Change Wired

Ever wonder why willpower fails you  more at night? Why some days you're laser-focused and others you can't concentrate for five minutes?  The answer lies not in psychology, but in biology.  Your brain chemistry literally transforms throughout the day.  That morning brain, charged with cortisol and dopamine, is a focus machine ready for complex work. By evening, different neurochemicals dominate, making discipline nearly impossible but creativity more accessible. Fighting these natural rhythms is like swimming upstream – exhausting and counterproductive.  This episode unpacks the science behind working with your brain's biology instead of against it. We explore how top performers aren't superhuman willpower machines but strategic schedulers who align tasks with their optimal biological windows.  Your brain, consuming 20% of your energy while being only 2% of your body weight, constantly calculates whether activities justify their energy cost. Understanding this calculation revolutionizes how we approach habits and productivity.  Become aware of your unique biological rhythm, allowing you to design your ideal schedule and multiply your effectiveness while reducing effort.  Achieving more with less effort starts here.  As Stephen Kotler says, "Biology scales, psychology doesn't" – meaning biological realities will always trump psychological theories when it comes to sustainable performance.  Ready to stop fighting your brain and start leveraging its natural strengths? Listen now and discover how working with your biology can transform your productivity, habits, and performance with significantly less struggle.    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

What if there's never gonna be a perfect plan and total clarity?  On today's episode Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, the author of "Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World", shares how tiny experiments can transform our approach to life, work, and meaningful change without rigid goals or predetermined paths. Her experimental mindset offers a powerful alternative to traditional planning - designing low-risk experiments to uncover your path one step at a time.  We will touch on:  From shiny to misaligned. Anne-Laure shares how a great job and smart teammates still left her internally “off”, impacting health and relationships - so she stepped off the ladder.  The risky jump (and reframe). A first startup “because that’s what you do” created avoidable financial stress. The second transition flipped the script: keep some income for safety and treat the next step as an experiment, not a bet-the-farm goal.  A scientist’s lens on identity change. Before you “optimize,” observe: practice 24 hours of self-anthropology (field notes without judgement) to notice energy, curiosity, and friction points.  Tiny Experiments in one line: “I will [action] for [duration].” Short, low-risk trials beat vague, year-long resolutions.  Bring the team. Run a shared “lab cycle” (30 days). Success = new knowledge, not a binary win/lose.  Mindful productivity > hustle. You’re not a calendar robot; protect moments and engineer creative windows with simple rituals (music, stretch, tea, micro-walks).  Procrastination is a signal, not a sin. Use Head/Heart/Hand to diagnose: misaligned rationale, low emotional pull, or missing skills/tools/support - then fix the right thing.  Generativity vs. Legacy. Aim to make a small, present-day impact you can see now; legacy may emerge as a by-product.  ... and so much more!  Ready to design your first tiny experiment?  Catch the full Change Wired episode with Anne-Laure Le Cunff and explore practical tools for mindful productivity, career transitions, and thriving in a goal-obsessed world.   Links & resources mentioned  Anne-Laure’s bio & personal site: https://anne-laure.net  Ness Labs (newsletter & articles): https://nesslabs.com/newsletter  Book: Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World Amazon  Target  Audible.com  Starter read on Mindful Productivity: “Mindful productivity: a sustainable way to work and think”   Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

Have you ever felt stuck in life or business, unable to make progress despite having what seems like a perfect plan?   This espisode is definitely for you then!  The problem might not be your goal, but rather your attachment to how you think you should get there.  Life isn't a clearly mapped journey but more like walking through fog - we can glimpse our destination in the distance, but the path only reveals itself as we take each step forward. This insight transformed how I approach challenges, from personal uncertainty to business strategy.  Netflix co-founder Mark Randolph perfectly captures this wisdom with his advice to "fall in love with the problem, not the solution."  The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders understand that rigid plans rarely survive contact with reality. Like Navy SEALs who follow the terrain when it conflicts with their map, true progress comes from adapting to what's actually happening rather than what we thought would happen. This is why companies that endure for decades constantly evolve while maintaining their core purpose.  The experimental approach to life and business follows a simple 5-step framework you will learn in this episode. This scientific mindset removes the emotional attachment to particular solutions that often keeps us spinning our wheels when we should be pivoting.  Whether you're building a business, improving your health, or developing relationships, treating life as a series of experiments rather than a fixed plan creates freedom to evolve and ultimately find what actually works.  What experiment will you design this week to move past your current challenge?  Share your thoughts, subscribe to hear our upcoming episode featuring a Google expert on experimental career design, and join our community of change-makers ready to embrace the uncertainty of the fog while steadily moving forward.    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

