Brain Food for Pioneering Spirits: How can we consciously steer our own actions toward the direction we actually want? Dr. Yasemin Yazan, Marc, Jürgen, Heike and Layla take apart what self-management really means beyond the office — from a CEO defeated by an Italian parking meter, to a twelve-person machine shop that out-competes Bosch and Porsche on culture rather than salary, to why the manager and the leader may need entirely different competencies. Along the way: the wheel of life, why gradual change is invisible to our brains until it suddenly isn’t, and a plea to swap “optimization” for “balance.”
Note: This session was recorded live in German as part of the Deep Talk Club, so the video above is German-language audio only. What follows is an English translation of the conversation, lightly edited for readability — the back-and-forth between the moderator and participants is preserved, but the original timestamps and speaker names have been left out.
Yasemin opened with today’s topic: Action and Self-Management. How can we consciously steer our actions in a desired direction — that’s the question they wanted to explore, alongside a first look at self-management competencies, which they’d break down further into specific areas over the coming days. Before diving in, she wanted to build the bridge: what does self-management actually have to do with action and competence, and how does it all connect? She reminded newcomers the room was recorded and would be published, and repeated the three room rules: a recognizable profile photo, first and last name, and at least one sentence in the bio — or, alternatively, contributing via chat.
Marc opened, saying he’d thought the evening before about where conscious action actually comes from, and whether it even makes sense to ask this question in every situation. He realized there’s a huge difference between being self-employed versus employed. If he worked for Heike and she told him “Marc, this needs to ship to the customer today, pack this box,” he wouldn’t have time to reflect on it — he’d act consciously in the sense of not acting unconsciously, but it’s a routine process; there’s no point pondering self-management there, since Heike’s instructions and the day’s rhythm dictate it entirely. He also reflected that if we only consciously perceive some small percentage of everything (he stressed not to fixate on the exact number, whether 5% or 30%), then we might not even know what we consciously want — and if we don’t know that, how can we act consciously at all? This led him to revisit the “wheel of life” concept they’d discussed before — for him: education, career, family, health — and to conclude that conscious action begins with the first step: reflection and self-dialogue, or asking others questions, to bring the unconscious into awareness. Only from there, as a second step, can one really think about and reflect on conscious action or conscious self-management.
Yasemin thanked him, and connected this to their earlier discussion of routines: with routine tasks, we don’t deploy conscious action anymore, since repetition and conditioning eventually produce a routine over time — brushing our teeth, for instance, nobody consciously thinks through how that works. But with routines, if we consciously reflect on wanting to achieve or establish something, we can deliberately turn a specific action into a routine, making it easier not to have to think about it anymore — which itself requires conscious action, built on the same foundation of reflection Marc described, as a precondition for self-efficacy.
Marc agreed fully, adding that if he were advising his son or young people today, he’d genuinely walk them through the wheel of life. For himself, thinking about conscious action, he’d written down: health, career/education, and family — with career and education coming before family for him, not because money is the most important thing in the world, but because he’s found that having your education/career sorted, without existential anxiety, tends to make family life work better too. Reflecting on his own list, he noticed “health” came first, yet recalled that at 17 or 18 he never thought about health at all — he was in perfect shape and felt invincible; at that age, you probably think about plenty of things, and if you’re lucky, health isn’t one of them. Still, that’s where he’d start. And this only works through self-awareness, reflection, dialogue — genuinely asking how you want to live, and where it makes sense to think about conscious action and self-management at all. If, say, education is the relevant life area at that moment, self-management becomes crucial: do I have financial support to get through my studies without needing to work, or do I need outside funding, can I study without a wealthy family, what support exists? In his experience, this works best through dialogue and exchange with others — a mentor, people who’ve already walked that path — since with too little life experience, you often can’t find the answers yourself, not knowing what possibilities even exist to reach your goal (finishing your studies or training) if you can’t finance it yourself.
