Daily Thought for Change

I decided to make myself happy.

And I’m naturally not wired that way.

I’ll find a cloud on the sunniest day - that’s my default setting.

But I learned that it’s not that great for me.

And I want to feel happy now.

Not someday. Not once the business stabilizes or the problems resolve or the calendar clears.

Now. On a random Tuesday, mid-stress, mid-mess.

I’ve noticed: I’m the one making myself feel stressed.

The challenges of life are of course real. The unresolved issues are real. But the suffering, the feeling inside? - That’s my own choosing.

Objectively, things are also good.

I’m healthy. I sleep and eat well. I train. The people I love are okay. There’s a pretty damn good roof over my head. By most metrics that actually matter, I’m winning as a human.

So why was I choosing to feel like I wasn’t?

I had a session with a client yesterday. We were talking about suffering, specifically, how much of it we carry by choice.

We pick up the bag. We carry it. We could just as easily put it down.

At any moment, you can choose to focus on what’s going wrong.

Or you can focus on what’s going right, keep working hard, and feel good while doing it.

Just like you sweat your ass out in the gym smiling all the way through the workout.

We often assume stress IS the price of high performance.

Push harder. Grind more. AND suffer your way to success.

Effort is the price of results, but suffering? It serves nothing good.

Shawn Achor spent over a decade at Harvard studying the relationship between happiness and performance. What he found is that a positive brain doesn’t just feel better — it performs better. Significantly better.

His and other’s data shows a happy brain is:

• 31% more productive than a brain operating in negative, neutral, or stressed states

• 37% better at sales — across industries

• 19% faster and more accurate at complex problem-solving (doctors making diagnoses in positive vs. stressed states)

• 40% more likely to receive a promotion

• Stress impairs working memory, attention, response inhibition, and cognitive flexibility Cambridge Cognition — the exact tools you need to solve hard problems

• High-trust, psychologically safe teams — where people feel positive and supported — report 74% less stress and 50% higher productivity

You’re not just happier when you’re positive. You’re smarter. Faster. More creative. More resilient.

Better human with better life experience.

By choosing to feel stressed I was making myself dumber at the very moment I needed to be sharpest.

I love this quote,

You can do both.

Pursue what you want. And love what you already have. Those aren’t opposites. Happiness doesn’t follow success, it fuels it.

My client said at the session,

“I think it’s a skill. It’s hard to think positively and take control of your happiness. Feeling like a victim, venting - that’s easier. You need to work on that.”

Yes. And.

Like any skill, the reps are hard at first. Then they’re not. You build the muscle. Eventually it’s just a habit. Like brushing your teeth. You don’t think about it. You just do it.

This April, I’m running an experiment.

30 days. Feel good no matter what the world throws at me. Not toxic positivity - not pretending the hard things aren’t hard. Just refusing to let the hard things take control of my happiness.

It’s a challenge. It’s worth it.

How often are you handing the world the keys to your mood? It it making your life better?

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Is this belief useful? How is it working for you?

I used to think I just needed the right diet at the beginning of my health and fitness journey.

Keto. Carnivore. Paleo. Vegan. Raw vegan. Intermittent fasting. Whole30. The Zone. Juice cleanses. Gluten-free. I tried them all. And they’d work — until they didn’t. Results all over the place. Energy all over the place. Mental and emotional state: also all over the place.

It felt like a guessing game I kept losing.

Why can’t I find something simple, something I can actually do for life, that ticks all the boxes?

Then I got more serious about the science, nutrition education, calorie balance, macro and micronutrients. Paying attention to what foods and eating patterns actually worked for me, not for some influencer. Not for a 90-day transformation story. For me. For life.

And I found it!

I’ve been eating the same way for about a decade now. No complaints.

It just keeps getting better, and I never feel like I’m dieting. I make reasonable choices. My results reflect my doing. Sometimes I eat too much and the scale goes up. I do the math for a bit, remove the extras, and it goes back to normal.

No magic. No guessing. No frustration.

What this taught me: I don’t need to know everything about nutrition. I don’t need magic for it to work. I just need a belief that makes me do more of what works.

And believing that science, imperfect as it is, outperforms any “clean” eating philosophy has served me exceptionally well.

Reliably well and reflective of what I do.

After working with 500+ clients and athletes on their nutrition, I’ve noticed something: some beliefs keep people stuck, regardless of how hard they’re trying or how “clean” they’re eating.

