I'm so sorry it's beautiful I'm sorry my friend my colleague here John is in London so I'm sorry for John but it's it's 29 here in Sydney it's absolutely a beautiful day it's excellent it absolutely shines through shines through the screen sometimes I blow my background so I don't make my London colleagues too we've got fair weather here too so it's okay I don't view that's much envious actually I think we're having a Taiwanese day today we've already had we've already had showers and sunshine showers sunshine so I'm very I'm very in keeping with your spirits today I think okay now I wanted to tell you since the last time I met you I've changed roles so I'm now in KPMG Impact and I'm working with John it's a new structure in KPMG and our overarching platform is the Sustainable Development Goals very exciting so we're doing a series of podcasts to talk about some of the themes under the SDGs and that's what we wanted to talk to you about today and the podcast will go on KPMG Impact website okay well since this is a podcast I will also have a local track where it's just my voice and I can send it to you afterward for maximum quality John's got one too and I must confess I've just bought one but I'm on my training wheels I don't know how to use it yet okay so do you have any questions otherwise I'll launch straight in yeah I think the revised list of questions is really good so I mean is the speed that I'm speaking okay for this podcast audience or should I attempt her to speak a little bit slower John what do you think I think it's I think it'll be fine I think you're very clear and audible okay okay excellent okay so so let's just dive in okay let's go you gonna call us down John are we on welcome to our KPMG Impact podcast I'm Ruth Lawrence a senior executive with KPMG Impact the global initiative designed to build a more sustainable and resilient future before we begin our conversation today I'd like to acknowledge that many of us listening to this and meeting today are actually on the land of our First Nations people and I'd like to pay my respects to elders past present and emerging leaders and recognize their continuing connection to land waters and culture KPMG Impact is highlighting the sustainable development goals in our podcast and today I have the great pleasure to speak to Minister Audrey Tang Taiwan's digital minister we're talking about social innovation in Taiwan how we see innovation solving critical social problems promoting economic growth and offering new ways to address the UN sustainable development goals Minister Tang I've heard that you're enthusiastic about the sustainable development goals where did that passion start well it goes way back when I was six years old my mom co-founded with a few other homemakers the homemakers Union which is Taiwan's one of the Taiwan's earliest environment protection foundations and they advocate for low carbon life green consumption green diet green energy and so on around the turn of century we switched to a co-op lifestyle where the homemakers Union's consumer co-op did this like purchase to the agricultural lands that is committed to the pollution free and low carbon way of farming sometime organic farming and so on and nowadays I click also myself and I make sure to use such materials so I mean sustainability it's as far as I remember it just runs in the family fantastic so it sounds like it's been a very long journey and it's part of your DNA what opportunities have you had to work on the sustainable development goals in your current position yeah so I often say that digital which in Mandarin is a wordplay Shoei also stands for plural and plural means that we have many different values societal values environmental values economic values however the digital technology enables these different values to make account to one another so that we can see actually we do share many common values around inclusion innovation and sustainability of course so my main contribution I guess is to make sure that no matter if you're registered as a co-op or as a university with the university social responsibility programs or listed company with CSR or GI reports and so on all the different organization types use the same 169 SDG targets as a share vocabulary to make accounts to one another and so on the social innovation database which lists more than 500 organizations I offer them my office hours where they can meet me every Wednesday for 40 minutes at the time for the on-the-record conversation of how to collaborate with other sectors friends and also running the presidential hackathon were the top five social innovation ideas gets the trophy from the president that's a projector that projects the commitment from the president saying whatever you did in the past three months will become presidential problems for the next 12 months as a national policy there's a lot of information there can you tell us a bit more about the hackathon how many of you had up till now sure yes we're on our fourth year now and each year as I mentioned five champions are selected and the selection process itself I think is very interesting which is only possible using digital technology because each year we have more than 200 different ideas each corresponding to one or more of concrete SDG goals and then because no jury panel is an expert in all 169 areas we make sure we work with collective intelligence so our national participation platform the joint platform which lists more than 10 million visitors in the country of 23 million each visitor get a 99 tokens so with these tokens they can vote for the SDG projects they're interested in there's a new way of voting called quadratic voting and this is a mechanism design that makes sure if you really like a project you can vote more than one vote but it's going to cause you more so with two votes that's cost four tokens three votes nine tokens so with 99 tokens one can vote for nine votes which is 81 tokens but not ten which would cost 100 and then with 18 still left right people are motivated to look for some synergies with the project they just get voted and maybe they do four votes and which is 16 tokens and there's two tokens left and they're more motivated to look to another two SDG targets and in this way we make sure we popularize the idea of synergies between the SDG targets and people end up doing it maybe seven and seven and so on so people on average vote for like five or six different goals different targets with the 99 tokens that they have and the upshot is that when we select the top 20 for the incubation everybody feel they have won I like the older voting methods where maybe 49% of people feel they have lost it's not like a very innovative voting scheme and one that we should be looking into can you tell us about some of the ideas that have actually come out of the hackathon and that have actually gone further I have heard about an innovative weather platform extreme weather event platform would you like to tell us about some of those certainly so the earliest hackathon idea are now all policies that's been implemented for a while for example the civil IOC Taiwan project born out of the earlier hackathon ideas about the air pollution map and the water level map and so on is now a fully fledged distributed ledger that's contributed by the civil society for example primary school teachers and students the measures air and water quality as part of their environmental education program so instead of teaching about media literacy or data literacy with these ideas we teach about media and data competence meaning that the young students they are producers and stewards of data not just consumers of data and with this of course the idea of data bias responsibility data collisions and so on become a part of a very natural curriculum for people to contribute and using these systems which enabled more accurate prediction of weather models of the for example water levels that causes evacuation needs and then we sent automated warnings including earthquake warnings and so on that then powered during the COVID the mask availability map which is essentially also a distributed ledger but instead of a mapping the water or air pollutions it maps whether some pharmacies still have masks in stock and similarly the advanced warning system which runs on SMS became the digital quarantine system which once and when people doing home quarantine left their home more than 50 meter radius day and the local medical officer received automated SMS and so on so I think it enabled us to fight the pandemic successfully without lockdowns and fight the infodemic successfully that this information crisis with no takedowns thanking to these public infrastructures digital ones that has people's broad input and people already understand the cybersecurity and privacy parameters of these were not declaring emergency state or inventing new data collection points during the pandemic. Wow that's very interesting around the pandemic and that new software what do you think was key for your population to actually embrace that software and use it and make it successful? Well because they wrote it right this is what we call a people public-private partnership the people the social sector came up with these ideas in the first place and the public sector endorsed these ideas instead of beating them we joined them right so we embraced the best ideas that is worth spreading worth amplifying and the public sector supports without controlling the data governance for example and so because of this the social sector could be rest assured that this is not about surveillance capitalism this is not about state surveillance but rather this is what we call participatory self-surveillance where people review