This is not a positivity post

Someone commented on a post I shared this week: "Love your positivity always, Niyaaz."

I sat with that for a moment. And then I wrote this.

This is not a positivity post.

I want to be honest with you about this week.

It has been heavy. Not dramatically, not in a way that makes for clean storytelling. Just the accumulated weight of a world that keeps producing evidence of itself.

Let me name what I'm carrying.

Monday. San Diego.
Three men were killed outside the Islamic Centre of San Diego — the largest mosque in San Diego County. It was a Monday morning. There were 140 children inside.

Their names were Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha and Nader Awad.

Amin Abdullah, the security guard, already shot, reached for his radio and initiated a lockdown protocol for the building. He was still firing at the shooters when he fell. Because of what he did in those final moments, 140 children walked out alive.

Let that land.

The two perpetrators were teenagers — the same ages as my own son and daughter. They met online. They left anti-Islamic writings. Nazi and White supremacist imagery were displaye on their firearms. Thirty weapons were recovered from their homes.

And the headline? "Two shooter situation. Possible hate crime."

Not "terrorism."

Pause on that word. Think about when you've heard it used quickly, loudly, without hesitation. Think about which perpetrators it gets applied to immediately — and which ones require weeks of investigation before anyone will say it out loud (or at all).

When two teenagers plan an attack on a place of worship, travel to it armed, open fire on a security guard, attempt to move through the building toward children — and leave behind written manifestos about why they did it — I'm not sure what word we're waiting to use.

Because the word matters. Not for the perpetrators — they're gone. But for the survivors. For the community. For the signal it sends about whose fear is taken seriously and whose is explained away.

I've seen comments online this week that I won't repeat here. People responding to the deaths of three men — a security guard, two mosque staff — as though the right response is anything other than horror.

That's not a fringe position any more. And that should concern all of us.

Tuesday. Wellington waterfront.
I finished my run. Three women nearby were trying to take a photo — one photographing the other two.

I offered to take one with all three of them in it. She hesitated. Said something non-committal.

Thirty seconds later, the next person who walked past — she handed them the phone without a second thought.

I'm not angry. I've been here before. Many of us have.

But I'm naming it because this is what the San Diego shooting and a moment on a Wellington waterfront have in common. Someone, somewhere, made a calculation about who was safe. Who was trustworthy. Who was welcome. And the calculation had nothing to do with the individual in front of them.

In San Diego, that calculation ended three lives. On a waterfront, it was a photo.

The scale is incomparable. The root is not.

This week in Wellington too.
Our government announced a further nine to ten thousand public service jobs will be cut over the next four years.

Nine to ten thousand people. People with families.

Many of them doing work that holds communities together — quietly, without headlines, in the background of a society that rarely notices the infrastructure until it's gone.

I've lived through this cycle before. I've been one of those numbers. Twice.

And I know how the language works. Efficiency. Fiscal responsibility. Right-sizing. The words are always clean. The impact on people never is.

What strikes me is the pattern. The San Diego shooting, a waterfront moment, a budget announcement. Three very different things. But in each of them, someone somewhere decided that certain people — certain lives, certain livelihoods, certain feelings of safety — mattered a little less than something else.

Before you ask me to remove my tinfoil hat — this is not a conspiracy. It's a pattern. And patterns are worth naming.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday. A room full of coaches.
A few days before all of this — before a week that felt like it was designed to make you disengage — I walked into a room with hundreds of coaches who had shown up to get better at serving others.

Not to be seen. Not for recognition. To sharpen the tools they use to help people move forward.

In hindsight, there's something quietly defiant about it.

The world keeps producing reasons to pull back, to protect yourself, to stop investing in other people. And there are people who keep choosing not to.

That choice — small, repeated, unspectacular — is what I think leadership actually looks like most of the time. Not the moments on the news. The Saturday and Sunday morning moments. The showing up anyway.

Final thought
I don't have clean answers for this week. I don't think you should trust anyone who does.

But here are the questions I'm sitting with — and I'd invite you to sit with them too:

• When you see a pattern of who gets protected and who absorbs the cost — what do you do with that?

• Where in your own life are you making calculations — about who is safe, who is trustworthy, who belongs — that you haven't examined honestly?

• And in a week that keeps asking you to disengage, where are you choosing to show up anyway?

Because Amin Abdullah showed up. He did his job. He made a decision in the worst possible moment that saved 140 children. And he paid with his life.

That's not just heroism. That's what it looks like to lead with conscience when it costs you everything.

The world needs more of that. Not less. And the price doesn’t have to be your life.

Go on. Take the Next Step.