Transcripts
1. Journaling Essentials Introduction: Journaling is an extremely powerful tool that we can use throughout our day to day experiences. It can change the way we interact with our environment, our experiences, and ultimately ourselves. My name is Alex Houston and I'm a creative coach, entrepreneur and investor. And I'm super excited to show you the various ways that I use journaling in my life for self-discovery, creating and sustaining a positive mindset, igniting my creativity in having growth each and every day in my life. Through the duration of this course, you will learn four different journaling methodologies that will help you better process emotions, more gratitude and self-worth. Keep your creative juices flowing and create momentum through small wins throughout the day, this class is for just about anyone and I don't say that lightly. Whether you're a stay at home mom, a high-performing CEO, or a student making their way through university. I truly believe that the journaling techniques and tips in this course can help you live more centered while creating more possibilities in every area of your life. I'm super excited to get started. So grab your pen and your journal and I'll see you on the inside.
2. Method 1: Process Emotions - Self Discovery & Self Care: The first journaling methodology that we're going to talk about is journaling for processing emotions. Journaling for processing emotions can be an extremely powerful tool to use for a number of reasons, but we're going to focus on three main ones today. Those three benefits being externalizing, internal chatter, gaining clarity, as well as the ability to compartmentalize. So let's start with the first benefit, which is externalizing internal chatter. In our busy days, it can become really, really easy to get caught up in challenging emotions that Vensim to exacerbate themselves into even larger emotions become unmanageable. For most of us, it is going to be challenging for us to internally process a challenge in emotion within the moment that it's happening right then and there. In fact, keeping these emotions in and trying to process them from an internal perspective only can actually increased stress levels, increase anxiety, and even cause depression, making us less effective in our day-to-day lives. Having the ability to externalize our emotions through the process of journaling can allow us to take a more objective view on what's happening for us internally, which brings us to our next point, clarity, when we are able to look at our emotions from a more objective view, we are more likely able to process them and created a solution if needed. This process of separating ourselves from the emotional experience itself gives us the opportunity to gain clarity on how to move forward in a productive manner. So once we begin to externalize our emotions and we gain a little bit of clarity taken an objective view. We then open ourselves up for the ability to compartmentalize that emotion. And look, I'm not saying compartmentalize that emotion and then forget about it and never work through that experience. But if you're like me and you stay busy throughout the day, sometimes these powerful emotional experiences were not able to process right in the moment. So being able to externalize this onto a page within five to ten minutes of journaling then gives us the opportunity to compartmentalize that, free up that mental energy so that we can continue our day and come back to processing what we need to in order to remain centered, healthy, and happy at a later time. So with all that being said, here are three prompts that we can start to use in our day-to-day experiences to begin to enact these three benefits of journaling for processing emotions in our lives. The three prompts that I really, really like to use on my day-to-day experience is R-one. Today I'm feeling too. Right now I am struggling with. And 3, in this moment my experience is, and so obviously the first step is always going to be putting pen to paper whenever we begin our journaling process. But these are three great prompts to get us started and using them as a launching pad so that we can really take the time to process what we need to through our journaling. Now, don't be surprised if you sit down and what you think is supposed to come out is completely different from what you actually write on the page. This happens to me all the time. And this is actually why processing our emotions through journaling is such a great way to discover deeper parts of ourselves and really discover what is happening for us internally. If you are struggling, even with one of these prompts to get anything out on the page, I would use this tip to get you started. Set a timer, set a timer for five, maybe 10 minutes, and just begin to write one word after another, you will create momentum and you will actually be surprised of how much you can get out onto the page. And after the five minutes are up, you'll look back and realize that there may have been a lot for you to process in this moment. So for the next seven days, I want you to take an internal inventory, make this a part of your morning routine. You'll be surprised as to how much opens up when you do this first thing in the morning. Maybe when you're drinking your coffee, when you're drinking your tea, take five to ten minutes. Just take an internal inventory and you'll be surprised at how much more centered you feel going throughout the day. And if something pops up throughout the day that you need to address, you know that you have this tool to begin to process that as well. So after the seven days of using this journaling technique, be sure to share some of your journal entries and your experience of this process in the discussions tab. If you have any questions about how to do this, feel free to comment, but we are going to move on to the next journaling methane, and I'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Method 2: Cultivating a Positive Mindset: Journaling for a positive mindset is a great way to fill our conscious and subconscious minds with thoughts and ideas that align with the experiences that we would like to have in our lives. Now there's tons of science and research talking about the brain having a neural plasticity to it effectively, what we feed the brain is what we will experience in