42. Pivot after Infidelity with Furkhan Dandia

What if your most painful moment became the turning point for something greater? In this powerful and vulnerable conversation, I am joined by therapist, coach, and author Furkhan Dandia, who shares his deeply personal journey through infidelity, divorce, and the rediscovery of self-love. If you’ve ever felt lost, ashamed, or stuck in emotional patterns you can’t break, this episode offers a relatable and hopeful way forward.

Key Takeaways:

• Why self-love is essential for emotional healing and relationship clarity

• How betrayal can trigger deep personal transformation, if you let it

• The real reason your habits don’t stick (and what to do instead)

• How to escape the trap of expectations and self-abandonment

• The power of compassion, solitude, and inner alignment

💬 Reflection questions:

Have you had to pivot after betrayal or heartbreak? What did it teach you about yourself?

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go. Hello and welcome to the After The Affair podcast episode number 42 with myself Luke Shillings. In today's episode I'm having a conversation with Fakhan Dandia.

He's a father, men's coach, therapist, group facilitator, podcaster and author. Just some of the things to look forward to in today's conversation is pivoting after significant life events. The challenge of expressing emotions particularly for guys.

Not doing what we should do or what we think we should do. How to take on new habits and make them stick and also the plateau of latent potential and how that can prevent us from making progress in whatever it is that we're trying to achieve. So without further ado let's jump straight into it.

Okay it's great to finally meet you Fakhan. We've been, it's been arranged now for a little while. I've been looking forward to hearing all about your story and hopefully my guests will find it useful today and I'm just looking forward to see where it goes.

So without further ado would you be able to introduce yourself and let us just know a little bit about your backstory and why you're here. Absolutely yeah thank you for having me on Luke. My name is Fakhan Dandia and I'm a therapist, author and podcaster myself.

My journey really started five years ago roughly or it's been over five now but when I was going through a divorce and I really struggled with that. I felt alone in isolation. I lost contact with a lot of friends and family just going through that and most of it was on my own because of the shame I was experiencing of going through that experience.

But fortunately I was able to seek out therapy and get support from the therapists, various therapists I worked with over the course of two three years diving deep into not only what was happening for me while going through the divorce but then as things progressed starting to dive deeper into my own trauma from childhood that I had suppressed and didn't bring to my conscious awareness until that time. So that whole experience made me realise how I'm not the only one who's probably struggling in this way and a lot of the men I was observing or was talking to were having similar struggles in their own lives and a lot of my friends in my social network were also experiencing different types of challenges with shame whether it was relationship related or in most cases it was even just being able to provide for their families or having a career so lots of shame. So that almost inspired me to become an advocate from a mental health perspective for other men and that started my journey of becoming a therapist.

So in the middle of the pandemic I applied to school to do a master's in psychology which was a pivot because I'm an engineer by background so quite the career transition and then when I started that programme I also started like I said having deeper conversations with other men and realised that this could be a podcast where other people can tune in and hear the stories of others perhaps relate and recognise that they're also not alone in their journey so how could I create that environment where people can relate and connect. So yeah that really started two and a half years ago and now I'm pretty much done my psychology programme and I'm hoping at the end of this year I can transition full-time into therapist and a couple months ago I also released my first book The Pursuit of Self-Love which is really a culmination of the journey I went on for myself to find love for myself and heal and then with the hopes of sharing that with the world so yeah. Amazing yeah a perfect clear understanding of where you've come from where you've been over the last last five years or so.