Yasemin picked this up, explaining the “wheel of life” concept for anyone unfamiliar: different life areas, which can vary and be expanded — commonly finances, career, family, sport, health, and so on, with some models covering fewer areas and others more, though the underlying principle stays the same: rating each area on a scale of 1 to 10, asking where you currently stand and whether that’s satisfying, or whether you’d like it different going forward. What’s interesting, in relation to self-management and action competence, is that this reflection first identifies, say, “I’m at a 1 in this area and want to reach an 8” — that’s the reflection and identification step. Then comes the next step: how do I actually do that? That’s where competence comes in — I may already have certain competencies needed to translate this into action, or I may discover I still need to build them. That’s where self-management, or self-management competence, comes in — managing my own competencies, knowing my strengths and weaknesses, and, looking at something like the wheel of life, assessing where I already have the tools to act and where I’m still lacking them.
Marc agreed completely, adding that knowing what you actually want comes first — something Yasemin has repeated often: do I actually want this? Independent of your environment — if you’re still living with your parents and they insist you get a certain degree or become a doctor, do you actually want that? If you don’t want to pursue that path, your chances of succeeding are slim. You have to ask yourself, independent of your surroundings, whether you genuinely want it — in some cultures, parents arrange marriages, and if that’s not what you want, you likely won’t be happy. So the first question is always: where do I want to go? Then, as Yasemin said, what prerequisites do I need? Taking education as an example: once you decide you want a certain qualification, you take stock — does it come easily, are there subjects you struggle with, who can support you, do you need tutoring? Struggling in one subject doesn’t mean giving up entirely on the goal. But the crucial first question remains: do I want this, or do my parents want this?
Yasemin thanked him and turned to what self-management actually means in this context, sharing a definition she’d found online: self-management is the ability to independently and autonomously take charge of shaping one’s own professional or personal development — just one of many definitions a quick search turns up. She also looked at the concept of “management” itself, noting a distinction: on one hand, in companies, leadership or top management is what’s typically called “management” — taking on planning, steering, and leading. This concept transfers to all areas of professional and personal life: whenever we’re planning, steering, and leading something for ourselves, regardless of whether we’re leading other people or just ourselves, we’re within this management complex — managing something, whether that’s competencies, skills, or something newly learned, consciously steering it.
Looking at self-management competencies specifically, there are various models with overlapping fields, some with more categories, some fewer, but broadly similar principles. She shared one she’d found from Graf, which included: self-awareness, goal management, time and resource management, health and stress management, relationship management, self-motivation and self-discipline, self-development, and self-responsibility — a model she found comprehensive enough to use as a starting point today, with each area to be explored in much greater depth over the coming days. She invited Marc to share his first thoughts.
Marc admitted this was tricky for him, since he operates in a very different “hamster wheel” than someone employed at a company — not a value judgment, just a difference. If he worked for Heike and got tasks assigned based on his role, whether managing a team or doing hands-on work that simply needs doing, he wouldn’t need to think much in the morning about taking on responsibility or anything like that — his supervisor or boss tells him what needs to get done and by when, no time to ponder self-management, it’s simply mandated. But running his own small business, without staff responsibility, it starts with self-discipline and self-responsibility, since no one’s watching — he could stare out the window for eight hours and no one would notice, his office door won’t suddenly open. So he’d distinguish based on one’s life situation — like Yasemin, working mostly alone from a home office or private office, self-discipline and self-responsibility become among the most essential things, since you have to go get your own work rather than have it assigned. He said he was curious what Jürgen, who’d just joined, would think.
Jürgen questioned this, saying he wasn’t sure he agreed — regardless of whether you’re employed or self-employed, what Marc described might apply to aspects like generating new business, but he’d push back critically: does action competence even function without self-management? Even in an employment relationship, where a supervisor assigns specific tasks, actually carrying them out, implementing them, still requires self-management competencies in his view. He suggested letting that sink in, and invited Yasemin to bring in others before drawing further connections. He apologized for arriving a bit late but said he had two triggers to speak up: he wanted to approach the definition and necessary distinction of “self-management” by asking what happens (or doesn’t happen) when self-management is absent — a thought he’d had, though admittedly with too little preparation time this round. His second trigger was a gentle disagreement: Yasemin had roughly described self-management via the functions of planning, steering, control, and leadership, if he recalled correctly. He drew a clear distinction between “management” (the manager) on one side and the “predestined leader” on the other, grounded in the different competencies each requires. The manager, for him, is precisely the one wearing the “golden cap” of self-management — possessing exceptional ability, aptitude, and qualification (i.e., competence) to plan, organize, regulate, steer, evaluate, conduct target-vs-actual comparisons, and take corrective action. The leader, beyond that (not to say a manager can’t have this too), is specifically distinguished by social competence — leading people, leading organizations. Bridging to today’s topic: he only now realized, given how Yasemin had framed today’s topic, that self-management reflects solely action competence — not a thinking, reflection, or awareness competence. He’d checked, and believed there was still a room this week on self-determination coming up — and this, for him, was the crucial distinction to keep in mind: today’s discussion of self-management methods should focus on what enables us to competently act, not what enables us to competently think ahead of acting.
