Daily Thought for Change

Nothing beats learning from your own experience.

A client of mine got sick. When he came back, we looked at what habits stuck with him, and what fell aside. And it became obvious to him that habits have a lot more to do with the systems he puts together than with his discipline or motivation.

One habit stayed solid: eating enough protein.
One habit collapsed: drinking enough water.

Same person. Same goals. Same level of discipline.

Different systems = Different outcomes.

He kept hitting his protein target because the weekend before, he had prepped all the chicken for the week. Bought it. Cooked it. Put it in containers. So when lunchtime came and he thought about snacking, he remembered: there’s chicken waiting. Ready. Easy. Already prepped. Plus he didn't want to waste it.

So he ate it.

Water didn’t survive the disruption.

His usual trigger, workouts and being out and about, vanished when he got sick. He was home. No gym. No structured breaks. No bottle in sight. No cue.

Nothing was “wrong” with him.

The right system wasn't there.

When we unpacked it, he saw something important: his daily behaviors had far less to do with motivation than he thought.

Protein worked because it was prepped and easy.
Water failed because it wasn’t properly designed for times like this.

So we redesigned it.

We stacked water with meals, the one rhythm already working. Bottle always visible. Always filled. No thinking required.

Same person. Same goals. Same level of discipline.

Different systems = Different outcomes.

If you plant the same seed in 2 kinds of soil —
One with sun, water, nutrients.
One in dry, shaded ground.

Do you expect the same plant?

We love to blame the seed.

But most of the time, it’s the soil.

Humans aren’t plants but most of our behaviors are surprisingly environmental.

Over to you, dear reader,

Next time, when you question your discipline (or someone else's), ask a better question:

What system does this behavior need to succeed?

What habit keeps “failing” you right now, and what would change if you stopped fixing you and started designing the soil?

But what do you do when you’re accountable for the result and you can’t control the process? How do you shift your attention then? Do you need to? Can you?

A sales team leader asked me this at a Mindset Gym workshop I did yesterday, where we learned some cognitive skills to deal with life's challenges better.

“YOU have to hit the numbers. But the work that drives those numbers isn’t done by you.”

That’s a tough one in life.

You want to raise a child well but you can’t control what the child does.
You want your business to grow but you can’t control the market, the customer, or even your team.
You’re responsible. But not in control.

So what do you do then?

You shift your attention to the only place where your power lives:
your ability to change your attitudes, your effort, your actions.

If I can’t control the outcome directly, I upgrade the inputs I can influence.

You learn how to motivate better.
How to teach more clearly.
How to delegate with clear expectations.
How to model the behavior you want to see.

You can get better at reading the market.
Better at listening to customers.
Better at building systems that make the right action easier for others.

Instead of burning energy being frustrated that people, markets, and children don’t follow your plan.

Frustration feels justified.
Focus on doing better is more useful.

I’ve helped many clients lose weight after years of struggle. One of the biggest shifts we accomplished wasn’t discipline. It was attention - what they stopped focusing on and what they started working on instead.

There’s no point getting angry at the scale.
No point getting angry at yourself for not following “the perfect plan.”

A better question is:

What can I learn?
What can I adjust?
How can I redesign my systems so next week works better than this one for the person I am and the life I have?

When you can’t control the entire process, you work on improving what you can, while letting go of the rest.

That’s harder work.
It demands skill building, reflection, humility, acceptance of the imperfect self and the imperfect world.

And it’s exactly what accelerates your growth🌱

Shifting your focus to what you control doesn’t reduce responsibility.
It increases it.

Because now the question becomes:

If you can’t change them, how will you change what you do?

Over to you, dear reader,

Where are you still spinning your wheels, frustrated at outcomes and people, when you could be upgrading the actions and systems that can shape them (and you)?

A very common sentence to hear in your head.
A very common sentence to hear in a coaching session.

And a very reliable way to hand your emotional life over to circumstances you don’t control and be forever unhappy with something.

You know the phrase, “Happiness is an inside job.”