So there's just some similarities here it's interesting these I spent probably the first part of my career actually in hospitality and then I moved into a more manufacturing stroke engineering type type role and did that for around 10 years and I've always and I've said before on the podcast I've often felt like I never really knew what it was I wanted to do with my life and then I all of a sudden I've finally I've reached this age has been this sudden impact in my life you know infidelity and divorce for me a few years ago and it sort of sent me on this trajectory which I had never anticipated or expected or although I'd always had like this interest in psychology and how people work it it wasn't something I pursued in it really in at 20 other than recreational you know the length in my earlier part of my life so how much of a you know on reflection when you think back comparing to like the earlier version of you to to the the more recent like how much of a surprise was that pivot for you and yeah yeah I mean looking back is a lot easier but like if I were to put myself back five even 10 years ago I don't think I would have predicted that for myself but looking back now it kind of makes sense I've always been more in tune with people's emotions and my own even though I struggled with expressing my emotions which obviously led me down this path I recognised looking back now that yeah that was always something inherent and I you know we often have to make a decision early in our lives where we haven't really experienced many things to what we want to do in life and at that point I had a strong skill set in math and physics so I just gravitated towards engineering because I couldn't figure out what else I would do with my life but yeah that people aspect was always there and and now that I'm in this field and I'm working with people I realise how much I enjoy it and how much I'm able to offer because I can connect with people and experience empathy for them and and not take on their emotions necessarily because that's something I have to work on myself as a therapist otherwise you experience burnout but yeah it is shocking in terms of the path I've taken because that's not something I envisioned obviously and didn't predict for myself but it makes sense because I enjoy being with people and and supporting and having that connection. You mentioned this pursuit of self-love and I think for many guys this again this is even sometimes I know that there will be some people listening thinking what you know what's that all about and it is it's something that I've spoken about on the podcast before and I think it's absolutely essential to be able to build solid connected relationships externally if you can't if you can't sort of make that connection with yourself first and really understand that so what was the turning point for you when you you recognised that maybe and I know you haven't said this per se but you recognised that you weren't self-loving let's say and what sort of shone that light on for you when was there like an aha moment or how did that come about? Yeah I mean you know you've touched on infidelity and that was kind of what terminated my marriage too because I was unhappy and I figured that if I can find love from someone else maybe that will bring happiness and it didn't it was a band-aid solution and I ended up staying in a relationship with the person I had an affair with and that lasted for a few years and that ended and when I came out of that I had to really once I got over the the sadness and the the loneliness I had to look inward and I had to be very honest with myself and recognising that okay you know there's a lot of patterns that are being repeated this is a second failed relationship and I'm I was part of both so how much of responsibility am I willing to take and at that point I had to take full responsibility and it was recognising there's a lot of healing that needs to happen there's a lot of childhood behaviours and beliefs that I've continued to repeat despite going for therapy and all of that so it the focus had to shift inward and that's really that turning point for me realising that okay I haven't been taking care of myself I haven't been giving myself love because I've been chasing it from others and with the hopes that if someone else loves me then I'm good enough but how can I give that to myself and the process for me became and I alluded to it earlier the sense of solitude where I pulled back and really focused on my needs and how to take care of myself and that some examples was focussing on my sleep focussing on what I was putting into my body in terms of food making all of those things a priority because those weren't a priority because I was constantly chasing validation externally so that meant I would compromise my sleep so I could go out and meet people or be around people that meant eating out as part of going out and compromising on my nutrition that meant not prioritising my mental health because I was constantly prioritising time out or around certain people so that shift inwards really meant okay having a regimen where I was sleeping appropriately getting enough sleep I was eating properly and I was making time to cook myself healthy meals I was prioritising my mental health so that meant making time for journaling and some of the other practises I needed and I was also prioritising my physical health not compromising on my workouts and being more disciplined and then ultimately I started stacking those habits and continued to improve and I started feeling better and I started feeling validated on my own but it was a significant process that continued to build over time and then I realised that okay this is the best I've felt in my whole life there was no like a need for external validation and that alone reinforced all the work I was doing I love hearing these these stories and I think it's I think for many people you know we all are we all hear like the gurus out there of you know what you should do and and you know we all know that if we feed ourselves well and we rest properly and we you know are active and you know all of these things that that is going to lead to improvements however the the pattern that most people take is not in line with those things so I know I noticed