Daily Thought for Change

Over the past few days, I’ve been learning how to build custom GPTs, tools that could actually coach people through change.
At the same time, I’ve been reviewing some coaching basics through master coach certification training.
And somewhere between the two worlds, AI and coaching, I had an “aha” moment.

General ChatGPT isn’t a good coach.
At least not without good training.

A good coach doesn’t try to give you everything all at once - no matter how much you ask for it.

She listens first.
She asks questions to understand exactly where you are, what drives you, what blocks you, what resources you already have.
She challenges what you say you want, because sometimes we chase patterns, not purpose.
She senses when to push and when to pause, giving you time to adjust to change.

And most importantly,
she knows that giving you more isn’t better.
It’s noise.
It overwhelms, distracts, and kills momentum - you freeze, protect status quo, stay where you are.

A good coach gives you just enough - the smallest, clearest next step that moves you forward, and what you need for it.

When I built my Self-Talk Trainer, the early versions behaved like a bad coach.
It kept talking, questioning, suggesting, until the only thing I wanted was to shut it down and do nothing.
Too much. Too fast. Too overwhelming.

The moment it became useful was when I started deleting.
Cutting everything that wasn’t essential to achieve the goal - I removed functionality instead of adding. One prompt, not 5. Maybe there's genius to the Google page after all!

Change doesn’t come from adding more - it comes from removing what gets in the way of doing the right thing.
Just like coaching, just like great design.

More isn’t better.
Enough is our brain's paradise.

So, over to you, dear leader,
What could you eliminate to make change feel simple again?

Where coaching meets behavioral science and organizational change.

I’m taking two career-advancing courses right now: one to become a master coach, the other in designing behavioral science interventions.

It’s funny how these two schools of thought, both about changing human behavior, rarely speak the same language.

Behavioral science talks about context a lot: the pressures and environments shaping our choices. Yet it often forgets the human inside that system, the one who isn’t always rational but does have a lot of agency, will, and the power to choose the unlikely path, despite all the biases and the context.

Coaching, on the other hand, works deeply with that human agency — motivation, accountability, making progress despite the odds. It empowers the will to shape one’s path. But it can often overlook the other side of the equation: the powerful gravitational pull of environment, social pressures, and systemic design that often determines whether that effort can sustain itself.

And in both worlds, I find something missing often - gravity.

The weight of why.

What’s the point of all this striving, optimizing, changing? What’s the impact of the pursuit? The bigger picture, what do YOU, what does "the system" want?

Whether we’re designing an intervention or setting a personal goal, we rarely pause to ask:
What system is this goal a part of?
How does it serve the core of me, or something bigger?
What direction is it pulling my life, my team, my organization, the world? Is the why aligned with the goal and the method?

What does the system (the human with identity and values, the bigger system where societal impact lives) want to achieve in the first place?

Over the long run, what coaching and behavioral science try to achieve, makes no sense and will not make any difference unless they align themselves with a bigger WHY - whether that’s who you are and what you value (the individual agent), or where the organization or society is trying to go.

So, do the goals you set have gravity of a bigger why?

How do we make better decisions, business predictions, bets about the future, so we end up more satisfied with our choices?

That’s rarely what works in a complex, unpredictable world.
That’s how you get financial crises no one saw coming, or pandemics no one could forecast the path of.

It’s through reps.

Mark Egan shares in the article in the BIT new newsletter:

“When doctors were 80% sure a patient had pneumonia, they were right only 20% of the time. But when weather forecasters predicted an 80% chance of rain, it really did rain 80% of the time.”

The difference?
Weather forecasters get a lot more prediction reps.
They practice constantly, every day, seeing outcomes and adjusting their gut feeling accordingly.

Doctors, on the other hand, make far fewer “predictions” they can quickly test and calibrate against reality.
So their gut stays untrained.

One other study found something similar when comparing big vs. small life decisions.
People make better choices about where to eat than which house to buy. Even though one is considerably more important.
It’s not that restaurants are simpler, it’s that we’ve had hundreds more chances to practice deciding what we enjoy.