Nice on a mug. Harder to practice in real life.

In those moments, when things you don’t want land on your plate, and you can’t change them - that’s where you’ll see whether it’s a skill you have, or just a phrase you like.

Sometimes life looks like this:

A lawsuit many things depend on dragging on for years.
A promotion you didn’t get, a job you lost.
A business idea crushed by new regulations.
A diagnosis that changes how you have to live your life from now on.
A job you are stuck in with people you don’t enjoy working with.
A place you don’t love living in.
Someone walking away and leaving a hole in your chest.

Things happen.
Things you don’t want will happen. Many times.

And it’s in this exact moment, not in the easy seasons, that you find out whether “happiness is an inside job” is a skill… or just a phrase on a mug.

This isn’t about putting a fake smile on your face.
It’s not about pretending you’re fine when you’re not.

It’s about learning to separate things you can and can not control, things you can change and things you have to accept, and then honestly asking yourself this question, that I stole from one of the top coaches out there,

“Did I do my best to make myself happy today?”

Not once everything is fixed.
Not once the lawsuit ends.
Not once the person apologizes or changes.
Not once the diagnosis changes or you get better (sometimes you don't).

But now.

With all the mess still on the table.
Without escaping reality.
Without denial.

Did you move your body?
Called someone you love? Somoneone you're grateful for?
Shifted your attention for 20 minutes to music and projects you're excited about?
Did one thing that gave you strength and belief instead of draining you?

Inner peace is not the absence of problems.
It’s the presence of choice inside them.

Over to you, dear reader,

What’s stealing your peace today?
And is it a battle worth fighting, or something to accept so you can redirect your energy toward what can bring more joy?

“God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can and Wisdom to know the difference.”

Even elite leaders, top CEOs struggle with consistency of improving their habits. That's something that blew my mind and didn’t surprise me at the same time.

“And so over the course of a year, everyone, the entire cohort, got better and stayed that way. So then we did two things. We… half the cohort dropped out, and were no longer called by me, and half continued. Well, six months later, guess what happened?
The six… the people who continued [asking daily questions prompted by Lisa's daily call] with it stayed better, and the people who did not continue with it got worse. They did not stay that way.”

This is what Lisa Broderick, a senior executive, a data scientist, a co-author of the book “Permanence: become the person you want to be and stay that way” shared with me on our podcast episode that just came out on Change Wired.

Leaders, top CEOs, high achievers struggle with new habits just like anyone else without a system!
People with resources, intelligence, ambition.

Not because they lacked willpower or were lazy.
Not because they weren’t serious about the change.

Because they have a human brain.

A brain that:

• Forgets what matters when the urgent gets loud, when cognitive capacity is overloaded.

• Conserves energy unless there’s positive, consistent reinforcement or immediate negative consequences.

• Defaults to old habits unless the new ones are easier, visible, and tracked.

Leaders struggle with consistency just like everyone else.

The difference between doing and not isn’t motivation.
It’s structure.

What I’ve learned from Lisa and her research with Marshall Goldsmith, asking some TOP CEOs every day questions that start with “Did I do my best to…[important area of improvement]?

One of the best ways to help a human do their best, despite all the circumstances, is helping them reflect on their personal mission and their capacity to create change.

This 2-minute practice of asking the right, meaningful, engaging questions, what Lisa Broderick and Marshall Goldsmith call “The Daily Questions Method” is designed to do just that.

Remind strivers, achievers, leaders of their capacity to put effort into something important and see it grow, changing their life, work and people around them. When done daily, it creates change that stays.

Over to you dear reader,

Have you tried using some daily reminders or reflections to keep your desired change top of mind?

PS Change Wired podcast episode with Lisa Broderick and more details on the Daily Questions Method is available now on all podcast platforms and here

Most often you fail at change because you start at the middle.

Sometime ago I realized why my sales weren’t clicking.

I was listening to Alex Hormozi talk about “the bridge of skills” The idea is simple: for most complex goals, like sales, you don’t get results until all the pieces are in place. You don't cross the bridge if you miss a brick in the middle.

