Daily Thought for Change

t just dawned on me that many of us have it backwards.

We make the wrong things easy.
And the right things too hard.

A friend offered to give me a lift on her way to the supermarket.
She was going that way. I was heading that way too.

I said,
“Walking IS the point.”

Not everything that can be done easier should be.

Getting your steps in?
That’s the “hard” we should keep.

I often tell my clients: incentivise your walking. Attach it to errands. Create reasons to leave the house. If your life doesn’t demand movement, design it in.

But take another goal: eating healthy meals.
Here, ease wins.

The less thinking.
The fewer decisions.
The more prepared the fridge.
The more automatic the outcome is - more healthy meals eaten.

If you want yourself — or your team — to do deep work, think hard, innovate… make it easy to do the hard thing.

Block the calendar.
Create protected time.
Build accountability.
Design special spaces.
Give fun tools.

Make the right behaviour the default.

But if you want people to build collaboration skills, trust, or have better conversations - keep that hard.

Don’t automate interpersonal growth.
Don’t shortcut the discomfort of getting out there and talking to people.
Don’t replace real dialogue with digital convenience.

There’s something close to a universal law here:
What shapes you must stretch you.

You only really learn a skill when you need it to survive something. When we go through hard sh*t - that's where we REALLY learn.

You don’t get better at sales because referrals keep landing in your lap, or you are lucky, or you have a good network.
You get better, when you have to sell cold. From zero. No safety net.

Once you can do that, you’re free. You can create results anywhere.

Neuroscience tells us something similar about learning.

If we struggle to retrieve an answer, wrestle with a concept, search for a solution — it sticks.

If we outsource all thinking to AI — it doesn’t. YOU do not change and learn.

Another “hard” worth keeping.

Over to you, dear reader, think of how you want to develop yourself, your craft, your life, and ask yourself,

What is the hard I need to keep to shape that person?
Where do I need to introduce ease to make the right things happen consistently?

(Subtitle - Comfort or Growth? Comfort blanket or mountain at sunrise?)
Every Friday at sunrise, we climb a mountain.

And every Friday, 2 forces pull me in opposite directions.

Stay under the blanket.
Or get up, drive in the dark, meet new people, climb hard, breathe deep.

Comfort or growth?

Stay in your home country and follow the familiar path.
Or go explore the world, build something new, let life's path with its challenges and rewards unfold over time in its unique way.

Eat the ice cream because the week didn’t go as planned.
Or go to bed early, hit the 6am workout, and face what needs adjusting.

Competing priorities.

Or as I learned in yesterday’s coaching class — inner conflicts.

“I want X… but I also want Y.”

Most people think this tension is a bug. Something to eliminate.
Many of my clients come to me hoping we can “fix” it. Remove the conflict. Choose once and for all. Build the ideal self where all the shoulds become dones.

But that’s a fantasy. An illusion.

The tension isn’t a flaw.
It’s a feature of being human.

The goal isn’t to make one value win — comfort over growth, belonging over self-expression, achievement over health, success over family.

The real work is a bit harder.

Integration.

Learning to walk the tension.
To honor the parts of you that want safety and the parts that want expansion.
To build a life where your values don’t fight but collaborate.

Here are a few useful questions you can use with clients, or with yourself, when you feel stuck in that pull:

• Why is X important to you? What value does it express?
• Why is Y important to you? What value does it protect?
• What does this conflict actually mean to you about who you are becoming?
• How do these values relate to your need for comfort and your need for growth?
• How might you design your life to honor both, instead of sacrificing one or the other?

When you explore these with an open mind, something interesting happens.

You realize both sides are trying to serve YOU.

Joy and discipline.
Adventure and loyalty.
Ambition and health.

A piece of chocolate with morning coffee — for joy.
Learning moderation — for health.

Exploring the world, while calling your family daily, showing up when it's meaningful and important.

Climbing the mountain at sunrise, knowing your blanket will still be there at night.

The tension doesn’t disappear.

You just get better at holding it, walking your path in-between.

Over to you, dear reader,

What is pulling you in 2 directions right now, and how might you design a way to honor both sides of yourself instead of choosing only one?

Have you ever made a plan — start eating healthy, exercise every day, get more consistent with bizdev or content creation — starting March 1st… and then the plan didn't work? Or you didn't work for the plan. Life got in the way. Stuff happened.

Most of my clients have been there many times before our work together.

Heck, I've been there many times myself.

And here's what we now do differently that sets the plan for success every time.

First, we don't stop at planning. We go straight into prepping for the plan.

