Hey everyone, it's Kristina with the She's Brave podcast. Today is part two of my amazing interview with Ani Naqvi. So if you haven't already, you got to go back, listen to part one. This is such good stuff. You guys, Ani is just an amazing human being all around. She survived the tsunami. She's been on Oprah. She was a journalist with the BBC.
Because she's had three near death experiences. She learned so much, this interview has so many invaluable insights, so many life skills. You learn about resilience. Overcoming depression. You learn about living your best life. She's amazing. You're not going to want to miss this. So if you haven't listened to part one, listen to part one first and welcome to part two.
Every time you interrupt a negative thought, and you do a moment of mindfulness or you do this mental fitness rep, for example, for a minute or two, every time you do that you delete the pathway in the surviving brain and you create a new pathway in the thriving part of the brain. With and there's lots of practices that can help with that.
Yeah. So doing whether it's, doing gratitude journaling or anything that's like working on making you really hone in on the positive things. I've been doing a what's gone well diary for the last three years, for example, and every day I just make a note of the things that have gone well.
And sometimes there's 30 different things, but then I try to keep it to three to five, otherwise it takes up too much time to do, but that just helps your brain retrain your brain so that it isn't focusing on that one negative thing that's happened to your week.
Yeah, so that's just, I love that so much. I wanted to add something personal. When I was a child, my parents always watched the six o'clock news with Walter Cronkite. Some of the older listeners will know Walter Cronkite and they still do. They'll come visit me in Seattle and they'll want to watch the news. And the minute I left home at 18, I never watched the news and I learned very early on that I only wanted to focus on something that I could change and make better and that 100 years ago, people didn't know what was going on around the world. They only knew what was going on in their village, right? That was as far as it went. So that's one of my little rules. I actually live in a pretty small town outside of Seattle. I am involved, very involved in my community here, and that's my focus. What I always like to say too, is pick one thing that you're passionate about. To help make the world a better place and or to like in my case, it's animal rescue. I'm really heavily involved in that and then my podcast. Those are the things that I can focus on to make the world a better place.
I can't fix everything right? So, I just wanted to add that in there because that part where you were saying it gets so bad for our brains to be watching the news and scrolling on our phone and multitasking like what you said that we don't actually multitask.
But yeah, such great advice and I don't scroll on my phone anymore either. It was an addiction that I had to overcome. Yeah, it is an addiction, right? It's a dopamine train. And that's why people mindlessly scroll for hours on end and liking this and liking that. It's a dopamine hit.
So dopamine is very addictive. And you're absolutely right watching the news. I used to be a BBC broadcast journalist and I do not watch the news at all anymore. And I wondered why I was so depressed back then. And now I know why. Oh yeah. You're constantly having this barrage of negative information all the time.
We are, they say you are what you eat, but I believe you are what you think. And the quality of what you think is based on what you consume and not consume food wise, but what you consume mentally and emotionally. So if you're spending all your time watching these Netflix true crime dramas that they seem to love to do, there's every week there seems to be a new one. You have to avoid the. I have to even avoid because, they do the little trailer thing, right? When it's a featured things, I'd have to even avoid that because, yeah, I get annoyed with that too, with the trailer of some show that I definitely am not going to be watching. And I wanted to say too, like maybe people think what I said was a bit callous or something, but my thing is, if you're going to.
Take in some information, but you're not going to be part of the solution, then maybe just take out that out of your equation just take in the information and focus on something that you can make a difference with, right? It's not callous. The thing is, if you meditate, which you do, and I do as well, you become very empathetic to what's going on in the outside world.
I cannot watch what's going on in the world without it upsetting me. Me too. I, so I just think I can't do anything about those things. They're not in my control. Yeah. So it's not in my control. Why do I have to let that be a part of my, why do I have to let that be in my consciousness? I will then have bad dreams about that thing.
I will have nightmares. Yeah. I'm very sensitive to those kinds of things. I used to be a. broadcast journalist. And now I don't even look and watch the news anymore because I just, I can't do it. I don't watch any thrillers or anything that's remotely violent or scary or anything like that.
Even if the music in a show starts to do the dum. Cause I'm just like, Oh my God. Oh my God. Let's stop. I can't watch anymore. I'm so sensitive now that I can really feel it. So I think it's just very sensible to know what your limits are and to put boundaries in place for what feels good for you.
Because if you were still watching the news, you would. It's feels a bit hopeless. And the thing is, it's not hopeless. Yeah. No, it's not. Just as much amazing stuff in the world, but because of this negativity bias and because everybody is using fear as a way of directing, people to their content and things.
