Daily Thought for Change

I started my coaching career 18 years ago as a personal trainer.

Somewhere along the way, through practice and learning from other coaches, I picked up one habit that never left me:
asking clients for just one more rep, when they were convinced they were done.

And here’s what I learned very quickly.

Every client, every single one, no exception, always had at least one more rep in them.

“When you think you're done, you're only 40% into what your body's capable of doing. That's just the limits that we put on ourselves.”
— David Goggins, the baddest ass Navy SEAL out there.

And there's good research on that.

There’s a framework in exercise science called the Central Governor Model (CGM), proposed by exercise scientist Tim Noakes.

In simple terms, CGM is about:

• Safety mechanism: Your brain acts as a governor. Its job is to keep you alive, not to help you reach your potential.

• Neurological fatigue: Fatigue isn’t just muscle failure. It’s a sensation created by the brain to slow you down.

• Predictive regulation: The brain pulls the emergency brake long before your body is actually at risk.

So when your brain says, “I’m done”, that’s not the truth. Your brain is lying to you to keep you safe. (It wouldn't be the only time)
That’s just a prediction. A conservative one. Just to be safe.

And once you see that, you start seeing it everywhere, applicable to your whole life. Not just weights.

I use this exact same rule when I don’t want to work on a project, a report, a client file, or a piece of writing.

I hear the familiar voice: Enough. Not today. I'm done. 

And I answer it the same way I did in the gym for my clients:

“Just one more rep, Angela.”
One more page.
One more hour.
One more day of showing up.

What I’ve learned, and what my clients learned too:

Once you do just one more, you discover there’s A LOT more in the tank.

It’s like stretching.
Flexibility isn’t missing from most bodies, permission of your "central governor" is.
The brain just hasn’t been shown that it’s safe to go further.

Once you pass the perceived finish line, the landscape changes.
A new horizon appears.
Possibilities you literally couldn’t see before come into view.

And then something magical happens.

You realize:
If I could do that one, maybe, just maybe, I can keep going further than my mind’s eye can currently see.

So over to you, dear reader,

Where could you overrule your central governor by committing to just one more rep?

PS They say as you climb, things don’t get easier - you get stronger.
I believe it’s simpler than that. You’re just updating what your governor thinks you can handle, using real-life proof.

I found myself stuck.
Unable to decide where to move.

Too many choices.
Too many criteria.
All of them technically “reasonable.”
None of them helpful to narrow down the choice.

Locations. Prices. Convenience for work.
And the not-small thing: the community I’ve built over the past year.

The more I tried to think it through, the more impossible it felt.

Luckily, I was reading a really good book on decision-making at the time: Decisions That Matter: how to make good decisions in the world of endless choice.

It gave me something I desperately needed, not "the perfect answer", but a way to make a decision I could stand behind now.

Not “the best possible choice in some imaginary future.”
But the best available choice, aligned with my life as it actually is.

Here are a few things that helped.

Stakes.
Is this decision worth deliberate thinking?
Yes. Where you live shapes your minutes, your mood, your thinking, your energy. Every single day.

Simplify the options.
What are my real options, not in an ideal world, but right now?

I was only looking for a place for 2 weeks before moving somewhere long-term. So I stripped it down to non-negotiables:

• Solid internet for work

• Quiet for calls, writing, podcasting, thinking

• Close to gym and food so I don’t lose time

• A place where I feel safe walking

• A kitchen

• Peace of mind

Without these, even short-term, everything else in my life would suffer.

Then came the second layer.
Community.
Proximity to the city for meetings.
A space that supports biz development.
Inspiration.
My own place vs sharing.
Freedom to work at 4am without boundaries.

Most of these conflict. You can’t optimize for all of them at once. At least not from where I am.

Given the deadline, I chose convenience and essentials, close to where I already was.

But for the longer-term decision, the book suggested something powerful for “impossible choices.”

4 lenses:

VALUES
What matters most right now?
For me: freedom and growth. Making the business work. Removing friction everywhere else.

JOY
What gives me energy when things are hard?
Walks. Sunrises. Sunsets. Space to think.
That’s not indulgence. That’s fuel for my future.