Sales isn’t one skill. It’s a chain.

Prospecting.
Opening the conversation.
Building rapport.
Doing real problem discovery.
Positioning yourself as an expert.
Proposing the right solution, in the right way, at the right time.

...

Miss one link and the whole thing wobbles. Maybe it works once but it won’t work consistently.

Yesterday, while studying the stages of change in my coaching course, I saw the exact same pattern.

Change is not one act.
It’s a sequence.

Each stage requires its own tools, mindset, and skill set. When the conditions for every stage are met, all bricks are in place - change happens and you get to the other side transformed.

One of the most important roles of a coach is helping a client to move through those stages faster and more prepared, more strategic, from pre-contemplation (not even sure change is needed and there's a problem) all the way to maintenance.

I called it:

THE BRIDGE OF CHANGE 🌉

If you want lasting change, you don’t leap.
You build every step.

Brick by brick.

1. Precontemplation

You need awareness.

Awareness of the problem.
Awareness of the cost of staying the same.
Awareness of how it affects your future, your work, your relationships.

This is the “why bother?” stage.

Without this, action is like a passing cloud, comes and goes as the winds change.

Why do you want to get healthier? Why do you want to get better at writing or sales? What "fitter" will do for your life? What will be negative about your life if you don't do this change?

2. Contemplation

Now you weigh the pros and cons.

Do the benefits of changing outweigh the discomfort? (For you)
Is this aligned with who you want to become?

Change has to feel like identity building, not punishment.

If it’s not personally meaningful, you won’t sustain it. Your brain is always asking, "What's in it for me?"

Are you ready to pay the "price" of getting there? 

3. Planning

Here’s where you design.

Small, concrete steps.
Tools. Goals setting.
Environment adjustments.
People who support you.
First visible moves.

This stage builds confidence, committment and preparation. You start seeing yourself crossing that bridge. You get all the building material, learn about the construction process.

No vague intentions. Specific moves. Your mean it this time! You set yourself up for success.

4. Action

Now you practice.

Not once. Not when you feel like it.

Consistently. For months.

You eliminate triggers for old habits.
You design rewards for new ones.
You manage urges and cracings, you learn from mistakes as a part of your journey.
You shape your environment and social circle to support the new identity.

This is where most people try to start.

Without the earlier bricks.

And then they crash.

5. Maintenance

The behavior becomes automatic.

It’s not a struggle.
It’s just who you are now.

No constant temptation. No daily internal debate.

Just do it :) It's part of your life. This is how my clients wake up doing all the right things feeling like no work at all.

There's power in understanding this process:

You stop trying to jump to Action when you haven’t built Awareness.
You stop forcing discipline when you haven’t built Meaning or Tools and Systems.
You stop blaming yourself when what’s missing is structure.

...

At each stage you build skill.
You build systems.
You learn.
You grow more capable.

The bridge gets stronger. And then you make it to the other side and the land of happily ever after.

Over to you, dear reader,

What are you trying to change right now? What stage of change are you in? And what brick do you need to put in place to cross that bridge to lasting transformation?

We talk a lot about how terrible our attention spans have become.

How we can’t focus.
How we forget things.
How everything slips our minds.

We know our attention is fragile. We know it can be hijacked in seconds.

But what I find interesting that we rarely use that fact on purpose.

Rarely use it to shift our emotional state.
To interrupt an urge, the craving. To stress less about difficult people or something challenging in our life.
To zoom out and act from the long-term instead of chasing short-term relief.

Yesterday a client asked me:

“How do you shift your negative feelings when you have to spend time with people you don’t necessarily like? Or when you’re stuck in situations you can’t escape? Situations that stress you out?”

I told him my dentist story.

When I’m at the dentist, no matter how you frame it, it’s not pleasant.
And yes, mindfulness is powerful. Presence matters.

But in that chair?
Mentally and emotionally, I don’t want to be present. I want to be somewhere else.

