Daily Thought for Change

Better Is Always Available

All-or-nothing thinking isn’t your personality flaw.

It’s a cognitive bias your brain has.

Hardwired.

Left unchecked, it turns every deviation from your “perfect” plan into a verdict on your character — complete failure when you fall short of your own expectations even by an inch, success only on those rare occasions you hit exactly what you imagined.

Neither is useful. Neither is true.

There’s flexibility in between. Adaptability. A lot of gray between the black and the white.

And seeing the world that way? That’s a skill. And you can train it.

Does any of this sound familiar?

You start intermittent fasting, or some all-clean eating approach. Day 7, you’re at dinner with friends, the plan isn’t executed, and you decide — it’s not working, you can’t do it, it’s not worth it. You forget that you executed well for six of seven days and felt pretty damn awesome.

That’s 85% consistency.

That’s not failure. That’s a great start! 👏👏👏

You commit to reading an hour a day instead of scrolling. Friday night you’re on your phone. You decide you just don’t have what it takes — conveniently forgetting the four 4 days you showed up and got a third of the book done.

You commit to an exercise routine. Mid-week things pile up and you tell yourself you’re too busy for exercise in your life right now - while not seeing that a 20-minute home workout was right there, waiting, possible and available - if only you’d let go of the perfect version long enough to see it.

My favorite phrase to interrupt this pattern with clients:

There is always a step you can take toward your aspiration.

Stopping halfway through the cookie counts too.

In skill acquisition, in habit formation — you don’t go from zero to hero. You go from where you are to better. That’s how growth works. For all of us.

Physically - when athlete earns additional 10kg lift kilo by kilo.

And mentally - when you get to feel more optimistic about failures, seeing them as a part of your growth journey just a second faster each time, lingering in the doom and gloom a bit less.

A few coaching tools that help build the better muscle:

• Set good, better, best options in advance. Some days your workout is a 5-minute tabata and walking to the bus. Some days it’s a full gym session. Most days it’s something in between. Plan for the range, not just the ideal.

• When you miss the plan, get curious instead of critical. What can I learn from this? What would I do differently? What support or system do I need? What was different the times I succeeded — even once? Failure is a data point. Not a final verdict on your change capacity.

• Become your own outside observer. Ask yourself, “If a friend were watching this situation and had to offer advice on what to do next, what would she say?”

Black-and-white thinkin exists for a reason.

It helps you make fast decisions in situations where speed is survival. It’s a useful tool we often use in the wrong context.

Growth is not that context. Most of life is not that context. Skill development and habit formation is not that context.

Where in your life, right now, could you start training the better muscle instead of trying to flex the perfect muscle?

You’re doing your best with what you’ve got, starting where you are.

Not some idealized version of your best. Not the best you’d have if you had more money, more time, a different upbringing, a different brain, different parents, different country of residence.

This. Right now. From here.

I used to get frustrated with that.

The PhDs I don’t have still.

The entrepreneur I haven’t become yet — despite the books, the work, the years.

The followers I don’t have.

The languages I don’t speak.

The places I haven’t been to.

The financial security I haven’t yet given my parents.

It felt like my life was just a long list of not-quite.

Yesterday, in our Self-Actualization coaching certification class, we talked about our B Self.

A coach shared that she felt far from her best self — that her life would need to change a lot before that version of her could show up. And then, one by one, the rest of us nodded.

We all felt that way.

Like we’re perpetually waiting for the conditions to be right before we’re allowed to show up fully, before our best self can fully shine.

Then we all reflected.

Maybe, just maybe, living as your best self isn’t about having it all. Maybe it’s about making the most of what you’ve got, starting from exactly where you are, as you are?.

If you’ve been out of shape for ten years, your best isn’t a six-pack and a marathon finish line. It’s a daily walk and one more vegetable on your plate.

If you didn’t grow up in a startup ecosystem with capital and connections, your best isn’t a unicorn valuation. It’s a business that serves the people you can actually reach and creates a comfortable life for the people you love.

If you just got injured — physically, professionally, emotionally — your best isn’t peak performance. It’s getting back on your feet.

I interviewed Rich Diviney, a former Navy SEALs commander for my Change Wired podcast, and he said something that’s stayed with me: in SEAL culture, they don’t aim for absolute best. They aim to perform as well as they can given the circumstances and how they feel on that specific day.

That reframe is a memo most of us never got.