Yasemin thanked him, unsure exactly when he’d joined, and recapped her opening definitions: self-management as the ability to independently and autonomously shape one’s own professional and personal development, plus the management-as-planning/steering/leading distinction, including the leadership angle Jürgen had just raised. She noticed Heike wanted to contribute and welcomed her in, planning to draw further connections afterward. In the meantime, she invited Marc to continue if he liked. Marc added that self-management always applies, even for something as small as buying milk for his coffee — he still has to think about which shoes to put on and what time to do it. But the specific angle Yasemin had framed today — consciously steering action in a desired direction — is, for him, a different matter entirely, tying to leadership, as Jürgen had said. If you’re embedded in a work process — say, a delivery driver for a logistics company — you can’t independently and autonomously shape your own development in the sense Yasemin’s definition described; you can’t simply decide “next week I’ll switch to an electric vehicle because I care about the environment” — your job and tasks are predefined and simply need executing. That’s exactly why he’d started by asking where it makes sense to think about conscious action at all — steering action consciously in the right direction. If, throughout his working life, he never wants to drive a delivery van but wants to move into dispatch or an office role instead, that’s where consciously steering action in the right direction begins — by asking people what he needs to do to get there. But that’s different from the day-to-day work tasks themselves, which are also self-management, but a different kind — tasks that simply need doing to keep operations running. That, for him, is the distinction.
Yasemin pushed back gently, noting the delivery driver he’d used as an example isn’t only a professional actor within an employment relationship — he’d mentioned the wheel of life himself earlier, covering multiple life areas, and self-management doesn’t only apply to one’s professional activity but to every area of life where we manage ourselves. Additionally, even within an employment relationship, tasks vary considerably — some offer less room for influence, but even within a given role, there’s always a question of where influence is possible, depending on the tasks and responsibilities held. The same applies equally to the delivery driver: the more complex the tasks within an employment relationship, generally the more room for influence over the daily structure, which meetings to attend, whether one’s presence is even necessary, and so on. There are genuinely diverse possibilities for self-management here too. So she wouldn’t frame it strictly as “self-management is highly relevant for the self-employed, but I’m massively constrained if employed.”
Marc clarified he’d meant exactly that — it’s about identifying where it makes sense to consciously steer action in the right direction; there are countless life areas, situations, and time-dependent contexts where it makes sense to think consciously about where one has the opportunity to steer action — that wasn’t meant to contradict, since we’re all multiple personalities fulfilling different roles. He said he agreed with her 100%, apologizing to Heike for jumping in before her turn.
Yasemin welcomed Heike warmly and asked for her thoughts. Heike said Marc had mentioned her name and drawn her in, and she had a lot to say — summarized briefly: her company wouldn’t function without being surrounded by people who simply act and manage themselves independently, both privately and in how they’ve found each other professionally at her company. She believes this constellation never happens by chance for anyone — we all carry within us a kind of framework of how we want to manage ourselves, what we can handle, and where we’d appreciate leadership (to use that word). We operate within this internal “playing field,” likely formed deep within us, often unconsciously, and it shapes where we seek our private, social, and professional environments — whether we have great natural aptitude for something or find it all easy determines which job or partnership or family situation fits, or doesn’t. She believes this is as individual as there are people in the world. Her company doesn’t function through her issuing directives, despite being co-owner and one of two managing directors — she can’t even recall the last time she instructed anyone to do something specific; it emerges from working together, and often each individual employee knows far better than she does what needs doing today and tomorrow. Everyone knows the big-picture goal, but her own tasks lie entirely elsewhere, since she doesn’t even have the technical competence to build their own machines, having never learned anything technical herself. It only works because everyone contributes within their own space, doing what they enjoy, and when it all fits together smoothly and easily, something good emerges — whether in business, family, friendships, clubs, or anywhere else.