the data for the public good only if they're concerned to it and also only if they understand repercussions. Government's not always keen to share data or decisions can you tell a bit tell us a bit more about your radical transparency policy? Sure so this very conversation while we're having I'm doing a full recording and we usually publish the recording as is on the Creative Commons platforms or make a transcript after co-adding by 10 days publish it as the public domain and this has two effects the first the people who come to me to visit me for a conversation or interview or a lobbying they always lobby for the public good for the like seven generations down the line because they understand it will look very bad for the upcoming generation if they lobby for something that's only good for the short term for themselves at the expense of other corners in the world so this is a way to make sure that the better parts of us are in part of those conversations and the second thing is that because people understand the why of policymaking instead of just what the resulting policies so even if the resulting policies has mistakes even if we did it incorrectly and so on the social sector has the context upon which to make better suggestions or in a parlance of open source development to fork the government to take the government's plans and make a different direction a different contribution so we had for example the opposition party's member of parliament doing the analysis on the mask availability and rationing pointing out that we were too happy in the government to announce that the population center and the pharmacy distribution match almost like exactly and she said and P. Gau Hong An said actually if you look at the rural places and correlate with the open street map you will see that the time cost for the rural people to reach the nearby pharmacy even though it's the same distance by helicopter it's not the same and by the time they reach the pharmacy maybe the pharmacy has already closed and so on so there's a bias in the data there's a bias in the way that we analyze the data and once this is pointed out then our minister minister Chen simply said legislator teach us and then her interpolation became the new distribution method completely was pre-ordering 24 hour mass PM and so on the very next day so like literally within 24 hours this would not be possible unless we publish whatever we have collected in real time. So transparency pushing along for social good. I'm wondering about some of the partnerships that have been forged so one of the SDGs specifically focuses on partnerships and I'm wondering about some of the partnerships that have been forged in your work on covid. Definitely so when we talk about people public private partnership we do rely on the private sector to scale out the solutions that's co-developed by the people and the government so for example when I mentioned the four convenience store chains in Taiwan they have more than twice the number of stores compared to the professional pharmacies so when they joined around March they dramatically extended the reach for people to get the PPEs so that by the time they joined I think we have almost half of people having access to medical grade masks but right after they joined by early April we have three quarters of people and at that time we reduced the basic reproduction value of the coronavirus the R0 to be under one and so that we've been largely covid free every after April and so without the scaling out of the distribution center the logistics of the four convenience stores without for example the Google CSR group supporting the necessary computation towers for the initial prototype of the mask availability and so this would not be so quickly deployed to every corner in the Taiwanese society but when private sector joins we make sure that they respect the same cyber security and privacy boundaries set by the previous social sector prototypes. I know in some of your work that around developing social innovation one of the first platforms was to look at values and to get values more immersed in the culture to develop social innovation I'm wondering if you could tell us about how some of that work has led to the success of these partnerships today. Certainly so when we're looking at the common values in emerging technologies we see a lot of potential for for example labeling one another like when in 2015 UberX first came to Taiwan they said oh this would enable more efficient routing of public transportation options and so would reduce for example the wasteful like taxi idling by and things like that on the other hand there's people who said this is not really sharing economy this is more like a gig economy this will destroy the social solidarity formed by workers unions and taxi associations and so on and of course they all have pretty good points however if we look at the core values that everyone supports it's very apparent that everyone want a more fair like meter everyone wants proper insurance registration not undercut existing meters and so on but this is not a rough consensus readily understood by people in the more anti social corner of social media such Facebook the controversial points get far more attention and calories and clicks than the more nuanced ideas that I just outlined right so we need to build a pro-social social media instead of the more anti-social corners of social media so we work with a Seattle startup a social enterprise now a non-profit called Polis and we deployed that and showed people that if you remove the reply button but encourage people to resonate or not on each other's feelings so instead of jumping straight to the decisions we just share how you feel about the uber act situation and after three weeks of voting just on the feelings and visualizing the common feelings people discover that actually most of the people agree with most of their neighbors on most of their points most of that time they agree to disagree on a few ideological points like platform economy versus gig economy but by and large we do have shared values and so this is when we realized that if we build a platform that highlights the common values and rewards a more nuanced idea of inclusion and diversity as represented by the user interface instead of just rewarding the clickbait like short-term attention spend and calling quote-unquote engagement then we actually have a pretty good public infrastructure also on the digital realm the internet doesn't have to be bad for discussions and that led to better co-creation in common values thank you you've mentioned several social enterprises in our discussion already how have social enterprises fair during the pandemic yeah they are very very important because they have on the one side the trust of the social sector and then the link to the private economic sector so they can both crowdsource the best ideas and then turn those ideas to production so I think one of the most exciting things during the COVID-19 is that people are more aware that those digital social innovations are also pretty good business these infrastructure that I just mentioned about tracking the PPEs about making sure that people get like physical distancing and now vaccination information correctly and so on are widely applicable in other domains as well this bot that automatically clarifies this information about PPEs could also be used to clarify other scams and this information as well so we get a lot of leading companies such as Trend Micro the leading antivirus company investing heavily into a new tool that just clarifies the online scams and this information and so on the so-called Miss Buster and who's called a leading company for like online scams and so on detection also developed the main another bot that will when you invite it into a group chat automatically compare incoming pictures and so on like a virus scanner and then show you like very fun like meme dogs and cat pictures and so on that will have this humor over rumor effect so that when you laugh about it you vent this idea of outrage and then you wouldn't share this disinformation and wouldn't increase its basic reproduction value but would instead share this very cute dogs message about for example where must to protect yourself against your own wash hands and so on so people see generally that anything that fulfills the public good and catches the public attention imagination is also good business it's taken a few years to come to this level of maturity in terms of alignment of values in terms of the social enterprises in terms of the ecosystem and the development there in the maturity to serve the public good I'm wondering if you've reflected on what have been some of the key elements that have led to this success and maturation I think just like the Q spoke stock is essential to our counter coronavirus communication campaign the cute icons the 17 SDGs as well as the icons for the specific targets and the very pretty colors the 17 colors I mean that actually play a really really large part because they're they're quite neutral they they don't speak like it this is a preference to the non-for-profits there's a preference for the large industries there's a preference for the state intervention right these 17 icons that they show people living happily together right people in wheelchairs people who are young people who have blindness or other disabilities and so on they all look actually quite comfortable around each other in the SDG portrayal and so I think this iconography more than anything made sure that people see that we may have very different positions just like those colors they're so contrasting with one another but we can also form a circle form a ring of sorts