Your best isn’t a fixed standard to maintain at all times in all conditions.

It’s a growth journey of looking at where you are, as you are, and asking,

“Is it the best that can be now?”

What would it look like to stop measuring yourself against the life you don’t have — and start asking what’s the best move available in the life you’ve got?

Play Your Hand

3 days ago, I made a decision.

I’m wrapping up my corporate business venture. Going all in on content creation, growing my audience, my 1-1 and group coaching.

I closed the loops. Cut the dead ends. Cancelled every meeting that no longer made sense. Blocked out this weekend to build my content strategy. And — almost immediately — landed a new client.

Then I did something I probably should have done sooner. I went back and looked at where I’ve had the most success in my life. Where I felt most alive. Where I made the most money.

I ran a couple of values and aptitudes assessments — drivers, personality, natural fit.

It became very clear.

I had been playing the wrong game. And that’s exactly why I was losing, while working really hard!

Yesterday I read a newsletter by Alex Hormozi called Play Your Hand.

The concept is simple. Life deals you a set of cards. Your job is to figure out the best game you can play with those cards — not to wish for a different hand, and definitely not to play a dumb strategy with the hand you have because you’re too busy fantasizing about someone else’s or some other game.

And that’s what I did when I decided I needed to get into corporate work instead of doubling down on the thing I was already quite good at.

And it’s what a lot of entrepreneurs do too — chasing some AI venture they barely understand instead of using AI to accelerate the business that’s already working.

And it’s what people do at work often as well — saying yes to a promotion with a little more status and a little more pay that quietly dismantles everything they actually love about the job, everything they’re actually good at.

Play the hand you’ve been given. And play it well.

So, what’s your hand?🃏

What drives you? What are your values?

What do you already do well, get complimented on, see great results from?

What do you enjoy so much you’d do it even if it wasn’t your job?

Mine?

I want impact I can feel.

I want freedom and agency in how I work, what I do, when and with who.

I need to express my own voice, my own POV every day.

And I want to learn, change, invent, and build something new — constantly.

(Not exactly the ideal checklist for a corporate partnership that runs on compliance, predictability, and scaled sameness.)

It’s my hand.

And I’m finally going all in on playing it.

What’s yours? And are you playing it as well as you could?

The story you keep telling yourself is the one you keep living through your habits.

I’m reading a book on Behavioral Science in Marketing. I loved one story there.

Someone complimented the author on having “runner’s legs.”

The author, not particularly fond of running, heard those 2 words and something changed for her. She bought professional running shoes. Joined a running club. Signed up for a 5K race. Months later, she’s still running.

Nothing changed except how she saw herself because of some simple comment that changed her narrative, the one she didn’t know she had.

Try something with me right now.

Grab a pen. Write: “I am… I am the kind of person who...”

And keep going. Don’t edit. Bring out the definitions you’re proud of and the ones you’d rather not admit to — all of it.

Now look at what you wrote.

Which of those stories are serving you — moving your life forward, growing and expanding you, helping you embrace challenges and persevere on things that matter? And which ones are some old recordings that hold you back? Things you picked up somewhere along the way and never questioned?

Are they true?

Objectively, undeniably, unchangeably true?

What else could be true about you instead?

There’s a difference between an unchangeable fact about who you are and a story you’ve been repeating so long it feels like gravity.

One of my clients in her testimonial said,

“Angela is really good at catching your stories, the ones we use to limit ourselves.”

I’m proud of this skill I developed.

Because that’s where it all starts.

Before you can grow into a different you, that makes new decisions and takes different actions, and ultimately transforms your life - you have to believe in a new story about who you can be.

The identity has to shift first. Everything else aligns with it.

Does the story you’re telling about yourself match the future you’re trying to build?

If you fight for your excuses, you get to keep them.

Most of my clients are busy. Really busy. No “extra time” — who has that?

The most concerning part?

They don’t have time for themselves.

Not for sleep. Not for exercise. Not for recovery. Not for the kind of quiet self-reflection that tells you who you actually are, what you value, what you’re here to do.

So they drift. Lose direction. Spread themselves thin across every obligation until there’s nothing left for the person doing all the obliging.

When we start working together, the first wall we hit isn’t a strategy problem. It’s an internal one: learning to make time for themselves — not because it’s urgent, but because clarity, capacity, and the health they’ve somewhere lost along the way don’t come without it.

But Angela, I don’t have time.

I hear it often.