Think about it: imagine Navy SEALs heading into a mission with zero prep, just a goal, an intention, winging it when they wake up Monday morning. Sounds ridiculous, right? We'd never accept that for a high-stakes mission with a team. But when it comes to our own goals, the things we're doing solo for our own stakes, that's exactly what most of us do - winging the plan. And it's exactly why we fail.

This step-by-step process below, that I use with my clients will make your follow-through as reliable as a Navy SEALs mission:

Intention: Why are we doing this? What's the goal? How will you know you're doing it? What's a movie of you doing it, so detailed that I can see it in my own head?

Plan: What's the exact step-by-step, from prep all the way to full execution?

Prep [where most plans go to die]: What needs to be in place so that when the day comes, execution just falls into place? Just slides into your unfolding day effortlessly?

Let's say your plan is to improve your eating starting March 1st. Before we begin, we walk through everything:

What exactly are you going to eat? When? Where will you get the food? When? How will you prep it, and when will you cook and prep it for easy eating even if it's on the go, so that on March 1st all you have to do is eat it? What happens on your busy mornings? What do you eat when you're out? When you're running late and have to sprint to a meeting or catch a bus? What are your go-to emergency snacks? What do you order when you're at a restaurant?...

We poke as many holes in the plan as possible before we start, so that just like a Navy SEAL, no matter what life throws at you, you're prepared to keep going.

Accountability: Who's going to keep an eye on you? Who can you "enroll" to help you execute, so you don't feel like you're on this mission alone?

People show up differently, and do a lot more when the right accountability is in place.

Research from the NIH shows: 

“Accountability significantly increases adherence (e.g., in health treatments, it has been shown to increase adherence by over 100% in some cases)”

Measure / Track / Reflect / Adjust… and keep going.

Life won't follow your plan.

Some things you were sure would work won't.

Some things won't give you the result you expected.

And that's okay.

You learn. You adjust. You prep again. You do better. You repeat.

And eventually - you get what you want.

Over to you, dear reader,

As we're heading into March and you're doing some new season planning, ask yourself: what step might I be skipping that's making my plans fail more than they could?

PS If you lead a team or a family unit and want to help them succeed with their plans, take a look at whether you have a similar process in place for them. Help set them up for success.

I used to argue with my dad a lot.

About how to live a good life.
About what I should be doing in my business.
About what he should be doing about his health.

It felt like we were on opposite sides.

Until I realized something simple:
We actually want the same thing.

He wants me to do well in life.
I want him to stay well for as long as possible.

Then, before each conversation, especially when things got heated, I started reminding myself of that.

We’re on the same team.

That small mental shift changed everything. Almost overnight.
Not because I changed his mind. (Or mine)
But because I changed my starting point.

I became more receptive. More curious. More willing to listen.
And when I listened better, my tone changed. The outcome changed. The relationship grew stronger.

In behavioral science, and in Presuasion by Robert Cialdini, this is called priming.

a psychological phenomenon where exposure to an initial stimulus (word, image, sound) unconsciously influences a person's response to a subsequent, related stimulus. Operating through implicit memory, it activates specific mental representations, shaping perceptions, behaviors, and decisions without conscious awareness.

Priming is the idea that what you are exposed to first shapes what comes next.
The first thought.
The first word.
The first action.

It influences what you see, how you interpret it, what you decide, and how you act, most often without you noticing it at all.

What you remind yourself of becomes your lens through which you see the rest🔎

At the coaching class yesterday we talked about Crucial Conversations, and how the first step to having a good, productive difficult conversation starts with shared purpose, with setting the intention to create more good. The goal isn’t to “win it” - it’s to create a better relationship. Just like it happened with my dad.

Not “How do I win this?”
But “What are we trying to build together?”

Once that intention is set, your behavior follows.

This works in coaching too.

The clients who transform the most are the ones who enter with a clear intention:

I’m here to learn.
I’m here to grow.
I’m willing to be uncomfortable.
I’m playing the long game.

They surprise themselves with how much they can change (and how fast).

The ones who struggle?
They never really pause to ask:

Why am I doing this?
What’s the deeper purpose?
What do I want this to mean?
What do I need to remind myself of daily to keep improving?

In agriculture, priming is soaking seeds before planting so they sprout stronger.

In humans, we miss this completely.

We focus on strategy.
On tactics.
On winning arguments.
On outcomes.

But we skip the mental warm-up.

The inner orientation.

The "seed treatment".

Over to you, dear reader,

Before your next hard conversation, your next negotiation, mentoring session, feedback or review, your next big decision —
what do you need to remind yourself of so you act from shared purpose and clear intention?

