Dato' Dr Rizal Abu Bakar

Founder, Malaysia Brain Academy

Dato' Dr. Rizal Abu Bakar is a clinical psychologist and brain coach. He founded Malaysia Brain Academy to teach Malaysians how their brain actually works with Islamic framing, for everyday Muslim life.

In a quiet room at St Vincent Hospital Melbourne, Rizal watches a brain on a screen.

The brain belongs to a patient asleep two floors above. Thirty grey slices, glowing where her diet has left damage. The agency he works for has scanned twenty thousand of them. By now the pattern is clear. Show him what someone eats; he can roughly tell you what their brain looks like.

He drives home that evening to a government bungalow in Canberra. The car the Australian government gave him is in the driveway. On the credit card they reload every month, exactly $100 has appeared for "family time."

What he knows about the brain, he writes up in journal articles other psychologists read. He is not, he tells himself, a businessman. Then he prays istikharah. And istikharah says: go back.

He gives it all up — the bungalow, the car, the petrol, the credit card — and moves the family to Kuching.

Two months later his second son sits UPSR in the worst class her new school has. He has never been in a Malaysian classroom. He doesn't speak Bahasa Melayu. The other children call her Melayu celup and won't let her into their conversations. She comes home crying every afternoon.

He listens at the door.

One afternoon she walks past him in the hallway. Stops. Turns around. Points.

"That is your fault. You brought us back only for us to suffer."

He doesn't sleep that night. He sits at the kitchen table and turns everything he learned in Melbourne about food and the brain into something a twelve-year-old can eat for breakfast.

Two months later he walks out of UPSR with an A and the rest Bs from the worst class in the school. The eldest matches it in PMR.

Other parents start asking how.

He invites a few of them to the house. Explains the brain. Explains the food. They sit quietly for a long time. Then one of them — a mother, still in her office tudung — looks at him across the sofa and says the sentence at the top of this page.

He drives her home. He drives back. He sits in his own driveway for a long time without going in. He has been calling himself a researcher.

He realises, in the dark, that what he has been is a hoarder.

The first public seminar — Otak Cantik, Otak Cerdik — opens in 2012. Over the next fourteen years, twenty thousand Malaysians, Indonesians, Singaporeans and Australians sit through it.

Most of them never know about the bungalow he gave up, or the daughter who pointed, or the woman in the office tudung who saved his afterlife by telling him the thing nobody else had.

Malaysia Brain Academy is what he built next — so the knowledge would go out before anyone else had to come knocking.

Real People. Real Success.

"Perubahan yang paling besar untuk kami sekeluarga ialah cara pemakanan. Sebelum ini, saya mudah tertarik untuk cuba makanan viral. Tetapi selepas belajar dengan Dr. Rizal, saya mula faham apa yang perlu dielakkan dan apa yang baik untuk tubuh."

Amir Abdul Hamid, Teacher

"Ilmu yang dikongsikan memang luar biasa. Bila kita buat, kita dapat result — dan yang penting, ia mudah untuk diamalkan."

Nurul Auni, Dentist

"Untuk mencapai big why dalam hidup, kita perlu betulkan otak dan mindset terlebih dahulu. Selama ini saya sedar, banyak perkara yang saya gagal capai bukan sebab saya tidak mampu, tetapi kerana saya belum betulkan cara saya berfikir."

Mohammad Noor

"Saya mula-mula join program Dr. Rizal sebab prestasi otak saya waktu itu tidak berapa bagus. Dulu saya boleh ingat dan boleh bercakap sampai satu jam untuk beri ceramah, tapi selepas itu saya mula susah nak ingat."

Omar, CEO

"Saya mengikuti OCOC online dan banyak perubahan berlaku dalam diri saya. Sebelum ini, selama 8 tahun saya tidur kurang nyenyak. Selepas Dr. Rizal berkongsi cara-cara untuk mendapatkan tidur yang lebih baik, alhamdulillah saya mula dapat tidur dengan nyenyak."

Maryam Muneerah, Arabic Teacher

"I teach people about how the brain processes information, so we can understand ourselves and others better, and live in a more harmonious way."

Elle Filani, Psychologist

"Saya mula tertarik dengan program Dr. Rizal sebab saya sedang menghafal Quran, tetapi rasa hafazan saya agak lambat. Saya tertanya-tanya kenapa ada masa otak saya rasa slow, dan ada masa rasa laju."

Khairul, Student in Usuluddin

"Leadership is a combination of brain and heart. Pemimpin bukan sekadar mengurus cara kerja, tetapi membentuk budaya kerja, teamwork dan cara sesebuah organisasi berfungsi."

Azham bin Zainal Abidin, Director Leadership Development Centre, Razak School of Government

Dato' Dr Rizal Abu Bakar

Real People. Real Success.

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