Here are the 3 most unhelpful beliefs about calories I see, the ones that might be keeping you stuck too:

1. “Clean” calories don’t count. Sugar-free, plant-based, all-natural, gluten-free, anti-inflammatory — if it’s “good,” it must be ok. Except your body runs on energy math, not moral categories. The body is designed to use and store as much energy as possible from ANY food source.

2. Weekends don’t really matter. You kept it clean all week. You earned it. Except five “earned” weekends - a couple of slices of pizza ~ 500 cal, a couple of pieces of cake ~ 500 cal, a couple of drinks - and a month can add easily another kilo (~7700 cal).

3. You need to eat a lot to gain weight. 10g of almonds: 60 cal. A medium cappuccino: 120 cal. A tablespoon of olive oil in your takeout: 120 cal. That’s 300 extra calories a day. Times 30 days: 8,400 calories. That’s roughly 1.1kg of potential weight gain — from 3 things that barely registered.

If you hold any of these beliefs and think you can skip the math, the weight struggle is likely to continue. Not because you’re not trying or unlucky. Because the belief doesn’t serve your goals.

These days, I’ve stopped asking “Is this true?”

I ask: Is this useful? How is believing this actually working for me?

That question has been more of a game-changer than any diet I’ve ever tried. If a belief isn’t working — you can change it. Today.

Over to you, dear reader,
Your beliefs, are they serving your goals?

“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” ~ Mark Twain

I woke up feeling a bit frustrated because I didn’t do as much reading last night as I planned and instead went straight to bed, feeling very tired and sleepy.

I found a reason to get upset at myself on a perfectly beautiful Sunday morning because of this expectation that I always need to do my absolute best.

Which is one of the 3 very common unhelpful beliefs many of us hold, creating more daily suffering for ourselves, according to REBT.

REBT - Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

The more I study research-backed mindset/coaching/therapy tools — the less I believe in magical thinking about beliefs and manifestation. And the better my daily experience of life gets.

Here’s the full list of unhelpful most common beliefs that bitter our sweet life:

• I must perform well and be my best at all times — or something is wrong with me.

• Other people must treat me well and as I deserve — or something is wrong with them.

• The world must bring me favorable conditions — or it owes me an explanation.

And when reality doesn’t cooperate (which it mostly doesn’t) — we feel justified in our frustration, validated in our suffering, and deserving our air time to complain and vent.

But who’s actually having a bad day believing this?

Not the world.

Not the other people.

You.

The one CHOOSING to carry the belief.

Here’s what REBT suggests instead: once you accept that sh*t happens, that you won’t always be your best, and that the world owes you nothing — it gets a lot easier to smile anyway.

To find the fun. To keep going. To not be your best and be fine.

Same event. Different belief. Completely different experience.

2 people stuck in traffic, both running late.

One chooses to stress about it - blame the traffic, themselves for not thinking it through better, blaming the Universe.

The other chooses to see it as bonus time — a long call with someone they love, a podcast they’ve been meaning to finish, a rare few minutes of quiet.

Same traffic. Your choice. Different feeling.

That’s the ABC model in REBT: Activating event → Belief you choose → Consequence (your feeling)

And the fix isn’t to change you, or the world, or other people to have a permission to be happy. It’s the D and the E — Disputing the unhelpful belief until a new, more Effective feeling follows.

What I love most about REBT?

It states that all the benefit comes in the reps.

You get homework. Real practice. Not just and insight.

A practitioner will assign you exercises to catch your own narrative, and redirect it toward one the one that serves your wellbeing and life.

(I start my clients with a Thought Audit exercise, then Optimism Reps the following week to condition a more-useful-thinking muscle💪)

Not magic. Just muscle you train.

Where in your life are your beliefs about events causing you more pain than the events themselves?

And what would it take to change the story, so you get to feel better, regardless?

I learned that many repeated mistakes might be avoided if you learn what the warnings signs are of you getting into trouble before the trouble happens.

I was prepping for recording a podcast episode on polarity mapping — a tool for navigating the parts of life that are impossible to balance — when I realized something unexpected.

The framework asks you to map out polarities, the extremes of your life that you are trying to balance. Or 2 values in tension.

For example, Deep Work vs. Social Connection.

One of the steps is to list what goes wrong when you over-index on either side.

I was reading through the downsides of too much social connection:

• − Shallow, fragmented, group type of thinking
  − Always reactive to what’s asked of you, never creative from the inside
  − People-pleasing over expressing your own identity
  − Exhaustion from over-giving
  − Real, deep, thought-leadership type of work never gets done
  − Resentment of others, without so much needed solitude
  − Noise of others drowns your own voice

And I felt… nothing. No sign of familiarity.

