Whatever your future Qur’an goals are, and whatever vision you have for how the ideal ‘You’ will interact with the Qur’an, at the most practical level, you will need to develop the daily habit of picking up the Qur’an and studying it every day. One of the reasons I’m such a fan of the Daily Qur’an Habit is that it doesn’t matter where you’re starting, and it doesn’t even matter where you ultimately want to end up – you will only reach your goals with the consistency that comes from daily interaction with the Qur’an.

It really doesn’t matter how ‘religious’ you are either. I know many people who go out of their way to make sure people know how religious they are. They are often making up for a lack of confidence in their faith which is a result of not having daily interaction with, and guidance from, the Qur’an. I also know people who are not from particularly religious backgrounds, and just genuinely want to learn and improve themselves. They are often believers who know that the Qur’an is the source and the main substance of Islam, so they go about building the daily habit. You may even be one of them.

When starting on this journey you may look at the Qur’an and in all honesty see nothing but squiggles and dots. And that’s okay. It doesn’t matter where you are, all the matters is the direction in which you’re heading. You are in the best position to really connect to Allah, because you don’t have the veneer of religiosity.  If people don’t see you as religious, you don’t have to worry about meeting their expectations, which is a stone’s throw away from putting people before Allah – which you probably don’t want to do. If people do see you as religious, that’s fine, as long as you are conscientious of that fact and don’t let it interfere with your Daily Qur’an Habit (which no-body sees).

It’s much easier to give yourself this gift of the Qur’an by making this little addition to your life than it is to start thinking about all the things you may have to stop doing if you become ‘religious’. Frankly, I say don’t be religious.  Just read the Qur’an everyday, benefit from it as much as you can, and go about your business. Everything else will fall into place. If you don’t build this habit first and foremost, the spirit and message of Islam will likely be lost on you as you fumble around joining this group and that, trying to work out the new ‘Islamic’ rules of how life should work – those rules only make sense when the Qur’an is in your heart.

I’m not a religious authority of any sort, and I’m certainly not here to tell you what you ’should’ be doing. I’m just here to give you tips and tools if you happen to want one of the life results I want. On a personal level, the Daily Qur’an Habit is certainly well up there for me.

If you’re already convinced, I would recommend subscribing to this blog which will gradually be filled with ideas, strategies, tools and resources that will help you build the daily habit. I would also recommend joining my new Face-Book group “I Want the Daily Qur’an Habit”. It is my goal to make this FB Group an extremely useful resource to all of its members, by regularly giving everyone valuable content. If we never meet again, let me leave you with a genuine prayer. I pray that you live your vision of how you ultimately want your relationship with the Qur’an to be.

The moment you set your goals, you set in place the obstacles that will stop you from achieving them. The first step to self-coaching, once you have some meaningful goals is to identify the four types of obstacles that you will face in the pursuit of your goals. Here are the four types of obstacles:

1. Mental Obstacles

These are usually in the form of limiting beliefs, or conflicting values that prevent you from taking intelligent action. You almost certainly have both of these, but they will only become important if they stop you from achieving one of your goals. NLP offers a variety of ways to overcome them, from sub-modality shifts to parts integration and Time-Line Therapy to eliminate ‘Limiting Decisions’. Stick with this blog, and I will soon walk you through each of these.

2. Emotional Obstacles

Being in a dis-empowering emotional state is enough grind your actions and results to a halt. The only ways I know of to overcome these obstacles are to use your ‘Emotional Triad’ and go through a specific sequence of questions that will get you to learn what you can from the experience, and release the disempowering emotions as and when they come up. There are also techniques from Tad James’ Time Line Therapy that will work to allow your unconscious mind to let go of negative emotions.

The objective here is not to permanently remove the emotions from your life, but to understand the message that emotion is trying to give you, decide on what actions need to be taken and thus minimize the time you spend in that dis-empowering state. This is emotional intelligence in action.

3. Physical Obstacles

These could range from you body not being trained to associate pleasure to taking the required goal-achieving actions (like not wanting to get out of bed), or not having enough physical energy, to being in a dis-empowering physical environment.  There are specific strategies you can use that focus on changing the people, places and things that surround you to create a physical environment that is empowering and gives you the space, time and energy you need to creatively undergo your projects and achieve your goals.