We don’t really know what we’ll like until we try it.
And if we don’t try often enough, we don’t develop that “gut feeling” muscle that gets better with each round.

So whether you’re leading a team, running a business, or trying to improve your speaking, selling, or decision-making - nothing beats reps + reflection.

Get more cycles. Test more predictions. Calibrate your gut feeling.

That’s how intuition sharpens.
That’s how judgment becomes less biased. Not through another training. Reps.

So, how many reps did you get in this week on the things that matter?

There are things in life we want, and then there are things we want most. They often stand in each other’s way.

I didn’t go to an innovation summit I really wanted to attend today. I felt FOMO. And it felt good.

There’s a fable about a donkey who stood between a stack of hay and a bucket of water. Equally hungry and thirsty, he couldn’t decide what to go for first. He died because he didn’t move at all. Afraid that choosing one meant losing the other.

Watching brilliant people speak is inspiring. But if it keeps you from doing the work that you are meant to do - it’s not inspiration anymore, it’s distraction dressed up as productive learning.

⭐If you want to stand in the spotlight someday, you can’t spend all your time watching others in theirs.

I told a friend about my dilemma, wanting to go, trying to justify it as a great networking opportunity, but also knowing I had work to work on, that mattered more.
He asked, “What do you want most?”

And I realized: it’s not about knowing more things from more people. It’s about shipping my own thing.

Maybe, just maybe, I can make a better choice than the donkey. And figure out what I need most before it’s too late.

PS: If the donkey had known dying of thirst is faster, perhaps he would’ve chosen differently.

Competition as the highest form of collaboration for a greater good.

I finally read The Inner Game of Tennis. It’s been sitting on my list for far too long. One thoughtful instagram post from Daniel Pink finally tipped me into, “Fine. I’m reading it now.”

This year marks the book’s 50th anniversary, and somehow, it feelt so current, more relevant than ever.

It made me, for the first time, realize how powerful competition can be for unlocking human potential, and how for so long I didn't get it at all! 

For years, I avoided competition because it felt like a zero-sum game. Someone wins, someone loses.

But competition, done right, isn’t about proving you’re the best. (And someone is a loser)
It’s about discovering the best in you and in others!

When you see someone doing something better, it’s an invitation to explore your own limits. You try, you experiment, you grow. In that pursuit, you stumble upon new techniques, new ideas, new courage and skills you didn’t know you had.

That’s the kind of competition that doesn’t drain you - it elevates you and others. It doesn’t create enemies, it creates partners in growth.

As Gallwey writes in The Inner Game of Tennis:

“Each player tries their hardest to defeat the other, but in this use of competition it isn’t the other person we are defeating; it is simply a matter of overcoming the obstacles the other presents... Both players benefit by their efforts to overcome the obstacles presented by the other. Like two bulls butting their heads against one another, both grow stronger and each participates in the development of the other.”

Imagine if we led teams, companies, or even industries this way -
where competition becomes collaboration in disguise,
and every challenge makes us all stronger.

So, over to you, dear reader,
If competition was about advancing the field you care about,
what would you try to be the best at?

“Choking is a performance phenomenon where pressure leads to a significant decrease in performance, even for skilled individuals. It occurs when high-stakes situations cause increased anxiety, self-consciousness, and distraction, which interfere with cognitive functions like working memory and attention.”

At the core, choking happens when someone who’s already learned the skill stops trusting the system, their own mind-body system, to do its job. Instead, they try to control what should be automatic. They bring in System 2, the slow, deliberate thinking, to a game that demands the speed and grace of System 1 (instinctual, habitual responses).

It’s like trying to consciously think through how to tie your shoes or drive a car during a high-speed chase. You freeze. You fall apart. You lose access to what you already know.

You see it everywhere. Someone over-prepares a speech, then stumbles through every word because they can’t stop thinking about themselves.
Or a tennis player, like in The Inner Game of Tennis, who hits perfectly in practice but falls apart under pressure because they stop trusting their body memory.