That’s just not me. I don’t over-socialize. I never have. All the conversations around boundaries - I never could get what people find difficult. I’m naturally ok with being anti-social :)

But then I read the second list. What happens when you over-index on Deep Work:

• − Isolation & loneliness creep in
  − Brittle thinking — no reality check from perspectives of others
  − Relationships atrophy quietly (and I suffer)
  − Rigidity, perfectionism spiral
  − Miss serendipity & meeting the right people
  − Burnout from being in my head too much without social replenish
  − Work becomes your only identity

That one?

I knew exactly how every single one of those felt. In my body, my mind, my soul. That’s my side of the polarity. The one that naturally dominates. The one where I tend to live comfortably.

The most beautiful part was when I realized I don’t need to build protective structures around Deep Work. It happens naturally. Effortlessly. Without me scheduling it. What I need — what I actually have to design for — is enough social connection to feel replenished.

Not to become a socialite, or to balance things out according to someone’s should or standard. Just enough to keep myself fully nourished and integrated.

Like learning to eat just one piece of chocolate a day without the spiral into regret. Not abstinence. Not excess. Calibrated, integrated - whole.

This week I went to a protein-bar tasting with local Gym Girl community (which my introverted-workaholic part wanted to cancel). A beach walk with a friend. A mountain sunrise hike with entrepreneurs. And I got my social fix. Life felt richer. I came back to my work with a lot more to give.

Replenished. Recharged. Integrated.

Whole.

Life isn’t a scale to balance. It’s a recipe where amount of perfect saltiness changes and entirely up to you.

This is what my upcoming workshop, Beyond Balance, is built around. Not searching for some elusive equilibrium that doesn’t fit your life. Instead: learning to read your own dial, understanding what intensity you need in different areas, and then building your calendar and experiences to reflect that.

Over to you, dear reader,

Look at your week. Which part of you is running the show? And which part is starving for airtime?

What would it look like if you designed next week to address that?

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Nothing frustrates the brain more than effort with no ROI.

Here’s the peculiar part: often, the return is there. You just never looked for it.

Someone on the mountain today asked me how hard it is to sell human development to companies.

“Quite a battle.”

Because most people development isn’t designed to measure the ROI that companies care about. So leadership spends the budget because there’s budget to spend. They sit through the training. They nod. Six months later, nobody remembers what changed.

Because nobody tracked the right thing.

Was the ROI there? Productivity. Retention. Performance. The bottom line that moved?

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

But if you don’t measure it, you’ll never know either way. And not knowing makes the next time so much harder to “buy”. And everyone loses.

When you believe your effort was a waste, even when it wasn’t, your motivation to try something similar will go waaaaaaay down. And the next time someone offers you a program, a coach, a protocol — you’re a hard sell. Good luck changing your mind!

This is why, before we do anything else, I get obsessively clear with every coaching client on what they actually care about. What does better look like? What does winning look like? In your work, your health, your life?

Name it, picture it, describe it before we begin.

Because if we don’t name it, we won’t design for it. If we don’t design for it, we won’t measure it. And if we don’t measure it — we can do real work together, meaningful work, work that changes something — and you’ll still walk away thinking: what was even the point?

The measurement also makes the tools’ choice more precise.

You want to lose weight? Track the calories. Not as punishment. As information you need to adjust the most important lever for the progress YOU want. Without the number, you’re guessing. You might get stronger, sleep better, feel lighter in your body — and still feel like you failed, because the thing you said you cared about didn’t move. So next time someone offers you a path, you shake your head. Already tried that - didn’t work.

But could it?

Before every sales cycle, every business development push, every new health protocol I consider — I ask myself 2 questions,

Why am I doing this?

Am I measuring the right thing to know if it’s working?

So I don’t end up working hard and feeling like it all was a waste.

Over to you, dear reader,

What are you working on right now that you’ve never actually defined success for? And what do you need to start measuring to feel like your efforts aren’t a waste?

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The Both/And

Humans aren’t great at the middle ground.

We don’t do “something is better than nothing” well. We don’t do well with “imperfect consistency” over inconsistent “maximum perfect effort” — that unglamorous practice of showing up at 70%, again and again.

And the swing is almost always what kills us - our fitness aspirations, businesses ambition, diet that we couldn’t sustain.

I’ve been reading about polarity management. One of the examples that stood out to me: organizational performance — the tension between rewarding teamwork and rewarding individual effort.

You need both.

