My friend and coach Dr. Daniel Friedland — the neuroscientist who had worked with me for eight years — was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer during COVID.
He was alone in the hospital. No visitors allowed. And he did what any honest person would do: he mourned. Forty-eight hours, by himself, in a hospital room.
Then he made a decision.
He decided the cancer was happening for him, not to him.
He didn't say it was good news. He didn't pretend it wasn't terrifying. He just chose to treat it as something that had arrived in service of his life rather than in destruction of it. Over the next months, he produced 180 pieces of content on how to die — on how to live fully in the time you have. He became one of the clearest voices I've ever encountered on what it means to lead from a place of meaning rather than fear.
He died doing the work he believed in. And he did it without being hijacked by what was happening to him.
That's the whole idea. Everything happens for you. Not to you.
Why Your Brain Defaults to "Why Me"
When something goes wrong — a key hire quits, a client walks, a diagnosis lands, a market collapses — your amygdala fires. That's not a metaphor. It's a neurological event.
The amygdala processes threat five times faster than your prefrontal cortex processes meaning. That means by the time you have conscious access to the situation, your brain has already registered it as danger and flooded your system with cortisol. Your thinking brain — the one capable of judgment, strategy, creativity, and problem-solving — is offline.
This is what Dr. Danny called an amygdala hijack. And most leaders spend entire seasons of their business careers operating from inside one.
The "for me, not to me" reframe isn't wishful thinking. It's a pattern interrupt. Saying it consciously — meaning it deliberately, even when it feels like a lie — re-engages the prefrontal cortex. It restores access to executive function. And executive function is where the actual solutions live.
What I Did with a Recession
In 2008, when the Great Recession hit, my staffing company Diversified Industrial Staffing lost almost everything overnight. Companies stopped hiring. The business model we'd built evaporated in a quarter.
I sat in that for a while. Then I asked: what does this make possible?
Here's what I found: nobody was hiring. Which meant nobody was recruiting. Which meant every strong candidate in our space — CNC programmers, skilled manufacturers, experienced ops people — was sitting uncontacted. No other staffing firm was building relationships with them because there were no placements to make.
We started a "failure of the day" campaign. We stopped counting yeses and started counting nos. A hundred no-contacts a day meant we were building inventory nobody else had. We recruited like the market had already recovered, because we were betting it would.
When the market came back, we were the only firm with a deep bench of pre-qualified candidates ready to place immediately. Clients came to us first. We came out of that recession stronger than we went in.
The recession happened for us. We just had to find the angle.
The Honeymoon Test
When Dr. Danny told this story on the Paper Napkin Wisdom podcast, he gave a simpler example to make the mechanism clear.
Imagine your flight is delayed five times on the first day of your honeymoon.
In "happening to me" mode: frustration mounts, the day is ruined, you're tracking every delay as evidence of how things go wrong for you, you arrive at the destination already at odds with the trip.
In "happening for me" mode: you're stuck in the Delta Club for four hours with the person you just married. No distractions. Nowhere to be. Just the two of you.
Dr. Danny said it became the best conversations of the first eight years of their relationship.
The flight was the same. The delay was the same. What changed was the question he was asking about it.
The Difference Between Intention and Expectation
One of the most useful distinctions Dr. Danny made: set an intention, not an expectation.
An expectation is a demand you're placing on reality. When reality doesn't comply — and it frequently doesn't — you're in conflict with it. You spend your energy managing the gap between what you wanted and what is.
An intention is what you're committed to bringing to whatever shows up. It's portable. It travels with you into the uncertainty rather than demanding the uncertainty resolve itself first.
In the crisis seasons I've coached leaders through, the ones who hold expectations break. The ones who hold intentions bend. Not because intentions are softer — but because they give you somewhere to stand when the ground shifts.
The Active Learning Cycle
Dr. Danny used a simple four-point cycle to keep moving through hard periods without either suppressing what's real or getting paralyzed by it.
Think of a clock face.
Twelve o'clock is where you name what's not working — honestly, specifically, without softening it. Three o'clock is where you set your intention for how you want to show up, not what outcome you expect to receive. Six o'clock is the concrete plan: the next action, not the entire solution. Nine o'clock is feedback — what's actually shifting, what needs adjusting.
