Daily Thought for Change

Every weekend I do a cold plunge at about 8°C for 8–10 minutes.

I never feel cold.
What I feel is pain, when I first get in.

How do I make the pain go away faster?

I start talking to anyone who’s around the plunge.

The pain doesn’t disappear.
My attention shifts.

And once my attention shifts, I stop noticing the pain.

That’s the whole trick for 10-minute cold baths.

Years ago, when I decided to go sugar-free🍬, I learned this technique while working with my cravings. The most effective way to get through intense cravings wasn’t to fight them or “be strong, or disciplined.”

It was to distract myself.

Not in a mindless way, but intentionally.

Trying to beat a craving, an emotion, or a thought pattern only gives it more airtime. Attention is fuel. Resistance is still attention.

The same applies to unproductive emotions, thoughts, and behaviors:

• self-doubt

• self-criticism

• rumination on past failures

• spirals of overthinking

Stop fighting your mind.

Learn to shift, not to force change.

Your mind can fully focus on only one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth. Use this knowledge.

When you want to reduce or redirect unhelpful thinking, ask yourself a question:

What can I pay attention to instead?

That question creates space for redirection to happen.

For me, one practical tool is what I call Empower-me List.

It’s a curated list of people and voices that instantly make me feel stronger, more capable, more resilient, and ready to act, despite all odds.

Sarah Blakely, Alex Hormozi, Robert Green, Leila Hormozi, Mel Robbins, Rony Robbins, Sharran Srivatsaa, Scott Barry Kaufman…

They show up on my Instagram feed the moment I open the app.

And just like that, my thinking shifts.
My emotional state shifts.
My judgment shifts.
My willingness to commit shifts.

Sometimes I need calm strength.
Sometimes I need fire.

I choose accordingly.

This isn’t accidental motivation.
It’s intentional attention design.

That’s why I often ask my clients to create their own empower-me lists:

• social media accounts

• Spotify playlists

• YouTube channels

• books

• podcasts

Prepared before they need them.

Just like you’d prep healthy food before you get hungry, if you’re serious about feeding your best self.

Shift.
Don’t fight.

Give the right thoughts your full attention.
What you water will grow🌱

Over to you, dear reader,
Do you have an empower-me list ready for when unhelpful thoughts and emotional patterns show up?

Your "hidden" potential is in plain sight. 

For a long time, humans didn’t have a word for the color blue.
It was one of the last color words to evolve. Mostly because nothing essential for survival was blue.

And because of that, everything that was blue appeared black, grey, dark, or green to people.

The ability to see blue was always there.
But you couldn’t really use it until you knew what to call it. Until you were told it's there.

The same thing happens with human talent and potential often.

A lot of our abilities stay underdeveloped and underused simply because we don’t have good definitions for them. Nobody tells us it's there, or how and why we should use it.

Psychologists and cognitive scientists say that people with a richer emotional vocabulary experience richer emotional lives. They notice nuance. Subtle differences. Gradations.

For people with a poor emotional vocabulary, everything collapses into one category.
“It’s all kind of black and white.”

That dark, greenish color instead of shades of blue.

It's like when people are trained to become a wine sommelier. For you and me - it'll all taste the same. For them, there are thousands of variations.

Some time ago, I learned a concept called the TEA account from one of the lead coaching instructors in the course I was taking.

TEA stands for Time Energy Attention.

That’s the lens he teaches his clients to look at life through if they want to understand why their life looks the way it does, and how to change it.

Because in the end, the way you allocate your TEA account is the way you end up living your life.

For better.
Or worse.

If I want to predict where your life (or my own) will end up in a few years, I don’t need your goals.

I need to see where your TEA pours.

Where your TEA goes, your life flows.

That’s why, during my Sunday reflection, I started adding one more check-in, not on outcomes, but on TEA allocation.

I ask myself:

“Where did my time, energy, and attention go this week?
And would the person I aspire to become allocate their TEA this way?”

If the answer is no, I course-correct early.
Before life quietly drifts in a direction I don’t actually want to go.

Before I had this concept, “manifestation” felt like magic.
Mysterious. Random. A bit woo.

Now it feels much more like keeping a budget.

Over time, your life isn’t defined by what you want, by what you visualize.
It’s defined by what you consistently spend your TEA on.

