You can be incredibly driven and still be held back by the one thing you keep postponing: recovery.

After DMing 50 founders, business owners, and leaders to ask what limits their performance, I got a surprisingly consistent answer: rest, recovery, and sleep.

Not strategy. Not hustle. The basics we all “know,” but rarely protect on the calendar.

Drawing from the book *Peak Performance* by Steve Magnus, I share the work-rest rhythm that shows up again and again in research and elite training.

We also dig into the Roger Bannister story and why breakthrough moments often arrive during the incubation phase, not while you’re grinding.

Then I get personal about what it feels like to wake up flat, lose creativity, and think you might want to quit, and why that’s often a sign to rest, not to walk away.

You’ll leave with practical recovery tools to reset high performance.

If you’re chasing your next level goal, this is your reminder to build a rest strategy that matches it.

Subscribe, share this with a high performer who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find a healthier path to peak performance.

Find the full protocol on my Substack Blog: "I asked 50 founders what’s killing their performance. They all said the same thing."

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

Willpower isn’t your real problem. Your environment is.

I’m Angela Shurina, and I’m diving into habit formation, aka your brain's automations, through the lens of high performance, neuroscience, and a simple principle I use daily: zonality, or assigning clear locations to specific behaviors so your brain stops debating and starts executing.

We talk about why habits are the brain’s automations and how automating more of your routine frees up limited brain power for the work that actually matters: leading, creating, training, building, and handling surprises without falling apart.

I also unpack decision fatigue. When your mental energy gets spent on constant micro-choices, the big challenges hit harder and you end up surviving instead of performing.

The core tool is context-dependent automation, the way your brain links a setting to a behavior and flips into “do the thing” mode with less conscious effort.

That’s why the gym makes workouts more likely, why offices can instantly trigger focus, and why a dedicated meditation corner can calm you down before you take a single breath.

You’ll leave with practical, step-by-step examples that make consistency feel automatic.

If you want better habits without more grinding, listen through, pick one habit you’ve been struggling to make stick, and design its dedicated place today.

Subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can build habits that actually last.

Connect with Angela on LinkedIn: Angela Shurina https://www.linkedin.com/in/angela-shurina/

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

In 1985, a 13-year-old boy watched his father sell the family house, move them into a caravan, and start training to cycle around the world — at a time when South Africa was closed off from most of the planet. The trip never happened. But something about that audacity never left him.

That boy is Rashid Toefy.

By the time he sat down with Angela for this episode of Change Wired, he'd already lived what feels like several lifetimes: gap years in London and Washington, DC (where he watched Nelson Mandela walk free and his own country begin to transform), a career built almost by accident in the youth travel industry, a "six-month" move to Amsterdam with his new wife that turned into three years traveling to a different country every month across 30+ countries, seven years as CEO of the Cape Town International Convention Centre starting at just 37, a bruising stretch as an entrepreneur opening the African division of a Geneva-based global company, a pivot into government where his job today is creating jobs across an entire regional economy — and, at 50 years old, a PhD completed in three years on how leaders make decisions inside a crisis.

Rashid and Angela cover all of it — the exhilarating parts and the hard ones.

Rashid opens up about growing up under apartheid, having to split from friends onto separate train carriages because of the color of their skin, and meeting Nelson Mandela as a student leader. He talks about 9/11 hitting while he had a hundred South African students on exchange visas stranded in the US. And he's disarmingly honest that he sees a therapist and works through personal challenges "day by day" — because, as he puts it, trauma either shrinks you or grows you, and which one happens is partly a choice you make.

What you'll learn in this episode:

• Why Rashid believes you can't plan a career from day one — you can only make sense of opportunities as they come, and trust your gut once the fundamentals are in place
• What "sense-making" means, and how it differs from both blind risk-taking and overthinking every decision
• The one question his first-ever coach, Karina Anderson, taught him to ask after any setback — and how it reframes adversity into fuel
• How 3 philosophies from 3 different cultures — Japan's Kaizen (continuous improvement), China's guanxi (relationships before business), and South Africa's own Ubuntu ("I am because we are") — combine in his approach to leadership
• Why Rashid believes refusing to settle for mediocrity isn't about ego — it's about what we owe to the world we're passing on

... and so much more!

