Daily Thought for Change

Brad Stulberg — high-performance author, coach, researcher — gave me one of the most useful decision-making tools I’ve come across:

When you’re struggling with a hard choice, ask yourself: what will move me closer to my values? Then pick that.

Simple and powerful. Except for one problem.

It only works if you know what your values are.

Most of us don’t. Not really. Nobody taught us. Not school. Not our parents. We were never handed a process for sitting down and asking — who am I, actually, and what matters most to me?

Everyone has values. Not everyone is aware of them.

It’s the same with standards around health, wealth, relationships. We all have our level of “good enough” even though most of us don’t think about it much.

These standards are operating in the background whether you name them or not. Shaping every decision. Determining whether your life feels good or not.

Your values sneak into everything — how and with who you live, what you choose to buy, who you become. And most importantly: how satisfied you feel about all of it.

I could tell you family is important to me. But I live on the other side of the world from my family. No kids. Not married. So — is it? The evidence says no. And I’m at peace with that.

I don’t belong to many groups. Most of what I do, I do solo or with one or two people. Belonging isn’t high on my list either.

Security? I’ve lived all over the world with no backup plan. I sleep fine. Risk doesn’t scare me the way it scares most people.

But freedom? Agency? The ability to make my own choices? I’m completely unemployable and I am not sorry about it. I would fight for that freedom. I wouldn’t trade it for anything else.

Impact — yeah. Big one for me. For a while I thought everyone wanted to change the world. Turns out, not everyone does. Some people want stability. Some people want peace. That’s their life. But impact is mine.

Work itself? I love it. I want to be one of the best in the world at what I do. I don’t want to retire early. I don’t want to spend my life on a beach. I want to be in the arena! That’s where my joy is.

I’m reading a book right now — Becoming You — that’s helping me map my values better. Right now, at 38, I’m realizing: I don’t want to be perfect or balanced. I want to be unapologetically myself. Fully. Loudly. Aligned.

But that starts with actually knowing who you are.

Values work is a damn good place to start.

3 questions from the book worth sitting with over your next reflection session:

What do you want people to say about you when you’re not in the room?

What did you love about your life growing up — and what did you hate?

What would make you cry at your 85th birthday — from regret?

Do you know your values? And is the way you’re living your life now aligned with them?

Every night at 8:30PM, my alarm goes off.

Not to wake me up. To tell me it’s time to wrap up my day.

Go to bed. Now. Before the evening bleeds into another hour of doing or thinking or “just one more thing.”

The alarm is a system that exists because my brain — left to its own devices — will absolutely forget what matters to me by 9pm - what my intentions are for a better life or better health, how I want to feel fresh every morning to seize the day before the world wakes up.

You’d think your own goals, your own values, your own desire to do your best work — those would stick in your mind. You’d think you wouldn’t need a phone alarm to remind you that sleep is important.

But that’s not how the brain works.

There’s a concept in behavioral science called motivational salience — the idea that what drives your behavior in any given moment has to become a center of your attention first.

Hunger wins because your body makes it loud.

Your intention to wake up at 4:30am and do your best work? That signal is quiet. It needs a nudge from the outside world to remind you it’s important.

My 8:30PM alarm is that nudge.

It reminds me that I do my best thinking early. That I feel more alive, more useful, more me when I’m up before the rest of the world (some call it creator’s hour). That if I go to bed now, tomorrow morning becomes a gift instead of a dread or regret.

Before the alarm, my sleep time was all over the place.

After?

Surprisingly consistent and easy, from day one.

Someone asked me recently: “How do I start waking up earlier? I accomplish and feel so much more when I do.”

Stop trying to win the morning. Start managing the night before.

Set an alarm to go to bed.

Put your meditation mat next to your bed as a reminder that you wanted to work on your mindfulness and presence - so you literally step onto your intention when you wake up, instead of asking for more motivation.

Block reading or learning time in your calendar like you’d block a meeting.

Put your writing time in your planner before the day tries to fill that slot.

These aren’t hacks. They’re reminders to the future you of what’s important.

They’re the system doing the remembering so your willpower doesn’t have to.

Most of the time, the gap between what you want to do and what you actually do isn’t closed by motivation. But by making sure you pay attention to the right thing at the right time.

Reminders will help you do that.