and then share this common space this common values and that let us innovate and make things better so reflecting on this past five years I think definitely without the SDGs and this related vocabulary iconography we wouldn't be that easy to join up the prior previous very like distributed sectors and some at arts sectors together to where the common ways so I fantastic the the actual icons playing a big part there in terms of working together and actually symbolizing where we're heading towards I'm wondering about the social innovation lab at the moment what are the top conversations that are taking place yeah the social innovation lab which is literally my office as I mentioned I'm there every Wednesday and anyone who is a registered social innovator can claim 40 minutes of my time and have conversations and I think partly because I think of the presidential hackathon people nowadays care much more about how to make a good business case out of a social mobilization toward a shared environmental goal previously we would have ideas that maybe just join two of the 17 goals together but nowadays I get the pitch that joins at least three sometimes five or six different goals together for example in the last year's presidential hackathon there is this team called circuit plus and which is already converted the social innovation lab to one of their check-in points it's like a Pokemon go game which you download on your phone and it shows you where are the nearby watery filling stations that you can take your bottles to check in and then not only comment on how a warm or cold or tasty the water is and have a real conversation about collect like gold coins and things like that and then leads you to nearby like walks that makes the community values the history and so on apparent just like the Pokemon go makes the environmental characteristics apparent with the selection of pocket monsters and then once you collect throughout those walks then you also get automated notifications when the temperature is getting hot like almost 40 degrees in summer around here in the recent years to remind you to drink more of this water you just collected so that you don't suffer from heat damage and then it also after you collect those coins you can also spend these on the social enterprises products and services and so on and after you form a habit of checking in like 50 days in a row then it also reviews like exactly how many plastic bottles that you have just saved and how much impact it has on the environment as a whole and so all in all I mean just by describing their play style this is maybe six SDGs there are already and so this is what I think is very interesting is that people are thinking about partnerships with very unlikely stakeholders nowadays and this really cheers me up what a wonderful example with that complete interconnectedness between the SDG that's a wonderful example and just finishing up now watch on your agenda for this year what's your big area of focus yeah this year we're going to announce to the world the national action plan on open government for the administration side and open parliament on the legislature side and with this we're taking the kind of cross-sectoral partnership the social innovation based approach and applying it not only in the administration's work which is what the social innovation lab is about but also in other branches in the government also so for example the legislature is now thinking about ways to make sure that people can participate in the lawmaking process not just in the rulemaking process using the same almost gamified way that they can understand more as part of their for example capstone projects in their high schools or in their universities and there's also a commitment as part of our referendum process our central election committee just announced that this year not only they will introduce a electronic counter signature system to augment the paper based one but they will also double down on the deliberation process that makes sure that people share the common values despite they bringing up the like pro and con referendum topics so we can all agree on the common values before going into the referendum station to make choices those way or another and so on and so I think I'm really heartened that this ideas of common values out of different positions and innovation based on the common values is now taken up to other parts of the democratic process instead of just limiting our conversations about voting which is essentially just three bits per person every four years we're now increasing the bit rates of democracy and turning democracy into a type of technology a social technology to come to think about it is also social innovation thank you so much for your time today minister Tang it's been a complete pleasure absolute pleasure to hear about what's happening in Taiwan and some of those leading practices around government innovation social innovation and the SDGs thank you thank you a really good question I really enjoyed this conversation left low and prosper thank you so much my guest today has been minister Audrey Tang digital minister of Taiwan thank you all for listening and I hope this has given you some inspiration and a fresh outlook on how we can innovate to collaborate and work together on the SDGs for a better world


Hello, everyone. This is Arno. It's an honor to be here today. I hope you all have a very good time during this event. So I took on upon the task of trying to give you kind of an overview of all the things that have been happening within Hyperledger. And I realized in 20 minutes, this is a real challenge. So bear with me. I'll probably won't be able to touch on every point that I even in my slides, so I encourage you to read the slides as I speak. But, you know, there is a tremendous amount of work that has been happening and I wanted to try and reflect this in my presentation and give you a sense of what you might be able to see and hear about in the coming days. And so I encourage you to, you know, dig into the schedule afterwards and look for additional information and some of the points that I'm going to touch on today. So first to give you a general overview of what the TSC itself does, you know, we actually work for the community trying to improve our processes, trying to help the different projects move forward with the maturation of their project. And so we actually have a decision log that tracks all the issues that come about and the decision that we make. And so one of the first decision that we made that I wanted to highlight was the increase in membership of the technical steering committee itself. It may sound pretty mountain on then but actually it is a representation of the growth of hyper ledger. When we started six years ago now, you know, it was fairly small organization with just a few projects we had nine seats on the technical steering committee. It became very clear that this was not sufficient to represent adequately the whole spread of project that we now have. So we actually increased to 15 seats, and I'm happy to say that it's very clear that this was a successful transition towards a representation that's much broader, both in diversity and gender as well as representation of the different projects and activities happening in hyper ledger. So there are things like, you know, what things we do is, we look at the project life cycle so where different statuses that kind of conveys the where different projects are in terms of maturity of the community and product. And so we have this status for instance, when you go to incubation and then you graduate to active status. And this has been a source of confusion for a lot of people because it didn't seem to convey what we really meant it to convey. So we actually changed this and call it graduated. And hopefully this will make it clear moving forward. We did a whole bunch of other things like, you know, we have these labs that we'll talk more about later, where we require to have a sponsor and it seemed to kind of defeats the point of making it super easy for people to actually stop little labs, little things that they want to experiment and start getting into the hyper ledger community, and build a community. So we really move that requirement that seemed to create a barrier from, you know, actual feedback we've received. And then we've talked a lot about one of the challenges that hyper ledger has been having is, you know, the fact that our community is quite fragmented and we have basically silos with different projects that tend to ignore each other and even though from the very beginning the TSC has been saying, we need more collaboration and trying to find ways to encourage collaboration, we still are quite siloed more than we'd like. And some of these, by the way, come from feedback we also got from the members submit that happened early on. And so we talked about this and one of the things we did is trying to find very practical, you know, actionable item was to invite everybody, every group within the hyper ledger community to come to the TSC and present on what's going on. And this is just another way to expose what's going on and maybe, you know, find the opportunities for collaboration. We also added news, new status to the project life cycle called dormant, which as its name implies, allows projects to, you know, it was a recognition of what can happen with some project in the quill project actually prompted this desk, because they came to us like, you know, we don't expect to be doing any activity for quite a foreseeable future we don't think this project is dead yet. We want to resume it at some point. But so we just want you to know, don't expect any feedback from us or any