our lives. This course isn't about that. If you have an interest in that, I'm sure you can find some stuff on Google or YouTube. But these journaling and exercises are very synonymous with those ideas and I'm excited to share them with you. Our first positive mindset journaling methodology is to journal on gratitude. Now, this journaling technique is as easy as it sounds if we allow it to be. Now, don't get me wrong because I've made this mistake as well too. It is so easy in our modern society to have the mindset of, I'll be happy when, right? I'll be happy when I get this job, when I have this relationship. When I make this amount of money, I'll be happy then. But the reality is, is that there's so much to be grateful for right now in this moment. And that's what we do with this journaling exercise. So when we take the time to find things to be grateful for that we have in this moment, we will actually start to realize that there's more to be grateful for them we thought there was before. So the way that we practice this exercise is to make a gratitude list either on a daily basis or weekly basis. And you can pick ten different things to be grateful for and look, start small. These don't have to be massive things to be grateful for. We can find so many little things to be grateful for. In fact, just the fact that you're watching this video means that you are alive, which means you've got something to be grateful for. So start implementing them. The second powerful positive mindset journaling technique we can use is journaling on affirmations. Journaling on affirmations is a great way to develop a loving, caring, respectful, internal voice towards ourself. Look the person that we spend the most time with while we're alive is ourselves. So it's imperative that we take the time to develop and practice a calm, clear, caring, loving, and respectful internal voice. Doing that with affirmations is one of the most easiest and effective ways to do that. When we sit down in a journal with affirmations, each one is going to start with an I am statement. This is the affirm part of the app formation. These I am statements can be followed by anything that you already believe about yourself or things that you would like to affirm into your beliefs and your life. So for example, we can say, I am capable, I am loving, I'm a good listener. I am athletic, I am strong. As we affirm these IAM statements on a daily basis, we begin to allow them to take room in our subconscious minds. And thus, we begin to align our internal experience with our external experience. So I hope you can see how journaling on both gratitude and affirmations is so powerful. So start to work this in for the next seven days on a routine basis. Maybe you do it in the morning, maybe you do it at night shoes where you prefer to do it and begin to work this in on a daily basis. Be sure after the seven days to post some of your journal entries in the class discussion, as well as share your experience and the benefits that you gain from doing this exercise.
4. Method 3: Unleash You Creativity: All right, Our next journaling methodology is going to be journaling for creativity. And I love, love, love this method. And something that I use not every day, but throughout my days. And there's a great compounding effect of this journaling method. So if you're anything like me, you've got too many thoughts to count in a day. Some of them are creative and some of them are just nonsense. But we want to capture the creative ones. And sometimes those creative ideas, that spark of inspiration happens at times when we can't give it our full attention. This is why this journaling technique is so powerful because it allows us to grab that snippet of creativity, tuck it away, and come back to it when we have the adequate amount of time to begin to extrapolate and explore that idea further. So there are two steps to this method. The first step being the creative log. This is going to be short snippets of creative ideas that you keep track of threat your days, weeks and months. You can either do this on your phone or you can do it in a designated journal for these creative ideas. But the idea is to just grab the creative idea and get it down on the paper. For me, I know that if I don't put it down, There's a good, good chance that I'm going to forget that idea later. And it might have been a really, really good one. So I want you to do this throughout your days and throughout your weeks. And you'll be surprised as to how many creative ideas you may get down. Now remember, this isn't a time to decide whether this idea is a good idea or bad idea. All ideas are made equal in this stage of the method, just write them down after seven days, will begin to review our list. And hopefully we have five, 10, maybe even 20 creative ideas that we can choose from. And we'll take one to three of these ideas and do a creative writing exercise on them, where we'll journal for about five to ten minutes on each idea. It's in this stage only that we decide whether these ideas are good or bad. In this exercise, we can either do a free write or bulleted list on each idea that we would like to explore further, we can start to identify what tools we may need, what resources we will need if we're going to need help from others and if we do who those people will be, how we get in touch with them. All these ideas and all these thought processes that would go in to making this creative idea, one that we would want to actually explore and go further down. So for the next seven days, keep a log of all your creative ideas that come through. Again. Do not judge them. Do not decide whether they're good or bad, just yet, just write them down. And on the seventh day, take some time out of your day and pick one or three of these ideas and take some time to extrapolate them on them. Explore them further and identify whether this is something you actually want to bring into fruition and if it's not scrap it, because guess what? You've got a list of a bunch of other creative ideas that you can go back to. Which is the great thing about this journaling methodology is that if we keep up with it, the list of creative ideas will almost never run out. So try this on for the next seven days. Post your creative log in the discussions and projects tab and let us know what you think of this experience.