Yasemin found this especially relevant given yesterday’s discussion of “learning to learn” — it’s worth considering how external organizational structures, depending on how they’re shaped, create massive differences in how “learning to learn” actually unfolds, whether that’s to further develop self-management abilities and action competencies, or to lean back since everything is essentially dictated and no further thought is required beyond fulfilling routine tasks. This is a genuinely fascinating topic not just in companies, she noted, but across all kinds of contexts — educational institutions too; they’d previously discussed the Bologna Process and increasing standardization/schoolification, with clearer, more standardized curricula at universities too — bringing potential advantages like comparability, but also downsides: the more a participant, student, or trainee is limited to consuming or simply executing, the more these very action competencies and self-management abilities can suffer, since they’re simply not being trained. The question becomes how changes to organizational or institutional structures can either hinder or, positively, support “learning to learn.”
She invited Marc, Jürgen, or Heike to continue. Marc thanked Heike warmly, saying he loves listening to her, and had listened, with his partner, to her earlier Author Breakfast appearance at least twice in the car, drawing so much energy from it. He wished more companies operated like hers — where colleagues (he specifically avoided the word “employees,” preferring “fellow travelers”) are encouraged and steered in the right direction, given a sense of belonging to a family, and trusted to take up part of the steering wheel themselves — you’re still the pilot, someone has to wear the boss cap, but you can rely on everyone caring enough to say “I steer within my own scope, and if unsure, I know I can ask Heike or someone else.” He wasn’t sure whether this depends on company size, admitting he didn’t know enough about that, but knew that if he ever had to choose an employer rather than being self-employed, it would only be a company like this — he could only handle an 8, 10, or 15-hour day if he felt part of a family, not just a number in some large corporation.
Yasemin thanked him and welcomed Layla. Layla joked that hearing “8, 10, or 15 hours” had immediately triggered her own self-management decision: no, those aren’t working hours she could live with — but she suggested that’s also part of self-management: consciously deciding what working hours actually work for you. She said she’d initially thought self-management meant organizing her work process, organizing herself, functioning — but then questioned why she should have to “function” at all. Stepping briefly outside her professional life, drawing on her own experience and observation, she noted people constantly oscillate between two poles: too much and too little. In the past it was “jump, and we’ll ask how high”; today it’s framed as “apprenticeship years aren’t meant to be easy” (though she’s not sure she agrees). There’s much talk about working hours, but really it’s about the energy one has to and wants to put into work — as Heike had beautifully described. Layla said she couldn’t say much about Heike personally, only that after hearing her speak, she’d love to work at her company, since what she described was deliberate, conscious, and empathetic — and that, too, is part of self-management.
Yasemin thanked her and invited Heike to continue. Heike thanked Marc for his kind words, and confirmed that yes, they do work hard — couldn’t function otherwise in a region where, despite running a small machine-building company (12 employees, custom equipment manufacturing) near Ditzingen — home to companies like Trumpf, with Porsche sites, Bosch branches, Festo, and Thales all within a few kilometers — she recently learned that a 28-year-old friend of her son’s, fresh out of university with a master’s in mechanical engineering, earns €72,000 a year starting out at Bosch. She simply can’t match that. So what can she offer her employees instead? Her company is evenly split 50-50 by gender, including in leadership, purely by coincidence. What she can offer is the flexibility to work in a way that genuinely suits them. Picking up on Yasemin’s mention of further training, she recalled offering a training opportunity during Covid to a colleague, Ilona, handling order processing, already in her mid-to-late 50s. Ilona said, “Heike, I’d have to drive all the way through Stuttgart for that” — clearly something about it made her uneasy, since sitting in a room doing training just wasn’t her thing. So she didn’t do it. It didn’t hurt the business at all — she does her job brilliantly, is still with them today, and will retire with the company. Heike admitted she’s the type who might push someone to overcome their fears and go anyway — but if they don’t, they don’t, and they’ll figure out how to handle it if that specific competence is ever genuinely needed. That gap never actually materialized. They very rarely work 10, 12, or 15-hour days — those are true outliers, arising only when the situation genuinely demands it, and then everyone who’s needed simply steps up. So what does a small company that can’t match those big salaries actually offer? She has more job applications coming in than ever, oddly enough, given what the media suggests. For her, it comes down to: does this feel like something worth being part of? Work isn’t always a party, but does it feel good to show up in the morning and earn your living here? With 12 employees, she has about seven or eight different working-time models — anyone building a house, or going through a separation (as one employee currently is), can rearrange their working hours, and the business still gets done, increasingly efficiently, with everyone genuinely wanting to be there.