updates in the coming months. So we created this kind of parking lot type of space. This is just examples of the issues we are looking at. We also looking at badging system that will provide a finer grain mechanism to measure the health of what's going on in the projects. We had several issues related to DCOs. We always try to find the right balance between ensuring that we have, you know, proper coverage when it comes to patent protection IP related issues. And at the same time, not creating extra barriers for contributions. And so there are, you know, practical aspects that we're looking at to try to streamline contributions, especially from people who are not necessarily active in the community on a daily basis. And so we've talked about the greenhouse. One of the issues is people, you know, the greenhouse is getting bigger and bigger. Some of the relationship between the different projects is not represented in the greenhouse. You're all familiar with I'm sure the graphic that's on the website. And so we actually are looking into ways to basically revamp this and at the same time update the charter which mind you is quite out of date. It actually states that we would be developing one blockchain platform. And obviously we have many more. So we need to update the charter to make it accurate. And one of the things we do as I said is look out after the different projects and help them move on the project lifecycle track. And so on that front, we actually graduated the project areas. I find it especially interesting areas is the most qualified project to graduate in my opinion in the sense that one of the key aspect of graduation is to actually have a healthy community, which is quite diverse. And areas by all means is the most diverse project we have in hyperledger. So it was very pleasing to me that, you know, they would come we actually prompted them to actually apply for to graduate. And I'm glad that it's actually happened. So this is the list of graduated projects as we stand today. So there is the areas project that I was just talking about. And as a sign again of the diversity they, they enjoy, you know, they have eight implementations of what they call the areas into your profile. And so they have countless deployment of the agent, and they actually have already work started working on the new version of the profile. So I think this is a great example of various successful project that reach out actually even beyond the hyperledger community because they're there are people outside of hyperledger that already that also implement at the this profile. On another front, the Bezu project. So they've actually been working on the IPM improvement proposal 1559, which is key to solving some of the most annoying feature aspect related to gas, use of gas and on the main net. And so they are looking forward to the fourth that will happen this July and that will this improvement will make some of these issues go away and make transaction cost more predictable. On the fabric side, there was a major shift, which again is a sign of material of this project where we're moving from the long term support being on the one dot X branch which is one dot four in this case to two dot two. And so work is happening on that version 2.3 and 2.2.4 and there is more and more features, making fabric more decentralized and more manageable with things like, you know, allowing to have snapshots that basically makes it faster for new participants to join an existing network and so on. On the Indy side. So Indy has been, you know, well known to be run by the sovereign network sovereign foundation has been running an instance of Indy. There are actually new instances to new one that came about. And it has actually prompted now an effort to create a deep method that would be used for all the Indy public networks. Iroha is working towards their version 2, which is rewritten in Rust. Iroha was initially written in Java. And so they're actually rewriting everything in Rust. And they're getting close to a first table preview reads. So Tooth has been going through some major reorganization. First day where they also went through a rewrite process where everything is rewritten in Rust. And they basically split So Tooth in different components. And now So Tooth for the most part is comes in the shape of the library that can be used by different blockchain and different pieces it uses transact for its transaction engine and the saber transaction mechanism is actually moved out into transact itself. So moving on to other projects that are actually incubation. We have Avalon. Avalon is actually moving along creating new releases where they're taking advantage of some of the progress made in the SGX world. The Borough project has had some very interesting new development where they are moving away from people writing code directly, but instead having a code generation mechanism that facilitates deployment of contracts and mission of transaction and so on. So this is actually a very interesting development. The Cactus project is moving towards a reorganization of the architecture so that based on a plugin architecture, they can make it easier to integrate other blockchain network into the system. The Caliper project has also gone through simplification of the platform connectors so that it's also easier to incorporate different networks. The Chillow project itself is being re-architectured to be more decentralized and more flexible. The Explorer project has been upgraded to support the latest version of Fabric in addition to the 1x version and it gives more insight into what's going on in the network beyond what's actually on the blockchain but also things like the endorsement policy. The Great project is moving along. They are working on a new release where they actually have a GS1 compatible product definition and they are working on the identity system features as well. Transact. Transact again is like a transaction engine and so they've been working on improvements both in latency and performance and it is actually now as I was saying earlier used by Soto as well as Plinter. Versa which is cryptographic library so they had a major release in December and they are actually working through some reorg because initially it was designed based on some expected usage and now we still months behind the initial release. They can actually look at how people actually use it and try to make adjustment to make it more suitable for how people effectively use it. Final slide and so this is for the projects and I wanted to give you also an update on what's going on in different working groups which is also an element of what Hyperledger the technical community is about. So the architecture working group was a bit in on a pause and is actually resuming activity around interoperability and I'll talk more about this later next. In terms of the diversity, civility and inclusion we still working groups in the works they have actually produced a whole set of recommendation and they're still meeting on a regular basis. They are you know they could use a little bit more participation. And if you are interested in this topic I invite you to look into it and see if you can join the meetings. The learning material development led by the amazing Bobby Muscada has been very active to literally you know help people come on board and find their way through the Hyperledger community and they actually maintain a page that gives you all you need to know about what's going on in Hyperledger. So this is an amazing piece of information that resource that's available to you are invited to look into. The performance and scalability working group also went a bit of a pause and they are just relaunching figuring out what they should do next. And then there's the technical working group of China which is developed credit because they have very active community in China, and they have been looking after them by creating this working group to that they can talk about you know Hyperledger related issues. Finally, I wanted to highlight what I see you know stepping back a little bit from what everything that's going on. You know, one thing that is very noticeable to me is the fact that into ruby is becoming a key topic. You know, especially in the world of permission network, it's been very clear for a long time that well we're creating a lot of islands, and the next big question is going to be like well how do I connect all these islands right. And so there are people who started from the very beginning to say well we need to fix interoperability but quite frankly, you know, I had a lot for standards organization say I'll know should we create a standards for interoperability of networks and I was like, this is just way too soon please come back in a few years. We are so busy trying to develop the technology. We have no time, you know, no cycle to think about interoperability how they're going to interact with one another. So this time I think is now. It's definitely happening. So we actually have three different efforts happening in April later now. There is the cactus project that's been going on for quite a while that was actually initiated by two different efforts that came together. We have now two different labs that were created in the last few months literally one, you know, initiated by IBM and other one by Tete Shen, they all take different approaches to this, you know, big problem and, you know, I think it's interesting to see that all this is happening and showing like there's a clear interest in trying to tackle this, this problem. So just at a very high level I want to give you a sense of the things that they are trying to solve, which I think is very critical. There are three main cases for