I find many leaders do the same. I call the problem "leadership choke"

They hire brilliant people, then don't let it go, having troubles "delegating" - which in reality the fear of not being in control.
They overcontrol, overplan, overmonitor.
They don’t trust the system, their people, enough to let them do what they do best.

Leadership choke — when leaders with great teams end up performing like rookies because they can’t stop thinking for others, can’t stop over-managing, can’t stop tightening the grip.

The paradox is, just like in sports:
When you’ve done the work, when you’ve built the system, when you’ve trained the people — the highest performance doesn’t come from control. It comes from release.

The best leaders, like the best athletes, trust the process they’ve built.
They create conditions for flow, not for fear.
They know when to step back so the system can step up.

Over to you, dear reader,
Where in your life, your leadership, your work, have you already built something solid but still can’t let go?
What might happen if you stopped tightening the reins and simply trusted the system you’ve worked so hard to create?

Houston, we don’t have a roadmap.

The beauty of the human body, and mind, is that they haven’t changed much for centuries. Biology (and psychology) evolves slowly. That makes it predictable. Once you understand how people think, feel, and decide, you can build around that. You can rely on that. That's how coaching method gets better and better, and better - as we keep developing deeper understanding of us.

Technology, on the other hand, is the opposite. It shifts under your feet every few months.

Every week now, I find myself asking:
How can I reimagine what I do - how I work, deliver value to clients, build relationships - in light of what’s changed?

Paying attention has become the new competitive advantage. And less and less people are in control of what they pay attention to.
Noticing. Being present. Interpreting signals. Catching shifts early enough to turn them into opportunity.

That’s what great, enduring companies do.

They build on what doesn’t change, human needs, and adapt the how.

Take Amazon.
Jeff Bezos once said, “I can’t imagine a future where customers want higher prices or slower delivery.”

The what, that stays constant:
People will always want lower prices, more choice, ease of access.

The how keeps changing, from bookstores to e-commerce to one-hour drone delivery...
Amazon didn’t bet on a trend. It bet on human nature.

Or look at Netflix.
People have always wanted good stories and easy entertainment.
The DVDs, streaming, and AI recommendations were just different vehicles for the same timeless desire: “I want to watch something I’ll enjoy, without friction.”

Universities launching degrees in “Applied AI” make me laugh a little.
We’re still figuring it out. There’s no playbook yet.
How do you teach something that’s changing every month, something we don't understand the evolution of?

Maybe what we should be teaching is how to think, how to learn, how to see what endures beneath the noise.

Maybe it makes more sense to master timeless principles - psychology, behavior, decision-making, trust, storytelling - and then learn to use any emerging technology to serve them?

Because tools change.
The way humans work doesn’t.

So a good question to ask,
What are you building on - trends, or timeless truths?

I love reading something that makes me think every morning.
That’s why there’s always an open book on the coffee table by where I write and work.

Lately, I’ve been stuck in my goal of speaking fluent Italian. Progress slowed. Then I started paying attention to Duolingo’s rankings, leaderboard, and competitions. Suddenly, I was learning more, 2x more, not just in the app, but outside of it too.
Staying on the leaderboard kept me consistent.

I used to think I was beyond gamification.

Turns out, I’m not.
And since it’s aligned with my long-term goals, why not let it work its magic on my psychology?

Yesterday on my podcast, I had a guest, Ricardo Lopes Costa, the author of "The Fantastic Engagement Factory: How to motivate people on a large scale with gamification".
Ricardo told me a little story about a cupcake stand outside his house.

The stand ran a simple game: a spin-the-wheel raffle. Winners could pick as many toppings as they wanted for their cupcake. Ricardo's little daughter kept going there, even though she wasn't much into cupcakes.
The line for that stand was more than 2X longer compared to other food sellers next to it.

Not sure how good that was for the cupcake eaters, but it was great for business.

It shouldn’t matter if my book is open or closed to get me reading every morning.
It shouldn’t matter whether Duolingo has a leaderboard for me to keep learning Italian.
It shouldn’t matter whether there’s a prize to win for buying cupcakes.