What seed do you need to pre-soak today for a better sprout tomorrow?

25 years of consistency.

I started my first gym membership at 13. I only went to support a friend. Many friends later — I’m the only one who never stopped.

A gym friend asked me recently,
“25 years! How did you do THAT?”

Not willpower.
Not discipline.
Not some superhuman trait.

I told him,
“I gave myself my word that for the rest of my life I’ll move my body for 30 minutes every day. Ideally in the morning.”

He said he’s made similar promises to himself many times.

So what made mine stick?

A) I built an MVP version of my exercise habit for the days I don’t feel like it.

When I don’t want to lift weights, I do yoga.
Or a martial arts workout.
Or mobility drills.
Sometimes I just dance.

He replied,
“I should probably schedule some yoga classes.”

And that’s where most people go wrong.

That’s also where my approach, the one I teach to my 1-1 clients and B2B teams working on performance - is FUNDAMENTALLY different.

B) Make it really easy. And I mean REEEEALLY easy to start.

I do not sign up for more classes.

I saved one yoga video on my phone. And on my Google Drive. A routine I can do in the smallest hotel room - it was handy, 15 years of digital nomad life, mountains, beaches, jungle gyms, remote locations and all.

I also have a workout app I can use anywhere.

That’s how my fitness survived Covid lockdown in a room with 2X2m space.
I lifted weights then too. Sometimes water bottles.

And THAT is the gold you are looking for🍯

The secret to lifelong consistency.

EASY.

And by easy, I mean so easy to start you almost slide into it without thinking.

Can you see the difference between:

“I need to schedule more yoga classes”

And:

“I have a video on my phone”

?

THAT kind of easy.

The kind I’ve done in the dark, naked, barely awake, before a 24-hour flight.

Over to you, dear reader,

Are you sure you tried easy before willpower?

PS: If you lead a team and you’re wondering why people struggle to adopt something new or stay consistent, I can give you a 100% guarantee you haven’t thought through the “easy” part well enough.

The human brain is lazy and defaults to conserving energy. Daniel Pink, who's studied human behavior for the last 30 years, says it’s the #1 factor everyone misses.

Where in your life (or organization) are you still overcomplicating and blaming it on a lack of consistency or the wrong people?

When you move often enough, you realize how much routines and habits save you.

They save time.
They save mental capacity.
They save your presence for the moments that matter.

Your brain can only think about a limited number of things on any given day.

"Cognitive capacity refers to

the total amount of mental resources, including attention, memory, and processing speed, available for storing, manipulating, and applying information at any given time. It acts as a finite, often trainable, "engine" for thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. When overloaded, cognitive capacity diminishes, affecting performance and mental energy.

Factors Affecting Cognitive Capacity

• Fatigue: Tiredness can significantly reduce mental resources.
• Information Overload: Too much data can overwhelm cognitive capacity.
• Training/Experience: As skills become more automatic (e.g., driving), they require less capacity, effectively increasing the available, free capacity.
• Stress: High stress levels can reduce the available capacity for complex tasks."

“You have one battery for everything you want to do in life — family, work, fitness, hobbies, self-development. If you spend most of it in one place, everything else will get less of you.”

The same is true for your cognitive capacity.

You have one brain to deal with:

Your food.
Your wardrobe.
Your commute.
Your family responsibilities.
Your health and fitness.
Your work routines.
Your studies.
Your relationships.
Your hobbies.

...

Something always has to give.

That’s why leaders like Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs and many before, after and around them simplified parts of their lives. Same clothes. Fewer trivial decisions. Not caring about many things.

The less you have to think about one thing, the more you can think about other things.

Solve complex problems.
Create.
Learn.
Notice subtleties in relationships.
Have better insights at work.

If everything is a decision, nothing gets depth.

With time, hopefully, you become more intentional about what gives and what gets the best of you.

THE MAGIC OF HABITS

Why does your brain love habits so much?

Because they save energy.

Research suggests 40–60% of what we do every day is habitual. That’s not laziness. That’s efficiency.

Habits are the brain’s way of conserving fuel.

And that fuel can be redirected towards meeting demands of your days.

Habits aren’t just great for nutrition, fitness, or reading.

They are cognitive leverage.

That’s why I constantly ask myself:
Where can I habituate more?

Same meals.
Same cooking flow.
Predefined gym outfit.
Pre-decided work wardrobe.

Moving from place to place, with all its novelty, disrupts all of this.

Suddenly you have to think about where things are, how you move through the house, how you cook, where you placed your keys. Tiny decisions multiply. Energy drains.