And I can.

You can time and space-travel anytime you want.

Attention management isn’t just about focusing on the here and now.
It’s also about deliberately focusing somewhere else when “now” isn’t serving your wellbeing.

So when I’m in that chair, I imagine the beach.
A sunset.
Ice-cream.
Good company.

I train my visualization muscle.

The discomfort feels more distant.
Time moves faster.
My body relaxes.

It’s not denial of the present.
It’s re-direction of my attention to where it serves me best.

You can do the same with difficult people, or that challenging transition in your life or work.

Think in 10 hours.
10 days.
10 months.

This will be over.

Feel how fleeting it is. Feel the future relief in advance.
It shrinks your present irritation.

If in less than an hour, or even a few days, this will be over, perhaps, you can start feeling like it's over right now.

Or if you’re in a hard transition — career, life, identity — borrow strength from your past.

Remember the times you figured things out.
The times you survived.
The times you made things better.

Let the past support the present self, borrow that confidence to take the next step.

There was a moment that made this very clear to me.

I saw a child crying hysterically because the parent said they would get ice-cream later🍦

I caught myself thinking, “Why are kids so dramatic about so many tiny things?”

Then I remembered: a complex understanding of time develops around age four or five. Before that, “later” barely exists.

For a child, now is everything.

Just like for cats and dogs.

We adults aren’t that different either.

We call it Present Bias.

We overvalue now.
We overreact to now.
We forget that later is coming and it's not the end of the world.

Optimal mental health isn’t always about being fully present.

Sometimes it’s about self-distancing, a very effective emotional regulation technique.

Zooming out.
Spatial travel.
Time travel.
Imagining how a wiser friend would view this moment.

Checking out strategically can reduce stress, regulate cravings, and help you choose differently now for a better future to come.

Over to you, dear reader,

I’ve decided to take my public speaking and writing seriously this year.

Especially writing.

And I know improvement comes down to 2 things:

Practice.
And feedback.

If you only practice and never get concrete feedback from someone who can name what’s working and what’s not, you’ll improve… but slowly. You’ll get stuck often. You’ll repeat your blind spots.

But practice still comes first.

Without practice, there’s nothing to give feedback on.
Just like reflection doesn’t work without actually living the life, doing the imperfect work first.

And then the most important question becomes,
What exactly should I practice? And how do I make it consistent? To get the results and my growth?

This is what I help my clients figure out.
And it’s what I need to do for myself and my writing.

Over the past 18 years, studying coaching craft, reading over a hundred books on behavior change, I’ve learned 3 very simple questions that help you figure out what exactly you need to practice and how to make it happen consistently faster.

1. The Miracle Question

Often used in therapy:

Imagine a miracle happened overnight and you got what you wanted. How would you notice? What would you see?

Let’s take writing.

If the miracle happened, I’d see more engagement.
People sharing it. Commenting. Saving it.
Telling me it was useful.

When I read it back, it would feel clear.
Easy to grasp.
It would stir something.
You’d want to do something after reading it. And you'd have all the tools to take action.

That tells me what to practice.

• Storytelling to evoke emotion

• Concrete examples to stay relatable

• Bringing it back to the reader: why it matters to you

• Clean structure, clear takeaways, next steps, simple tools

Now I have something specific to model.
Something I can ask ChatGPT or a good writer to critique.
Something I can break into sub-skills.

And, most importantly, something I can measure, to see whether what I do works or not.

2. The Constraint Question

Why don’t you already do it?

This one shifts your brain into systems thinking.

Very often, once you remove the REAL constraints, the desired behavior often happens on its own.

Writing?

• Being too abstract → not relatable

• Being too wordy → hard to grasp

• No through-line → scattered focus

• No skimmable structure → hard to act on

Eating well?

• No healthy food available

• Not knowing how to shop or cook

• Family habits pulling in the opposite direction

When you list the obstacles, you usually find something surprising:

It’s rarely a personal flaw.
It’s usually a system design flaw.