interoperability. The first one is the transfer is basically trying to, you know, retrieve value from one network to another, in a way where you can actually validate that this data is the real thing. And then there is asset exchange where you actually want to be able to do two transactions one on each network so you can have a payment on one side and an asset transfer and another for instance, and you want to make sure that they both succeed or both fail. And then there is the asset transfer itself where you're actually moving the asset from one network to another and you need to ensure that this is happening without losing the asset in between or creating some assets out of thin air. And so, given the state, and all this activity happening, I have to say, even personally, I started getting confused about, you know, people trying to understand what's going on and hearing claims and say, Well, our system is different because we do this and the other we do that too. And I say, guys, we need to get together and get a real understanding of what these solutions are all about what the differences are between these different approaches. And so we started a discussion which is taking place in the architecture working group to basically understand, develop a common understanding on all these different approaches, looking at different aspects of them with the goal that, you know, once we have a common understanding, maybe we can actually identify areas of collaborations where I could lead to development of some shared components. Then I wanted to give a glimpse of what's going on in the labs. So the labs we created the labs because we didn't have, you know, the tool for to create an actual project you have to get TSE approval there's a fairly elaborated process which is pretty heavy. And there were projects that didn't seem to be quite ready for a project, but it would have been a shame to completely shut them off. And so we created lab as a space where the community can create areas where they can work, get exposure, get visibility for their project and create more communities so that maybe they can transition to a project later on. And so this is a very active space. There are many different labs that exist, we have new ones coming in all the time, some labs eventually transition to a full on project, others are eventually merging into an existing project. It doesn't matter. To me this is a lot of the future of hyperledger is happening in the labs today. So it's very interesting to look at what's going on. And so there are too many of them for me to side, but I listed some of the topics that I see being touched on. So there's some of relapse some are very different. And there are different dimensions and ways to split this. It's very clear to me that there's a lot happening and it'd be a shame to not look into this. You know, just to name one, the very last lab that we have heard about and that I just came about, I should say, our firefly and the fabric smart client, which I think is the idea of yet another space in which I expect hyperledger to work in the foreseeable future because it's basically taking up, you know, a level up the stack. We've been primarily focusing on the low level blockchain layer and these these these efforts look into at the higher level, you know, what does it take to actually create an application, a blockchain application. There is a lot more to it than what is provided by the low level framework. And so I'm looking forward to see what's going to come out of this project, but I think this is going to be very important. And just to end, I want to give a plug to the TSC itself.  It's a bit, you know, more subtle than that. I don't think the TSC has that much power. We actually leave a lot to the projects themselves, but we try to provide some common, you know, infrastructure and organization processes to streamline as much as possible to work and try not to get in the way too much, but help the community to grow. But so they, you know, it's a very open setting, even though they are officially 15 members, anybody can join. We often have 30 or more people attend the call and I invite you to look into it yourself. And then to finish, we have the TSC doesn't happen out of thin air itself, right. We are all active contributor to Hyperledger, one of the other project. And, you know, there is an election happening in the fall every year. So I invite you to consider running the more the merrier. And, you know, if you at least you don't want to nominate yourself, please do consider working on, I mean, consider voting in the process because that's very important. We want to have as many people vote as possible. So with that said, thank you very much. I hope this gives you a taste of what's coming up during this week. And I invite you to dig into any of these topics that might be of interest to you. Thank you Arnaud. There's an amazing sweep of all of the activity happening across Hyperledger. Sometimes it can feel very chaotic and feel very, very hard to stay on top of. I sometimes compare what we do in the technical steering committee as being less like an orchestrator and more like one of those traffic cops who stands in the middle of, you know, a gigantic traffic circle, trying to like just hope that they can steer traffic in the right direction. But somehow it works. Somehow somehow we're able to like help guide these communities to shipping product and working together, and it's a little bit messy sometimes but I think that's that's true for every open source project. And it's really awesome. Thank you for the work that you do to support that. Thank you.


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Peace be upon you and welcome to Making a House a Home on Imam Hussain TV with myself Raghad Baqir and our expert life coach and NLP practitioner, Fahima Muhammad, who today will be talking about combating stress.   Can you tell us a bit more about how you go about combating stress and how you help people overcome this type of anxiety? Yes, we have to understand what stress is and it's actually a biological response that we need actually sometimes for survival and, you know, the stress allows our biological system to sort of prepare itself to do something, either to fight or to run away. So, you know, we might not think of it like that but it actually does, it's a vital need to a certain extent. And psychologists sort of stress that, you know, we often base our individual perception on different situations which can actually make it more stressful for some people and less stressful for others because it just depends how we look at things. So that's why we find that some people cope with certain situations which are similar, a lot better or a lot worse and that's all to do with our perception. So when someone says, oh, you're better at coping with stress, it's not that they're actually better at coping with stress itself, it's just that how they look at the situation, they look at it differently. Exactly. Exactly. And we have an American psychologist, Julian Rotter, who describes us as our locus of control. So basically, externally, it's either the individual feels that, you know, that, you know, outside the environment controls their situation or they themselves internally can control whatever's happening. So even in life, we might think that, you know, we don't have control because it's the economy or it's because of our parents or it's because of, you know, certain situations. So that's what it just describes.  Generally, as individuals, we have a little bit of both and we prefer sometimes to use one or the other depending. So obviously, it's nice to sort of feel that, you know, we as individuals have more control regardless of our outside circumstances, but then again, it's all psychological and how we look at things, how we feel about things. And with that becomes, you know, our actions and our emotions. So it's really interesting to sort of understand what stress is. And I think in life that, you know, we need to also have stress sometimes to actually perform better because when we under pressure, then it helps us sort of like keeps us on our toes.  I guess that's why biologically we are made to stress sometimes. It's just it's a way of survival. Yes, it is a way of survival. But I mean, in today's world, it is really, really testing. It's overriding us. And we need to be a lot more aware of the symptoms and how it can actually overtake, you know, and actually become unhealthy. So we need to take steps to sort of recognizing it. So when we sleep less and we eat less and we don't perform well. And usually it's because it's physically as well that we have to understand. But it comes generally from the mind. So when we are aware of that, there are certain steps that we can take in order to control the stress levels. So it doesn't get to a dangerous point because it can actually have an adverse effect on us in every way, mentally and physically. So you're saying stress can affect you physically. Yes. Is that when it's stress ties into anxiety or are they two to completely separate things? It can to a certain extent. Anxiety is more about thinking about the future and trying to overcome, you know, what may happen. So that is slightly looked upon a bit different stresses. It can be also futuristic, but actually it's more about the moment. And it's also a worry and a concern as well. So it's a very thin line between the two. But there is a distinction between the both. But, you know, it's, you know, sadness and stress and depression and anxiety. All of that has its own sort of like label. But it does actually overlap to a certain extent. And I think stress is a very simple formula, which we have, which can lead to