Reward only the team and your highest performers go quiet and quit. Individual creativity gets jammed. Some people coast. Reward only the individual and collaboration dies — everyone optimizing for themselves, the whole organism stops working.

The perfect solution?

You don’t pick a side. You hold both. Dial one up, dial the other down but you never abandon either pole that need each other to keep the whole thing going.

The both/and.

It shows up everywhere once you see it.

Some time ago I was a “January gym member” in my own business.

Hit sales hard at the start of the year, burned bright, stalled out, results vanished. Rinse and repeat. I thought I had a knowledge problem. I didn’t. I had a self-management problem — I kept treating effort like an ON/OFF light switch, bright or darkness, instead of a dial, slowly adjusting as the days went.

Now, on the days it feels unmanageable, instead of quitting, I ask myself,

Not the perfect, maximized, heroic, over-caffeinated version. Not the version worth posting about. Just the version I can actually do today, and tomorrow, and the week after that.

The research on behavior change showed long time ago, starting at a pace you can maintain beats swinging from couch to CrossFit every time. But we keep swinging. Because the swing feels like commitment. It looks like “real effort”.

It just doesn’t last.

The pattern that doesn’t work: go hard, crash, kill the momentum, and usually the desire to ever try again.

The pattern that works: start with the intention to still be going for as long as it takes.

Adjust the dial. Don’t use the switch.

Where are you treating effort like an ON/OFF switch right now, and what would it look like to use the dial instead?

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36 pull-ups today. Heavy squats. Some solid back work.

It felt great!

And also it got me thinking about all the times it didn’t feel great. Visa stress. Moving countries. Work piling up. Life being life.

I showed up anyway. And the results? They followed what I did not how I felt.

That’s the thing about results. They don’t check in on your emotional state first. They reflect what you do every day.

I got this insight this morning, gearing up for another round of cold outreach I had zero desire to do. It dawned on me:

I’ve been showing up at the gym for 25 years. I didn’t feel like it half those times if not more. The results didn’t care.

It’s kind of harsh. But also kind of liberating.

I don’t have to wait for my feelings to cooperate. And my feelings are like Cape Town weather. Several seasons in a single afternoon, depending on which way the wind of luck turns. Not exactly a reliable GPS for getting things done and getting things moving.

I can decide to wake up, show up, do the thing, knowing that results don’t care how I felt on any particular day.

Wake up. Show up. Do the thing.

A month from now I won’t remember how I felt on any given Wednesday. But I’ll know exactly what I did, and what I built because of it.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where are you letting mood decide how many reps you do, and is that working for you?

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There’s a book I’m reading right now — The Jolt Effect.

It’s about sales.

But really it’s about human nature.

The authors found that what kills most buying decisions isn’t price, or even status quo bias. It’s not competition. It’s not even doubts about the product.

It’s the fear of making the wrong choice.

And the worst mistake?

Giving more information or more choices.

There’s a famous experiment. Researchers set up a jam-tasting table. Some days, 24 flavors. Other days, 6. When given 24 choices, 3% of people bought. When given 6? 30% bought.

10X more decisions made and actions taken — with less options on the table.

Why does this happen?

Because more choice creates more chances to be wrong. More mental work. And somewhere in the brain, that extra friction translates into: This should be easier. Maybe this is wrong.

And people walk away.

Let’s think about your own growth goals.

Eating better. Moving more. Using AI at work. Getting better at giving feedback. These things are already hard. They require effort, real consistency, discomfort.

Are you also making the choosing hard on top of that work?

Nutrition

You could track macros, go keto, try intermittent fasting, cut sugar, go plant-based, count calories, do Whole30, add protein, cut processed food, meal prep Sundays…

Most people who succeed long-term start with one thing: eat more protein at every meal. It’s concrete. It crowds out junk naturally. It makes you feel full. You don’t need an app. It’s simple and easy to start.

Exercise

You could do HIIT, lift weights, run, swim, cycle, do yoga, try Pilates, walk 10,000 steps, join a class, follow a program, buy equipment, train for a race...

Most people who actually stick with exercise start with one thing: go for a 20-minute walk every day. Not because it’s optimal. Because it’s simple and moves things forward. And movement compounds.

Using AI tools

You could explore ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Notion AI, Copilot, AI for email, for research, for strategy, for writing, for scheduling…

Most people who integrate AI meaningfully start with: pick one task you do daily and run it through one tool for a week. Not the whole workflow. One task at a time.

