Daily Thought for Change

Happiness = Reality – Expectations.

I love this formula because it describes exactly how the brain generates our emotional states. And those states shape what we do with our days. Whether we try again or decide to quit it for good.

I tried baking healthy cupcakes last weekend.

They didn't work. And that's ok. It was my first time.

My mindset was: I'll bake a few test batches to get it right. I'm trying again this weekend. Equipped with experience.

Expecting great things from yourself matters. You need that belief to reach for the edges of your potential. To try baking that cake.
But high expectations have a dark side when they’re not balanced with the simple truth: on the way to anything challenging, you will experience setbacks.

Lots of them. And that’s not failure. That’s the test batch.

We forget that too easily.

When we start a diet or decide to change our lifestyle, we begin because we believe we can do it. But we rarely plan for the inevitable slip-ups. And so when they happen, we take them as signs we should quit.

When we launch a business or give birth to an idea, we begin because we believe we can do it. But we forget to mentally prepare for all the things that will NOT work. Not because we’re incapable, but because that’s how creation works. And so we quit too early, when pivoting, trying again better - would’ve been smarter.

When we try writing, podcasting, running, coding, baking,  anything, we start because we believe we can. But then it’s not perfect, and instead of adjusting expectations, designing a better experiment like a scientist, we conclude it’s not for us. Or not possible.

But what if you just expected perfection too soon?

PREPARE TO FAIL. BETTER.

When you know things won’t be perfect and many moves won’t work at first, something powerful happens:

You’re less emotionally thrown off.
You start asking premortem questions like:
What are all the things that could go wrong? And how can I reduce the damage or likelihood of this happening before?

With that approach, failures still happen but they’re smaller, lighter, and easier to bounce back from. And you bounce because you expected it, and you already know what to try next.

Like with my cupcakes, I didn't make a whole bunch of cupcakes, just 5. And I have a whole bunch of material to try again, again, and again. Until it gets good.

So over to you, dear reader,
For the goal you’re working toward…
Have you prepared yourself to fail gracefully, recover faster, and try again smarter?

“Don’t you think we’re all like this? Uncomfortable speaking to a room full of strangers and yet somehow doing it?”🙂
Mart said that to me at the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce meeting.

My pitch that day, whenapproaching strangers as an introvert, was simple:
“Hi, I’m Angela. Can we talk? I’m not great at this networking thing. I’m an introvert working on getting better. What’s your name?”

I met more people that day than at any event before.
After a few reps, I wasn’t just fine - I felt comfortable.

THE RULE OF ONE REP
Everything starts with 1.
Not confidence.
Not a perfect plan.
Not knowing exactly what to say or do.
Just one rep.

Most people don’t lose their potential because they’re incapable, or even afraid of hard work.
They lose it because they avoid the first unfamiliar step.

I have a client right now, mid-career shift, new line of work, "starting from scratch".

She was having trouble calling her first potential client. She just felt overwhelmed with all the things she didn’t know yet. She was afraid of not being good, of not getting the result, of screwing it up. 

I asked her,
“Just commit to one call. If you hate it, hang up. No one will ever know.”
She did the first one, and then the second.
Now she’s done 10+ and can’t believe she almost didn’t start.

“What was I even afraid of?”

...

Whether we’re transforming ourselves, leading a team, or reshaping a company, the block isn’t the work.
It’s stepping into something we’ve never done before where we need the most help.

So, over to you dear reader, what’s the thing you’ve been circling around, avoiding, overthinking?

What’s the one rep you can commit to today?

If you want to be a great coach there’s a golden rule you must never break. If you want people to change, not just comply. Grow for a decade, not perform for a day.

The golden rule of a great coach: never tell people what to do.

Leaders forget this all the time. They think they need to know everything and prescribe everything. And people, for the most part, think they need that too.
But nobody changes because they were told what to do. Not even your kid.

We change because someone asked us a question that made us see ourselves differently. Notice different things. Change our understanding.

What do you think you need to get better at?
What do you need to know? Or see? Or learn?
What support would actually help you?

On the days when you do it well, even once, what made it possible?
On the days when you don’t, what got in the way?

When do you feel great at work? What creates your best days?
How do they happen?

Moving forward, how can you set yourself up for success?
What needs to be in place for you?

It seems like you find this challenging, what helped you overcome similar challenges in the past?
What did you do then?