And my answer is always the same,

Yes. You don’t. And unless you make it — you’ll be exactly where you are today. No, actually, you’ll be worse.

When I was a kid, I hated green vegetables. Healthy food in general, not my thing. Sandwiches. That was my whole personality.

Then somewhere in my early twenties I had a realization: health and fitness actually matter to me. A lot. So maybe — just maybe — I needed to learn to enjoy the things that would make that possible. Instead of just saying I don’t like salads.

Now?

Roasted Brussels sprouts with garlic and black pepper are my comfort food.

Here’s what nobody tells you: your tastes change when you tell yourself a different story about who you are.

I don’t like small talk. I don’t like uncomfortable conversations. Sales calls are not my idea of a good time. Learning AI feels like homework. Given the choice, I’d eat chocolate, cookies, and cake for every meal.

So what?

Limit my entire life to what’s convenient? What gives instant gratification? And in doing so, give up everything that makes life rich, adventurous, and deeply worth living?

This morning I walked for thirty minutes after the gym. Nothing special about the route. But somewhere in the middle of it, I thought: this is extraordinary. No pain. No discomfort. Pure ease. Energy. Drive. Full presence.

That feeling, that limitlessness, exists on the other side of every inconvenient thing I decided was worth learning to enjoy.

You can keep telling yourself: I don’t have time. I don’t like it. That’s not me.

And you never get what’s waiting on the other side of those limits.

You’re free to choose. You’re always free to make any choice.

But is that really what you want to settle for?

Balance is an illusion.
Problems are a part of life.
Nobody owes you sh*t (So you might as well move on and deal with life as it is not as you wish it were in some imaginary ideal world or scenario in your head).

3 truths. Most people know them. Almost nobody lives them.

And almost every lingering negative emotion I’ve experienced could be traced back to resisting one of these 3.

You know this saying, “Pain is not optional suffering is”?

Learning how to live it VS just understand it might be the most important skill to be happy, fulfilled and at peace traveling through the storms and waves of life.

I stumbled upon a friend from the gym yesterday. We had a chat about life.

“You show up in the gym every single day. How do you stay motivated?”

“A couple of weeks ago I cried. Life felt so heavy — the things I have to carry, to figure out, to push through. I still showed up. I work out not because I feel good but TO feel good. Or at least better.”

A lot of the clients I work with are high-performers. Successful by every external measure. Smart, driven, capable.

And what we often end up working on — quietly, underneath everything else — is emotional regulation.

The skill of creating and holding your inner peace aka Emotional Regulation.

Not eliminating hard emotions but managing them so the storms pass but the beyond the surface ocean of you stays calm.

Life at a higher level doesn’t get easier. The climb gets steeper.

More responsibility. More pressure. More at stake. That’s the price of climbing higher, and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Just like the gym.

Building muscle requires doing hard things. Harder and harder. And learning to sit with the soreness — not hate it, not avoid it — that’s part of the job.

Same with life.

Here’s what most people miss about emotions: they have 2 parts.

The first is biological.

Your nervous system reacting to what just happened. That part isn’t up for debate. It’s what’s called your Primary Emotion. “The animal in you” speaking.

The second is psychological.

The story you tell yourself about what it means. Whether it’s good or bad. Whether you’re a victim or a navigator.

That second part?

That’s entirely up to you.

And it’s the one that decides what lasts.

That’s the skill.

Not pretending you don’t feel it. Feeling the pain and choosing not to carry the suffering forward.

What emotion keeps lingering for you — and what story are you telling yourself to keep it alive?

PS In fact, science, for example, differentiates 2 stress responses - threat or challenge - which one is activated depends on what you tell yourself, and THAT changes everything. Even your blood pressure and blood sugar levels.

Monday.

New week - new you?

Start where you are instead.

No, like really where you are.

Not where you wish you were 10 years ago. Not where you imagine some more disciplined, more together version of you would already be.

Behavioral Science research shows that when people align a new behavior with a natural beginning — new week, new month, new chapter of life or career — they’re more likely to stick with it. There’s a real psychological reset happening. A sense of “the slate is clean.”

But… that’s not the whole truth.

The fresh start gives you psychological permission to begin again. It doesn’t give you new capacity, new skills, new resource though. You have EXACTLY what you had before. Old you and your old life.

Confusing psychology with capacity is exactly why most fresh starts fail.

Only when people are very honest about where they’re actually starting from - there’s a chance for new you to survive.