SUCCESS
What does success look like this year, honestly?
Business growth. One clear focus.
My environment has to support that.

IMPACT
Who do I want to affect, and how?
More people impacted means meeting more people.
Which means being closer to the city.

Once I looked through these lenses, the decision became obvious.

I could compromise on size.
On how modern the place is.
But not on what the seed of the next version of me needs to grow🌱

And it brought to mind another point.

Our values change.
Our definition of success changes.
What brings us joy changes.
The impact we want to create changes.

So will “the right choice.”

The job isn’t to find the perfect answer forever.
It’s to prepare the conditions for who you’re becoming next.

Over to you, dear reader,

What does the next-level you need, based on your current essentials, values, joy, success, and impact?
And are you putting those things in place, the way a gardener prepares the soil before planting the seed?

There’s an entire field, sports psychology, built around one simple insight:
what happens in your head is just as important as what your body can do.

Sports psychology studies how psychological factors, aka what happens in your head, affect your performance and well-being. Focus. Motivation. Confidence. Stress regulation. Mental skills that help athletes reach peak performance and stay there. It blends psychology and sports science to build resilience, emotional control, and a mindset that can win, on the field and off it, sustainably.

Some tools of the trade 🛠️:

• Performance enhancement: concentration, managing competitive anxiety, self-confidence, a winning mindset.

• Motivation & well-being: understanding motivation, regulating emotions, improving overall quality of life.

• Mental skills training: self-talk, visualization, goal setting, arousal regulation.

In sports, athletes and coaches figured this out a long time ago.
If you ignore what’s happening in your head, it’s like owning the most sophisticated equipment and never learning how to use it.

Like buying a professional camera and only pressing the automatic button.
You’ll get decent pictures.
But you might as well have used your phone.

What’s even more important: they realized mindset is trainable.
Just like the body.

With repetition.
Consistency.
Feedback.

One thought, one frame, one story - one rep.

Novak Djokovic, famous tennis player, talks openly about this.

His ability to come back after defeats, to stay steady under pressure, to redefine success through purpose, to normalize negative emotions, to treat temporary failure as information - this isn’t accidental. It’s trained. His mind became his best coach.

Athletes get it.

Your mind is a set of habits.
You can train it to help you win.

Most people outside professional sports don’t see it this way. We aren't taught to think this way.
We assume our thinking is fixed. Our confidence, our optimism, our emotional default are all fixed personality traits.
That we’re stuck with one voice in our head for life, for better or worse.

At some point, I had to learn that the conversation in my head wasn’t always useful for where I wanted to go. And that realization changed what I did - training it, like I would train my biceps.

One rep at a time.

If you do a bicep curl once, nothing changes.
If you do it for a year, the change becomes undeniable.

Mindset works the same way.
For a while, you won’t see much difference. You’ll be doing the reps without obvious results.
And then, over time, your life quietly starts moving in a new direction. And it would feel like some manifestation magic.

I read a short piece today by Seth Godin today.

He wrote that some people spend their whole lives training pessimism, spotting what’s wrong, what won’t work, what might fail. Others train optimism, learning to see opportunity inside every challenge.

Whichever one you practice, you get good at it.

And the question, to you dear reader, not what mindset is the best, but

Which one are you training, and is it helping your life work the way you want?

JSB - Joy Spending Budget

It’s a concept I came across in the book Decisions That Matter: how to make decisions in the world of endless choice by Adrienne Adhami.

The idea is simple:
plan to spend a portion of your monthly income on things that reliably bring you joy.

Not emotional spending.
Joy spending.

Adrienne makes a clear distinction.

Joy spending is grounded in self-awareness.
It’s informed by a longer-term understanding of yourself.

This brightens my days.
This adds color, beauty, or quality to my life.
This is something I’d choose again.

It’s intentional. Repeatable. Regret-free.

Emotional spending, on the other hand, is about closing a gap.
A gap of dissatisfaction. Fatigue. Neglect. Stress. Something to "remedy" our present discomforts.

Think of buying yourself some fresh berries for breakfast every day because you know they brighten your beginnings so life feels more beautiful from that point on.

Compare that to "comfort foods", overdoing on chocolate at night, not because it brings us joy, but because it helps to mask pains.