So, over to you, dear reader,

What still feels like invisible magic running your life right now?
And where might learning the right word help you put it back into your zone of mastery and control?

PS Business used to feel like magic to me. When I started breaking it down into concrete concepts I could learn, skills I could master - it became more like school I could prep for, less like magic I hope to work.

There’s a very specific way you move, sit, and talk.
And all of it is a set of habits you can change.

That’s why there are voice coaches.
Posture specialists.
Movement coaches of every kind, especially for actors and people whose image matters.

Nothing about how you show up is fixed.

And neither is how you think.

At the coaching course I’m attending, yesterday we practiced techniques that help people reprogram their thinking, their mindset so that emotions and actions downstream work better for their lives.

The first step is always the same.

Whether it’s voice coaching, posture coaching, or mindset coaching:
you create awareness of what you’re doing, when, and how.

You need to know what you’re working with before trying to change it.

Voice coaches ask you to record yourself speaking.
Posture coaches ask you to film yourself.
I give my clients a thought audit exercise, to capture unhelpful thinking patterns in real time as they show up.

Before a change, there has to be awareness of what it is there to change.

Only then can you work on each piece, one rep at a time, replacing the old pattern with a better one.

If you speak too softly and need more impact - you practice speaking with more volume for a week.
If you speak too fast - you practice slowing down.
If you use too many filler words - you practice pauses.

Thinking is no different.

The only issue?
Nobody but you can hear it.

So write it down.
Every time you catch a thought you don’t like. This is what I call Thought Audit.

If you constantly worry, practice shifting your focus to what you can control, and act there.

If your mind keeps replaying everything that went wrong (or might), ask:
What did this give me? What did I learn? What insight is here? What can go right and good?

If self-doubt shows up on repeat, counter it with evidence - hard things you’ve already done.

And just like with any serious coaching…

You don’t do this once.
You don’t keep it all in your head.
You don’t “hope it sticks.”

You train.

You track your workouts.
You track the reps.
The weight.
The time.
The sets.

And you reflect - daily, weekly, monthly.

At our coaching study session, we all admitted the same thing:
we need to stop treating our thoughts like some magical kingdom we can’t reach...

…and start treating them like a gym💪

Notice what needs work.
Design the program.
Do the reps.
Track.
Adjust.
Repeat.

No magic required.

Over to you, dear reader, have you scheduled your mindset gym sessions yet?

A good system works so well that you don’t notice it.
Until it stops working.

This morning I opened a cabinet to grab my electrolytes before a workout.
And I saw something strange.

The vitamins 💊 I was supposed to take last night were still sitting on my electrolyte bottle.

Untouched.

I haven’t forgotten to take supplements in almost a decade!
So this felt… unreal. Almost impossible. Like seeing an alien!

Then I laughed.

Ah.
That’s exactly how my clients forget to take their pills.

Not because they’re forgetful.
Not because they don’t care.

But because they built a system that doesn’t actually work for the human brain.

Any habit you want to repeat without thinking needs 3 things:

• A cue – something that reminds you to act

• An action – a simple, repeatable sequence

• A reward – some sense of benefit or satisfaction

So what went wrong with my evening supplements?

In my old place, I always put them where I ate dinner.
While eating, I’d see them.
I’d take them. No thinking required.

In this temporary place, I couldn’t put them near the dinner table.
So I tucked them away in a cabinet.
Out of sight. Out of system. Out of mind.

And so… I forgot.

I forgot so completely that seeing them the next morning felt shocking.

But ... that was good news.

Because it reminded me how powerful good systems really are.

A great system frees your mind from small, repetitive decisions,
so it can focus on things that actually matter.

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, has a saying:

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

That’s what systems are for.

Whenever I move into a new place, temporary or permanent, I do this first:
I make sure my day-to-day life requires as little thinking as possible.

Because when the basics run on autopilot, creativity shows up fully.
Focus deepens.
Flow becomes available and almost inevitable.

You can’t fully forget the outside world if your brain is busy reminding you to drink water, take supplements, send that email, remember "that" thing.

That's what systems are for.
Your mind gets to do what it does best - thinking and solving problems - at its full capacity, unoccupied by the mundane.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where in your life are you trying to remember your way to consistency, instead of designing a system that makes it happen?

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.