What if everything you thought about changing habits is backward?  Most of us believe high performance comes from discipline, willpower, and pushing ourselves harder. But what if your environment shapes your behavior far more than your intentions ever could?  What if high performers are just better at putting themselves in a situation to win?  Drawing from recent conversations with behavioral scientists and my own experience as an executive coach, I've discovered something revolutionary: the secret to lasting behavior change isn't trying harder, it's designing smarter systems around you.  Humans possess a unique superpower that sets us apart from every other species on earth. While animals must adapt to their environments, we can consciously create environments that transform us into the people we want to become.  Through personal examples, including how I broke a decades-long lip-picking habit overnight, I reveal the 3-part habit loop that governs our behavior. By manipulating these elements we can achieve effortless change where willpower repeatedly fails. Research consistently shows that environmental design strategies work dramatically better than information or motivation alone.  This isn't just about personal habits.  The principles apply equally to leading teams, raising children, or influencing friends. As Charles Duhigg's work shows, approximately 40% of our behaviors are habitual, and even our non-habitual actions are largely triggered by environmental cues. By shifting your focus from changing yourself to changing your surroundings, you'll unlock a more effective path to transformation.  Ready to redesign your environment and watch your habits transform? Listen now and discover how to leverage the science of behavior change to create lasting results in your life and work.    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

What if your greatest strengths are secretly holding you back as a leader?  In this illuminating conversation with Dr. Martin Dubin, we uncover the hidden blind spots that prevent even the most successful leaders from reaching their full potential and making forward progress.  We all have blind spots, patterns we don’t notice in ourselves that limit our growth.In this episode of Change Wired, Dr. Martin Dubin, clinical-psychologist-turned-entrepreneur-turned-leadership coach, and author of Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader, shares why blindspots are often the flip side of our greatest strengths, and how leaders can build self-awareness to avoid getting stuck in default behaviors that no longer serve them.  🔑 Main Takeaways  The 6 Blindspots Leaders Face:  Identity – when your role evolves but your self-concept doesn’t  Motive – not seeing the true drivers behind your decisions  Traits – overplaying strengths until they become weaknesses  Emotions – failing to recognize and regulate your own or others’ emotions  Intellect – relying too heavily on one type of intelligence  Behavior – blind spots in communication, influence, and priorities  Strengths become blind spots when they’re overused in the wrong context.  Metacommunication (communicating about the communication) is a powerful way to clear misunderstandings and align intentions with impact.  Five things only a CEO can do: select the team, shape culture, set strategy, decide priorities, and manage key relationships.  Small tweaks matter more than big transformations - like adjusting decisiveness with guardrails or changing the timing of important decisions.  📚 What You’ll Learn  How to uncover blind spots in your leadership and career.  Why emotions are data and how to use them to guide decisions.  The four kinds of intellect leaders should balance in teams.  Practical strategies to align identity, behavior, and motives with the roles you aspire to.  How to use the Blindspotting framework inside your organization to build more effective teams.  📝 Resources   Book: Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader  Blindspot Assessment: https://www.blindspotting.com/assessment  Website: martindubin.com  Connect with Marty on LinkedIn  👤 Marty's Bio:  Martin Dubin is a clinical psychologist, serial entrepreneur, business coach, and adviser to C-suite executives and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. He founded and sold a multimillion-dollar health-care company, served as Vice President at Anthem BCBS, and later became a partner at RHR International, working with Fortune 500 leaders and top venture capital firms.  Marty’s latest book, Blindspotting distills decades of experience into a practical framework for identifying and overcoming leadership blindspots.   Want to grow as a leader faster? Been stuck and not sure why?Tune in and start blinspotting!  Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