It is driven by fleeting emotions, your body reacting to what’s happening right now, that stress and unease.
And it bypasses real self-knowledge, about what will help future you more. It often comes with regret afterward.

One gives you nourishment.
The other gives you a temporary fix, a patch to cover the wound.

That distinction matters far beyond money.

From spending to life decisions

In my coaching sessions yesterday, we spoke a lot about choice with clients.

Not the small ones.
The hard ones.

Career direction.
Future self.
Life trajectory.
Where you’re actually headed, and whether that direction feels right.

And one thing really stood out to me,

There’s no way to make those decisions well if you exclude feelings from the room. I helped my clients to invite them in fully, with awareness, with intention.

We like to think that good decision-making is ALL about logic and objectivity.
But the most life-enhancing choices come from learning to use both, your WISE MIND:

• clear thinking, analysis of all the possible options

• and lasting feelings, like joy, alignment, feeling "it's right"

Feelings aren’t noise.

They’re how the brain stores what matters.

They carry compressed information about your values, your lived experience, and who you are becoming, ready for fast access for the decisions that matter.

When you pair that with thoughtful reflection, many complex choices become…
obvious.

Not always easy.
But obvious, what the right choice was all along.

Over to you dear reader,

Which decisions feel overwhelming right now? Impossible even?
And did you bring your whole wise mind into the room?

The logic and the lasting feeling of what’s right for you now.

Having coached people for the past 18 years toward their healthiest, fittest selves made one thing clear to me:

We don’t rise to the level of our aspirations.
Or even our identities.

That’s the story we tell ourselves after the fact, "That's just not who I am"

In reality, we fall to the level of the systems we build.

And then those systems quietly shape our beliefs about who we think we are.
(The brain hates incoherence. It will always build a neat story to explain why you do what you do.)

Seth Godin writes,

“Culture is the story people tell about why things work the way they work. Systems are why things actually work the way they work.”

Over the past week I’ve been moving from place to place.
Onboarding new clients.
Figuring out new systems in my business.

And still,
Eating well.
Exercising.
Meditating every morning.
Writing every single day this very blog.

You could say it’s because I consider myself that kind of person.

Or…
Is it because when I plan my day, I design systems, now habits, that make these things inevitable?

Yes, what I choose to do is influenced by my values, priorities, goals, and who I think I am.

But the reason these behaviors persist isn’t willpower or identity.

It’s the systems I’ve built, and rebuilt, every day.

In 18 years, that I've worked with clients, who hire me to "get consistent" with things they find challenging.

Almost never I work trying to change the client.

But almost always I work helping client to design the soil for their new habits to grow🌱

We change the environment, the triggers, the defaults, their daily rhythms, things that are easy, visible and rewarding.

And then, almost as a side effect, their thinking shifts.
Their identity updates.
Their goals start sticking.

Over to you, dear reader, 

Where are you trying to change yourself…
when a smarter system design would quietly do the work for you?

PS Do you know what researchers found to be the easiest way to change old habits, get unstuck and out of your old rut? Moving to a new place with new environment, with a completely different system that you redesign.

When we hear someone’s idea, we accept it or dismiss it in under a minute.

Is it useful?
Is it interesting?
Is it something we want to engage with, or something we can blissfully forget in the next 5 minutes?

We assume we “get it” from the very first words we hear.
Even though the depth, the core, the essence, all of it, lives far beyond what can possibly be communicated in that short window.

We do the same with people.
We meet someone and almost instantly decide whether we like them or not.

We do the same with places.
We see a house and feel like we already know what it’s like inside.

And yet.

When it’s our ideas, we spend most of our time obsessing over the core, and almost no time thinking about how to package it so others actually want to engage with it beyond the first few seconds.

David Ogilvy famously said that 95% of your advertising budget can be wasted if your headline is ineffective.

Alex Hormozi says the exact same content can perform many times better with a different thumbnail.

Seth Godin argues that Darwin’s theory spread so widely partly because it just sounded better, “survival of the fittest” was digestible enough for people to bite in it quickly.

Lately, scrolling through my LinkedIn inbox, my email, my Instagram, I’m confronted with this same reality over and over, and over again.