Wow, in such a short episode it feels like we've covered a whole era!

Connect with Rashid:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rashid-toefy-phd-5b09689/ — he's genuinely open to people reaching out about his leadership philosophy, his journey, or his PhD thesis on crisis leadership.

About Rashid Toefy:

Rashid Toefy is the Deputy Director-General in the Department of Economic Development and Tourism, with the mandate of creating jobs in the Western Cape economy. Rashid has served as the Chief Executive Officer of the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC) and has worked extensively in the travel and tourism industry, both in South Africa and abroad. He spent three years based in Amsterdam, developing business and marketing strategies for businesses in over 30 countries, working extensively in Central Europe and Latin America. He has a degree in Economics and Environmental Science, as well as an MBA, and has recently completed his PhD, focusing on "How leaders make strategic decisions in crisis conditions." Rashid hates settling for mediocrity and wants to do profound things that impact positively on all those around him.

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

Motivation is a terrible plan and most of us keep learning that lesson the hard way.

When you’re tired, stressed, or not “feeling it,” the real challenge is not willpower, it’s the story running in your head and whether you know how to work with it without sliding into burnout.

We get extremely practical with 6 questions you can start using in the moments when your resistance to do the work shows up.

Write them down.

Put them on a sticky note.

Put them on your phone's screensaver.

We unpack the “what’s so special about tomorrow?” trap, the power of a minimum viable rep (5%, 10%, 20% still counts), and how to make hard tasks easier to start using temptation bundling. We shift into focus and identity: what to think about, who to “hear” in your mind when you need to move, and how imagining two futures can snap you back into action right now.

If you care about consistency, discipline, mindset, productivity, and goal setting for fitness, business, or life, this one gives you a simple framework you can reuse anytime resistance hits.

Subscribe, share this with one person who’s stuck in a yo-yo cycle, and leave a review with the question that helped you most.

Read all the questions on my Substack: https://yourbestcoaching.substack.com/p/what-winners-do-when-they-feel-like

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

Discipline gets all the credit, but your environment does most of the work.

I’m Angela Shurina, and I’m unpacking a simple idea that can change your health, habits, and results fast WITHOUT more discipline.

When you choose the right “everybody,” you stop relying on willpower to do hard things.

If you’ve ever told yourself you just aren’t disciplined enough to work out, eat well, wake up early, or stay consistent with your craft, this conversation is your permission slip to redesign the inputs instead of blaming your character.

We look at the crowd you’re currently copying and ask the uncomfortable question: do you actually want their outcomes? Because “everybody does it” is only a good guideline if you want what everybody gets. We talk about overindulgence culture, the cost of average norms, and why being the odd one out is often the price of real change.

Then we get practical: how to build a better people diet by curating your tribe across different areas of life. 

If you want sustainable behavior change, self-discipline, productivity, and better health and fitness, start by choosing smarter comparisons.

Subscribe, share this with one person who needs a reset, and leave a review with your answer: who is your everybody?

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

When your doctor gives you 3 months to live, what do you do with the company you spent 23 years building? What do you do with your life?

What would crash most people resulted in another successful business venture for Yaron.

What kind of person can do that?

Let's find out!

Yaron Assabi built 1 of South Africa's first e-commerce businesses in 1998 — before most of the country had ever been online. He rode the dot-com wave to a FTSE listing, watched it crash, bought his own company back, and spent the next 2 decades quietly building Digital Solutions Group into 7 specialist businesses serving brands like Nando's, KFC, DStv and Coca-Cola across Africa, the Middle East and the UK.

Then, in April 2021, everything stopped. 3 cancers, diagnosed at once. A family history that had already taken his mother at 39 and his father twenty years later. Doctors gave him 3 months without chemo. He chose to fight it his own way instead — and rebuilt his health, his mindset, and eventually a whole other business, from the ground up.