That then we think that's the case, because you don't ever get good news on the news, do you, but there is a ton of good news you say that you're very heavily involved in your community. I'm also involved in my community as well. And during the pandemic, for example, our neighborhood already.
Rally together, neighbors, they had like lists of volunteers to go in and support people that were, two that were old and that were too scared to go out, all sorts of things, there's a lot of goodness in the world. And if you focus on what's going good in the world and what's going right in your life, you're going to then have more of that.
If you focus on what's negative in the world and what is going wrong in the world and what is going wrong in your life, you will then create more of that because that's what you're focusing on wherever your attention and your energy. Is where your attention will flow to, so that's another reason why it's important to really pick and choose which thoughts you give your time and energy to, which people you give your time and energy to, and what you want to consume, I only watch light stuff, comedies, that kind of thing, because if I'm going to watch something I want to feel it.
Yeah. Joy whilst watching it. I don't want to feel the negative stress hormones and the adrenaline and the cortisol kind of coming through my body and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Same with my husband and I, we recently started watching a show called Curb Your Enthusiasm and it's been going on for 20 years. The main character is Larry David.
He was the creator of Seinfeld. I'll be honest. I'm not a huge Seinfeld fan. I'd never really got into Seinfeld, but. We decided to try this show and it's hysterical. We watch an episode or two every night and we laugh every single night and it feels so good. It's so good, it is so important, right? Because if you are laughing for, before you go to bed, you're, you're the. The lovely serotonin endorphins, everything's going off and everything. You have a lovely night's sleep, that helps you sleep as well. But if you're spending your time focusing on the positive things and what you can do and how you can make a positive impact in the world, then life is.
Great. You can't, and you will never be able to control external circumstances, such as a tsunami or a war that's going on or anything like that. We can't, or a hurricane that happens. We just have no control over any of that. But what we do have control over is how we choose to respond and react to things.
We choose to consume mentally and emotionally and how we spend our time and what thoughts we give our attention to. Those are the things that we can control. We don't have any control other than that. That's quite a lot of control. Like you said, you don't watch anything then you don't watch the news.
For example, that is a choice that you've made. You don't scroll mindlessly on social media. That's a choice. That you have made, and it's important to acknowledge that we are all making choices, whether they're conscious or unconscious choices throughout our day. And that you have the ability to change the choices that you choose to make.
So people that say, Oh, I can't change, for example, that's just them. Get being stuck in their comfort zone and because it requires effort to make a change. Yeah, it requires effort to do something different. And most people like hanging out in their comfort zone, even if they're depressed. For me, for example, being depressed was a security blanket.
It was like, okay, if I'm not, I wasn't consciously thinking this, but unconsciously, if you're depressed, you can't ever be successful at anything because you're too depressed to even get to do anything. So it's almost like a fear of success playing out in a really big time kind of thing.
So I'm not suggesting that all people that are depressed are like that at all, but. For me, it was a comfort blanket. It was a security blanket. It meant that I just didn't have to really try very hard. Also I can tell looking back at my depression in those years, that's how I was using it.
When you look back at your life in hindsight and you've done the work and everything, you can see these patterns that you were playing out. So I have a question for you for my listener out there. I'm sure there are some that are listening right now and they're saying, Oh my gosh, that's me.
I'm, I feel like I'm stuck. I'm depressed. What advice do you have? For that person to slowly, take a step or do something to get out of that state. Like I love how you phrased it, like that your depression was like a security blanket and there's no judgment. We're all just, spiritual beings having a human experience and we all go through different phases and some good, bad.
And so I, I had never heard that. You said that, but it makes sense. I'm like, Oh wow. Yeah. So that you, at some point you realized it, you owned it and you moved forward. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. So if you, I also think that depression and if you're experiencing depression as we said, there's no judgment here whatsoever.
Yeah, absolutely. I do feel like depression is also about how it's like this discombobulation between the soul and the reality of life. Okay. So we are, because I believe we're spiritual beings having a human experience. The cause of my depression was, this feeling of, what is life all about?
What we just get born, go to school, go to college, get a degree, get a full time job, work nine to five for a salary, buy loads of goods that we don't really need, and then. Have, get married, have a couple of kids, then retire and die. And that for me was like, that was like, I was having an existential crisis.
I was like, surely that life's got to be more than that. And I think a lot of people who are feeling stuck and depressed, it is like a, this sort of this just, this disconnect between the soul and the reality of life, especially if you live in a Western society where it's like that, what we, a lot of the, what we see as success is having a good job, earning good money, having a nice house.