If I can’t understand it fast,
I don’t really care to dig deeper.

And that makes me think:

If I want to “sell” my work, my ideas, my vision to the world, maybe I don’t need to work harder on the thing itself.

Maybe I need to work harder on the cover, that sticks with people long enough to understand the rest.

The cover is what buys attention.
The cover is what earns curiosity.
The cover is what gives the idea a chance to live long enough to be understood.

So, over to you, dear reader,

Where in your work, and in your life, might you need to spend more of your time budget on the cover, not the main thing?

Because no matter how much we tell ourselves that the cover isn’t everything, that we shouldn't judge the book by it - our decision to stay with something longer depends on it more than we’d like to admit.

You know that saying,
“We make our choices and then our choices make us”?

The same has been said about our habits.

Yesterday I was moving to a new place.
Almost no reading.
No learning.
No quiet thinking time.

I even took a day off work for it.

And this morning, I felt different.
Writing was harder, stiffer.
Ideas didn’t come as easily.
The page felt like a heavy dumbbell.

And then I remembered something I once heard from James Clear, the habit guy - that before he writes, he reads.
That creative output is almost always the result of prior input, at least in his years of writing experience, and the book that has been on a bestseller list for a decade.

Then I realized something else.

It wasn’t just the missed reading.
It was the environment shift.
The broken routines.
The lack of those small, familiar anchors my brain relies on.

Everything needed more conscious effort.
Nothing felt quite “in place.”

It reminded me of starting a workout in a new gym.
Or doing groceries in a new country.

The first day is clunky.
You’re slower.
Out of rhythm.
A little (or a lot) off.

And realized once again,
for most of us, routines aren’t restrictive, they’re freeing.

The less your brain has to think about life logistics,
the more energy it has for creative work.

So I did a simple thing.

I sat down.
I read for a few minutes.
Just like James Clear does.

And almost immediately, ideas started flowing again.
Like finding your favorite machine in a new gym.
Like slipping back into your groove.

Rep by rep.
Word by word.
Letter by letter.

This move has me thinking a lot about how the environment shapes us - what we do, what we create, who we become.

"The easiest way to grow is to put yourself in the conditions where growth is the only option", ~ Alex Hormozi.

This it’s left me with this question:

What’s the right place for me now, the one that makes the next level of me almost inevitable?

And, over to you, dear reader,

What places, habits, and choices can give the next-level you fertile soil to grow? 🌱

When I used to do a lot of fasting, I learned something very useful about controlling where my focus goes.

During fasting, the hardest part isn’t the physical discomfort.
Especially with short fasts.

It’s managing your own mind. Where your thinking goes.

Thoughts about food show up long before your body actually needs fuel. Way before hunger is real.
And the fastest way through a fast doesn't depend on more willpower. It’s all about attention management.

Get yourself busy with something low-key.
Admin. Cleanup. Simple work that absorbs you just enough.

When your attention is occupied, there’s no space left to obsess about food.

I also noticed something else.
When something in my life fully absorbs my attention, intense work, a personal situation, an emergency, I naturally forget about food entirely. 

Not because my body needs less fuel.
Because my spotlight is pointed elsewhere🔦

Your attention works like a spotlight.

It’s a spotlight you can control.

Whatever you shine it on gets more thinking, more energy, more bandwidth.
And if you want something not to dominate your mind (food, worry, anxiety, distraction), the solution isn’t to “stop thinking.”

It’s to start thinking about something else.

TI use this principle when I work with entrepreneurs on work-life integration, burnout prevention, and actually enjoying the life while they’re building, I often give them a simple exercise.

I call it Time Budgeting. And it's all about managing spotlight.

You get 168 hours per week.
Not expandable.
Not extendable.
Not transferable.

Before the week starts, list the areas of your life you want to matter, grow, or maintain - work, health, relationships, learning, recovery, play.

Then yourself ask 1 simple question:

Which of these 168 hours will each area actually get?

Because if something gets none, none will happen.
Just like hunger during fasting fades when it gets no attention.

What you don’t give the spotlight to slowly disappears.

So, over to you, dear reader,

Want to get through a fast?
Get busy.