you mentioned the the phrase habit stacking there and that just made me think of Atomic Habits the book by is it James Clear I think it is which is an amazing book for anybody who hasn't read that I highly recommend it so actually I was going to ask just to see if you could obviously you've mentioned that part was there any other sort of techniques strategies too because I think sometimes it can just seem like too much like it's like I know that that's what I need to do but every time I try I fail I've maybe gone on a diet and I've done it 30 days or maybe I've done one of these you know push up or sit up 30 day challenges or or maybe I've managed to cut out a particular either chocolate or alcohol or whatever for a month but then I always fall back into my old routine like how how did you get past that and and what what strategies did you use to do that yeah absolutely I mean there's probably three themes that I'll highlight through that but first of all it was committing to myself that I'm gonna and I started off small I didn't set a lofty goal because you know again to your point we all know we all have that information it's easily accessible but in practise it's hard so you know the number of times I get disciplined and then fall back especially in the summers in Canada the winters are long so you have a limited window of getting out and enjoying and and being out but yeah it was it was holding myself accountable so initially it was like okay I'm gonna focus on my sleep for two weeks and in that period I'm gonna cook myself meals and see and then I think sometimes you know one of the things to your point gurus advise all these things and they recommend it but sometimes you need to the dark side as I say to appreciate the light and so you know I came out of this toxic environment that I had put myself in during the pandemic and then experiencing the other side just I'd never slept eight hours consistently for two weeks in a row and fortunately on my podcast I had a sleep expert who came and said I for anyone who thinks or you know they can get away with five or six hours of sleep or because most of the time when we're busy we compromise our sleep it's the easiest one to give up always eat yeah so he challenged anyone who was listening that give it a shot for even just one week and notice the difference so I gave it two weeks and I felt great and it was like okay and since then I haven't looked back so it was those little things I did and I started feeling the immediate rewards where it was like okay so now I want to build this and and and make it a priority now did I fall short at times and in the past when I would fall short I would use that as an excuse to continue compromising those habits or practises and not get back but the way I looked is like okay well I fell short now I start again today's day zero and we start again and continue to get back on that train and continue to do it and over time so that's the other thing I want people to recognise is you can't try to do too many things at once and this was not something I set out to do at the time but looking back this is how it worked out and you know we talked about atomic habits and James Clear talks about it is like make small incremental changes so it's not try to achieve like a 20 improvement in one day try to do one percent at a time and over the course of the year it's exponential so that's what happened for me is it was the sleep then it was the eating then it was like the cold therapy and I continued to build these positive habits in my life over time and I would hear about something I was trying to learn through podcasts reading books and I would implement something and see how it felt if it didn't feel great or I didn't notice a difference that I would make tweaks along the way but I continued to really stack those habits where now I have a really good morning routine where I take two hours to myself before I start anything else and I feel great I feel emotionally regulated I feel in my body and even if I'm having a tough time if I'm going through a difficult season of my life what sometimes you have a few days here and there where maybe your mood isn't the best or something's going on externally that it's hard for you to stay focused I'm not compromising on those practises and after doing it for a year and a half now it feels like it's become a part of me so that plasticity in my brain and those habits have become something I'm used to now it's like clockwork I'm up at 5am and I'm out of bed before it was like always kind of pushing myself and struggling with it but now it's just become routine for me and it feels like something innate I'm smiling as you're talking here because obviously I'm seeing a lot of this in myself despite I've also been through various phases of really good sleep habits and I've actually been able to maintain them for quite some time and then some circumstantial event has happened which has just rocked the boat a little bit and then I find myself like it feels like I'm back at the start like yet there are certain parts of my life where I'm able to take full control of that and really acknowledge that and I know I can with this as well and I suppose it's fair to say that I'm choosing not to you know if I'm going to be responsible for myself and be honest with myself it's a choice but as you're talking now it's making me think of the I'm pretty sure it's called the plateau of latent potential I think that's right yeah this idea and I think a great example of this is like you know people joining the gym in in January you know there's an influx in new members of the gym in in January they go to the gym it's really hard work you know they're sweating you know there's all this like loads and loads of effort going in and then they get sort of two or three two or three weeks down the line they look in the mirror and get on the scales and there's not really any difference or it's absolutely minuscule if anything and it's like oh I'm putting all this effort in I'm getting nothing so it feels it's worthless I'm not seeing the results so I'm just going to give up but of course when you follow that on over time you get to the point let's say for example you did keep showing up and you did keep doing it and you keep that consistency over the