you know, with your kids and you can come up with really great solutions. Just to stop yourself and show the mistake, but the fact that you can recover from your mistake and you can realize it quickly is so powerful.

Well, you just said something very important, by the way. Hold on for a second because this can't be missed. Basically what you're suggesting is that parents admit their faults and show up vulnerably and admit when they made a mistake. This is unbelievably powerful for children because in child psychology, like, your parents are God. Your, your parents can't do anything wrong. So when they yell at you, when they make these— and when they hurt you in very severe cases, if there's violence or, you know, other really dark traumatic things, children don't have the ability to process it. So they think that this bad thing—

they're a bad person.

I'm a bad person. I did something right. This is so common. And so people grow up feeling like there's something wrong with them because they have childhood trauma that hasn't been dealt with. And this is the core of it. You know, the percentage that are, that are walking around traumatized is Right. It's so if a parent can have enough emotional intelligence to say, Mary, Sarah, darling, I did something today and I'm not proud of it and I'm sorry. And I'm, I'm, you know, something like, I'm working on this. And, you know, whatever that is, that can prevent a trauma from happening. Is that right, Nadim? If they have the conversation?

Yes, partly, because obviously you can, you know, it's just they can lose trust. Um, so I would say yes. No, honestly, it's true. So, but it prevents— yeah, but it prevents a lot of the trauma. So let's agree. But obviously if you can't— so that's the thing. So as you say this, you have to mean it, and therefore there is work to be done. And I'm talking from, from my own, you know, development, because it has happened to me to actually just do it too regularly to not, and therefore, because I come from a very authoritarian family, and for me it was totally normal to actually do that. So I didn't realize that it could affect my children so much, that they might not feel safe just because I'm getting angry. And actually, so one of my work in this world is actually to go out there and to say, you know what, I fucked up as well. And I realized that I was affecting my children. They didn't feel safe because actually I needed to go through my own childhood and realize that I thought initially that I had an amazing childhood. My parents were great, just a bit of conflict at home, but actually realizing that their anger just really made me not feel safe was something I discovered after, you know, I had to do kind of regression things that, because I had forgotten all these things in my childhood, because what we do typically is like, it's easy to shut down and just our coping mechanism, we shut down and we remember the good things. So that was what happened to me. And I was always happy in life except when I could get angry. And guess what? I would get angry mostly with my children or my wife. So that's the people who are the most important. But so the big, I would advocate always totally be vulnerable, but also when you realize it's happening too much and that it's affecting the child, you know, and just, it's worth doing a bit of personal development, you know? I mean, get to the bottom of this, because often it's about reparenting our inner child. It's about getting to the bottom of what we lived, what we didn't experience, what we weren't happy with. And often then it's not rejecting this part of ourselves. That's, for example, the angry part. It's actually just having more compassion for it and realizing that we have to be compassionate because if we resist it too much, it's just going to continue coming up. Well, if we find the compassion and we realize where it's coming from and that it's much easier to deal with it.

Wow, that's incredible. Well, God, there's so much more we could cover, but I think you, you nailed it.

Um, thank you.

It's, it's, it's critical for everyone to really recognize that it's not easy, that we need to all do work. And typically, um, you know, we have one trauma or another to deal with, and once you become a leader or a parent or whatever you have additional responsibility to do your work so you can show up in a, um, clear way. I think it's, um, I think the work that you're doing is amazing. It'd be interesting, um, for the audience to, I'm sure, to learn about the names of your 7 books, where they can find you. Like, yeah, how, how do we access you?

And you're all— thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. The easiest is to go to happyconfident.com because it's called the Happy Confident Company. So you can go to happyconfident.com, or I also have my own website, nadimsaad.com. So these are the two, and you can find all the resources there.

Okay. And would you name all your books just for fun? I'm curious.

Well, I'll do so. Some of them are the Happy Company Life Skills Series. So these are a series because you also have daily gratitude and mindfulness journals in the series. And you've got the Life Skills Journal, the daily journal, and you've got Kids Don't Come with a Manual. You've got the Working Parents Guide to Raising Happy and Confident Children. And you've got, yes, and Raising Happy and Confident Children. Just so the Working Parents Guide is really about the parallels between leadership and parenting and realizing that is the same science. So I literally take the kind of top 20 leadership skills and then say, how can we apply them to parenting? Wow. Well, it's amazing. I go in corporates and actually I ask them, so I often, it's obviously quite risky, but I ask them, what are the top 10 leadership skills? Just give me, and I go, you know, I did that Google biggest banks everywhere and always come up with the same 10. It's incredible how, yeah, yeah. And so what's great is then I apply these basically to parenting and show that this is, this would ultimately, this is the gift is how to apply it because it's all about leading people, even if they're tiny.

Yeah, that's right. It's especially about leading people when they're tiny.

Okay.

So before we close then really quickly, just name the top 10 powers again, just one by one.

So power of introspection, power of optimism, power of interoception.

Yeah.

Power of mindset. Power of failure. Power of resilience. Yeah. Power of creativity. Power of mindfulness. Power of compassion. And power of humanity.

Oh, I love that. That's amazing. Well, if you're curious about this content Nadim shared with you, where you can find him, I hope that for the non-parents, you found some value in this because All of these things we can apply to ourselves in preparation, you know. Like, I don't have any children, but I, I remember thinking when I was in college, gosh, when I— if I take that step of having children, like, I want to do as much work on myself as possible because your children absorb everything, you know. It's your— they're your ultimate teacher and your ultimate test. So, um, even if you don't have kids, I hope that you found some value in this. And if you do have kids, it seems like a no-brainer to get his journal, to get these books. Um, and obviously Nadim's working with some of the best minds in the world and in the country, um, so I think you can trust the content. So anyway, thank you everyone for joining. Nadim, it's so, so good to have you on. Thank you for the awesome content. Again, this is Tipping The Power of Clarity, where we learn about how you can take personal pain and turn it into personal power. And I'm your host, Amina Zamani. Again, you can find me on Instagram here, um, coachmina.com, although I am rebuilding this, um, and on Facebook at Amina Zamani, and LinkedIn, of course. All right, everyone, have a wonderful day.

Thank you. Thank you, Mina.