Questions unlock people. Directives shut them down.

The right question at the right time is the key that opens the door to change🔑

When I’m unsettled or stressed, I don’t lecture myself (anymore).
I ask:
What exactly is making you feel this way?
What would make you feel differently?
What’s one thing you can do now to move in that direction?

Whether you’re coaching yourself, your clients, or shaping the culture of an entire organization, how can you start asking more questions instead of giving out directives?

It felt like magic.
30 strangers messaged me on WhatsApp asking about my service🎉

For the first time in my business life, I felt I could actually make it.
And for the first time in my entrepreneurial journey, I realized,
I can actually influence my own results. Directly. Deliberately. Predictably.

And that also reminded me of one of the most important findings in motivation science, one that most leaders forget and most people underestimate.

Researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000+ work-day diaries from people across industries. Their conclusion was very simple:

Nothing boosts motivation more reliably than a sense of progress toward meaningful work.

Not passion.
Not speeches.
Not company perks.
Progress!

Even tiny progress.

Adam Grant writes about similar psychological findings in “Give and Take,” referencing studies where nurses and call-center employees were burning out. Their work was repetitive. Emotionally heavy. Often thankless.

Then something shifted.

• Nurses were told stories about patients who recovered.

• Call-center agents, whose job was raising money for student scholarships, got to meet one single student who benefited from those funds.

The result?

Productivity went up. Burnout went down.
But their tasks, the amount of work didn’t change at all!
What changed was that they could finally see that their work mattered.

That’s the power of seeing the right kind of progress.

And that’s exactly what happened to me.
The moment I saw those WhatsApp messages, everything I’d been calling “hard work” suddenly… wasn’t. I was answering those at 8pm at night all buzzing with energy with no caffeine needed.
I didn’t give myself a pep talk. I didn’t change my mindset.
I just saw movement.
And my brain lit up like a Christmas tree: “Give me more!”🎄

Now reflect with me, dear reader.

Think about the goals in your life that feel heavy or emotionally draining.
Is it really the amount of work that exhausts you? Or is it the lack of visible movement?

No feedback.
No signs of life.
No evidence you’re getting anywhere.

It’s rarely the effort that burns us out.
It’s working without the feeling that any of it is adding up.

So if work or life, or your entrepreneurial, fitness, or health journey, feels unbearably heavy, check for this first:

Are you tracking progress?
Are you creating progress?
Or do you need to temporarily shift into something where progress is faster and more obvious while the other thing catches up?

Because, it turns out, you can handle a lot more, if you know it’s taking you somewhere meaningful.

How can you build more visible progress into your days?

PS. To leaders: If you want engagement to rise, show people progress every single day. Your strong end of the year depends on it.

• James Dyson built 5,126 failed prototypes before the vacuum that made him a billionaire.

• Spanx was rejected by every manufacturer before one guy’s daughter convinced him to give it a try.

• Angry Birds was Rovio’s 52nd game. Fifty-one tries nobody remembers.

We love the final version. We forget the drafts it took to get there.

- It’s fascinating, a friend who just had a baby told me. There’s all this parenting advice, books, experts, people online and every single one of them says something slightly different… and then you try it, and your experience is different again.

- Kind of like life, isn't it?

Nobody bakes a perfect cake the first time. Not even with a perfect recipe. Not even when the recipe comes from a world-famous chef. Parenting, baking, business, there’s a part of it you only learn when your hands are in the dough.

The longer I’m in business, the more obvious this becomes. You can collect the best advice, underline the smartest books, memorize the “perfect” formula… and the moment you try it, you still hit a learning curve.
You start off average at best. You produce a few rough drafts. And only then, after some bruised ego and messy attempts, you begin to find your footing.

We forget this. Or worse, we pretend the curve doesn’t apply to us.
We expect ourselves to bake the perfect cake on attempt #1.

Sometimes we don’t start at all because we’re waiting to have the perfect recipe first, thinking we can avoid the messy part then.

A client recently delayed doing cold calls for their new business because they were afraid they wouldn’t be good at it.

They were right.
They weren’t.

But that was never the point.

The point of starting isn’t to be brilliant or polished, or to even get a result. The point is to give yourself a chance to become someone who can do this well. Over time. Through reps. Through a stretch of days where things feel awkward and clumsy. And like you are failining all the way.