course of let's say a year or two years then all of a sudden going to the gym doesn't feel like hard work anymore because it's become the habit it's just you it's your identity it's who you are it's your lifestyle you've become that person and now all of the results that you're that you now have you know you now maybe are at the ideal weight maybe your body does look the way it does or maybe you can perform certain activities that you couldn't do before you know you've got that fitness and that strength you're not getting injured as as often it's not really because you're at the gym there that day it's because of all the work that you've put in and that commitment that you've made over the previous you know one to two years in that case and then another element is so I had a similar thing with with yoga and I can't remember if I've spoken about this on the podcast before or not but if I have I apologise you're going to hear it again that I wanted to do yoga every day that was I wanted to be the kind of person that did yoga every day and anyway I started doing this and I did the typical managed to get to sort of 30 days maybe even a little bit longer I can't remember exactly you know a few weeks anyway and and then it started to fade off and I would start to you know make excuses either woke up a little bit late or I just hadn't planned my time properly or I'm allowed enough time or maybe I just couldn't be bothered or maybe I was a bit achy that day or whatever it was and then it would start to fall apart and before I knew it I was no longer doing it and then I really started to sort of express that well why did I give up why did I stop that anyway once I really started to get to the the bottom of it it was I realised that I thought to be someone who does yoga every day I've got to do at least 30 minutes and there was that there was this there's this time zone of this 30 minutes so actually there'd been plenty of times where I had 10 minutes or 15 or 20 but because I didn't have 30 available not worth doing so I didn't do it so I then completely re-approached that strategy and now I'm the kind of person that does yoga every day even if that's only 30 seconds or 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 10 minutes it doesn't matter so which leads me on to expectations you know we all set these expectations about how we should behave or how we should you know act or show up in the world and again I think this can sometimes be quite overpowering when we're hearing these messages from the gurus who say this is what you should do this is what you should do the problem is every time you start shitting yourself you then you're pinning yourself into a corner and you basically if I don't show up exactly like that then I'm not doing it right and then that's an excuse to beat yourself up and you talk about the self-love that's a good excuse to say actually maybe I'm not good enough you know maybe it's me maybe I'm the problem you know and now I can't make progress how do I how do I get past this so it's and I think this is going to be obviously different for everybody of course you know some people are naturally going to find certain things easier than others nothing as Perkins suggested it's like you find one habit that you already do whether that be brushing your teeth in the morning or getting out of bed or opening the curtains or whatever it is something that you just happen to do already every day and this is something that I say James Clear talks about this habit stacking idea and then just attaching one desirable habit to that and it can be the tiniest thing drink a glass of water you know maybe I'm not drinking enough water today how can I do that I can tie it into something I'm already doing and then the brain is amazing at automating processes but it needs to do it enough times for it to become automated so I think it's uh yeah it's fascinating both seeing it in myself as you're talking I almost like feel like I'm being called out but then also recognising that I have the power to to do something right do something about it yeah yeah yeah and I think it's having compassion for yourself too and that's the biggest lesson because I'm my harshest critic and most people are for themselves so initially as I was trying to work on these habits if I fell short as I mentioned earlier I would feel guilty and I carry that guilt around but I had to really reframe that and and look at it from a different perspective that okay the things are going to happen that are outside my control like especially when I'm travelling whether it's personal or for work I can't stick to a lot of those habits because I don't have all the things I need or sometimes I can't just wake up early especially if I'm in a different time zone so again it's being kind to myself recognising this is my temporary situation and there's nothing preventing me from getting back on it and often that requires me to write that to myself as part of my journaling practise that okay just be patient be calm because I feel like that guilt for for not sticking to those things really pulls me down but how can I be my ally through this through all of this and that's been one of the journey is being my biggest ally and we're not that right and so so how can I speak to myself kindly in those moments where I'm not happy with the situation and recognise that sometimes it's not in my control and just focus on the things that are in my control so if that means I'm having to give up certain things of my routine how can I continue to stick with the other ones that are in my control and and then still getting the most out of it. So talking to that do you feel that along this journey that you've had to sacrifice anything? Yeah I mean I've had to constantly do an audit on myself and majority of the time it's recognising okay what kind of habits am I still engaging or in what kind of behaviours am I still engaging in that are preventing me from living the life I want to live and then it's being honest with myself if I'm not ready to give up some behaviours it's like okay I'm not ready to give this up I will circle back in a month maybe six months or giving myself a deadline that hey you know after a month you're going to try to move away from this behaviour or do something different.