Things like that, but they're not the things that really are meaningful to people. They're not the things that really give you purpose and a feeling of contribution and connection and joy. Yeah. They are almost like you're filling a hole in a way, but true meaning comes from other things.
That's why I'm always fascinated when I go to Asian countries, for example, because the people there literally. Living in Tin shacks, they don't have proper running water and electricity, and yet they seem to be so much happier than I. I had that experience. I had never been to Asia and I went last February. Two years ago, all the travel companies were desperate to sell some packages to go somewhere because everybody was. We were still in the midst of COVID, so I took a gamble, rolled the dice and bought a package and got a great deal. One of the countries I went to was Cambodia and they say it's, I think it's, number one or two in happiness in the world, yet it's one of the poorest countries in the world.
And, I met a date sugar farmer who is 70 years old and climbs up about 50 palm trees a week. And, and To collect the sap and then they boil it down and make it into sugar. Ridiculous. Him and his wife were, I think, the happiest people I'd ever met. And in general, the people in Cambodia were again I couldn't believe how happy they were all the time.
And it's so interesting, isn't it? It is, and I think this is where, I think this is where we've gone a little bit wrong in the West is that we focus on the things that we think are going to make us happy, but they're actually not the things that make us happy. And it was really, when I did survive the tsunami, it, it, the, my memoir is going to be called Tsunami, The Wave That Saved My Life.
Why? Because surviving that tsunami, it gave me this sense of purpose that I talked to Oprah about, when I said to her, I need to make the most of my life, I need to make it mean something. It then meant I was very adamant about trying to find this purpose. And it took me a few years.
I'm not saying it happened overnight. It took another 10 years and it took a further kind of cancer diagnosis and all sorts of other things going on in my life before I got there. But. It did make me really think about, what do I really want to be doing? How do I want to be contributing in the world?
What do I want my legacy to be? Because one of the things when I was dying in the tsunami was I can't believe I'm going to die and I haven't truly lived. That was what was going on for me was, I can't believe I'm going to die and I haven't truly lived. And yeah, of course I'd had some career success at that point in my life, but it was meaningless.
My career success went out in the face of death and was completely meaningless. The things that mattered were, I hadn't left any real legacy behind. I hadn't done anything amazing with my life. I hadn't fallen in love. I had, I didn't have a family. It was all of those kinds of things that were going through my mind when I was at that kind of precipice of death.
And, a really I think it's really important for people to understand that life is much more than the things, the super, they're not all superficial, the things that we think that we want that tsunami helped me really find that purpose and really set me on a path of finding purpose and this kind of like exploration of going around the world and, I was in Iraq during the war.
Working for an NGO, delivering projects to those people that were being displaced, for example. Then I came back and worked for the UK's largest charity. So at first I thought maybe it's something like that, but it just turned out that those weren't it either. And that's why I needed to go on another path to find the purpose.
And I know for sure that what I'm doing today and what I'm doing now is my purpose. And that's why I'm excited to be able to come on to podcasts such as yours to share this with your listeners, because I have this mission to impact the lives of over a quarter of a million people and leaders.
And I just, I'm not going to be able to do that on my own, I need to be with other people, but broadcasting as much as I can to show people, look, I've been depressed. I've had terrible traumas in my life. I've had big, kind of big life threatening challenges that I've had to face in my life.
And if I can do it, then you can also do it. Your listeners can also do it because I'm not special. We're all the same at the end of the day. It's just, I often think, what if in our darkest hour, we find our greatest strengths. And sometimes depression is a part of that journey, maybe we have to hit that rock bottom and confront the kind of the spiritual kind of disconnect that we have with living in the kind of Western world that we are in.
And that's okay. So if you are struggling, Look at what help you can get, get some kind of like support, therapists or coaches, whatever that is for you, but get some support and, be active as well, because depression feeds on the kind of in Ayurveda, it's called Tamasic energy, which is this kind of like heavy kind of energy. And one of the main ways of moving out of this Tamasic energy is action. And, so exercise movement can help as well, but meditation, mindfulness. Those kinds of things will also help, even doing the, what's gone well, diary, for example, really noticing because we all wake up in, most of your listeners, I'm sure as well, we're all waking up in a warm house.
