Change Wired
Change Wired: Change in days—not in years!
Ready to ditch slow change and start thriving sooner? Change Wired is your new favorite podcast for practical, punchy insights into personal growth, productivity, mindset mastery, and creating high-performing cultures.
Hosted by an Executive & High-Performance Coach with 15 years of global experience (who now runs a culture transformation consulting & coaching firm), each episode breaks down science-backed tools from biology, neuroscience, and systems thinking into actionable tips you can start using today.
Expect lively solo episodes, inspiring guests, and real-world strategies designed specifically for leaders, entrepreneurs, and growth-focused professionals eager to accelerate their impact—both personally and within their teams.
Tune in, wire your brain for rapid growth, and get ready to transform in days—not years!
Change Wired
đź‘€Your Eyes Control Your Brain: the panoramic vision hack to motivate yourself do boring, hard things.
What if the way you look at the world could change how you think?
Every week, I climb a mountain in Cape Town. At the top, everything shifts. The city looks smaller. My problems feel lighter. The higher I go, the bigger my perspective becomes. But here’s the thing—you don’t need a mountain to experience this shift.
Navy SEAL commander Rich Diviney, in his new book "Masters of Uncertainty" talks about how simply changing your gaze can rewire your brain. When you focus on a single object, your mind narrows in, locking onto details. But when you soften your gaze—seeing everything without focusing on anything—you activate a different part of your brain. Suddenly, you connect more dots, see patterns, and think beyond immediate obstacles.
This practice isn’t just about problem-solving; it’s about freedom. For me, true success isn’t money or titles—it’s living without compromise, expressing myself fully. Every decision I make comes down to one question: Does this expand or limit who I am?
Next time you feel stuck, pause. Shift your gaze. Step back. Look at the bigger picture. A new perspective might be all you need to keep going with a lighter heart.
Try it today. Then share this episode with someone who needs to see things differently.
Text Me Your Thoughts and Ideas
Brought to you by Angela Shurina
EXECUTIVE & OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE COACH
Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of your Brain's Coach podcast. My name is Angela Shurina, I'm your host, I'm your Brain's Coach and also a change agent accelerator here to share with you, discover, learn with you all the amazing brain-body tools that we get more and more data about and scientific support of brain-body tools, psychology tools, behavior tools, so we could take better control of this vehicle that we call human, this vehicle in this life. So we could take better control of our emotions, of our thoughts and, most importantly, of our actions. So we get to live the life experience that is closer and closer to what we envision in our wildest dreams or all the inspiration that we have for ourselves. You know, yesterday on my walk, I was thinking to myself that I am so freaking not lucky because I actually worked on that, but I feel so immensely rich because I have this one achievement that I've done in my life. Is it maximizing my freedom in a sense of not, let's say, financial freedom and being able to fly anywhere or buy anything, but in terms of spiritual freedom, I thought to myself there is not a single person in my life whose bullshit I have to take and I'd like to keep it this way, so literally. There is not a person in my life. I don't mind people who disagree with me or people who think differently, not at all but there is not a person in my life who limits my spiritual, my self-expression freedom in any way, and I thought that is such an amazing achievement. And any opportunity, if I think to myself, any opportunity that I get in life, I always somehow subconsciously measure against that. Is it going to limit my freedom of self-expression or is it going to enhance it? Is it going to help it? Or at least just you know, be neutral towards it? So, as I put it in my post on threads, my most treasured achievement is having the ability to not put up with anyone's bullshit and any opportunity I measure against that.
Speaker 1:If you have that in your life, you probably know what you're talking about. And if you don't, and you have to think a few times per day or per week that, oh, I wish I could do that, but because of this person or this circumstance, I can't. For me this is the worst kind of prison and I'd rather be less rich or, I don't know, powerful or in any way perceived as being successful in the world. I'd rather have my spiritual freedom than all the gold in the world. I'm a freedom fighter. That's why, probably, I connect to Mandela and living in South Africa so much as well. But anyhow, that's a lyrical walk around.
Speaker 1:And now to the main theme of our podcast, and I want to tell you a story. First, I got a message from a friend and he knows a fellow entrepreneur that I go and hike up the mountain the same mountain every Friday and he asked me the same mountain every Friday? And he asked me so you do it every Friday? Are you sort of religious about it? And I told him why I was doing it.
Speaker 1:And one of the biggest reasons, guys, it's because when you go above, like literally, when you rise, when you raise yourself above the regular environment, above the city just up there, and you see a bigger picture literally. So you see the city from the top of that mountain all around you. This is like 360 view on the top of that mountain and you see all of that and it allows you to see a bigger perspective. And also the way you see things changes the way you think about things. When you see a bigger picture, you see a bigger picture, you think of a bigger picture in your mind's eye. That's how amazing that human beings are designed, that our biology changes our psychology. For animals it's probably also true, but they don't have much of psychology or prefrontal cortex to be able to do such a thing as complex thinking. But we humans do have this capacity and so, yes, the way you see things changes the way you think, and that's why I told him.