Why do our intentions so rarely transform into consistent actions? What prevents our aspirations from becoming achievements?  The answer lies not in willpower or knowledge, but in a crucial missing link that's often overlooked in our pursuit of consistent behavior change.  In this enlightening exploration of human motivation, we uncover the fundamental truth about why behavior doesn't stick until we see the connection between what we need to do and what we deeply care about.   While Simon Sinek popularized "starting with why," we rarely apply this principle to the small, daily actions that ultimately build the next level of ourselves.  Drawing from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and years of coaching experience, we examine why educational systems and workplace training programs frequently fail to engage learners. The brain simply doesn't prioritize information or actions without understanding their relevance to our personal values and aspirations. This explains why we can memorize facts for tests but quickly forget them, or why we initially commit to fitness goals but struggle to maintain them.  Through practical examples, we demonstrate how connecting habits like quality sleep, nutrition, and movement to deeper values, such as being present for your children, advancing your career, or maintaining independence as you age, transforms these actions from obligations into priorities. This isn't a one-time exercise but requires ongoing reinforcement, like taking a shower or brushing your teeth.  Whether you're struggling with personal habits, leading organizational change, or simply curious about human behavior, this episode offers a powerful framework for making change stick.  By repeatedly drawing bright lines between your actions and your deepest values, you'll find yourself naturally motivated to do what matters most - no discipline struggles required.  Ready to bridge the gap between your intentions and actions? Listen now and discover how practiving your "why" can transform everything.    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

Ever feel frustrated when people don't seem to "get" what you're saying? The gap between what you mean and what others hear isn't about your words - it's about metacommunication, the powerful yet often overlooked dimension of human connection.  This episode unveils the science behind why we're frequently misunderstood.  Astonishingly, research shows only 10% of our meaning comes from our actual words, while 30% derives from tone and a whopping 60% from body language. When I deliver feedback like "Your presentation lacked technical depth," the way I frame it completely transforms how it lands - as crushing criticism or as supportive guidance.  Metacommunication is communication about communication, the signals that tell others how to interpret your message. It's what separates a comment that breaks trust from one that builds it. Through vivid examples and research-backed insights, I break down why even smart, articulate people struggle to be understood, and why simply knowing about metacommunication isn't enough to master it.  The heart of this episode is a practical 5-point checklist for effective metacommunication that you can implement immediately. Each element builds on the next, creating a framework that works whether you're leading a team, building relationships, or navigating difficult conversations.  Being understood isn't everything, but it's the first step to anything meaningful.  Master these techniques, and you'll transform not just how you communicate, but how you connect, influence, and lead.  Ready to be understood - truly understood - for perhaps the first time? Listen now, and discover the metacommunication advantage that changes everything.    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