Yasemin thanked her, noting they were leaning heavily into the work context today — understandably a huge area we spend a lot of time in — but self-management, in her view, isn’t confined to the work context alone, especially given Marc’s earlier wheel-of-life framing covering career, love, friendships, family, health, sport, leisure, personal development, wellbeing, and more. Viewed holistically, we’re far more than just workers or self-employed professionals, and self-management competencies apply across all these life areas too. Perhaps the reason the conversation keeps drifting toward work is that the word “management” is baked into “self-management” itself. Still, self-management competence, taking an example like self-motivation or self-discipline, might apply in a completely different context — or relationship management, regulating one’s emotions, which initially has nothing to do with work but still ties back to emotion regulation and, ultimately, action competence. So it’s worth looking at this a bit more broadly.
She invited Marc, Heike, and Layla to continue. Marc shared a story he’d told before: part of his own self-management is not wanting to fall behind globally. He recalled discovering in Italy that, as a CEO, he wasn’t able to buy a parking ticket for his car — the machine had gone fully digital and required entering a license plate. That kind of moment, he said, is exactly where self-management starts for him — paying attention to things like AI, how banks are changing, whether he can manage his account and track transactions via a phone app, since he doesn’t know what else the future holds. He’d observed with his own parents that his mother never once used a phone or turned on a computer in her life — she’d be completely lost today, given how insurance companies now favor customers who handle contracts online or via hotline rather than in person. Since he can’t predict which technological developments are still coming, part of self-management, for him, is keeping his eyes open every day, observing things — even small, seemingly banal things, like trying to buy a public transit ticket via his phone rather than assuming ticket counters will always exist. People might laugh, he said, but these are the things that matter if you want to stay connected and keep self-managing your way toward staying self-determined, even into old age.
Yasemin thanked him, and connected this back to routines: these external influences do have real effects on us, our work, or our leisure time, which raises the question of how important it actually is to keep developing these various competency areas in order to maintain self-efficacy through self-management. Something at work or in private life — the parking ticket story was a great example — can shift, similar to when many bank branches closed in favor of ATMs, which had a real impact especially on older people. In daily life, there are countless areas we don’t consciously question, where things feel routine and self-evident, until either being in a different country/culture, or technological change, disrupts that routine — and only then do we become aware of it, since our brain doesn’t register small, gradual changes, but does register large ones. Being abroad and noticing “oh, it’s done differently here” stands out far more than slow, creeping changes closer to home, which our brain may not consciously register at all — and by the time we do notice, we might already be somewhat behind, needing to actively catch up in terms of action competence or self-management, closing a gap that’s already formed.
She invited Layla to continue, noting there was also a raised hand to address before moving into the closing round. Layla suggested that we often associate “self-management” heavily with work, since “manager” itself implies work — but managing one’s life does carry a work-like quality, and she’d heard these are apparently two separate halves. Perhaps “self-regulation” frames it more as an addition than a departure, helping clarify the terminology a bit. She found Yasemin’s point about gradual change extremely important — we don’t consciously notice slow shifts, which is exactly why we take before-and-after photos, or those “365 days” compilations showing how people change over time. She found this especially relevant to emotion regulation too — the real question is always how we react to something, and perhaps work, through habit, stops feeling like work because it no longer stands out and becomes second nature. She recalled hearing that habits, more than anything else, are what’s truly real — without wanting to steal her own closing thought.