Want more of something in your life?
Decide when it gets the spotlight of your attention, and schedule it.

One of the best habits to prevent overwhelm, overcommitting, and constantly rushing from one thing to another, barely having time to do a good job, let alone a great one - is a simple sentence:

“I need to think about it.”

That’s a response you’ll hear from me more often from now on.

Now more than ever.

With all the automations and AI tools that can speed things up, the temptation will be to say YES to even more. To juggle more balls. To stack more commitments on top of each other.
And then to be surprised that, somehow, you still don’t have more time. Probably less!

Because just like before with the telephone.
Just like before with email.
Just like before with remote work.

Convenience does not equal more thinking time. Or more of any time!

If you respond to more emails, you’ll get more emails.
Will more get done?

If you measure productivity by emails sent back and forth - sure.
If you measure it by finishing meaningful projects - maybe not.

As Cal Newport, the author of Slow Productivity, said on the Finding Mastery podcast:

“I might fear that productivity actually will go down. Because the noisy work will go up.”

We’ll see.

But when I look back at my past year, almost 3 years now in South Africa, the thing that got me into trouble wasn’t lack of opportunity, lack of consistency.
It wasn’t lack of ideas.
It wasn’t even lack of tools.

It was saying YES too quickly.

Yes, before thinking through how much work it would actually take to do something well.
Yes, before checking whether I had the energy, focus, and capacity to show up properly.
Yes, before asking whether this was a project that could change everything, or just another thing keeping me busy.

If we equate productivity with being busy, then yes, AI is making us wildly productive.
If we equate productivity with moving meaningful work forward, then a much better habit is this:

Think first.
Decide deliberately.
Commit only when you can do it outstandingly well.

So over to you, dear reader,

Maybe it’s worth scheduling not only time to learn new AI tools, but also time to learn how to think better about what’s actually worth doing.

PS Stay tuned. I’ll be running events soon where I’ll share practical frameworks for thinking and deciding well before doing.

I’ve decided to restart my weekly 24-hour fasts this year.

My reasons are plenty. I used to do them a few years back.

But the final push came from something a client said.

She was talking about wanting to restart her own 24-hour weekly fast and said, almost casually:

“It’s quite simple. You just stop eating on Sunday at lunch and you don’t eat till Monday lunch.”

That was it.

When she said it like that, it sounded easy.

Before that, for some reason, I had built this whole complicated story in my head.
That I had to not eat an entire day.
That I’d feel low on energy.
That my morning workouts would suffer.
That I wouldn’t be able to function properly.

So I never started.

I couldn’t see a scaled-down version that could actually work with my life.

This client made it sound simple. Almost effortless.

Nothing fundamentally changed about the process.
It’s still a 24-hour fast.

What changed was the story.

In his book $100 Million Offers, Alex Hormozi shares a value equation for creating great offers:

(Dream Outcome × Likelihood of Achievement) / (Time Delay × Effort)

What I’m only now really getting, after years of coaching and studying behavioral science, is this:

Every single part of that equation can be changed by perception.
By framing.
By story.

Not by changing the thing.

In the fasting example, my client “sold” me on the idea, not because the habit became easier, but because her framing made the effort feel smaller.

Same habit.
Different story.
Different motivation because of less PERCEIVED effort.

This works the same in the transformations I'm taking my clients through.

You can focus on:

• the hard work

• the uncertainty

• the time it takes

• everything that might go wrong

Or you can talk about:

• working on one new skill at a time

• measuring progress and seeing change every day

• getting closer to a meaningful outcome every week

• having focus, structure, and support you need

• feeling momentum again, maybe for the first time in years

We often get stuck not because the thing is too hard, but because the story we tell ourselves about it feels heavier than it needs to be.

We assume there’s only one way to see it.
One way to do it.
One way to feel about it.

In reality, there are always multiple perspectives.

And sometimes all it takes is an outside view, or a zoomed-out perspective, to make forward movement feel obvious instead of overwhelming.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where might the way you’re looking at something be the exact opposite of what you need to get you going toward what you want? Where do you still have a "heavy story"?

PS: And if you’re in the business of “selling”- ideas, change, services, transformation - where might the story you are telling be the thing standing in the way of your customer action?