It's also required me to look at my social circle and the people I was spending time with and prioritising the people that uplifted me or I enjoyed spending time with and I felt this positive energy and I didn't feel this drain so then I've had to sacrifice certain friendships or acquaintances and in some cases I've had to tell people that or just do it on my own so yeah a lot of things I've had to sacrifice even the like I said earlier being mindful of what I was putting into my body and a lot of things in terms of that I enjoyed the eat and letting those go recognising that they weren't good for my health or they weren't beneficial for me and sometimes the impact was immediate or sometimes the impact is long term but it's having those conscious decisions that you make and being I think the biggest thing I've realised is being honest with myself and not deluding myself yeah so you touched on friendships there and you took touched on this element of you know you have to sacrifice some some friendships but what has learning to love yourself or maybe rephrase how has learning to love yourself impacted your relationships in general like all the relationships with people you know in a positive sense like what what what has been the difference and and how's that absolutely I think just finding through loving myself I've been able to feel joy and peace in my life and I'm content because I'm not seeking validation from others I'm not personalising a lot of the things that people do whereas I used to because I had this negative view of myself so I would tend I tended to anything anytime someone did something I would personalise it and be like oh it's because I'm this or they think of me this way so through all of that through that journey like I said I have I experienced this sense of peace and love and joy every day and people around me also can tell right and that's really improved my relationships because I'm not putting any expectations on others I'm not projecting my trauma or my anger onto others I meet everyone with the same compassion that I hope to give myself and understanding and looking at everyone that hey everyone's on their own journey and sometimes people are sometimes people are figuring it out themselves just like I was and just like I am it's it's a never-ending journey but that's really because I'm able to meet everyone with that sense of compassion and empathy it allows for a deeper connection and that's really improved all my relationships including with my family members my close friends and there's a mutual respect now and a sense of love that we all experience and I'm super grateful for that because that's not something I experienced before because I was constantly angry and upset about what was going on and often that anger was projected onto others because I was angry with myself because I was unhealed so it was easy for me to get triggered um and that often pushes people away right and then when you have those situations where you're projecting your own trauma and anger onto others they're doing the same back to you and you're just mirroring each other and that just creates a lot of friction yeah so like the we talk about those relationships and it's about again coming back to I mentioned expectations earlier we go through life having all of these expectations of other people about how they should behave how they should show up and then getting angry and frustrated and annoyed when they don't show up in the way that we had hoped or expected and and it leaves us and I'm sometimes hesitant to use this word because I think it can be misinterpreted but I'll use the word victim and of course there genuinely are perpetrators and victims in given dynamics and settings and crimes and events and but it's one thing giving it a very specific definition it's another thing wearing it as a label wearing it as an identity that you've maybe been hard done by or you're interpreting a situation as being hard done by something's been unfair I mean let's say you and I both recognise that the impacts that infidelity can have on on our relationships from both sides of the spectrum and then and then wearing the sort of the victim label and almost like shutting yourself in a room to to a sense where well I can't walk out of this room until the other person changes their behaviour you know I can't I can't move into a you know the only way to get out of this relationship or to try to find a better relationship is to change the partner or for them to change their behaviour but then that keeps you completely trapped and you can't move forward and you become completely well paralysed in in some sense you know um I was also going to ask about so you mentioned that you you've been through a period of therapy for for two or three years yourself um as as a client is that the right word yeah and then you then obviously were then into another relationship and that that didn't end in the way that you had had hoped or maybe had formed over and that this is this is during the period where you've been in therapy is that right yeah yeah it was all happening at this point yeah sure yeah okay so just just be interested yeah so just interesting to sort of just to see and and your just your idea of how you thought therapy helped and what what was good and what came out of that for you and and what wasn't for you at that time and what you later found to you know send you on this current path yeah yeah I mean the therapy really allowed me to be able to talk through the shame and give it a name and then at the same time also start recognising a lot of as I mentioned the trauma I was carrying around from childhood and bringing it to my conscious awareness and then looking at it from a place of forgiveness for others and myself which