The corporate burnout that led Zarina Tariq to coaching

From Pindi to Islamabad: the bubble that shaped her

The episode opens with Muzamil establishing that he and Zarina Tariq have known each other for twelve to fourteen years — they were in school together. That shared history gives the conversation an unusual candour from the start.

Zarina grew up in Westridge, Rawalpindi, before her mother moved the family to Islamabad around grade three. The shift from a small Beacon House campus where the principal knew every child by name to the sprawling Margallah campus was, she says, genuinely overwhelming. Islamabad itself she describes as a “nice, cozy vibe” — a city so small that you know everyone, which is a double-edged sword. The sense of community is real, but so is the gossip.

When Muzamil asks whether Islamabad is as “burger” as its reputation, Zarina gives a considered answer. Having lived in Islamabad, then Lahore for four years, then Karachi for four years, she argues the city does exist in a kind of bubble — not because its residents are uniquely sheltered, but because the socioeconomic range is narrow. The city is dominated by bureaucrats, army families, and upper-middle-class professionals. There is very little variation in class background, which means you can go through your entire school life without ever really encountering people who live differently from you.

LUMS and the first bubble burst

That bubble burst when Zarina arrived at LUMS to study Economics. She had been, by her own description, the “padhaku bacha” — the overachiever who needed to be top of the class in every subject. “I need to be the best. No matter what subject it is.” At LUMS, that identity collapsed almost immediately. Everybody was smart. The semester system meant constant assessment. Class participation carried marks. Surprise quizzes worth five percent of a grade would appear without warning.

She graduated with a 3.96 GPA — which, she notes, got her roasted at P&G for being too high. Muzamil, who graduated with a 2.2, finds this predictably baffling.

The conversation also touches on why Islamabadis at LUMS tend to befriend Karachiites rather than Lahoris. Zarina’s explanation is practical: most Lahoris were day scholars who went home in the evenings, while Karachiites and Islamabadis were hostelites living on campus together. The friendships that form at midnight in a hostel corridor are different from the ones that form in a lecture hall.

The P&G years and what consumer research actually involves

After LUMS, Zarina followed the standard trajectory: graduate, join a major FMCG company. She joined P&G in Karachi in a Consumer and Market Knowledge role — essentially an in-house consultancy function. Her department partnered with sales, marketing, and top management to translate consumer research into strategy. This meant commissioning qualitative and quantitative studies through agencies like Ipsos and Nielsen, conducting in-home visits across different socioeconomic classes in Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad, and then convincing decision-makers to act on the findings.

She describes the role with genuine warmth: “The part that I loved the most about this role was the consumer in-homes and the visits that we do.” Watching how real people interacted with products in their own homes — sitting with their children, watching them wash clothes — gave her a ground-level understanding of consumer behaviour that the marketing and sales teams rarely had.

But six months into the job, she started quietly asking herself whether this was really it. She didn’t say anything. Everyone around her — peers, her mother, her siblings — told her she was being ungrateful. P&G is the job to have. So she kept going.

A father’s absence and what it built

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about something Zarina mentioned in passing: that when the family moved from Pindi to Islamabad, it was her mother and sisters who moved — not her father. She answers directly. They moved out of the house. She has been raised by a single parent since third grade.

Her mother did not work. She raised four daughters on family support and whatever assets she had. Zarina describes this as her mother being in “a full-time job of raising four children.”

The impact on Zarina was significant and, she says, largely subconscious. As the youngest of four sisters, she had been an animated, confident child in Pindi — the star of the annual school play every year without fail. After the move, that confidence quietly collapsed. “When your own father is not involved in your life, you obviously, even on a subconscious level, take it in as: I’m not worth shit.”

She connects this directly to her overachievement at school. The need to be the best in every subject wasn’t ambition in the conventional sense — it was a void being filled. She also connects it to her fierce independence as an adult: an inability to ask for help, a refusal to depend on anyone, because “what if they leave” was always the background noise.

In relationships, she says, she didn’t lose trust in men wholesale. But any conflict, however minor, would trigger an immediate internal conclusion: “This is going to get messed up. Because this is just what happens.” A self-fulfilling prophecy, she calls it.

Why your partner cannot fix you

Muzamil pushes on this — suggesting that a good partner plays a crucial role in helping someone navigate these patterns. Zarina disagrees, clearly and without hedging.