4. Spiritual Obstacles

Regardless of what you believe about life, at a certain point your faith and hope must out-weigh your fears and doubts. This will actually go a level deeper than your mental beliefs and work at the level of what the meaning of life is for you. Personally, I have noticed that it actually doesn’t matter what religion you follow, or what sect of that religion you prefer. What matters is how you personally interpret that religion/spiritual tradition to connect to ‘God’, the ‘Universe’, ‘Energy’ or whatever you call it. Is your interpretation of spirituality one that causes you to be the Cause of the consequences in your life, or one that causes you to be at the effect of all the environment around you? This will ultimately have a radical effect on whether you become an achiever or an excuse-maker.

How to Overcome these Obstacles

There are specific self-coaching strategies you can use during the process of moving towards your goals, that will help you to overcome each of these four obstacles. Although I have a great passion for sharing these strategies and getting people to coach themselves as much as possible, it is beyond the scope of this post to go through each one of them in detail. So, I will leave you with a few options of how I can provide you with the most value right now.

The first, cheapest, and possibly best option for a lot of you, is to sign up or bookmark this blog. It is my goal to update it with some articles, podcasts, and videos each week, and update you all by email once per month on the most popular material.  More or less every post will be looking at how to coach yourself to shift and overcome each of these four obstacles in the context of each of the six major areas of life (career & finances, relationships, personal development, spirituality, and health).

The second option is to sign up and attend one of our live trainings, or tele-seminars, details of which you can find on this website. My next event is on NLP Self-Coaching to Achieve your Islamic Development goals, and you can sign up by visiting www.iidr.org

The third option is to utilize one of my 90-day personalized one-to-one coaching packages to achieve a specific result you want in life. Most of what we cover in results coaching is focused on supporting you with the particular strategies you need in order overcome whatever obstacles you are currently facing, to achieve your goal. Once you go through a coaching program, you can use the strategies you learn for the rest of your life, to continue achieving similar goals.

If you’re a student or young professional, you’ll probably spend a number of years living with people. You’ll either be flat sharing or in student accommodation. You’ll be living with people just because you all have to, basically because rent is high, and you can save a lot of money by sharing.  The down side to this of course, is that you have a handful of people who may or may not start off as friends, who all have totally different maps of how the world should work, sharing a living space.  This will often lead to pointless arguments, and kitchen – feuds.

Here on some tips on sharing a living space from someone who has pissed a lot of people off by accident.  Be wise. Learn from my mistakes.

1. DON’T BOTHER SHARING FOOD COSTS

It always seems like a great idea. It always breaks down after a few weeks, and it usually results in an argument, followed by everyone agreeing to not share food costs.  Save yourself the time and energy.

2. SHARE THE COST OF CLEANING PRODUCTS AND TOILET ROLE

Everybody uses these equally, even if not everyone does an equal amount of cleaning.

3. ALWAYS CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF

You may not have particularly high cleaning standards, but you can guarantee someone in your flat does. Everyone has a different limit for how much mess and cleaning they will tolerate.

4. SET CLEAR BOUNDARIES

This will happen naturally as the year goes on, as each flatmate accidentally annoys the other.  Nobody wants to purposely get on your nerves, so it will serve you to kindly show them what boundary to not cross.

5. KNOW THAT IF YOU HAVE NO BOUNDARIES, YOUR FLAT-MATES PROBABLY DO

They might mind if you go into their rooms, eat their stuff, use their computer, even if you wouldn’t mind them doing that with you.

6. IDEALLY GET A CLEANING ROTA AND STICK TO IT

If everyone cleans one area of the flat/house once a week, you’ll keep it in pretty decent shape. If not agree to get a cleaner in weekly to do the communal areas and split the cost.

7. IF YOU’RE LIVING WITH A DIRTY PERSON…

They’ll probably be part of the generation of men raised by women, who haven’t learned to clean their stuff up.  They’ll be of two types. Either they’ll be willing to learn what they’re doing wrong and how to build better habits, or they won’t. Find out, and decide how much you’ll tolerate and if it’s worth you living somewhere else, given the recent blogs on how your environment effects your mind.

8. AGREE ON BILLS AT THE START OF THE YEAR

It’s probably best to put each one on a different person’s name, so everyone has a stake in paying on time.

9. NEVER PUT ALL YOUR NAMES ON ONE CONTRACT

This is a landlord scam to take advantage of students by making them stay in the flat for as long as possible. It stops you from leaving with one month’s notice, because your current flatmates will have to pay your rent and/or find a replacement.

