Tawakkul & High Performance at Work

May 26

Written By elisa b

The Art of Trying Hard and Letting Go

This article is the second in our series on Tawakkul at Work. If you haven't read the first, we'd encourage you to start there: Tawakkul at Work: The concept that changes everything. This article builds on that foundation, moving from the concept to its specific application in high performance.

Most conversations about high performance circle around the same things: how much you prepare, how well you execute, how consistently you show up. These matter deeply. But they account for only part of what makes a professional truly excellent.

There is something else. Something that sits alongside the effort, quietly shaping the quality of everything.

That something is tawakkul: the active, intentional release of what comes after the effort is complete. Not resignation, but trust. Not passivity, but the discipline of returning what was never in your hands to the One who holds it. When effort and tawakkul are practised together, the work carries a different quality; steadier, more generous, more sustainably excellent. This combination is what barakah productivity is genuinely built on.

The hidden cost of holding on

Most high performers share a common trait: they care deeply about outcomes. That care is part of what makes them good. But beyond a certain point, it quietly becomes the thing working against them.

A 2023 study in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology followed knowledge workers over twelve months and found that the inability to mentally release work after task completion was among the strongest predictors of creative decline, poor decision-making, and burnout. The workers who performed best over time were not those who thought most intensely about their work between efforts. They were those who could switch fully on, and then fully off.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace (2024) found that 44% of employees globally reported significant stress the previous day, a figure that has barely shifted despite years of wellbeing investment. Part of what sustains that stress is a culture that equates outcome-fixation with dedication, and equanimity with not caring enough i.e. producing capable professionals who perform well in the short term while steadily depleting the reserves that long-term excellence requires.

Tawakkul speaks to this directly. Not by asking us to care less, but by inviting us to direct our care toward what we can genuinely influence and release what we cannot.

Precision, not just sincerity

"Tie your camel, then put your trust in Allah." — Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (Al-Tirmidhi)

What makes this hadith so striking is not simply its encouragement of trust. It is its insistence on specificity before trust. It does not say "do your best." It says: tie the camel. Complete the action that is yours to complete. There is a quiet accountability in that instruction.

The professional who has genuinely tied their camel can point to something concrete: the preparation was thorough, the thinking was careful, the quality reflected ihsan. That specificity matters because it is what makes genuine release possible. You cannot meaningfully hand over what you have not clearly completed.

Tying the camel well tends to involve three things. A gap in any one of them can make release difficult to reach.

A clear pre-work standard. Before significant work begins, define what "tied" actually looks like; the preparation required, the quality benchmark, the consultations needed. When named in advance, you have something concrete to complete, and something concrete to hand over. A vague intention cannot be finished; it can only drift.

Niyyah that holds beyond the result. When a professional is clear on why they are doing the work; the deeper purpose, not just the deliverable, they carry meaning that survives whatever the outcome delivers. This is what allows honest learning from a loss without being defined by it. The niyyah holds when the result does not.

Du'a as the moment of completion. Du'a is where effort and trust finally meet. That is, the deliberate act of placing completed work into Allah's hands. Without it, the work is finished but not handed over. With it, the effort is whole.

What the research tells us

The mechanisms that make tawakkul effective as a performance practice are increasingly well-evidenced in organisational science.

Research in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Miron-Spektor & Rafaeli, 2009) found that professionals who sustained the highest performance invested in the quality of their attention to a task, not simply hours or intensity. A professional freed from outcome-anxiety is more present, more precise, and more capable of creative thinking than one whose attention is split between executing and bracing for the result.

Research from the University of Amsterdam found that individuals who maintained aspiration without rigid outcome-attachment demonstrated significantly higher creative problem-solving than those with fixed result-orientation. Not because they cared less, but because they could think more clearly.

Martin Seligman's research at the University of Pennsylvania on explanatory style identifies how we interpret adversity as one of the strongest differentiators of sustained performance across a career. Professionals who read setbacks as specific and temporary recover faster and build stronger results over time. Tawakkul, which locates outcomes in Allah's wisdom rather than personal inadequacy, produces exactly this orientation but grounded not in positive thinking, but in theology.

One practical takeaway for the Muslim Professional

Distinguish reflection from rumination. Reviewing your work is part of what makes someone a strong performer. Replaying a completed outcome in search of a different result is not. After a significant result, give yourself a defined window: draw out two or three actionable lessons, note them, then close the review. What belongs to learning, keep. What belongs to Allah, release.