“If you start looking to your partner to fix you or to fix whatever damage that you’ve been through, that is the recipe for a codependent relationship.” A partner is not there to complete you or to fix you, she says. “That’s your job. That’s as simple as it is.”

She is careful to say this isn’t theoretical — her own relationship with her husband, whom she has known for over a decade (also a LUMS alumnus), has evolved significantly over time. But the evolution required both people to be willing to change, and it required her to do her own internal work rather than outsourcing it. “If you keep looking at your partner, you’re going to start repelling them as opposed to magnetizing them.”

The more important shift, she argues, is self-awareness. Once you understand how your experiences have shaped you, you realise that those patterns don’t have to be permanent. “I get to choose. Because I’m an adult now.”

Dubai, Reckitt, and the body that finally said no

After four years at P&G in Karachi, Zarina moved to Dubai and joined Reckitt in a marketing role — a shift from back-seat strategy to front-line execution. She was a brand manager covering all of Middle East, shooting ads in Lebanon, running campaigns across multiple markets. On paper, it was the next logical step in an already impressive trajectory.

By the end of two years, she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. “I was an absolute mess. I was completely burnt out. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.”

She is careful to distinguish between long hours and misalignment. Muzamil works twelve to fifteen hours a day and is happy. She was working over twelve hours a day and was not. The difference, she now understands, was not the hours or even the work culture — though the Middle East work environment was genuinely brutal. The difference was that the job simply didn’t speak to her. And neither, she admits, had P&G. She had known this six months into her first job and had spent seven years ignoring it.

“I kept ignoring the fact that while it may have been a good decision for somebody else, it wasn’t a good decision for me.”

NLP, coaching, and the remote control for your mind

A friend recommended a coach. Zarina called in sick to Reckitt one morning — “I called in sick because I was sick” — and went to a session. She started seeing the coach sporadically. Slowly, she began questioning things she had always taken for granted. She started a certification in NLP — Neurolinguistic Programming — not with any professional intention, but out of curiosity.

She explains NLP in plain terms: “Neurolinguistic — the words we speak and the thoughts that we have — and programming. How to program ourselves for achieving our goals.” The way she loves explaining it is as “a remote control for you and your state of mind.” For someone who had spent her life oscillating between emotional numbness and aggressive outbursts, the idea that she could interrupt those patterns was transformative.

She followed the NLP certification with one in CBT — Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. At that point, she realised she could start taking clients. The fears were real. Seven years in corporate, a salary, benefits, insurance — and now she was considering something that had nothing to do with any of it. “What if it doesn’t work out? What do people say?” She held back for a while. Then: “Karna hai toh karnahai. Nobody else is living my life for me.”

What empowerment coaching actually means

Zarina defines empowerment coaching as facilitating someone to reclaim their power — and she is specific about what that can look like. Setting a boundary with a boss. Learning to communicate assertively rather than aggressively or passively. Stopping procrastination. Stopping the habit of letting external situations or emotions run your life.

“In my case, it was reclaiming my power from not being at the mercy of external situations and also not being at the mercy of my emotions.”

Most of her clients are South Asian expats — people from Pakistan or the subcontinent, living abroad, often from corporate backgrounds. She argues that cultural fit matters enormously in coaching. A Western therapist who tells a Pakistani client to simply cut off their family is missing the entire context of how family obligation works in that culture. “That’s just not the solution. It’s not an option.” Her seven years in corporate also mean she understands the specific texture of difficult workplace conversations — asking for a promotion, confronting a manager’s style, navigating a relocation request.

Pakistan in 2050

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Zarina the question he puts to all his guests: how do you see Pakistan in 2050?

Her answer is grounded in what she observes through her coaching practice. She sees a genuine shift in how people think about their lives — a willingness to question choices that previous generations never examined. A client recently told her that a breakthrough in their session had made him determined that his children would not have to go through the same thing. “That ripple effect is happening and people are becoming more conscious.”

She credits the pandemic, in part, for accelerating this. The lockdown forced people to sit with themselves in a way that the relentless pace of normal life had never allowed. “People are starting to be more mindful as opposed to just working like little hamsters in a cage.”

Muzamil adds his own observation: the parental generation was handed a set of values and never questioned them. The newer generations are different. There is a generational disruption underway, and its effects will compound as those generations grow up.

Zarina can be reached on Instagram at @coachingwithzee.