This episode is the rare kind of conversation that moves fluidly between "how do you scale 7 companies" and "how do you sit with your own mortality and choose to do your own thing" that only Yaron could pull off so well it feels.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• How Yaron decides what to say yes to 
• The shared-services model that lets DSG launch new startups faster every time, without founders having to be good at everything
• Why he believes a business that depends on its founder is a business that hasn't really been built yet — and how to design yours so it can run without you
• The exact morning system Yaron credits with his recovery and the energy that carries him through his day
• What changed in his mind the day he was diagnosed — and why he says fear is just "a false experience appearing real"
• How losing both parents to cancer shaped his relationship with risk, intuition, and not postponing his life
• Yaron's take on AI in the business 
• Why Yaron believes you don't have to sacrifice your wellbeing to build something great — and what changed his mindset

Whether you're building a company, rebuilding your health, or trying to figure out how to do everything - this episode will be your inspiration, breaking many limiting beliefs and fears that are stopping you from Doing Something Great with every day of your life.

Tune in, get inspired - Do Something Great!

About Yaron Assabi

Yaron Assabi is the Founder and Group CEO of Digital Solutions Group (DSG), a South African-founded, globally active group of seven specialist digital businesses spanning customer experience, digital marketing, telecoms, cybersecurity, data and AI, and digital commerce. Since founding the company in 1998 as one of South Africa's first e-commerce ventures, Yaron has grown DSG into a 600+ person group serving 60+ enterprise brands across Africa, the Middle East and the UK, with clients including Nando's, KFC, DStv, Coca-Cola and Unilever. He built and launched one of the world's first mobile commerce transactions in 2000, served as ICT strategist for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and designed the 46664 global HIV/AIDS awareness campaign technology. A 3-time cancer survivor who chose to heal through lifestyle transformation rather than chemotherapy, Yaron also founded Chilled, a plant-based wellness and lifestyle brand born from his own recovery journey. He holds a degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Links mentioned in this episode:

• DSG: www.dsg.co.za
• Chilled: chilled.mobi

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

Your sleep is not “just sleep.

When nights get choppy, it is easy to blame stress, age, or bad luck. I see something else again and again: small, fixable habits that keep people stuck in a tired and wired loop, then they wonder why they wake up at 3 a.m. with a brain that will not shut off.

I walk you through 3 specific, practical sleep protocols I use personally and with clients to improve sleep quality fast.

Yoga Nidra (also called NSDR), a simple brain dump journaling practice, finally, we get concrete about nutrition for sleep: what to eat for dinner to sleep through the night like a baby.

If you struggle with insomnia, racing thoughts at bedtime, frequent wake-ups, or early morning waking, this is a one-week experiment I'd recommend. 

Listen, try the three-step routine tonight, then share this with a friend who needs better sleep and leave a review so more people can find the tools.

What is the biggest thing ruining your sleep right now?

Yoga Nidra: https://youtu.be/M0u9GST_j3s?si=W_gIDXa-auRwSGwC

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

You can do everything “right” and still not get the result on your preferred timeline and that doesn’t mean you’re failing.

Today I’m unpacking the mindset shift that removes so much goal frustration: outcomes don’t owe you a deadline. When you stop demanding that the scale, the KPI dashboard, or the relationship dynamic change on command, you get your power back and start making real progress.

I share a practical, coaching-tested, 5-step goal achieving framework built on goal setting science, motivation, behavioral science, and 18 years of work with ambitious clients.

I also explain why tracking and rewarding actions beats obsessing over outcomes, and how to reflect and adjust without spiraling into self-criticism.

The big takeaway is simple and freeing: obsess over the process like masters do, and let the “masterpiece” arrive as a side effect of consistent work.

If this helps you, subscribe, share it with someone who needs a better process, and leave a rating and review so more people can find the show.