We've got a roof over our heads. We've got electricity running water. We've got heat, we've got all of our basics needs met. Be grateful for all of those things every day, rather than taking them for granted. Be grateful for everything that we've got, either the smallest little thing, even if it's a nice cup of coffee in the morning or a hot shower in the, or a nice relaxing bath, be grateful for everything and notice those things.
Oh, that's what's gone today. That's gone today. It doesn't have to be big things. People think, Oh what am I going to put in a what's gone diary? Mine is, it consists of, I had a lovely bath this morning. My husband cooked me a lovely lunch today. It was a beautiful sunny morning, the big parakeets of tweeting outside my bedroom, just the little things in life.
The more that you can focus on those little moments of joy that we all can tap into, you will experience more of that in your life.
Oh my gosh. So incredibly Beautiful. And I'm so honored and also excited that your words and your message is getting out into the world and I get to be a part of it too.
Thank you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity as well.
Oh, thank you. Thank you so much, Ani. Any last words that you would like to share with my listeners before you also share how we can find you? Because I know my listeners are going to want to connect with you.
So I really want everybody, a couple of things here, to reframe that life is happening to you, to life is happening for you.
And if you think that everything that's happening in your life is happening for you for your greatest good for your spiritual involvement, then you are going tof ind that you're going to be more mentally resilient around the challenges that we all face in our lives. And always ask yourself, what quality, strength or what thing do I need to grow in order to overcome this particular situation in my life. Do I need to be more resilient? Do I need to be? More patient. Do I need to be more forgiving of myself? Whatever that is for you. Okay. And also think to yourself that if you are in a dark place, this could be a place where your greatest strength could come out as well.
And always see that a challenge is an opportunity and a gift for you. I think that.
Oh, I love that. I'm going to say that again. A challenge is an opportunity and a gift for you. That's beautiful.
Think to yourself that your soul has come here on a journey and that, if you are having a challenge, then it might be a challenge that you've chosen in this lifetime to overcome.
So don't be scared about it, really meet it head on and overcome that fear or that thing, that challenge that's holding you back so that you can live your best lives as well. So those are a couple of things I really want everybody to take away. I've survived four near death experiences, three near death experiences, multiple cancer diagnosis, a stage four cancer diagnosis, a tsunami, and I'm sitting here with you all today sharing parts of my story and sharing also the techniques that will help you to shift your own neuroplasticity.
It's incredible. Ani you're just incredible. You're an incredible human being.
We are all incredible human beings though. And it's just about finding that strength within us. Okay. And that's why I'm saying, if you need to find support, go find support. It's hard to do these things on your own sometimes.
So go, there's no shame in asking for support. Go see a therapist, go see a coach, help see someone that's going to help you move forward and do some movement and have this kind of attitude that, whatever you're going through at the moment, there is a reason for that. There is, I often say to my clients, what's going on in life is we have this very narrow perspective from our own view, but what's really going on is like much, much greater than that.
There is a plan, but we can't see all of the plan in the period of time that we're in. If you'd have said to me. Oh, Ani, do you think you're going to be on a podcast and talking about your life story and have written a book and doing what you're doing? A few years ago, I would have said no way, right?
Because life is funny. It takes you off in all sorts of different directions. So don't be scared of the journey. Embrace the journey as much as you can, get support if you need it, and just remember those things. If I could managed to overcome those things. You too can as well. I want you to know that I want your listeners to really know that there is hope for everyone. I've suffered from depression, anxiety, PTSD, the whole shebang. You can also do it and you will do it as well.
What a light. What an incredible light you are to the world. Ani, tell us how we can get in touch with you.
Of course, so you can find me on the Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook. My name is Ani.Naqvi on most of those channels, or just as my name, and then my surname, which is N-A-Q-V-I.
You can also connect with me on my website, which is ultimateresultsgroup.com. And come and hook me up for a call if you want to discuss any of this further, I'm always open to discussing things with people and if you need any support at all, then yeah, get in touch with me for a discovery call through my website or follow me on Instagram and I love it and you guys, everything will be all the links will be in the show notes.
So all you have to do is go to the show notes, tap and bang. You can connect with Ani. Thanks again, Ani. This has been an incredible conversation today.
Thank you so much for having me. It was lovely to speak on She's Brave Podcast today.
Hey everyone, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy life to listen to today's episode. I love learning about what makes you brave. I'm here with you, I see you, I hear you, and I want to hear from you. I want to know how you're showing up as being brave and authentic. Connect with me on Instagram at She's Brave Podcast or come join our community in the She's Brave Podcast Facebook group.
I'm sending you so much love. Until next time, keep being brave.