something even more severe like depression. Because, you know, as humans, we form a habit of the way we think and act. So when we are used to being like, oh, we're stressed and this is how we perform, and this is how we think, then it's another habit that we're creating, which is not healthy. And that habit becomes more like anxiety, becomes more depression. So, and that becomes dangerous because we're living in that way. Because we are humans that, you know, we live through habits. Yes. So that's why it's important to sort of recognize the stress levels that you have. Yeah, because a lot of people do actually get confused or merge them together, stress, anxiety and depression, when you're actually saying each of them is a different, a different thing. It is a different thing. But we still can think of it in a way that I'm not trying to say that, you know, if you are strong minded, you're not going to feel these things. Because as humans in the moment, we're going to feel stressed, but it's not about not feeling it at all. It's about trying to get out of that feeling so that you don't stay in it for too long. When you stay in those sort of like downward spiral, yeah, for too long, that's when it becomes dangerous. That's when it becomes the habit. That's when it can lead to sort of severe, you know, depression and sadness and also, you know, being overwhelmed with the stress, not being able to cope with it and it taking over you instead of you taking over it. So that's why it's really important how we understand stress, how we know we can use it for our advantage and how we know that we can actually overcome it for our advantage. OK. So, I mean, the causes of stress really, it's quite important to also understand that what causes stress and usually it's the environment, you know, social standards, the communities, all this expectation that's put upon ourselves from the outside, you know, for students or for generally people who are professional, the academic pressures, you know, extracurricular things that we feel that we need to do as individuals to sort of perform better, look better, be better, you know, against our peers. You know, we have all of that, the workload that we put upon ourselves, even though we say that, you know, we might have that workload that we cannot get rid of, but actually, you know, we're choosing it and we, you know, we get what we tolerate as well, we put up with what we tolerate with.  So, you're saying that we can control our stress levels?  Stress comes in many forms and in various ways, you know, with work, school, you know, at different stages in life, whatever you're going through. So, things like being organized, you know, being on time, and we always say, oh, we work so late, we work so hard. But then if we just went to bed an hour earlier, and how many of us say that, you know, we always say we're gonna go to bed early, we don't. And then we get up tired. When you're physically drained as well, and you start the morning like that, then whatever you have to face, the stress is 10 times felt, it's felt a bit more. So, you've got to understand how your body can handle certain things. It's not like you can't handle it, or what pressures are you putting on it in order for you to not handle it, and then it leads to the stress. Yeah, so set yourself realistic targets as well. Yeah, so whatever situation you're in, you've got to question yourself.   You can't do everything every day and be on top of it all the time, you know. And it's the way in which you look at stuff. And sometimes to let things go.  And when I sit with my clients one to one, we go through their day, we see how it can work, and there's always pockets that we can fill with some real, you know, tips and strategies and techniques where we can put it into use. And the effects of stress as well, you know, you realize when you're stressed, because some people don't even realize they stress because it becomes such a habit. And then they don't realize that they're stressed out and they wonder why, you know, they're not feeling very well or they're constantly getting ill or, you know. Just generally depressed. Yeah, or they just, you know, their energy levels are down. So having lack of sleep, you know, you generally have poor eating habits and, you know, lack of memory, you know, difficulty in focusing and concentrating and losing weight, gaining weight. And it can actually lead to anxiety and panic attacks.   So you're saying that these are alarm bells for you to slow down or to change something, rather than which some people look at that and say, actually I'm not doing well enough, I need to do more. Yes. So actually the best thing to do is to slow down. To slow down. Well, then that brings on to my next point as to how to, you know, ways to relieve stress. And there's various ways to do it. And it depends on the individual. And people are always like, well, we don't have time.  It really, really helps to just focus and be in the moment. And a lot of them say, well, we cannot be in the moment because in the moment it's stressful.  Just when we realize that we have to open our mouths and close and breathe, that gives us the pause, the seconds that we need, not even minutes sometimes. The second, when we are overwhelmed or we're feeling a bit stressed, just to take a minute to breathe and pause. And if you're in that room, wherever you are, which is really a very healthy tip, just focus on anything around you. Just to bring yourself away from the stress that you're feeling and thinking about.  And you don't realize how the mind can just switch. And it can actually boost you back to where you need to be. Can that be said for Salah, for example? Absolutely. Allah has done Salah for us five times a day, or three times a day. To give yourself the break. Just to focus on that Salah, on the Torah, on the Kabila and just breathe, not be running around. You know, we're supposed to not think about anything else. Yes. But we actually do it all the time. But that's the aim of it, not to think about anything else other than just breathe. Yeah, it's not just saying to do the Salah, but before the Salah. So you're preparing.  And it literally takes seconds and minutes. So it's really important to understand how these little tips that you can take control over and you can practice wherever you are. You know, they say meditation and being focused.  You've got to have a peaceful environment and all zen around you. It doesn't work like that. You have to be in a classroom where it's chaotic sometimes as a teacher or as a student with other kids around you. And you've got to like refocus with all the noise and the chaos and bring yourself into a place that you can actually be in control and can pause and you can do what you need to do with all of that disruption around you. That's an invisible bubble. Yes, you create that for yourself. And it's not easy. It takes time. It's another habit to create, but it's a healthy habit to create. And when your mind is now, you know, creating this new habit and you're constantly catching your thoughts each and every time that you go through this, then it becomes natural. It becomes quicker that you can get out of the stress levels and it becomes healthier for your body because, you know, you are taking control.  And you realize actually, you know, that thought changes, the mind changes. And with that, the language, the actions and, you know, a few seconds ago, it was all stressful and all of a sudden that's how the brain works. And it's all the unconscious that's, you know, behind the mind and, you know, with NLP as well. It's such powerful strategies that could help you overcome with such little small tweaks and techniques, but it's all to do with the way in which you think and how the brain works. So it's like coming back to a safe situation but we can get it from a different perspective, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. You're taking yourself out of it. So we constantly gotta take ourselves out of our minds, out of our heads and look at ourselves from an outside perspective.   And that creates the stress, the worry, the anxiety and it leads to depression. And that's why it's about really being in the here and now and just being able to breathe. And if you can't focus on the mind then the way in which you get to your mindset is the breathing technique. And it's so important because a lot of us don't even breathe properly. So that's really, really vital. And, you know, in this life, in today's day and age, we always think that, okay, life without stress, you know, at the end of the day should be so much easier because we've got so much to help around us with technology, with the advancements but actually that makes us much more fast moving. And the way in which we have to look at life has to change. We don't need to keep up all the time. We don't need to have everything perfect. We don't have to put so much expectations on ourselves.  Everything. Trying to make the perfect healthy meals and this, this woman- There's a lot of- Women, I mean, I do say women, but also men, but a lot of extra pressure in themselves. We need to be healthy. We need to be a perfect family. We need to be making enough money. And it's just too much for one person or a couple to handle sometimes. Yeah, we have to change our outlook on life. You know, we want the highest standard and the big expectations are put upon us. There's more competition with each other. You know, all these things add to the stress levels and that's what makes us like wanna drive more, wanna be on top of our game and you can do all of that if you can handle it, but if you can't handle it, is it really worth it with your health? And also, you're not giving the time, your reactions to other people, even, you know, the way in which you might be more quickly to be angry or annoyed or irritated.  