allowed me to feel liberated now there was still a lot of work I needed to do on myself but unfortunately because I had put myself in another relationship coming out of my marriage it wasn't giving me the space or the opportunity to to heal because we it was almost like a trauma bond where both my partner at the time and I had come out of our marriages and jumped into this thing and we were just projecting our trauma onto each other and because we hadn't taken that time to heal it was just not going to happen so when I came out of it like I said I had to really look inward and and be conscious of it because it would have been easy for me to continue to delude myself and avoid and and distract myself by putting myself in other relationships or constantly being surrounded by women but that was not enabling my growth so it was recognising okay well I'm in the space I'm talking about all these things and I'm trying to be an advocate for other men but I'm not really doing all the work myself right I'm doing bits and pieces of it I'm picking and choosing yeah whatever feels convenient I'm doing whatever is easy I'm doing but I'm not really living that life and when I fully stepped into it and started healing and now that I'm coming out of it slowly it's for a lot of people it's obvious too right so it's they can see that I've made that transformation so when I talk about it now it's coming from a place of experience and I'm almost walking the talk but I didn't get there initially and it had to take a lot of time for myself to do it to do it and and then stick with it right and hold myself accountable which wasn't happening before it is so clear to see and I think it's so clear it's something I recognise as well in in myself and you know and people's observations of me over the last you know so many years that when you do turn inward you know which is often not a very pleasant place to to want to go you know there's lots of things there that we've we've hidden away and you know and not faced and I mean I've I've always been quite self-exploratory but even so I've still learned an awful lot about myself in the last few years and that then it's like you can still kind of show up in what you feel like is the same way but people start to see you differently there's obviously something different that that that you're giving off that that is interpreted in yeah whether it's this air of sort of maybe an air of authority or expertise or confidence or maybe just at peace just not dependent not frustrated not on edge not on yeah you know not agitated in some way and of course I know this is going to be different for everybody but there's there's rewards that you don't expect I think it's probably what I'm trying to get to you know you yeah because it is it's reflected in ways that you probably never anticipated and then all of a sudden all kinds of metaphorical doors start opening up you know whether that be your personal life and your friendships and your relationships or maybe even in the business world you know whatever you're in your workplace whatever whatever it is for you it yeah you can't sing its praises high enough but it does require work it does require commitment it does require intention and and like that focused goal and I think I don't know whether you this this rings true for you but for for me and for the people I work with one of the key things is like setting that specific goal of some description it doesn't have to be like perfectly ironed out but it's almost like if you get in the car and you're trying to head to a specific destinate or you're trying to go somewhere you need to know where you're going so you can put the you know the postcode or the address into the GPS into the sat nav and otherwise we just get in the car and just drive and randomly who knows where we'd end up you know and I think most people go through life without putting the the details in the GPS yeah so yeah I just I find it absolutely fascinating to both sort of like self-reflect but also to see it in others and it is wonderful to see so what at what point did you decide that this was going to become a book and you're going to sort of start to talk about in that direction for sure absolutely I mean there so there's a lot of so as you alluded to going into that place of solitude was really hard because obviously there's a lot of difficult truths you have to face but then it was also uncomfortable because I I would like to think I was a fairly extroverted person and I enjoyed being around people but I also enjoyed being around people for the sake of being around people because I didn't enjoy being alone at home and that was probably the biggest challenge getting comfortable with that but now it's something I actually really really value and I've I would say I've probably shifted closer to the introverted side and and so so that getting used to that where now I can tell where my energy levels are falling and I recognise that okay maybe I need to go home and read a book and ground myself and connect with myself again so through that process I realised that okay there's a lot of these self-reflection moments I had and a lot of these thoughts that I thought about and and reflected on and over time it became a collection of things and I decided to make a book out of it and share it with others to see if they could also take it and learn and what this book really comprises of is my thoughts that I sat with and that came to me in my moments of reflection so I share the thought and then I ask I talk through the thought of terms of okay well it's my personal experience and then I ask the the reader questions so that they can journal about it in the book itself I've provided space for for the readers to journal and the way I've approached it is