Speaker 1:That's one of the reasons why I go and hike up this mountain. I'm not religious. I went to church maybe like twice and maybe twice more for a tourist exploration purposes. But other than that, the main reason why I go there, especially when I'm going through a lot in my day-to-day life and sometimes you have more problems to deal with than you have wins or joys when you raise yourself above the mundane physically and also hiking up the mountain, it's quite a physical fit, at least for me. Still so, when you do that, it helps you A to think of a bigger picture, like, ah, these are the goals, these are the dreams. This is why I'm doing this day-to-day. This is why I'm working on taxis, on company setup, on cold reach-outs, on cold calls and emails. That's why I'm doing all this boring work or this unfancy. Day-to-day. My days are actually quite boring, like majority of them. Sales are not that fancy for a majority of the time.
Speaker 1:But going up there it allows you to almost force the bigger picture thinking and get yourself back to realizing what it's all for. What's the goal of the goal, what's the bigger picture? And it also allows you to get your thinking into even bigger thinking mode, to envision that there is a whole world out there. There is a lot of opportunity out there. Get in the boat, get in the plane, get out there, fly there. It's not the thing that you see. So it switches that thinking pattern into bigger, more audacious. But then also, while you climb up there, it shows you that you're capable of doing hard things.
Speaker 1:I used to be afraid of heights, or I used to think that I was afraid of heights, and then I did this mountain, did it once, did it twice. Well, I did it first with other people. That helped also a lot. But then I did it many times and I'm not afraid of heights anymore, it's just a normal thing. Well, everything is relative, obviously. Probably, if you put me on some ever-historical image, I might have my fear of heights back to some degree. I guess it's human nature to be a little bit afraid, being up there and exposed and seeing all the stuff down there and imagining yourself falling. So there is a part of that. But it also made me realize how many things I'm afraid of might be just a condition of me not being used to that.
Speaker 1:I come from Siberia. It's very flat. There are a lot of things about Siberia that are cool. Well, maybe not that many actually, but it's very flat. There is almost no elevation. We do skiing a lot, but it's cross-country. It's not that fancy as mountain skiing. You put on skis and you work hard to move anywhere. No fun, just monotonous going forward, pushing forward. So that's what Siberia can teach you, but anyhow, so no elevation.
Speaker 1:So when I first even was driving towards that mountain parking lot, I was, oh, that already feels weird and I'm already afraid. But then you do it and you do it and you do it and it's like this is the most mundane thing I've done, but still it has this effect. You get up there and you see bigger picture and you start thinking of a bigger picture, and even when you feel, oh, I'll just keep working, I have other things to do, et cetera. But it's worth that Because every week it allows me to readjust, to tune myself up, literally to tune up my thinking. So I don't keep myself small, but instead I ask myself questions like what if I could build my million-dollar business sooner? And what if I could scale faster? What are the tools? What are the people? What are the things? What if everything goes well? What things do I need to put in place in advance so I can capitalize on this opportunity? What if I get my million-dollar contract tomorrow? How can I fulfill it? So this kind of questions will come to you when you get up there and you see the whole world that is out there and you will start thinking bigger. So how you see things that's the beauty of our biology changes the way you think.
Speaker 1:But then also today to day, what Navy SEALs recently finished the book Masters of Uncertainty by former Navy SEAL commander Rich Deviney. A lot of things around high performance, and he starts the book with this physiological slash, psychological tools that allow you to change your biology, to change your thinking, to change your emotions so you could perform optimally for the task at hand. So he teaches you how to push your own buttons, to push those levers that allow you to again get in the right state mentally, physically, emotionally to perform optimally for the task. And another tool that Trish Devaney. Well, one of the tools that Trish Devaney talks about there in the first chapters is the gaze, how you control your eyes and, yes, you can go to the mountain to think bigger.
Speaker 1:But also when you just engage your panoramic vision, meaning when you have focused vision. Let's say you look at your phone. That is the example of your focused vision. You're very narrow, you focus your visual attention very narrowly. But then when you opened it up, let's say right now I'm looking out of the window and I look at the mountain and I look at the sky. So all of a sudden you can even look at your ceiling and just kind of soften your gaze and look nowhere, seeing everything but nothing. That is how you engage your panoramic vision and again you can see the mountain.