So you're not dealing with situations in the best way. So you have to find the best way that works for you. And I think the most simplest way as well, a lot of the time, which is, we can touch at any moment, is to sort of like be more with nature. Allah has created a wonderful world for us, whether it's rain or even dull, like we live in London most of the time, but we can actually appreciate that, you know, whether we see the tree swaying or the raindrops that are falling, but you know, notice it. When you notice it, then it's a different feeling and it doesn't have to be a lovely, hot, sunny day for that. You can really make anything beautiful and wonderful by just having and showing appreciation.  That's actually a really great point that you make because subhanAllah, when you look at, for example, the weather, it's very easy to feel down about it. It's so dull or it's just so depressing, but then you can look at it from a different perspective and say it's kind of like, you know, we live in a country where it's always quite cold whenever it's too hot or anything so extreme. It all depends on how you look at the situation.  You can go out for just like fresh air, you know, things like that if you're at work or if you're at school or if you're even at home, open the back door in your kitchen and just look at the sky. You know, that could be refreshing for a couple of minutes. And subhanAllah, when you go out for the smoke break, you're thinking about all the stresses and all the negativity. When you're going out for a quick break, just to walk around, appreciate everything. Look around you. Then you're actually bringing in positivity. So it's all about how you look at things. How you do things. And we have a lot of strategies and tips for this.  You've got to avoid certain things. You've got to alter certain things. You've got to adapt to certain things. So all of these things are really important for you to focus on. And obviously being Muslim, the best way of combating stress, you know, we have the added gift of liquor. So that could be done at any time, any moment. Just, you know, being grateful and thankful and, you know, saying certain names and, you know, being so like at one with your creator. So no matter what you're doing, and just for that second, it'll give you the boost that you need.  But no, we're humans. We're going to go through stress. I'm going to go through stress. We're going to go through everything.  You're going to feel it with human. But with psychology today and with the knowledge that, you know, Allah has asked us to sort of create for ourselves and build continuously because there are ways that we can overcome this and not stay in that for so long. So that even though we feel it, we can definitely overcome it with the psychology of today and the fact that, you know, we have our Islam to sort of teach us, you know, ways in which that would help us overcome this and it gives us another tool which we're so grateful to have. So Paala, every human being has to go through a test, has to go through a hard time in their life. So you can't say that someone who goes through a stressful situation doesn't have Iman. No, it's just how you handle that stressful situation is how your Iman can be looked at. Yeah, and we need to go through, you know, the bad to understand the good. We need to have sort of like, you know, sort of like, you know, sort of really stressful times to appreciate the peaceful times. So everything is a gift and, you know, we have to appreciate it. We wouldn't know what's happiness if we didn't have sadness, for example. So we need to educate ourselves about psychology, the way in which we think, the way in which our human minds are and, you know, the more we have understanding of it, that's when we can cope with it just like how when we're raising children and we have to understand the psychology of the development in their different stages so we can know that they're not just winging because they're terrible kids, they just don't have a way of expressing themselves and they're having so much emotion for that moment that they don't know how to, you know, probably, I don't know, use. So that, again, is another way of looking at things and if you do that with every stage and every step of your life, then just having awareness and interest will get you into a place that, you know, when you have that understanding you can cope with it. You can cope with it really well and the stress will, inshallah, with everything that, you know, the tools that you have, you can actually definitely overcome it and combat it. Inshallah, yeah, and like I said, we all, like he said, we all have to overcome stress one way or another. It just depends on how we look at the situation. Yeah. And Fahima, you've been very, very insightful and inshallah, all our viewers have managed to get a better understanding on how to combat stress and how to deal with that. And inshallah, we're going to go for a break and after the break, if you have any questions for Fahima, we'll do our best to answer them and we'll be back soon. Salaamu alaykum and welcome to Making a House a Home. We're back with some of your questions. Fahima, I have a question from Layla who asks, how do I manage my stress levels when I work and have a husband and children to look after who are young and the day-to-day life is so hectic? Yeah, I mean, that is a very common sort of, you know, issue that we faced with every single day and people come to me all the time saying, you know, I don't have time. I'm really busy and this and the other, but we do tend to generalize a lot of these things and I'm not saying that she doesn't feel it is genuine what she feels, but I think to take a step back and like I said, if I was to work with somebody in that situation one-to-one, is to really analyze how are you managing your day, you know, being productive, being organized, being sort of militant and disciplined with certain things that you need to do and you cannot do everything every day.  I think, you know, all those organization skills really does make a difference and if possible to have people to help out, you know, with you like, you know, your husband could maybe take some time during the week or evenings or whatever it may be to help with the homework or pick up, drop off if it's possible. You know, there's so many different ways of, you know, working towards this, but when we get overwhelmed, we look at the whole picture and we think the whole picture is bad, but it's not. So if I was to sit within, you know, an individual and analyze their day and work a plan to see, well, what is the real stress? Is it the way you're looking at it? Is it the actual, you know, events that are happening? Can we control certain things and make it better? Is there a better way of dealing with certain things when it comes to the children? Are they all, you know, doing certain things at the same time when it can be separated so you're not being overwhelmed with everything? So there's so many different techniques, so many strategies and tools, and then to work within yourself as an individual, do you actually take the time out for yourself for a couple of minutes before you walk in through that door and there's chaos, you know, to breathe and to think and to see that, okay, this is what's going to happen and then plan it and give sort of advice and delegate, you do this, you do that, this is what needs to be happening so that everyone's separate and to do what they need to do so they're not overwhelming you. So there's so many ways of looking at it and I think generally, I think in a home, it is really up to you to sort of make it much more organized and I know that people that are militant and organized with regards to their planning of how, you know, even if you just prepare your meals for the week and you don't have to think about that or cook two in one day, for example, so that you're not cooking the following day because that day you're coming late from work, you're not going to have the time. You know, certain things can really make a difference to everything by just being organized and planning and working in advance and a lot of the time we're not disciplined in that way and that's the basics of what I can give for that sort of advice but obviously if I had like a real conversation getting into deeper understanding, there are other techniques as well. Right. So once you understand the actual where the stress is actually coming from and what her family is like. Dynamics, yeah. Dynamics are, then you can actually give more advice, inshallah. Absolutely. Mustafa asks, I have a very stressful and demanding job so I am always stressed and cannot seem to get rid of my stress. How can we help? Yeah, that is very common as well, you know, working in a demanding job. But then again, you're looking at that job as being demanding. I'm sure if you're doing it, there is a payoff and there is a reason and there's a benefit. So, you know, you need to focus on that and sometimes the language we use can actually make us think that it's demanding when actually you can use it as being challenging. I'm in a challenging job, not a demanding job, so the challenge can be overcome. Whereas demand is more like you're disempowered. Whereas when you're empowered, we can use different language. Yes, I'm in a challenging job. So how can I, you know, overcome this? So then you look at it differently and you'll have a different concept of dealing with it.  