Most people never survive this part.

It’s not glamorous to be a beginner. It’s not pleasant to have your first attempts look a little (or a lot)… off. But if you treat the start like learning, not performing, it becomes lighter, tolerable, sometimes even joyful. And getting better becomes inevitable.

So here’s my question for you, dear reader,
What aren’t you starting right now because you’re scared you won’t get it right?

I can save you some time - 
You won’t. Not the first time.
But that's the only way to give the one you can become a chance to exist.

So, start.

Alex Hormozi spent $4,000,000 on ads for his book launch, $100M Money Models.
And that was just the pre-launch.
And that’s someone with millions of followers already.

I suddenly remembered this fact and the profound truth of growth it holds.
For the first time in my life, I rstarted running ads… and got 20 leads in the first 6 hours.

It was the slap I needed.
While I’ve been busy fixing myself, refining my product, polishing the next detail… the only thing I was actually missing was getting better at telling people about what I have.

Marshall Goldsmith, one of the world's top executive coaches wrote in The Earned Life:

“You must earn your credibility twice.”

I'm only now starting to get it.

He meant this:
It doesn’t matter how good your idea is.
It doesn’t matter how strong your track record is.
If you can’t communicate the value clearly, consistently, and in the right rooms, often and loud enough it won’t move the needle.

Ideas don’t spread because they’re good.
They spread because they’re heard in the right spaces.

Over the past week at Africa Tech Festival and all the startup events around it, I listened to pitches from founders who genuinely want to change the world.

Brilliant ideas.
Innovative tech.
Huge ambition.

And yet…
Most of the pitch was about how “great the idea” is. (Somebody just told me they had a "unicorn idea", don't we all?)
And almost nothing about distribution, networks, access, connections, or the ecosystem needed to give the idea a real chance to survive🌱

It scares me a bit because this is why so many small businesses stay small.
Not because their product is worse than what "the big guys" have.
But because we keep ourselves small with the belief that “if it’s good enough, it’ll take off.”

It won’t.
Not on its own. You have to become the biggest promoter.

So here’s the question I’m asking myself now, and the one I’m passing to you dear reader,

The thing you’re trying to do, that product or service that can change the world, or even your next promotion, are you telling the world about it enough?

In the right places,
to the right people,
at the right time?

Whether you’re trying to change yourself, change one other person, or shift an entire culture, the most reliable lever is always the same: ask better questions. The kind that points the mind toward a different destination.

To motivate change in clients, I routinely ask these very common in our practice questions:

Are you where you want to be?
Is what you’re doing working for you?
If not… what will you do differently?

Simple. Direct. Impossible to hide from.

If you’re a leader steering people through transformation, the real skill is learning how to ask these questions at scale. Not as an interrogation. As direction-setting. As culture-narrative-shifting.

I ask them in my weekly self-reflection sessions.
I ask them when clients lose their drive and drift away from the future they say they want.
And if I led your team meeting, you would hear them there too,  not to extract a perfect or specific answer, but to build a culture where people remember that their life, their career, their impact… are ultimately in their own hands.

If you want something different, something has to change in what you consistently do. There’s no simpler truth than that.

Which even Einstein noticed, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - which seems to be misattributed to him and was more widely used by the Alcoholics Anonymous, the most effective community-driven transformation program in the entire world.

So over to you, dear reader,

Are you where you want to be?
Is what you’re doing working?
And if not… what will you change?

How do you know if your business is actually working?
You don't. Unless you set success and kill criteria in advance. Without it - it's just guessing.

In coaching, we are taught to use evidence-based decision-making. Before you choose a new eating routine, a new sleep ritual, a new way of giving feedback, you first define:
What evidence would convince me this is working?
What evidence would tell me it isn’t?

Otherwise, you are just doing things, shooting in the dark, and quite often wasting your time. Guesswork never produces consistent results you can rely on. Even worse, you might spend months doing things that don’t move the needle while ignoring the things that actually could.

But you can’t make decisions based on evidence if you never decide which evidence matters. When will you stick with it? When will you pivot? When will you kill the idea entirely?

Annie Duke, former professional poker player and absolute Jedi of decision science, popularized a tool I now teach founders and use in my own coaching: kill criteria.