Here’s what I see over and over again (sometimes in myself):

Someone decides to get healthier starting Monday. Same schedule. Same kitchen with all the tempting foods. Same couch with Netflix the moment exhaustion hits.

Same result.

Someone gets serious about building their business. Calendar unchanged. No new way of making decisions. No non-negotiables carved out.

Six months later — same spot.

Someone decides their relationships are going to be different from now on. No scripts rehearsed. No boundaries thought through. No plan for when the old dynamic shows up.

Same decade of patterns, playing out again.

There’s no new you magically ready on Monday morning. No skill upgrade downloaded while you slept — Matrix-style.

There’s only the old you, building better systems for your future self to follow new tracks, to make new choices and decisions, that over time will upgrade the new you and what you get in life.

That’s the whole truth.

Fresh starts make it psychologically easier to do a different thing. But they don’t change what you have to work with. Your capacity, your skills, your deeply ingrained habits. Those are still exactly the same!

Which means if you want to actually grow into the future version of you, consistently and sustainably, here’s what needs to get done:

• Focus on getting a little better, not drastically different. Leap thinking is what has people quitting by week three.

• Build systems like scaffolding. A new tree doesn’t survive the wind without support. Neither do you. What holds you up when the motivation disappears and life bends you down?

• When you fall, get specific about how you’ll deal with this next time instead of spiraling into “what the hell” effect. What went wrong? What do you need to scale down? What support is missing? What skill is missing? Your old self is the one who has to grow the muscle for your new you to make the lift. Every failure is feedback for a better next rep.

Think big. Start small.

Where in your growth journey do you need to scale things down to give your big dream a chance to survive the punches of life?

I was in the produce aisle this ordinary Saturday morning. Doing what most of us do often - weekly grocery shopping.

Choosing fruit. Checking the protein section. Making sure I won’t need to leave the house for another week to pick up some more yogurt or veg I missed.

The most ordinary thing in the world.

And this thought casually popped in my head,

Building a dream, most of the time, looks exactly like anyone else’s ordinary life. The only difference is how it feels inside. Enchanted. Like you know a secret nobody else can see.

Maybe that’s what makes working hard on a goal so disorienting, so challenging.

Not the work itself. But the sameness of everything around it.

Maybe that’s why we reach for extremes — 30-day challenges, brutal sprints of work, dramatic overhauls, black and white, going cold turkey. At least then we can feel the hard. Something looks different. To the outside world, we appear to be on a mission.

Only — that pace doesn’t last.

It always runs out before you get what you wanted. At some point you have to stop sprinting and learn to walk.

And that’s where boring finds you again.

Brick by brick. Day after day. Building something nobody else can see yet — believing that effort compounds, that one day it will look like an overnight success to everyone who wasn’t paying attention, believing that brick by invisible brick you’ll get a cathedral nobody else can deny.

What if boring is the real challenge? Not the hard we think we’re afraid of.

The boring of eating well for the next 2 years with no one saying a word of encouragement.

The boring of workouts that earn no medals.

The boring of cold outreach that barely moves the needle.

The boring of getting fractionally better at speaking on stage, one rep at a time, looking quite average.

The boring of walking offstage slightly less terrified than you were last time.

The boring of daily writing that barely gets a like.

The boring of watering seeds every day so you might have a garden in a decade.

We think our dreams die in failure. The big collapses. The public stumbles.

But what if they don’t?

What if they die quietly — in the small daily choices to choose escape over effort, excitement over discipline, the fast hit over the slow build?

What dream are you giving up on — not in one big moment of failure, but in a hundred small, daily steps not taken?

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I became that person I was trying to rush away from.

Another Friday morning hike with fellow entrepreneurs. New friend. Long climb up the mountain.

We were talking about the brain under stress — how it functions like a completely different organ when we’re running on pressure. How it narrows. Optimizes. Stops seeing anything around except for what you need to get done.

My friend had taken some good time off work. And what he found was this recognition, that for quite a bit he became myopically work-focused. He noticed how transactional life had started to feel. Every conversation, every interaction filtered through the lens of deadlines and deliverables. And then the pressure lifted when he took that time off. Life started to look different. Wider. More human.

He came back to his next new chapter with one clear intention: he did NOT want to become that person again. The one optimizing every minute, every meeting, every moment for output and “getting” it.

I told him about a study I’d read in a book on behavioral science.

