Change Wired

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.

Discipline gets all the credit, but it is the wrong tool for the job of getting you fit for the rest of your life.

If you have ever tried to “just be stricter” with workouts, nutrition, sleep, or even scrolling, you already know how it ends: a strong start, a busy week, then a full stop.

I share a conversation sparked by a futurist friend who asked how I help my clients create long-term discipline for hard things.

My answer is simple. I do not teach discipline.

I teach habit formation and systems design, because habits is what creates long-term results that feel effortless and therefore easy to maintain.

Once a routine is wired, it feels easier, almost like cheating, and it stops stealing attention from your work, family, and goals.

We get practical with a science-backed habit “recipe”. I explain how cues and rewards lock in routines and why positive emotion and reinforcement speed up consistency.

We also cover fallback plans so you keep the routine alive when you travel, get injured, or cannot do the perfect version.

If you want sustainable fitness, better energy, and mental clarity without living in a constant grind, press play.

Subscribe to Change Wired Podcast, share this with a friend who needs a smarter system instead of discipline that fails every time, and leave a review so more people can find the habit-first approach.

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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 goal might be real and deeply meaningful, but the timeline you attached to it could be the thing draining your energy.

I’m sharing one quote that has repeatedly helped me drop the stress of trying to achieve something and return to motivation and peace.

When I hold that frame in mind, I stop treating progress like a verdict on my worth and start treating it like a journey I can adjust.

We dig into a distinction I picked up from How to Live a Meaningful Life: the transactional world versus the flow world.

Doing VS Being. 

How we need both and how to balance between them - to get more and feel good.

Transactional mode is about getting things done, hitting targets, and moving on.

Flow mode is about being present, noticing your experience, and actually living your life while you pursue big outcomes.

The problem isn’t doing.

The problem is living only in doing, even turning “spiritual” practices like meditation or prayer into another task.

I talk through how these two modes work best as polarities you use intentionally, not extremes you choose between.

If you’re working on long-term goals like fitness, health, building a business, creating impact, growing a career, or improving relationships, this mindset episode gives you a simple framework to reduce overwhelm - with a simple quote/mantra and a question to come back to every time your goals feel heavy or life feels like a chain of frustrations and setbacks.

If it helped you - share it with one person, and leave a review to help me reach and help more people around the world.

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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.

Waiting to “feel ready” is one of the cleanest ways to stay stuck.

Angela Shurina sits down with sales coach and author Charles Hsuan to unpack the real reason people don’t change, and it has less to do with willpower than with decision mechanics. 

Charles shares how he left banking, stumbled into sales, and then spent years distilling what makes someone commit. 

Charles Hsuan never planned to end up in sales — or coaching. He studied financial management, spent years hating a banking job so much he'd wish for his car to break down so he'd have an excuse not to go in. A friend's tip led him into sales almost by accident, and a knack he didn't know he had turned into a 20+ year career, and eventually a very successful business built on one simple idea.

In this episode, Charles and Angela dig into what actually drives a "yes" — and what actually makes people change instead of just thinking about it.

Charles shares the 3-part formula behind every purchasing decision, the 15-minute rule that makes "1% better" concrete instead of vague, and the story of a Viking king who never knew when a ship was "good enough" to launch.

What we cover:

• Why Charles spent his first 3 years in business "storytelling" instead of selling — and the one conversation that changed everything
• The decision formula to make anyone to finally change instead of thinking about changing
• The "1 to 10" urgency question Charles asks every prospect, and why anything under an 8 is a soft no
• 1,440 minutes in a day — how Charles turned "1% improvement" into something doable every day instead of drowning in vague self-development tools
• GMO (Good enough to move on) — and the cautionary tale of the ship that sank because nobody knew when to stop building
• Growing up with ADHD, repeating two grades, and how sport and community rebuilt his confidence
• Gain vs. gap: why measuring how far you've come beats measuring how far you have to go
• The shift from chasing success to chasing significance — and why his book is really a letter to his son

About Charles Hsuan

Charles Hsuan knows what it's like to start with challenges and turn them into growth.

Growing up with ADHD, he struggled with school but quickly discovered the power of words. During his studies in Financial Management, he realised that clear communication could influence outcomes — and it shaped his career. Today, through his Story-Selling coaching at Flying Kite, Charles helps industry experts make complicated ideas simple, so that clients instantly understand their value. More than 60% of his clients have doubled their sales, proving that even if you start off struggling, you can learn to excel — and help others see your unique selling point.

Connect with Charles:

• Book a call: https://www.flyingkite.co.za/contact
• Get The Alphabet Soup of Selling: https://www.flyingkite.co.za/thealphabetsoupofselling
• Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshsuan

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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.