And yet it does.

Because we’re people with human psychology, which is driven by instincts and emotions first. We aren't machines or AI (which also seem to have caught some human tendencies to be biased)

It was a good reminder for myself to put a bit more thinking into designing experiences for people and myself to move us towards our desired goals with the psychology of motivation and all the biases in mind - towards our goals of learning, improving, creating more positive impact, not just more fun that leads nowhere. (PS all companies that get you hooked have been doing it forever)

It might be a good nudge to you, dear reader, to ask ChatGPT or your other favorite AI agent - how can you use gamification strategies and other known cognitive biases to help me do/achieve/change more/less of X?

Let's play for good🧁

"Function-focused design assumes people have the motivation to complete tasks and focuses on efficiency. Human-focused design assumes people do not always have motivation and aims to create more motivation at every step." - Yu-Kai Chou, world-known gamification expert.

I take a cold shower every single day.
Not for the health benefits.
But because afterward, nothing in the day feels that hard anymore. Discomfort doesn't stop me.

This morning, my Uber driver told me he does the same.

He wakes up at 5am, does a quick workout, takes a cold shower.
“It makes me feel right,” he said. “Calmer. More confident. More disciplined. My friends laugh at me, but when I skip it, my brain just doesn’t feel right.”

I smiled.
Because he’s right. And research agrees.

I often remind people in my workshops on emotional intelligence and stress resilience:
“Exercise is 1.5 times more effective than therapy or medication.”

Your brain really isn’t quite right when you don’t do what you were designed to do — movement.

Maybe cold showers aren’t that essential. But I have my reasons to keep doing it. Just like my Uber driver this morning has his.

Then he asked me,
“How do I motivate my friends to do more of things like this?”

After years of coaching, I’ve learned that motivation, the REASON we act, is deeply personal.
The reason I take a cold shower might be completely different from yours.
But the secret is always the same: you have to connect what you do to why it matters to you.

If you want to do the right things — the things that make you better — you first have to know why they matter.

Find the payoff, that’s personal, then the action.
Draw a bright line between what’s already important to you and what you need to do more of.

Nietzsche said it best:

“He who has a why can bear almost any how.”

Want to help people change?
Help them figure out THEIR why, or at least, help them start asking the question.

Who does what, when, where, how often, and with whom?

During one of my recent masterclasses, a participant shared they were struggling to stay motivated to exercise.

So, I walked them through a little if–then scenario - a simple but powerful way to make an aspiration more concrete so it actually happens.

Most of us make plans like, “I’ll start reframing my thoughts this week” or “I’ll pay more attention to my negative inner dialogue”, "I'll pay more attention to my food this week"

The problem with that?

Our brains don’t work that way.

So with clients, when they say “I’ll practice it this week,” I stop them.
And we repeat together, a few times if needed:

• What exactly will you do?

• When?

• Where?

• How often?

• With whom (if relevant)?

It sounds basic, unnecessary, trivial. And it works.

Because when you talk yourself through the exact scenario of what you’ll do, you’re programming your brain for action the way it’s built to operate:

Trigger (when, where) + Action (how, what, with whom) + Reward (acknowledging progress).

That’s how you also support your long-term motivation. Not through abstract inspiration but through brain-friendly design.

The if–then approach, also known as implementation intentions, is one of the simplest and most evidence-based tools we have to program your brain for new practices and habits.

“Implementation intentions are highly effective, as research shows they can double the chances of achieving goals by turning vague plans into specific, actionable "if-then" statements. This strategy works by automating responses, so when a specific situation is encountered, the desired behavior is triggered automatically, reducing the need for willpower and conscious decision-making at that moment. By pre-determining the when, where, and how of goal-related behaviors, individuals can better handle distractions and self-regulatory problems”

Lasting motivation isn’t about pushing harder.
It’s about designing your brain’s autopilot to work for you, not against you.

So, have you tried it?
What’s one new practice or habit you could reprogram with a clear if–then plan today?