Now zoom out to work.

If you want people to adopt new behaviors, whether using tech tools, running meetings differently, or giving feedback better - don’t tell directives.

Give them an algorithm.

Step 1.
Step 2.
Step 3.

Make it simple.
Make it repeatable.
Make it cognitively cheap.

Otherwise, you’re asking them to reinvent the wheel dozens of times a day. (Like they already don't have to deal with a lot)

In networking, they recommend having a script for how you start conversations. Not to sound robotic but to lower the entry barrier so you can talk to more people.

Life and work work the same way.

The more scripts you have for the right behaviors, the more often you’ll execute them. And the more of your brain remains available for life as it unfolds. SO you don't react but respond with intention.

Over to you, dear reader,

Where are you wasting precious cognitive battery on things that could be automated?

And what could you script — at home, at work, in your health — so that more of the right things happen by default and more of your mind is available and present for life?

A friend came back to the gym after a long break. She was frustrated.

“It’s like I didn’t do anything before.”

We want progress to be permanent. Like once we earn it, it should stay.

But every skill you learn, every muscle you build, every trait you develop, it’s like installing a program on your computer. It takes space. It uses resources.

And just like your laptop or phone, you don’t have infinite storage.

Your brain and body are in constant motion. They reshuffle resources all the time. They optimize. They clear space. They ask one simple question:

Is this still needed?

My phone asks for permission to optimize memory.
“Delete unused apps?”
“Shut down background programs?”

Your brain doesn’t ask. It just does it.

What you don’t use, you lose.

Not because you’re unlucky. Not because you failed.
Because your brain works as it's designed to work.

The only signal your brain respects is demand.
Aka practice.

So don’t get frustrated when your speaking skills feel rusty.
When your abs disappear.
When your emotional regulation isn’t as sharp as it once was.

That’s not misfortune. That’s biology, trying to keep you alive, adaptable and ready to dedicate resources to what's most needed now.

Ask yourself better questions insead:

What trait do I want to keep?
What skill do I want to strengthen?
What kind of person do I want to remain?

And what practice will send my brain the signal:
“This matters. Keep this”?

You can say all day you want to become a powerful speaker.
You can dream about strong abs.
You can wish for calm under pressure.

But if there is no practice time on your calendar, your brain will optimize for something else.

Magic doesn’t apply.

And just like with a shower, if you want to stay clean for life, you got to take it daily.

My mom asked me the other day,
“So do I have to take this magnesium every day for the rest of my life to feel great?”

Kind of.

Maintenance is not a punishment.
It’s the price of lasting capacity.

Over to you,dear reader, 

What are you practicing daily that tells your brain who you are committed to be every day?

The biggest mistake we all make when building new habits or trying to change what others do?

We underestimate how much our environment decides for us.

Not willpower.
Not motivation.
Not discipline.

What's around us. And what we can design.

I bought cocoa powder to mix into my yogurt-protein-berries lunch.

The week before, I’d finish a pack easily. Chocolate lover. No problem there.

This time?
I didn’t touch it.

Why?

Because I put the closed bag in a drawer I rarely open. The “dry goods graveyard.” Out of sight. Out of mind. Out of action.

The following week I put an open bag next to my protein powder.

I finished it in 7 days.

Same person.
Same love for chocolate.
Different system = Different result.

Do you know #1 reason why people don't take medications that their health (sometimes life) depend on? 

They forget because it's out of sight, out of mind, with no triggers to jump-start the routine.

Behavioral science shows that environment exerts more control over behavior than willpower or intention, with environmental design increasing desired actions by up to 300%.

Another client bought a small treadmill for under his standing desk.
He didn’t use it for 2 weeks.

Lazy?

No. It was still in the box.

He “didn’t have time” to set it up.

We spent 20 minutes unboxing it together during our session. Plugged it in. Positioned it.

He’s been walking 2–5k a day ever since.

Same person. Same willpower.

Thoughtful design = Different actions.

Another leadership client couldn’t “find time” for short Purpose-and-Progress check-ins with his team.

Busy?

We picked a time slot during our session.
Wrote the script.
Built a simple tracking sheet.

He ran the first round the following Monday.

Same schedule. Same intentions. Same person.

Different prep = Different outcomes.

The lesson:

It’s almost never - the person, the laziness, not even not having the time.

It’s almost always - the tracks you lay in advance to make the action you want to do ride along those tracks easy.

We blame character when we should redesign context.

If you want to build a habit, don’t start with motivation.

Start with friction.

Where is the action hidden?
What’s still in the box?
What requires 5 tiny decisions before it even begins?