Kill Criteria = pre-defined conditions that tell you when to stop.
A specific milestone + a deadline.
For example:
“If we haven’t hit X by date Y, we shut it down.”

Why does this matter?

Because of the sunk-cost fallacy. We humans hate waste. Once we invest time or energy, even a tiny amount - we cling. We justify. We tell ourselves “just a bit more.”

Kill criteria save you from that trap. It works best with outside accountability.

Fast success in business is really fast learning.
And fast learning requires 2 things:
a) knowing exactly what you’re trying to learn
b) knowing when to stop if the learning isn’t producing the result you want

So over to you dear reader (and a note to myself):

The projects you’re working on right now - your startup, your diet experiment, your new workplace initiative - do you have clear, pre-set triggers that tell you when to keep going and when it’s time to walk away?

“So what do you do when the doubt creeps in? When you think maybe you’ll never get what you want, and all the effort is a waste?”

I asked a friend on our Friday hike this morning.

“I just don’t let that thought take space. I don’t give it my focus.”

That’s a superpower🦸
Every high performer I’ve worked with, or read about, shares this ability: they don’t indulge unhelpful thought loops. They redirect their focus to where it's needed to help them keep going and eventually succeed.

What fascinates me even more is how selective our mindset strength is.
We can be relentless and disciplined in one area of life… and completely chaotic in another.

I see it all the time.

Brilliant founders who’ve built multi-million-dollar companies saying things like:
“But I have no discipline around food. If I crave something, I must have it.”

These are people who’ve pushed through failure for decades. They’ve survived the kind of pressure most humans never experience. They’ve done the hardest things.
And yet they doubt their “mental skill” in this tiny, simpler area.

It fascinates me how humans work.

It’s never a lack of ability.
It’s a lack of mindset skill transfer (which you can learn and improve).

We often forget we already have everything we need to succeed. We forget our wins. We forget the mindset we’ve practiced for years in one context, and don't see how it applies to where we need to overcome current challenges.

Conversations like this remind me that all of us already possess the strength, discipline, the systems of self-management we think we’re missing. We just haven’t learned to reuse it everywhere we need it.

We learn and adapt in some areas (like business) better than in other areas (like fitness or food).

We stay closed-minded somewhere, stuck in our ways like it's our fate, while being flexible like rubber elsewhere.

So if you’re doubting yourself right now, try asking yourself this with me:
Where are you already succeeding, big or small?
And how can you apply the same mental system, the same way of focusing, to the part of your life that needs growth?

That’s usually the unlock.

What area of your life needs a skill transfer?

"What’s the most common cognitive bias founders have that makes them fail?"

The same one that makes them succeed: optimism bias.

It’s the bias that keeps you moving when logic would stop you. It convinces you the mountain is climbable, the idea is workable, the market is waiting. Without it, you’d never start.

But optimism bias also has a shadow side.

It makes you overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and underestimate the negative ones. You start selectively processing information - spotlighting every green light, ignoring every red flag.
That’s how founders end up surprised by the exact storms every naysayer saw coming.

Then there’s overconfidence bias, optimism’s loyal sidekick.
Without it, again, no company would exist. Why would you start if you didn't believe you are THE ONE to make it happen?
With it, you might believe the ride will be smooth, or that early success means permanent success.

The danger?
a) You’re not mentally or emotionally prepared for the setbacks, delays, and gut-punches that are guaranteed.
b) You don’t build reserves for the rainy day because you’re so sure YOUR rainy day won’t come.

My approach as a coach has matured a lot over the last 10 years.
I stopped trying to “fix people.”

Now I help founders, leaders, organizations to double down on their strengths, including the biases that got them this far, AND build guardrails to protect them from the dark side of those strengths.

Guardrails like:
• Decision rules that prevent you from riding the emotional roller-coaster straight into a bad call that you'll never recover from.
• Teammates who do the due diligence before your enthusiasm closes the deal.
• Pacing growth and building systems that can scale before inviting in more customers.

Every superpower has a flip side.
If you don’t design systems to counter it, the flip side eventually bites.

A good way to spot your own biases?
Look at the places where your expectations consistently don’t match reality.
Or review your failures, which overly optimistic people rarely do, because they assume things will “just get better.”

So… can you name some of your biases?
(Overly optimistic, big-picture, fast mover, insatiable learner are definitely some of mine. Every one of them has a shadow.)