Speaker 1:You don't have to see a mountain, but you can relax your gaze, which relaxes your neural circuits, which changes the way you think and you start thinking about a bigger picture instead of this problem or this bug that you can't figure out and everything seems to be doomed and you're like, oh, it's so hard right now I won't be able to do it. But then you relax your gaze, you look at the ceiling, you look out of the window, you can see everything but nothing, not focusing specifically on anything, and all of a sudden your brain again starts thinking wider, it connects more dots, I believe, more neural circuits interact with each other and all of a sudden you start thinking you know, this is just one day, this is just one moment, and this too shall pass. There are going to be other days and I'm going to be succeeding again and I'm going to be on an upswing and I'm building this big thing. So it all matters, it all means something, it all going to sum up to something. So, again, you don't have to have an amazing view, even though that helps to do it more naturally. That's why I love to go to the ocean, that's why I love hiking mountains, that's why I love having apartments with the view which, again, just naturally allows you to do so. But you can also just do staring at the wall or ceiling somewhere a little bit further away, again, looking everywhere but nowhere.
Speaker 1:Soft gaze which will engage your neural circuits in a different way, which will allow you to think bigger, wider, differently, connect more dots, see a bigger picture, which then makes it easier to work through the mandate. Because if you think about that let's say, I do cold reach-outs and lead generation it doesn't engage a lot of my talents. It's quite boring, to be honest. Not my strengths as well, so I'm hoping to delegate it fully at some point. But it has to be done. And it has to be done because of the bigger goal I have, because I do want to work with all these amazing companies and people and helping create workplaces where we all thrive and do our best. So it all matters.
Speaker 1:And I know that I don't do it just for the sake of doing it. And, yeah, it might feel in the moment like a waste of time, but I know that at this point I need to do it in order to give my bigger dreams, visions and goals opportunity to realize one day. And the same as workouts yeah, you know, not every workout is going to sum up to anything meaningful but I know that if I don't create the habit and routine of doing it every day, then my mental state is not going to be there and over the years I might accumulate diseases and pains that are going to limit my life in so many ways. They're going to limit my energy and the way I show up, my leadership, the impact I can create in the world, the talents that I can give into the world, that I've been given when I was born. And when you think about that in the context of a bigger picture of your life, you're like, yeah, that matters. This workout today, this half an hour I stood up for, and it might not be the most perfect or the most audacious and mind-blowing, but it's worth it and it meant something from big to small, and that's what changing your gaze allows you to do.
Speaker 1:Your biology, your psychology, your mental, emotional state, your physical state they're interlinked, they're one and the same. And that's the idea we're going to get back to again and again and it was our upcoming guest that we're going to have at least two this month. We're going to get to this idea again and again and again that your physiology is not separable from your psychology, from your emotional state, which then define how people perceive you, how you show up, what you do, what you don't do, what kind of goals you set for yourself. It's going to define your whole life, guys, and so you want to understand this and, just like elite Navy SEALs, you want to be able to push your own buttons, to push those levers to get yourself into the state, to engineer the state mental, physical emotion that you need and, in order to show up as your best, do your best work that you're capable of in this moment and then move your life closer and closer and closer to the biggest possible expression of self and the potential that you have in you. And that's it for today, guys. That's what I wanted to share.
Speaker 1:Just one takeaway Use your gaze to change your thinking. So look somewhere, but nowhere. Relax your gaze when you need to think bigger and understand the small things that you do. That might be boring, that might be challenging, that might not again open up your talent center, that might seem meaningless often, but they add up to something. So use your gaze. Focus narrowly when you need to dial in and get this problem solved, but don't open up your gaze. Relax your eyes, take those breaks you know. Lay down on bed or on the floor or in the chair, just lean back and look at the ceiling or out of the window. Allow your visual circuits to relax, which will broaden your thinking. Think wider, bigger, which will allow them again to think bigger before you dial in to perform the next step.
Speaker 1:I hope you found this useful.
Speaker 1:If you are in Cape Town or somewhere with the ability to climb mountains regularly, then do that See the bigger picture, to think of all the amazing possibilities that are in front of you.
Speaker 1:If you don't have the mountains, then do something else, I don't know. Go and find the tallest building and ride the elevator and get on the roof and see things from the above. To understand how they all add up to the bigger picture of your life and your mission. To understand how they all add up to the bigger picture of your life and your mission. And what else? Till next time, till about a couple of days, I'm going to release a new episode with more tools to push your own buttons. So till then, guys, start mastering, pushing your own buttons, start designing the life you absolutely love living, and don't forget to share this podcast episode with at least one other person. So, together, help me to create a better world for all of us. Together, help me to help others to master themselves, so we can create the most amazing world it can possibly be. Thank you for your attention. Until next time, be awesome.