Then you rotate.
It's not a problem-solving framework. It's a staying-in-motion practice. The goal isn't to fix the situation in one cycle. The goal is to keep engaging with it from the right posture rather than grinding to a halt.
The Young Entrepreneur Who Needed Permission
I coached a young founder — early thirties — who had been running her business on the framework she'd inherited from her father. Work hard, be hard on yourself, don't let up. That was his philosophy, and she'd adopted it whole.
By the time we worked together, the difficulty in her business wasn't strategic. It was the constant low-grade suffering of someone trying to achieve under conditions she'd never examined. She was exhausted in the specific way people get exhausted when they're working against themselves.
When I introduced the "everything happens for me" reframe — when I explained the amygdala hijack, the prefrontal cortex, the choice she could make about the posture she brought to adversity — she went quiet for a moment.
Then she said: I needed someone to tell me there was another way.
That's often what's on the other side of this reframe. Not a technique. Not a hack. Permission to stop operating from inside the wound.
How to Actually Use This
The reframe isn't passive. You don't just say the words and feel better. You use it as an active interruption.
When you feel the hijack starting — the heat in your chest, the narrowing of focus, the compulsive problem-solving that isn't actually solving anything — you stop. You say the phrase. And then you ask the question: what is this making possible?
Some days the answer won't come. That's fine. The question is what matters. It moves you from victim posture to curious posture, and curious is the only posture from which you can actually see options.
Change the physical state if you need to. Go for a walk. Change rooms. Dr. Danny used to say: change your clothes. Put on the version of you who shows up differently. It sounds small. Physiology and mindset are not separate systems — what you do with your body changes what's available to your brain.
Victor Frankl survived conditions I can't imagine with a version of this idea: between stimulus and response, there is a space. The reframe lives in that space. The more you practice finding it, the larger it gets.
If you're in a hard season right now — personally or professionally — and you want to look honestly at where your ceiling actually is, the Growth Ceiling Audit is a place to start.
With gratitude,
Frequently Asked Questions
What does "everything happens for me, not to me" mean in practice?
It means treating every setback — a lost deal, a market collapse, a difficult diagnosis — as something that's happening in service of your growth rather than in opposition to it. The reframe doesn't deny the pain. It changes your relationship to it. Instead of asking "why is this happening to me?" you ask "what is this making possible?" That single shift moves you from victim posture to agency, and agency is where solutions live.
Is "everything happens for me" just toxic positivity?
No — and the distinction matters. Toxic positivity denies the reality of hard things. This reframe acknowledges the hard thing fully, then asks what you're going to do with it. Dr. Daniel Friedland, the neuroscientist who coined this phrase, spent 48 hours in a hospital room alone during COVID mourning his stage 4 brain cancer diagnosis. He didn't skip the grief. Then he made a choice about what the diagnosis was for. That's not positivity. That's agency.
How does the "for me not to me" mindset affect brain function?
It interrupts what neuroscientists call an amygdala hijack — the state where the brain's threat-detection system fires 5 times faster than the thinking brain and cuts off access to your prefrontal cortex. When you're hijacked, you can't access executive function: judgment, creativity, problem-solving. The "everything happens for me" reframe acts as a pattern interrupt. Repeating the phrase consciously re-engages the prefrontal cortex and restores your capacity to think.
How do I apply this mindset to a business crisis?
Start by separating what happened from what it means. A lost contract is a fact. "I'm failing" is a story. Once you've made that separation, ask: what does this situation make possible that wasn't possible before? During the Great Recession, my staffing company turned a hiring freeze into an inventory-building operation — we recruited candidates nobody else was chasing, so when the market recovered, we were the only ones with a deep bench. The crisis didn't stop us. It created the advantage.
What is the active learning cycle and how do I use it?
It's a four-point reflection cycle developed by Dr. Daniel Friedland for moving through difficulty without getting stuck. Twelve o'clock: what's not working right now — be honest and specific. Three o'clock: set an intention, not an expectation — what do you want to bring to this, not what outcome do you demand. Six o'clock: make a concrete plan for the next action. Nine o'clock: gather feedback, see what's shifting, and adjust. Then rotate. It's not a one-time fix. It's a continuous practice for staying in motion.