it's 30 messages and reflections that I share with the readers with the hopes that they do this every day or every second day and build this habit into their life because typically any habit can take 30 to 60 days if you do it consistently so so that's really the hope to enable people to journal and reflect on those things that I reflected on and part of it was also to learn about what what goes into publishing a book how complicated it is it is and and get some experience so if in the future I want to write more books I know what it takes and how I can be prepared and there's a lot of things I learned from this whole experience maybe we'd have a separate call to discuss that as well yeah yeah but it's things uh things I've learned that I probably if I were to do it again I would be mindful of and and not repeat those mistakes but in all of it it's it's it comes back to this journey that we we go on and to your point earlier you almost need to have some sort of destination but don't get too attached to the destination because then you fall back into those expectations that you've talked about and and I talk about expectations a lot too because anytime we fall short you have to be mindful of what kind of internal narrative or dialogue are you having with yourself when you're falling short of those expectations because that can also prevent you from loving yourself because you may have a negative view of yourself when when you're not meeting those expectations so focus you know have a destination in mind but recognise that that destination evolves it changes you know you may set a goal for yourself but as you learn more that goal can shift um so so the what I try to tell people is focus on the journey enjoy it be more present and that's where I think a lot of people are seeing the change in me is because I'm not frustrated or stressed out or you know experiencing anxiety I'm at peace but I'm also present so when I'm engaging in interactions with the people that I care about I'm present and they can tell and it creates a place of safety non-judgement and and people gravitate towards that but that's been the biggest piece even with the book it was a journey that I didn't know what it was going to look like but enjoying all of it and and not getting too caught up on the final destination amazing well thank you Furkan it's been an absolute pleasure and I think that's a great way to summarise everything that we've spoken about today and the book sounds really really good so could you let us know how people can get hold of this okay if they can contact you yeah sure yeah yeah I mean I'm fairly active on social media the main platform I use is instagram so my handle on instagram is you know as zen it's e-u-n-o-i-a-z-e-n for people that are curious you know is a greek word for beautiful mind and that's something I aspired for and and hope others can do that too but yeah that's the best way to get a hold of me and that's where you can find information about the book and then I also have a podcast for people that are interested it's called easy conversations so ez from the you know as n and conversations with the hope of normalising a lot of these conversations that people don't have or shy away from and and try to give people something where they can feel that oh I can relate to this someone else's experience is very similar to mine because as I experienced and what I hear from other people when we're going through those difficult times in our lives we feel so alone because we feel like I'm the only one going through this and no one's going to understand but that's not the case someone out there is going through something similar it doesn't have to be the exact same thing but the experience they're having is perhaps similar perfect brilliant thank you ever so much for it's been wonderful to have you on the show and maybe we can talk again sometime in the future thank you yeah I would love that thank you as always I will include all of the Khan's details in the show notes which you can find as you scroll down in your respective podcast app below the episode I'd love to know what it was that you took away most from today's conversation for me it's just that pattern that's being repeated so many times this a significant unfortunate or unwanted situation happens in our lives but we can use that as the catalyst for something so much more and even though we do go to a lower place a place that we probably wouldn't have voluntarily gone to had these set of circumstances not happened the fact that we do we grow so much as a human being so much as an individual and really without clicheing it the sky sort of is the limit you can aim and rewrite your story and target your future in a way very very intentionally that you probably never did beforehand if you are inspired by some of the stories that you hear on this podcast and in other places of people completely changing their life from a place of adversity to a place of fulfilment but you don't know where to start then reach out let's talk you can contact me directly at luke at lifecoachluke.com I respond to all my emails personally you could also book a discovery call which is completely free there's no obligation we can talk through your situation I can give you some advice some reflection some ideas about what you can do next and where you can go of course if we're a good fit we can look at what working together might look like but that's not the objective so please if you're on the fence and you're like ready to press that schedule now button that you've been holding back just do it and let me help you get some action steps in place today so that's everything I have for you today thank you ever so much again for listening and I can't wait to speak to you all again next week.