Giving feedback

You could learn radical candor, try the SBI model, practice nonviolent communication, read Thanks for the Feedback, work on your listening, get a coach, join a workshop…

Most people who get better at feedback fast start with a simple recipe: after every hard conversation, write one sentence about what you wish you’d said differently. That’s it. One thing. One rep. One improvement.

The pattern is the same every time.

Give yourself some direction. Give yourself a simple starting point. A couple of clear options to choose from. Repeat.

You still have freedom. You just have fewer places to get lost. And make mistakes.

The thing most advice misses: the work is hard enough already. Hard enough that most people quit before they improve. The last thing you need is to burn your energy deciding where to start, and if it's the right choice.

Save that energy for the doing.

Ove to you, dear reader,

Where in your self-improvement journey are you making the choosing harder than the doing — and what’s the one simple thing you could commit to starting today?

I’ve slept 7.5 to 8.5 hours a night for almost a decade.

At some point I looked at the science, felt the difference a full night made in how I felt the next day, and decided: this is non-negotiable. My life has to run with my sleep, not against it.

Same decision with nutrition. Same result. Nearly 10 years of consistency.

One decision made once, that keeps on giving.

Yesterday in my Self-Actualization coaching training, we worked with a tool called Polarity Mapping. which helps you explore and integrate very often seemingly opposite desires, priorities, things that we want in life more of that tend to contradict each other.

More meaningful work and more life outside of work.

Excellence in your craft and more presence with the people you love.

Deep professional ambition and a rich inner world, that doesn’t get compromised.

When you push hard toward one, the other seems to suffer.

Polarity Mapping doesn’t ask you to pick a side. It asks you to consider: what would it look like if both sides were genuinely integrated — not perfectly balanced, but right for you, at this stage of your life?

You map the positives each pole brings. You look honestly at what breaks down when you overindex on one and starve the other. And then, this is the part that matters, you ask: what’s the ideal proportion of each that would make me feel good about my life right now?

Not your mentor’s answer. Not some productivity guru’s framework. Yours.

Because someone else might need more work than life. Or more life than work. Or something in between that doesn’t have a name yet.

The real work isn’t in finding the perfect ratio. It’s doing what I did with sleep and nutrition — deciding your standard, then building your calendar and your resources around it. Not waiting for “the obstacles” to disappear from your life. Not wishing for more hours in your days and more days in your weeks. But working with what you actually have.

Most of us are waiting for ideal circumstances before we decide it’s time for a change. But ideal circumstances aren’t coming.

The constraints of your life are the canvas to draw a picture of your “ideal” life.

Saturday. It’s a good time for me now to spend some time and ask myself,

What areas of my life need to become non-negotiable like sleep? Where do I feel unfulfilled and why? And where do I need to create deliberate space, time, and resources so those things can grow the way my health has grown?

The question isn’t whether you can have it all. It’s whether you’ve decided what your “all” looks like.

Have you, dear reader?

If you knew it would work, would you try harder?

I actually know the answer.

Even mice do.

Nir Eyal, in Beyond Belief, describes this famous experiment on learned optimism. Researchers took wild mice and dropped them in water. Left alone, at first, most gave up within 1 to 15 minutes. But when the researchers pulled some mice out, dried them off, let them recover, then put them back in, those same mice swam for up to 60 hours.

60 hours!🤯

The researchers replicated this.

Different animals exposed to different kind of suffering kept fighting when they had reason to believe rescue was possible. Or that their own effort could save them.

Humans are no different.

When we believe our efforts can actually work — we try harder. We last longer. We push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit.

It gets a bit more interesting for us humans, though.

We don’t need the direct experience of making it that the mice needed.

We don’t need to be rescued first before we’ll believe rescue is possible.

We can choose what we believe by choosing where we direct our attention.

All the people who succeeded before us with fewer resources. Or all the people who failed.

We get to decide which story we’re gathering evidence for.

Nir’s Motivation Triangle makes this very clear.

To get motivated — and stay motivated — 3 things need to line up:

1. knowing what to do,

2. knowing what benefit you’ll get,

3. and believing your efforts can actually get you there.

Remove any one of those 3 legs, and the whole thing collapses.

So if you’re struggling to keep going — 2 days into a diet, months into a business with no traction, weeks into trying to sleep better or improve your self-talk — ask yourself, Do I actually believe this can change things for me?

Not “do I hope.” Not “do I wish.”

Do you believe?

Nietzsche famously said,

But I think the quote is missing something important.

The why only carries you through if you also believe that how can help you reach it.

Over to you, dear reader,

What story of disbelief are you telling yourself, the one that makes you drown in minutes when you have what it takes to go for hours?