You don’t always need more discipline. You don’t need the world to change.

You just need the right alarm, at the right time, to bring your own priorities back into focus.

What’s one reminder you could put in place this week, today — an alarm, a cue, a ritual — that closes the gap between who you want to be and what you actually do today?

How many of you started working less because of AI?

For 99.999% of people, the opposite happened.

You started doing more. Bragging about how much you can crank out now. Watching your to-do list expand instead of shrink.

Yesterday I was hiking up a mountain with a mix of friends and strangers. Somewhere between the rain, mist, views and the summit, we talked about this: unless you intentionally carve out time for the things that matter — your health, your relationships, your soul, your hobbies, the things that make you feel genuinely alive — AI isn’t going to give it back to you. The time won’t magically appear. The list will just get longer.

Hasn’t it already?

Let’s talk about the story of humans and abundance.

There was a time, not that long ago, when getting enough food was the real problem. Production, storage, transport — none of it had caught up yet.

Then it did.

And did people eat just enough?

No. We kept eating well past the point of satisfaction, straight into chronic disease — which, by the way, is still growing. We literally had to invent a drug to make us stop eating. One of the most popular drugs out there!

People are not great at less. At subtraction. At enough.

Not without intention.

Some people will figure it out. They’ll design beautiful lives — the same way some people figured out how to eat well in a world drowning in options.

And some people will keep running themselves into one burnout after another, convinced that “enough” isn’t an option. That the grind is just what you have to do now to keep up.

I’m not a fortune-teller. Not even a futurist. I won’t predict which camp you’ll land in or what will happen to the world.

But as a coach, I’ll tell you this without hesitation: if you’re not intentional about designing the life, the health, and the work you want — it won’t come to you “naturally”. If it did, coaching wouldn’t be one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.

It’s Easter weekend. You might have a sliver of extra time. (Do you?)

Take it. Sit down. Write about what your best life could look like.

Not the life you’re defaulting into. The one you’d intentionally choose.

Directionally Right

I was in a strategy class a couple of days ago.

We were talking about how every strategic goal is built on a pile of assumptions.

We never have complete information about the future. And the further out the goal — the more people, variables, and complexity involved — the less we can expect to hit a specific outcome, on a specific timeline, following a specific plan.

A friend of mine, an entrepreneur, shared what he learned the hard way, through all the entrepreneurship ups and downs. What worked and stuck: one overarching vision, and then 6-month execution sprints. Even then, he said, all you can really hope for is to be directionally right and somewhere close to the original timeline.

I noticed the same thing with clients, who always have complex goals - navigating the next chapter of their career transition, figuring out meaning of life or some health challenge.

The ones who get results are the ones who know what they’re after, and are willing to work on it as long as it takes - making progress, staying the course, adjusting as they go.

The ones who need it yesterday either don’t make it frustrated with the amount of work needed (that they, as we humans do, underestimate). Or, they get it but unable to keep it because the fundamental skills weren’t built.

The new behavior never had time to take root in their identity and life.

Two things worth understanding, that I learned in life and coaching — if you want to stop stressing every time you miss a milestone or a deadline in the complexity of our lives or business:

1. Goals are your compass, not a bullseye.

Getting closer counts. Progress counts.

The timeline you wrote down in January?

That was always a guess. A good guess, maybe, but a guess. What matters is the direction of travel. Directionally right is all what we can shoot for.

2. When you don’t have a solution you’re certain of, your job is to find one — not force one.

Block out time to explore. Design small tests. Measure what works in the real world, not the one in your head. The best strategies aren’t revealed in planning sessions. They’re refined through contact with reality.

Whether you’re building a company, launching a product, losing weight, or trying to change something fundamental about how you live:

• Set a target you can measure your actions against. - That number on the scale, sales, the kind of work you want to do more of, the kind of leader you want to grow into.

• Build a strategy and a plan to test it. - Block out time with the intention to learn, not to “earn”, to figure out what can be right, not to force what you want to be right.

• Check in. Reflect. Adjust. - Flexible in how you end up doing things, firm on where you are headed.

The best strategy can come out of a great offsite or a thoughtful planning session.

But the best results always come from staying aligned with how the world is in the moments of taking action.

Over to you, dear reader,

Are you holding your goals as a compass, or as a verdict of your success?