And if you’re leading a team, the same rule applies.

Are you asking for behaviors that are buried in the pile of tiny and bigger effort?

Or have you made the right behavior the easy ride along laid out tracks?

Your future self is not stronger.
But you can set her up for more wins.

Before you close this tab, dear reader — what can you unbox, open, place, script, or schedule in the next 10 mins to make the right action obvious and easy for the future you?

And if you’re responsible for others, what tracks are you laying for them?

How do you know if a recipe is too sweet or too salty?

You add a little more.
You taste it.
Pinch by pinch, you adjust until it feels right.

Turns out, some of the best coaching works exactly like that.

Not with perfect recipes.
Not with fixed answers.
But with careful probing and tasting.

Someone asked me the other day:

“How do you know when to push a client toward growth… and when to give them more self-compassion, more grace, more rest?”

Exactly like you would cook an unfamiliar dish.

You don’t throw a whole chunk of salt in it.

You probe.
Question by question.
You taste until you hit the sweet spot.

The best coaching tool isn’t advice.

It’s questions.

Questions are your tasting spoon. Your calibration device. Your way of finding the next "perfect" action.

When I see a client being stuck in the mud, spinning the wheels, in indecision - choosing their next business or career move, where to draw the boundary between self-care and achievement, or simply not sure whether they need to change it's good enough,

Here are 4 questions, that are often used in coaching and therapy, I use, especially when someone feels stuck between changing and staying where they are:

• What could be good about changing?

• What could be good about not changing?

• What could be hard or bad about changing?

• What could be hard or bad about not changing?

These questions slow the rush. They surface ambivalence. They reveal truth without being forced into it. They give choice. They give awareness and understanding.

Another great one:

On a scale from 1 to 10, how ready/willing/able are you to take this next step?

Then ask:

• Why that number and not lower?

• Why not higher?

That’s where the gold is.

Just like with the recipe, where the perfect saltiness isn’t defined by the chef but by the eater, in coaching, the perfect next step isn’t defined by the coach but by the one living it - the client.

We all want the recipe. The plan. The certainty. It feels safe to believe there’s a clean path from here to there.

And the life is anything but a clean path.

So you poke.
You probe.
You try something small.
You reflect.
You adjust.

Pinch by pinch🧂

Over to you dear reader,

If you’re facing a need for change right now, are you waiting for someone else to hand you the recipe, where asking yourself the right questions is what you actually need?

I went to another #WGW this morning, a mountain hike with local entrepreneurs.

And once again, I almost didn’t go.

Early rise. Long before sunrise.
A long drive.
The day feels “off schedule.”
Fewer work boxes ticked.
An hour uphill. Not exactly a walk in the park.

I could feel the excuses lining up nicely.

Then the first people arrive.
First conversations start.
We begin walking.

And almost immediately I think, how ridiculous that I almost skipped this.

The people. The movement. The laughter. The ideas mid-climb.
That subtle but powerful shift in my state that lasts till next Friday.

It changes my whole day.
Often my whole week.

And I caught myself thinking: I need to do a better job remembering this feeling. Remembering how holistically good this is for my life - socially, mentally, emotionally. How it expands and inspires me. How it reminds me I can do hard things. How it inspires me to try bigger things.

This is behavioral activation in action. You do the thing - you get the feeling.

In coaching and therapy for anxiety or depression, behavioral activation is a simple, effective, and often-used tool. When someone feels stuck, anxious, low, withdrawn, flat - we don’t start with “fix your thoughts.” We often start with: do something different.

Specifically, do something that might bring joy, meaning, connection, energy, fulfillment.

Before the activity, you write down:

• How you expect you’ll feel.

• Whether you think you’ll like it.

• Your “doom and gloom” forecast.

After the activity, you write down how you actually felt.

2 things usually happen.

First, you see how unreliable your predictions can be. Especially in the fun. The mind says, “This will be exhausting. Not worth it. Stay home.”

Reality says, “That was exactly what I needed.”

Second, you build data. A reference library of lived evidence about what (and who) genuinely makes you feel better.

Over time, you stop treating your mood like weather, like majority of people do — random, uncontrollable, something that just happens to you.

You start treating it like a craft.

What you feel each day is not only chemistry or circumstance. It’s also the sum of activities you choose to put on your calendar.

A painting doesn’t become bright by accident.
It becomes bright because you chose the colors.

Living your life is your ultimate masterpiece.

And the best part?

YOU choose the colors to paint with.

Over to you, dear reader,

What’s on your list of things that always make you feel better, even though you resist them at first? And when will you schedule the next one?