You know, and maybe talk to the bosses, talk to colleagues, see how they're doing it. A lot of the times, we just see ourselves in a bubble and think there's no one else going through the same things. But there's other people that are actually coping in the same situation as you, so talk about it. So you can actually find out some information about it. And even generally, even with the scenario before, with the mum that's finding it hard, talk to other people or talk openly about it and you realize actually it's not so bad. We always look at our lives as it's just us, just me. But there's always things that are much worse off. So, you know, to be grateful for the situation you're in and be more than yourself, do for others more. Because, you know, the stress that you feel is only when because you're looking at it just from, you know, your perspective and it's only you. So you've got to open it up into various ways. Firstly, I'm not the only one going through this, for example. Or secondly, I'm going through this because there's an end goal. But let me look at it in a way where I can actually, you know, perceive it in a different way. So that could help a little bit as well with regards to the job. Okay, I have a question from Samaya. And she asks, how do you not get stressed when you have important exams to prepare for and take knowing that the result determines your future? Yeah, I mean, again, it's all to do with preparation and you have to have belief that, you know, when you're going to study and plan for something and work towards something, whether it's exams and yes, it's your future, you don't have absolute control over it. You've got to leave the rest in Allah's hands too. You do your part as best you can and the stress only goes really far and really out of control when you know that you don't have belief. You've got to have a little bit of extra belief knowing I've done all that I can and, you know, the rest is up to you, Allah. You know, you have my future in hand really. You know, even though that exam can be correct, it still may not plan out the way you expected it to go and that's what normally happens in life. You know, you won't get the result or you get the result and it still doesn't lead you to where you wanted to. So, we as Muslims, we know that about life. We just need to remind ourselves all the time. But it doesn't mean that you've got to sort of like, oh, you know, I don't need to study because, you know, Allah's got it planned for me. No, you have to take the, you know, the steps to do your best but leave it. And to have to work with it as well. Exactly. Exactly. When you have to work with Subhan Allah, it's like you put the stress onto Allah's shoulders as they say. Absolutely. That's what I mean. Allah. Yeah, because you do the best you can do and that's all that people can ask of you and you should not have, you know, so much of a blueprint. We live in this life, generally, having a blueprint of how our life needs to work out and how it needs to go. When it comes to studies, education, jobs, marriage, you know, the whole package, we want it in a blueprint in that way and it doesn't work out and one thing doesn't happen and then we get stressed, we get depressed, we get sad because it hasn't worked out because of the way we think it should go and that's not how life is and the more we get used to it saying that even there's a plan, you can have an end goal but the direction and the planning will change over time and you just got to go with that and just know that whatever direction is there for you and whatever, you know, stresses and challenges and tests and whatever maybe trials that you have to do it to overcome that is in order for you to grow and evolve and to learn and with time everything comes because it's testing you to get to the next stage, to the next phase in life so you can't grow and evolve unless you cross another hurdle so that's how you got to look at it and don't have a story in your head saying this is how it's going to be I'm going to go to private school I'm going to have this, this, this, this and you know, it's going to work out like that nobody ever does that and the ones that even have that like you'll see in Hollywood they've got the money, the fame, the fortune everyone aspires to those things and then they're depressed and they commit suicide because again that's not happiness so you have to be very, very careful how you perceive life and as Muslims we have the answer we know the meaning and the purpose of us being here so we need to be very careful how we do that with everything that we decide and the choices that we make and don't just think about yourself when you make life more than yourself and you want to help others and do for others regardless of your own goals that's when you can even appreciate whichever stage you're at and that's what makes you more Thank you Fahima Noor asks, when you are stressed in the moment is there a way of getting out of that stress pattern quickly? Absolutely, in NLP we have some really, really strong powerful techniques and generally for example I will tell you if you've got some sort of like worry and anxiety there's a... you can have your hand held out and sort of picture it in your palm for example and you picture all of it bring it close to you that's one technique and then slowly you tap, tap, tap tap till it goes to the end and kind of drop it you do that a few times and you'd be so surprised that just by doing that for a few moments you know it's kind of like really taking away and these are just one or two of the techniques of NLP and there's one of anchoring which is also like trying to basically have another thought and tapping your shoulder or your elbow and you know like a happy thought for example so that whenever you feel stressed or whenever you feel like in a certain way that will sort of like bring out that feeling of the happiness because you've sort of like created like a connection so is that tapping like a reminder like a reminder to yourself like a happy thought that's an anchor a lot of people do that for different things whether it's like you know flickering or raising your eyebrows and it's really powerful it works because we just have this all the time we don't realize like when you walk into the kitchen you automatically open the fridge you know why and it's the same sort of thing so you can create that where you get rid of stress immediately and also like I said before we mentioned about the pause about the breathing about just focusing on a different thought and an alternative in that moment and focusing on something which is in front of you other than what you're going through that can take away the stress immediately but NLP has amazing powerful techniques that we can use with our clients that can actually they can train themselves and it's a habit to create and they have control over it and it's so amazing that they can actually do this for themselves when you talk them through it and you take them through it then they are automatically thinking of the problem which was so big and so small and there's also another one where you can picture you can have like a frame of whatever stress you have it's really a big picture and all of a sudden you bring it smaller smaller closer and it disappears and for children if they have like sort of scared of spiders for example you make them have an image of the spider then you sort of talk them through it to say well now the spider has really long legs now it's dancing now it's acting all funny and you know with children it's really amazing because they can create that image much more clearer than what we can we have to really think because we always surround by different ways and there's always these filters for them it's easier but we can learn from them and NLP understands the way the brain thinks and the mind works so these sort of techniques can help you sort of overcome you know sort of like anything anxiety, depression to a certain extent it's an extra tool alongside if you were to have sort of medical help as well but it really does work and I find it fascinating it's very simple it's quirky and a lot of people think oh it's a bit silly but try it and you know it can really make a difference so yes there's definitely steps to take to overcome stress in the moment but mindfulness is the amazing thing to be present right here in the moment right now even overcoming fear what is fear? right now you're not really fearful but most of the time we have the fear it's because if we're worried about the past fear that we've experienced or something that may happen which is the future thing so to overcome you know all of those things it's really about being in the moment and focusing you know in the here and now and that's what we have control over anyway so that's you know all of that is amazing to sort of like have insight of have awareness of have knowledge and when you have that then you can use it in your daily routine and build yourself a different habit and create a different character and you know build different perceptions of things in life that can make it easier and smoother for you to carry on and over time you will train your mind so when you have depression when you have stress when you have anxiety worry, sadness you'll flip out of it very very quickly and easily insha'Allah insha'Allah anyone who's going through a stressful time may Allah ease your stress insha'Allah with bikr and with iman and with tawakul it can get easier thank you so much Fahima it's been so insightful it's we've all well personally I've learnt so much insha'Allah all of you have enjoyed listening to you and thank you so much for your questions thank you so much for listening to us and insha'Allah we'll be back next week with another very interesting topic by Fahima and see you soon at hotmail.com