Yasemin thanked her and welcomed Raphael. Raphael thanked her for letting him join, and said he found Heike’s point fascinating too — the word “authenticity” came to mind for him: you run your business your way, live your own conditions, and people notice, finding satisfaction in that — satisfaction being one of the key words here. He noted a certain “self-optimization mania” currently going around in the self-management space, where everyone feels they must constantly improve — he used a slightly exaggerated example: being 16, single, feeling your relationship “wheel of life” area isn’t quite where it should be, so signing up for a dating/flirting seminar to fix it — there are countless examples like this. He finds it more interesting simply to live life and notice what actually works, whether that’s a parking machine or something else. Being a bit older, he catches a lot, but knows he can’t catch everything — just the day before, someone told him you can fly first class using PayPal points if you have enough of them, rather than paying cash, which he found fascinating. He said he continues practicing self-management every morning, and the more automatic it becomes, the better for self-management overall. He signed off, joking about it being Thursday.
Yasemin thanked him and picked up the theme: much of this, as they’d established, comes down to the connotation we bring to certain terms, often shaped by what we’ve absorbed externally. She found the word “management” fascinating in how it steers our thinking in specific directions, and wanted to flag, as a closing thought, that “optimization” is another term that sounds like efficiency-boosting — she preferred Layla’s earlier word, “balance.” We can always pull and frame things in different directions, and self-management, at its core, is partly about establishing balance — she could just as easily substitute “optimization” here: how can I use technological developments like AI to become more efficient on one hand, while also managing my time and resources gently on the other — freeing up more leisure time, or finishing work faster to get to that leisure time sooner. How that’s ultimately shaped is up to each individual. She found the concept of self-management competence a genuinely broad one, worth questioning: what do I actually associate with the word “management” here — does it have to be that way, or can I use the term differently, and what advantages might come from framing it more broadly and seeing everything it can encompass? That, she said, is part of why they’d spend the coming days exploring each individual area of self-management competence in connection with action, going deeper into each. Tomorrow, for instance: Action and Self-Awareness — to what extent does self-awareness play a role in relation to action? That’s the question they’d explore next, deepening individual components of self-management competence to keep showing the connection to action, making clear it’s far more than just efficiency or optimization — something holistic, not limited to the work context, even though work is part of it too.
She moved into the closing round, in the order Marc, Heike, Layla, then Raphael (noting he’d already said goodbye but was welcome to add a final word too).
Marc closed exactly where he’d started with self-management: for him, it begins with becoming aware of where the journey should go, in which area of the wheel of life. Once that’s clear, self-management comes second, as the path to get there.
Heike said that whenever she feels overwhelmed or momentarily helpless within self-management, two things tend to happen: either appointments, private or professional, dissolve or mysteriously reschedule themselves, or communication becomes the competency that helps. She has a very close friend who never reaches out first — she’s the one who takes action and calls her, and her friend lights up with joy, and they see each other the next day. As long as she’s standing in front of a machine, or a person, and doesn’t know what to do, she can still ask — and that, too, accomplishes something. She thanked everyone for a wonderful room today.
Layla said that in her regional dialect, there’s a saying roughly translating to “I manage, therefore I do business.” She tries to consciously reframe this as something positive, using modal verbs — an exercise she uses in her classroom, learned from a dance educator: having students sit with the modal verb itself. There’s a real difference between “I can go to school,” “I want to go to school,” “I may go to school,” “I must go to school,” or “I should go to school” — tying back to where the conversation started. She noted a regional saying preferring “my arm stays on” over “my arm comes off” — she’d rather keep her arm on, and rather have action competence, because she wants things, sometimes must do things, but can also do things.
Raphael added a final thought: he considers self-management incredibly important, and becoming consciously aware of it too. At 30, he would have loved someone to talk with about his future, having the knowledge he has today back then. He said he was looking forward to future rooms and further learning, and wished everyone a wonderful Thursday.
Yasemin thanked everyone, calling today’s exchange a genuinely exciting entry point into the topic of self-management competence. She previewed tomorrow’s first specific deep dive: Action and Self-Awareness — to what extent does self-awareness play a role in relation to action, the question they’d explore together. She said she was looking forward to seeing what conclusions and insights emerge from each of these individual areas as they go, and invited everyone warmly to join again tomorrow at 8am. Until then, she wished everyone well. Ciao.