These five steps are adapted from an excellent book “How to Write Better Essays”, which you can find here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Write-Better-Essays-Palgrave-Guides/dp/0333947150/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257339459&sr=8-2

I know it works, because I’ve done it… and it works. Each time I follow these five steps exactly as they are laid out, I get above 70% for my essays, which is a 1st.  Each time I don’t get a 1st, it’s usually because I didn’t follow this system, or followed it but skipped over parts (which is very tempting), or because I was just a little lazy towards the formatting at the end.

I think one of the key reasons people procrastinate is because they often don’t know what their outcome is, they aren’t focusing on all the reasons they have to follow through, or they haven’t worked out the NEXT ACTION to move forward.  When writing essays, by following this plan step by step you should never be left not knowing what the next action is.

Here are the five magical Steps. Read them, and use them, then email or call me to let me know when you get your 1st.

STEP 1: INTERPRET THE QUESTION BY ANALYZING EACH KEY WORD

• Notice the ‘key words’ in the essay question, and brainstorm what you think they each mean (use wiki if needed). This will create your ‘key word concepts’
• develop your ‘overall essay concept’ by answering the essay question based on your own opinions, based on what you understand from the ‘key word concepts’ (without doing any reading or research)
• brainstorm essay plan – everything you know about the subject, based on the new ‘key word concepts’ and the ‘overall essay concept’ – Ask yourself: “what am I curious to find out, in order to fully develop/shape my argument?”
• Get curious and create sub-questions: “what do I want to know to test out my essay concepts?” Come out with as many questions as possible

STEP 2: RESEARCH THE QUESTION, GUIDED BY YOUR ANSWERS FROM THE ‘INTERPRETATION’

• determine which sections of which books, and which online articles are directly relevant to answer the questions from STEP 1.
• Read the sections that are most compelling to develop an argument, based on the interpretation phase.
• Make your questions direct your research.

STEP 3: PLAN

• Create a detailed outline, including only those aspects of the research that are directly relevant to the essay question, and the sub-questions that will help you argue the essay question
• Relate each point in the detailed outline back to the essay question, to form a very powerful argument
• Make notes of each of the references that will be used in the final piece of work, so you can easily find them when you need to.

STEP 4: WRITE THE ESSAY

• Write the essay at the pace of at least 1000 words per day (this worked for me – the writing is the easiest part when you know what you’re on about – by the end of my degree I was at about 500 words per hour)
• Write the essay entirely on the basis of the detailed plan – use language skills to powerfully articulate the points in the final version.
• Make each paragraph start by linking the main point back to the essay question.
• Strong introduction saying exactly what argument you will make
• Strong conclusion based on the premises laid out in the essay paragraphs.

STEP 5: REVISE, EDIT AND REFERENCE PROPERLY

• Go through the whole essay and make a list of ‘works cited’
• Write a Bibliography, based on everything you’ve ever read that is relevant to the essay topic, and some of the other main texts that you know are relevant.
• Use the ‘Harvard System’ Document for help, or whatever system your university prefers you to use. The book this was adapted from has a whole section on explaining exactly how to do citations according to the different systems.

It’s key, in terms of motivation, to have some long term vision to pull you through short-term set-backs and rough times. That’s why it’s key to create your Qur’an vision. You can’t hit a target you can’t see. Creating your vision is as easy as pie. Just grab your Coaching Journal (or a piece of paper) and brainstorm answers to the following questions:

Where do I ultimately want to be in terms of my relationship with the Qur’an?

What is the ideal amount of time I would like to spend each day with the Qur’an?

On a really busy day, what is the minimum amount of time I would like to spend y with the Qur’an?

How much of the Qur’an do I ultimately want to memorize and understand?

Which books about the Qur’an, which Tafsirs, and which interpretations do I want to have been through before I die?

If I could choose how much of the Qur’an I will know before I die, and in how much depth I will know it, what would my ultimate vision be?

How, specifically, will I know when I’ve reached my ultimate Qur’an objectives?

How many ways do I know about how to study the Qur’an, and how many of them do I want to master before I die?

For your entertainment, here is the first week of a 16-week training plan you can get online. Follow me on my journey to discover how well it works in real life.

This is the first week of a 16 week training program I’m on to reach my goal: six-pack abs. If you want to read about Mens Health, go here.