What if your greatest strengths are secretly sabotaging your success?  This eye-opening exploration delves into the fascinating paradox at the heart of personal development - how our natural talents, when overused or misapplied, become the very blind spots holding us back.  We'll explore the concept through analyzing my CliftonStrengths 34 report - not just learning to see how your blind spots can hold you back but also how you can build simple systems to prevent that from happening.  Drawing from Martin Dubin's groundbreaking book "Blind Spotting" and my personal revelations from the Clifton Strengths Assessment, I share how my top strengths - Learner, Strategic, and Activator - create both extraordinary opportunities and unexpected challenges.  As someone who thrives on continuous knowledge acquisition, I've had to recognize when my love of learning becomes an impediment to action or creates friction in relationships. My strategic thinking allows for rapid pattern recognition but can appear as criticism or confuse others when I don't properly explain my thought process.  Most revealing is my Activator tendency, turning thoughts into immediate action propels progress but leads to hasty decisions I later regret. The practical systems I've developed to counterbalance these tendencies have transformed my effectiveness.  Unlike weaknesses we can typically identify, blind spots remain invisible without external reflection. That's where tools like coaching, assessment instruments, and even AI assistants become invaluable mirrors, revealing patterns we cannot see ourselves. The beauty of this approach lies in its elegance - you don't need to fundamentally change who you are, just create strategic guardrails that harness your natural talents while preventing their downsides.  Share, review, and consider discussing this episode with friends or family to help each other identify blind spots and build systems for more fulfilling, rewarding lives.  What strength might be holding you back without your knowledge?    Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you keep making choices that don't align with your goals, despite your best intentions? The answer might surprise you. And it's not about willpower or discipline.  What happened when my family's Wi-Fi unexpectedly died during my parents' visit revealed a profound truth about human behavior. My father, who had been refusing physical activities for days due to arthritis, suddenly suggested a bike ride.  Behavioral scientists have a term for this phenomenon: choice architecture. Research shows that modifying your environment is dramatically more effective at changing behavior than simply trying to exercise more discipline.   This isn't just theoretical, governments worldwide have implemented these principles to encourage everything from increased savings to healthier lifestyles, not by convincing people intellectually but by making the desired choices easier to make. The most powerful environmental factor? Your social circle. The people you surround yourself with shape your decisions even more strongly than your physical surroundings, which explains why joining a group with respected peers is more effective than any solo willpower effort.  The most common mistake I see among intelligent, accomplished individuals is overestimating their capacity for consistent willpower. No matter how smart you are, your brain is fundamentally designed to conserve energy, which means you'll almost always default to the path of least resistance.  The solution isn't to double down on discipline but to strategically redesign your environment so the right choice becomes the ONLY available choice.  Share this episode with someone who needs to hear this message and help us create more positive impact by rating and reviewing the podcast on your favorite platform.  Let's get wired for change!  Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant

Ever wondered why changing habits feels like an uphill battle?What if culture change, product design, or even personal transformation wasn’t guesswork but a process as reliable as engineering?In this episode of Change Wired, I sit down with behavioral scientist, author, and “empathetic scientific activist” Matt Wallaert to talk about the science - and the humanity - behind designing change that actually happens.We get into everything from M&Ms to meeting culture, VR boxing to corporate ethics, and why fuzzy words in leadership are killing your results. Matt breaks down how all behavior results from competing forces. Matt demonstrates how small environmental changes can create massive behavioral shifts.Perhaps most fascinating is Matt's insight into organizational change. While companies obsess over changing customer behavior, they often neglect internal behavior design. "Fuzzy leadership language" about wanting "more engaged employees" or "better culture" fails because it doesn't translate to specific, observable behaviors. Matt provides a framework for creating workplaces where people thrive by applying the same rigor to internal behaviors that companies apply to customer acquisition.Whether you're looking to transform personal habits, lead organizational change, or design products that genuinely improve lives, this episode offers effective frameworks for making behavior change systematic, ethical, and effective.We dive into:Why defining specific behaviors is the missing first step in almost every change effortThe difference between naïve behavior change and evidence-based designHow to think about promoting vs. inhibiting pressures (and why it matters more than motivation)Real-life examples from parenting, product design, and internal culture changeEthics in behavioral science: intention–action gaps, autonomy, and long-term thinkingHow leaders can stop hiding behind values statements and start engineering cultures that workIt’s practical. It’s funny in places. And it might just make you rethink the way you design… everything.BIO, Links & Resources MentionedMatt’s Website: mattwallaert.com Free Behavioral Science Course: SIDE Model Training (recently made free)Matt’s book: Start at the End: How to Build Products That Create ChangeConnect with Matt on LinkedInFor almost 20 years, Matt Wallaert has been applying behavioral science to practical problems.  After leaving academia, his career as an executive lead from startups (Thrive, Churnless) to the Fortune 500 (Microsoft, CapGemini) and back again, before founding BeSci.io (Behavioral Science in organizations), where he and the world’s most experienced behavioral science leaders help companies grow applied behavioral science capabilities within their organizations.These days, Matt is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at Oceans, helping to bring high-quality job opportunities to international markets so that talented people don’t have to emigrate to grow. More about Matt Text Me Your Thoughts and IdeasSupport the showBrought to you by Angela Shurina Behavior-First, Executive and Optimal Performance Coach 360, Change Leadership & Culture Transformation Consultant