The problem isn’t you.
It’s what's around you that makes your habits happen.

So you don’t need to reinvent yourself.
You need to redesign the environment so the new practice can win.

How do I make the new action easier than the old?

3. The "Bright Spot" Question

Where is it already working?

This is learning from your accidental successes.

That email someone sent saying your piece was helpful.
What worked there?

That week you were consistent with eating well.
What did you do differently?

Those few nights you actually went to bed on time.
How did that happen, even with the workload, racing thoughts, and not being a good sleeper?

Your own small successes are clues.
Proof that the capability exists.

Your job is to reverse-engineer them. That's the best map of your growth journey.

I’m applying these 3 questions to my writing habit.

Not to become some polished, flawless version of me.

But to build systems that help me get better as I already am.

Over to you dear reader, what do you want to get better at? Try asking these 3 questions to help you build systems to succeed as you, not some miracle version of you.

As I was wrapping up my talk on systems for behavior change at scale — turning strategic aspirations into lived results — at the Align & Inspire offsite with the Department of Economic Growth and Tourism, one participant asked:

“Angela, if we don’t use a system like this, what’s the risk of failure of our initiatives?”

“Research says 75% of change initiatives fail globally due to the disconnect between plans and action. So I’d say that’s a pretty good estimation.”

75% failure rate. Smartest people involved. Billions of budgets spent.

Research also says about 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail in the first month.

Different contexts. Same problem.

Only a small percentage of people, and organizations, manage to translate goals into lasting results.

Why is that?🤔

In 18 years of coaching, 25 years of trying to improve myself in ways that last, reading hundreds of articles, books, listening to podcasts, studying behavioral science, here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s not about willpower.
It’s not about motivation.
It’s not about “imperfect humans.”

It’s about the absence of a system designed for human behavior.

Change works quite well, and lasts, when:

1. You can answer this question:
“If I were to videotape you making this change, what would I see?”

If it’s not visible, it’s not actionable.
If it’s not specific, it’s not measurable.
If it’s not concrete, it’s not gonna be real.

2. You make it easy, remembered, and rewarded.

Eliminate friction.
Prepare in advance.
Don’t rely on memory, build prompts.
Don’t rely on motivation, design incentives all the way.
Acknowledge progress. Involve others.

Your brain is: Lazy. Forgetful. Self-interested.

It constantly asks:
“What’s in it for me?”

So design for the brain you have, not the one you wish you had.

3. You measure what matters.

There’s a reason the phrase “what gets measured gets managed” has survived for decades.

Measurement creates attention.
Attention changes behavior.
Self-monitoring and being watched by others increase follow-through.

We try harder when we know someone is watching.
Even when that someone is us.

There are, of course, many more nuances to lasting change. Decades of research went into that.

Cognitive biases.
Our energy fluctuations.
Motivation dips.
Confusion.
Misalignment.
Ego.

...

I don’t pretend to know it all.

But the purpose of my work, whether it’s a government offsite, culture transformation, or 1:1 coaching, isn’t perfection, or knowing it all.

It’s progress towards better.

One habit.
One behavior.
One daily action at a time.

Helping people see what completely changed my life:

Everything you want: in work, leadership, health, culture, personal growth - depends on something incredibly simple.

The daily actions you take, daily action that depends far more on good systems than on perfect humans.

Over to you, dear reader,

What do you want to create or change this year? And what system will make that action reality-proof, even on your worst day?

What differentiates the truly successful people I’ve worked with from everyone else?

What’s different in their mind when things get hard?
How do they push through when most people stop?

A new client asked me that this week.

And Friedrich Nietzsche said it better than most of us ever could somewhere in the 19th century:

“He, who has a strong enough why will bear any how.”

The leaders who endure.
The founders who survive the chaos.
The people who reinvent themselves more than once.

They have a why that’s bigger than their challenge, their discomfort and their deepest fears.

They don’t push through because they are superhuman.
They push through because stopping would violate something deeply personal, it would be destroying a part of who they believe they are.

