Maaria Mozaffar, Civil Rights Attorney and Author, Talks Selfless Goals

"Meddling," my husband said after consulting dictionary.com to try to settle an argument, "is a bad thing." I put my headphones back on, not acknowledging what he considered a win. Sure, a meddler isn't invited to address an issue, but that doesn't mean she can't help make it better with her unique skills. After meeting Maaria Mozaffar - civil rights attorney, policy drafter and author of More Than Pretty - who describes herself as a "meddler," I can't help but see the descriptor as good. "I think everybody has the ability to have empathy and step in others' shoes, but not everybody pays attention to it," Mozaffar told me on this week’s episode of #WeGotGoals. "I paid attention to it since childhood ... that it made me very satisfied." And as we conversed our way through her accomplishments for the podcast, Mozaffar shared how her natural draw towards helping others shaped her life. Mozaffar saw a future in which she would use her powers of meddling as an attorney, to ensure justice for those who couldn’t always stand up for themselves. First, though, there was the little matter of passing the bar exam. She tried—and failed, five times. Rather than doubt her intelligence and abilities, though, she put the situation in perpective. "Real life and application of the law and advocacy for the law is not a multiple choice test - such as life is not a multiple choice test," she said. Resilience is a natural result of failure in the face of a big goal and when she took the test a sixth time, she succeeded at her mission to take home the license she needed to practice. After passing the bar exam, she continued her work in policy and advocacy, inserting herself into the issues where she could impact the most people: rights at the borders, the travel ban and food deserts. Along the way, she also took notice of how women viewed themselves and their success, developing the ideas that would lead to her book More Than Pretty. In the book, she explores issues relating to beauty, intelligence, social media (and selfies) and how strong women navigate a world where their worth may seem determined more by how they look than what they contribute. "If I want [my three kids] to have a good example of what a strong woman is, a strong mom is, I can't just tell them about it - I have to be that," she said. And a natural way to show your children exactly how strong you are is to add "triathlete" to a list that already includes "she who stands up for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Mozaffar describes the sport of triathlon as a way to keep her body strong and feeling good to allow her to "contribute to society." "Triathlons are uniquely interesting because triathlons are like life, right? It doesn't matter if you're first. It doesn't matter if you're last. The only thing that matters is that you cross the finish line smiling," she said.   Listen to the episode of #WeGotGoals and get the book by Mozaffar (which she used as a tool to raise money for an organization she loves, The United State of Women, for the first month it was on sale). And if you like what you hear, be sure to rate it and leave a review. ---     JAC:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me I have Maggie Umberger and Kristen Geil. KG:Hello Jeana. MU: Good morning Jeana. JAC: Good morning ladies. MU: So Jeana this week you spoke with Maaroa. JAC: I did. I spoke with Maria Mozaffar. She is a civil rights attorney. She is an author and speaker and just generally a protector of humans who need protection. MU: And the way that she sets goals is really cool because she has her eyes and ears open to what people need. And when you say she's a protector of humans that like encompasses her many jobs because she goes into so many different realms that take her on a lot of different paths but they're all under that umbrella of like total selfless acts. JAC:When she was describing her law practice she talked first about where she volunteers her time, which I find really interesting because the places where she volunteers her time or donates her time--those things tend to take up more of her time than sort of the billable hours stuff. So she she's been active in sort of the Border Rights and the rights that humans have at the U.S. borders as well as the ban, the travel ban. And she also wrote a book called More Than Pretty. KG: One of the things that came through on your interview with Maaria is that she has no quit in her. Can you tell us about some of the obstacles that she's faced and how she's overcome them? JAC:So Maaria, you're right does not know how to quit. She failed the bar exam five separate times and she'll talk through the story of how she overcame it what she did to overcome it. But she knew that she needed to pass the bar to practice law, to do the things that she wanted to do and because that was a block in the way of her big goal. She understood that she would just have to keep banging her head against that wall until she broke the wall down. And she wrote letters. She reached out to people. But I think what was most incredible was that I didn't even have a chance to ask her how it felt to pass the bar exam because she immediately explained how it felt, which was that she was on this high probably so high that it was almost as if she was stoking her own ego. But she has this incredible connection to sort of religion and the universe and she felt that the universe almost put her back in her place after feeling like she'd passed the bar and she was on this high. And she found herself sort of back down where she needed to be where her head had to be to actually move forward and achieve the things that she was there to achieve. The bar exam was just one step along the way. MU:And when we think about fitness I think a lot of times we get to treat fitness as our little selfish moment of the day where it’s just, we do this for us and I know that's how I feel about a great yoga class or whatever it might be. But even when she talks about her relationship to fitness she's a role model to other people. Can you talk a little bit about that? JAC:So she is a triathlete which is incredible because I don't know when she does it. A multi-sport athlete takes a lot of time for him or herself to train for the three sports, involved for swimming biking and running. And she's doing those things and she's also sort of doing them for her family. So she talks about how she crossed the finish line carrying her daughter in her arms wearing a T-shirt that said she was her husband's wife and her daughter’s mother. She's not just doing it for herself she's doing it to be a role model for her whole family which was incredible and a lesson to me as well because I as I sort of think about where my life will go selfishly I think about how children will fit in because I think so much about how you can be either a strong woman or a caretaker. And that's just not true. Because she is both of those things she is both a strong woman and a caretaker sort of in one body doing all those things, vacillating wildly between being strong so she can take care of people and taking care of people so that she can be strong. And I thought that was the most incredible thing about her was that she sort of broke all the rules. MU:It's a truly amazing interview. So here is Jeana with Maaria. <p paraeid="{eb0c...