In 1973, Princeton psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson ran one interesting experiment in social psychology. They took seminary students — people training to become priests and help others — and asked them to prepare a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan. The story, if you don’t know it, is about a man left injured on the road. A priest walks past. A Levite walks past. Only a stranger stops to help.

Then Darley and Batson sent the seminarians across campus to deliver their sermons.

Some were told: you have plenty of time. Others: you’re running a little late. And the final group: you need to go. Now.

Along the route, slumped in an alley, was a man. Coughing. Visibly distressed. Clearly in need of help.

Among the seminarians who had been told to hurry, only 10% stopped. Among those with time to spare, 63% stopped. One student, in his rush, literally stepped over the suffering man without acknowledging his existence.

Here’s what makes it interesting: the students who claimed they were motivated to be in the clergy for intrinsic reasons — because they felt a strong drive to help others — were no more likely to stop than anyone else. A simple situational factor, whether a person was in a hurry or not, played the dominant role in determining what they actually did.

They were on their way to preach about helping. And they walked straight past someone who needed it.

Researchers call this “narrowing of the cognitive map.” When we speed up and feel rushed, we miss details. We’re not present enough to notice what’s actually happening, what might be important.

Rush doesn’t just make us less present. It makes us less human.

And here’s where the mountain turned the mirror on me🪞

On the way back down — me moving faster now, trying to get back and start my day, trying to get back to “getting things done” — my friend stopped to say hello to people on the path. Chatted. Lingered. Noticed.

I kept moving.

Without realizing it, I had become the rushing person. Trying to optimize, chasing meaning, directed to the next thing every moment. Terrified of wasting time of my life. So focused on being present that I was present for none of it.

My friend said something very insightful at the end of the hike:

“I think you might need to let go of that need for control a bit — to let life bring to you what’s meant to be there. That’s how I used to be.”

I knew he was right.

But it took someone holding up a mirror for me to see what I couldn’t notice myself.

This reminded me.

No matter how many tools you practice. No matter how many years of self-work you accumulate. You will still drift. You will still rush without noticing. You will still remain human.

Which means you have to design the moments where you stop.

Not to get something. Not to extract meaning or optimize the pause. Just to stop. To recalibrate. To be available to whatever life is trying to put in your path.

Meditation masters don’t eliminate anxious thoughts. They just return to calm faster — because they know it’s always there. One shift of attention away.

Maybe that’s the whole practice. Not eliminating the rush. Just catching it sooner.

What has the rush been costing you, and what would you notice if you slowed down enough to look?

Once upon a time I was standing in the NYC subway when I saw Simon Sinek, sitting and reading.

We talked.

He was working on The Infinite Game. He asked me about my why, my purpose, what I did for a living.

Then he asked for my card.

He wanted to get in shape. I was a coach. Perfect fit at the right moment.

I handed it over. Simon never called.

I spent a lot of time being annoyed about that. Replaying it. Wondering what I’d done wrong. Was it something I said?

Then, months later, I heard him on a podcast laughing about how he always loses business cards. Every single one. It’s just what he does.

My frustration disappeared instantly.

It was never about me. It was him being him.

I have a friend who goes radio silent mid-conversation on Whatsapp. You’ll be texting back and forth, and then nothing. Sometimes for a month.

It used to drive me crazy.

Then he told me he has ADHD and autism. Without an alarm or a reminder, things just escape his mind with no sign of return. Not rudeness. Not indifference. Just how his brain is wired.

I stopped being frustrated. I adjusted my actions. We figured out a rhythm that worked for both of us. No more “bad vibes.” Just understanding.

Most of the frustration we carry isn’t about what happens.

It’s about the gap between what we expect and what actually shows up.

Happiness = Reality - Your Expectations of what that reality is supposed to be.

We build these internal contracts — with people, with situations, with life itself — that nobody else signed. And then we get angry when they don’t honor terms they never agreed to.

Life doesn’t owe you the outcome you planned. People don’t owe you the behavior you assumed. The universe is not bending around your expectations.

That’s not cynicism or being negative. That’s freedom, if you let it be.

I’ve been sitting with my own frustrations lately.

And I’ve started asking myself this very useful question more often, the one I’d been giving to clients for years:

“If you dropped your expectations and stopped holding so tightly to how things are supposed to go — what could you do right now, with what actually is?”

Not what should be. Not what you deserved. Not what was promised.

What is.

That’s where your agency lives. That’s where effective action begins.