5. Method 4: Create Momentum with Small Wins: Apparently for growth is one of the more popular journaling exercises that I use in my day-to-day life. It can help create momentum, identify step-by-step processes, and keep yourself accountable to achieve small wins throughout your day. In fact, that's exactly what this journaling technique is, is journaling on small wins. To effectively use this journaling technique, we will break up a page of our journal into three different sections. I'm going to use the example of the sections that I use for my journal, but feel free to change them to your needs that best suits you at the top of the page, the first thing I'm gonna do is date the page after the date. I will create a section called Body. These are going to be all the things that I'm going to do throughout the day to take care of my body. For me, this is typically I'm going to stretch, I'm going to foam roll and I'm going to complete an exercise that correlates to whatever training program I'm engaging with at that time. This allows me to keep myself accountable while also giving myself a little bit of boost on myself esteem each time I get to check something off, the next section is going to be my generalize to do list that I'm going to try and hit throughout the day. This is going to include anything that's in my spiritual practice like meditating or praying, or calling friends and colleagues that I need to speak to on that day, as well as the one to three or maybe even five general tasks that I need to complete throughout the day. I like to keep both small and big or tasks in this section because I know that on most days I'm not going to be able to hit everything on the list and that is okay. But keeping both those small and large tasks in this section allows me to realize that I'm still being productive even if one or two things didn't get hit that day. The final section that I'm going to use is going to be checkboxes. This is going to be typically one to three boxes that I'm going to check at the end of the day that correlate to anything that I'm doing on a daily basis. So for me this is something like falling my nutrition plan by counting my macros or something like limiting my social media time to 30 minutes or an hour a day. And if I hit that benchmark at the end of the day, I'll give myself a checkbox on that specific activity. So I hope you can see how powerful this journaling exercise is to use each and every day. It'll help you create momentum and keep yourself accountable throughout your daily experiences. A quick tip on what I like to do is I like to set this the night before before I go to bed. I'll take five to ten minutes and I'll write the next day's date or write out my body activities, my generalized to-do list, as well as my checkboxes, so that when I wake up, I don't even have to think about it. It's already set up that way for me and I can just start to make progress on this. Doing this gives me a lot of mental clarity in the morning so I can focus on taking care of myself in the morning and setting my day up for success. So for the next seven days, give this one a shot and let me know what you think about it in the discussions tab.
6. Final Thoughts & Tips: Okay, so if you've made it this far through the class, congratulations, we've learned so much so far on how to implement journaling to better our lives and our day-to-day experiences. I hope you don't get overwhelmed with this because we don't need to implement all of these journaling exercises all at once. That would be extremely overwhelming to me. Try a few of them out for seven days, then try another one out for seven days and pick the ones that work best for you. For me, the daily small wins ones is one that I will do every single day. I'm not skipping that. I'm doing that every single day because that one works the best for me and the others. I layer in where I need. So find what works for you and begin to develop a routine of journaling that serves you in your self-discovery, your creativity, your personal growth, and your mindset. And I hope this was beneficial and I'll see you in the next class. Lots of love.
Alex Huston, Coach