For me, it’s simple.

I don’t want to reach the end of my life knowing I left potential unused.
I don’t want to look back and see places where I played small, and underlived.
And I genuinely believe every person is a superhero in disguise. If we unlock more human potential, we build a better world, the one with more capable, happier, thriving people solving problems for generations to come.

That’s my double why:
No regret.
And contribution beyond myself - building systems to unlock more human potential, so everyone gets to live their most extraordinary life, fulfilled and fully realized, with no regret on their deathbed.

Look at the people who build great things despite all odds.

Elon Musk decided early that energy sustainability and humanity being stuck on one planet were existential threats. His work is rooted in that lens, survival and expansion, Tesla and SpaceX, SolarCity.

Jeff Bezos built his career on a regret-minimization framework. He asked himself: “At 80, what would I regret not trying?” The answer wasn’t the safe job. It was the crazy idea of an online everything store. Later, with Blue Origin, it became about expanding humanity’s future beyond Earth.

Sara Blakely kept going because she was on a mission to empower women (starting with herself first),  not just through products and better-looking butts, but through normalizing failure and doubt as well. And succeeding despite it. She publicly shares her mistakes as part of the mission.

Different personalities.
Different industries.
Same pattern.

A big enough why makes the how survivable.

Recently, a client in a painful career transition told me, “For the first time in my life, I feel like doing absolutely nothing.”

That’s not laziness.
That’s a loss of direction. Loss of why.

When the destination is foggy, the brain conserves energy. It won’t activate “go get it mode” without a compelling "prize" on the other side. Motivation isn’t magic. It’s a clear direction plus fulfilling meaning.

If the why disappears, the drive follows.

So, dear reader, if you don’t feel particularly gritty right now…
If you’re stuck, procrastinating, circling the same doubts…

Don’t start with discipline.

Start with WHY.

What would make the struggle worth it for you?
What regret are you unwilling to live with?
What future would feel like stealing from yourself, if you never attempted to live it?

What do you care enough to suffer for, feeling like it's the best ride of your life?

That’s where your perseverance, your grit, your next level is hiding.

So, what's your why, that's stronger than any challenge?

PS Here’s a good book with practical exercises on that by Simon Sinek team “Find Your Why”

Action is above all.

I’m finalizing a few free trials with clients right now.
Most of them came in asking for one thing: clarity on how to move forward.

What surprised me (and didn’t) was this:
The clients who gained the most clarity were the ones who took the most action on what we discussed.

Not a perfectly planned action. Just any action.

All of them realized what was the biggest value, the missing piece:
Finally taking consistent action on things they’d been thinking about often for years.

Yes, self-knowledge matters.
Yes, you do need to reflect.
You do need to understand your values, your why, the difference you want to make in the world, what a deeply fulfilling life could look like.

But even that understanding, that clarity doesn’t come before action.
Action comes first.

You move first to experience.
Then you reflect, and you learn.
Then you make better, more intentional choices next time.

Wisdom lives in the actions you’re avoiding.
And if you want something different, you have to do something different.

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Right now, my own work feels chaotic.
I’m trying many things.
Different clients. Different assignments.
No neat storyline yet.

And that’s exactly what I need.

I need the chaos of action to reflect on it.
To see what fits. To learn what works.
To choose the next path with more real-life insight, not more books.

You take action, you learn through reflection. 
You grow through challenges you don’t avoid.
You make better decisions because of the imperfect ones you already made.

You can't learn from an unlived life expecting deeper self-knowledge.

I’m looking for a long-term place to live. I’ve seen many places that didn’t work. And because of this, I know what will.

Trying a lot made me fast and decisive.
No “I’ll think about it.”
It’s either a hell yes, or a no.

If you are on a journey of self or work re-invention, there’s no way around one thing - taking action that might (and often won’t) work. Can you act without having a perfect answer?

Over to you, dear reader,

What are you waiting to be clear about? And what action can you take today to explore the options instead of waiting for the right plan?