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

The moment you feel stressed, tired, or overwhelmed, do you suddenly “forget” all your healthy plans and slide back into old patterns?

We’re tackling that frustrating loop of falling off the wagon and why it happens across nutrition, fitness, business, and relationships, even for smart, high-achieving people. The problem isn’t knowledge or ambition. It’s that our plan only works in "good weather".

We unpack a deceptively simple mindset from Jim Rohn: “When it’s summer, think winter."

Summer is when motivation is high and routines feel easy. Winter is the inevitable dip: low energy, emotional drain, packed schedules, and decision fatigue.

The breakthrough is learning to use your “summer” days to build resilient systems, habits, and safety nets that protect you in winter, so one hard day doesn’t turn into a week-long spiral of guilt, shame, and lost momentum.

If you want consistency that survives bad days, hit play, then subscribe, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review so more people can build systems that actually last.

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

If your workouts vanish the moment life gets busy, it’s not because you’re weak, lazy, or “bad at discipline.” It’s because you’re treating exercise like a choice that requires motivation.

High performers do something completely different.

Do you need motivation to brush your teeth?

We talk about what motivation really is, and how your brain constantly runs an effort-versus-reward calculation.

We get concrete with the routine that’s kept me consistent with my fitness, not skipping a day for 25+ years.

We  dig into the neuroscience of stress and habits, including why stress reduces goal-directed planning in the prefrontal cortex and pushes you toward automatic behaviors, meaning you don’t rise to your expectations, you fall to your training AKA habits.

If this helps, subscribe, share it with one person who needs it, and leave a quick review so more people can build stress-proof habits.

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.

Hustle is loud, but clarity is what lasts.

We sit down with Willem Venter, founder of ZEDMEN - Men premium custom menswear with boutiques in Cape Town and Johannesburg, to unpack how Willem sustained a demanding entrepreneurial life for 20 years WITHOUT letting his health, relationships, or mindset collapse under the weight of growth.

Willem Venter has spent 2 decades in business and never stopped training — not because he has to, but because he's built a system where health, family, and business all get equal weight.

In this episode, the founder of ZEDMEN shares the exact framework he's used since discovering Stephen Covey's The 8th Habit over 15 years ago — and why he still lives by it today.

What stood out most: Willem doesn't talk about "hustle." He talks about scripting your life on purpose — training, sleep, nutrition, and family all scheduled with the same seriousness as a client meeting, because "how you do something is how you do everything."

In this episode:

• How Willem splits his week between two cities and adapts his training schedule to protect family time in each
• The "4 intelligences" framework from Covey's The 8th Habit (SQ, IQ, EQ, PQ) and how Willem uses it to keep business and personal life in balance
• Willem's non-negotiable: 7+ hours of sleep, even when travelling — including how he schedules flights around it
• Why he treats his gym memberships as a wellness and happiness investment
• The "sharpen the saw" principle for avoiding burnout when business gets stressful
• The Tony Robbins racing-driver story he uses to explain focus under pressure: "don't look at the wall, look at the track forward"
• How a clear, specific vision (down to a picture on your phone) accelerates goals 
• Willem's reading list for entrepreneurs

BIO
Willem Venter is the founder and owner of ZEDMEN, a premium custom and tailored menswear house with boutiques in Johannesburg (Rosebank) and Cape Town (Century City). Since 2005, ZEDMEN has built a reputation — and a 5-star Google rating in Johannesburg and in Cape Town — on what Willem calls "Personality Dressing": engineering a client's wardrobe and personal brand around who they actually are, not what's trending. Twenty years in, Willem applies the same discipline to his own life that ZEDMEN applies to its clients — treating health, family, and personal development as non-negotiables, not afterthoughts.

🔗 Website: www.zedmen.co.za
📷 Instagram: instagram.com/willemzedmen
💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/willem-venter-b00a2a19

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Brought to you by Angela Shurina  

Certified Health, Sleep, Performance & Executive Coach 360 with 18 years of experience helping people change to feel, be and do their best.