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A table without legs isn’t furniture. It’s wood on a floor.

You don’t learn to swim by reading about water. You don’t learn to cook by collecting recipes.

For concrete skills — baking a cake, following a recipe — the sequence is obvious. Certain ingredients. Certain order. Mix before you bake. Get into the water before kicking your legs. Not the other way around. Skip a step and you don’t get a cake. You get a mess.

For abstract goals, the same logic applies. We just forget it does.

Want to be a better leader? Learn to listen before you work on being heard.

Want to grow your business? Figure out what people actually want before you try to sell it.

Want to wake up earlier? Sort out when you go to bed first.

Sequence matters. So do the ingredients. More than the vision, or at least as much. A vivid picture of the finished cake doesn’t help if you’re missing half the pantry.

Most people who come to me for coaching believe their problem is motivation. Or accountability. They think they need someone to push them harder.

Often, what’s actually missing is simpler: they haven’t mapped the ingredients. They haven’t asked what needs to happen before the thing they’re trying to make happen.

The vision is clear. The recipe isn’t.

When you get the recipe right — the right ingredients, in the right order — the outcome stops feeling like a dream. It becomes the inevitable result of good cooking.

Have you mapped the full recipe for your goal — every ingredient, every step, in the right order?

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Decomposition.

That’s it. That’s the thing.

The proverbial elephant, eaten one bite at a time. The thousand-mile journey, started with a single step. These aren’t just motivational quotes — they’re describing the actual mechanics of how big things get done.

The people who achieve extraordinary things — athletes, artists, entrepreneurs who go from zero to the richest people in the world— they aren’t doing something special. They’ve just gotten very, very good at decomposing things.

Which means a few things in practice.

Turning a vague vision into smaller, defined milestones you can wrap your head around.

Cascading a decade-long plan into something you can work on today.

Breaking down something as abstract and overwhelming as “better leadership” or “a more meaningful life” into its most important ingredients — sub-skills you can practice, track, and improve.

Decomposition.

That’s the essence of any coaching methodology. It’s why coaching is so effective in any arena of work, life or self-growth.

Here’s a tricky part for a lot of people.

It’s not the breaking down that’s hard. It’s the consistent return to those basic ingredients. Seeing how the pieces fit together — what to adjust, what to keep, what to start, what to stop. And being humble enough to go back to the basics consistently when that’s exactly what’s keeping you stuck.

There’s no point in designing a complex macro and micro nutrition plan if you can’t stick to simple, consistent meals for a week.

There’s no point in building an elaborate workout program if you’re not showing up to the gym.

There’s no point in learning every sales technique in the book if you haven’t yet found the courage to start talking to people about what you do.

The beauty of life is that any goal, no matter how complex, starts with a few basic elements.

The challenge is not forgetting to come back to the one step you need to take today.

What goal or vision feels overwhelming right now?

Try this: ask your AI to deconstruct it for you and identify your single most important first step.

Then take it.

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I decided to make myself happy.

And I’m naturally not wired that way.

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

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

And I want to feel happy now.

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

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

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

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

Objectively, things are also good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We often assume stress IS the price of high performance.

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

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

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

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

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

• 37% better at sales — across industries

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

• 40% more likely to receive a promotion

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

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

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

Better human with better life experience.

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

I love this quote,

You can do both.

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

My client said at the session,

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

Yes. And.

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

This April, I’m running an experiment.

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

It’s a challenge. It’s worth it.

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

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

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

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

It felt like a guessing game I kept losing.

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

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

And I found it!

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

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

No magic. No guessing. No frustration.

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

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

Reliably well and reflective of what I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REBT - Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not the world.

Not the other people.

You.

The one CHOOSING to carry the belief.

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

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

Same event. Different belief. Completely different experience.

2 people stuck in traffic, both running late.

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

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

Same traffic. Your choice. Different feeling.

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

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

What I love most about REBT?

It states that all the benefit comes in the reps.

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

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

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

Not magic. Just muscle you train.

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

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

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

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

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

For example, Deep Work vs. Social Connection.

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

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

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

And I felt… nothing. No sign of familiarity.

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

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

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

That one?

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

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

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

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

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

Replenished. Recharged. Integrated.

Whole.

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

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

Over to you, dear reader,

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

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

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