Journaling For Self-Reflection: A Simple 3 Question Practice

1. Introduction: Writing fundamentally is an organizational system. So when we Journal, It helps us organize our thoughts and our feelings much better. But it also allows us the space to reflect on the different events that we might be dealing with in our daily lives. Hello everyone. My name is Gabby and welcome to Journalism for self-reflection, a simple three question practice. As I'd like to introduce myself, I am a coach creator and a very curious human being. And, and journaling for over 18 years now, I feel like journaling has been the single most effective practice that has helped me understand myself better, but it has also helped me understand the world better. And by the world, I mean my inner world. In this class, I'm going to teach you a three question practice that is all about self-reflection and helping you cultivate more clarity and understanding towards her thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and helping you reflect on the different events that you might be dealing with in your life. I will share with you why and how journaling helps us. I'll talk about my own experience and I will introduce you to the three questions that are going to serve as the foundation for this journaling practice. And our class project is going to be to do this practice for seven days in a row and then share your insights and discoveries with their community. By the end of the class, you will have learned a simple yet very powerful tool that will help you gain insight into your own self. And by the end of a seven-day practice, you will have learned something new about yourself. I promise. I'm so excited that you are here and I will see you in class. 2. Demystifying Journaling: First of all, welcome. I am so excited that you decided to join the class. And before we jump into the actual practice and into the three questions, I wanted to briefly talk about why journaling is so effective. And I kind of wanted to demystify journaling because I could simply tell you journal, it'll help you, it works and I wouldn't be lying, but I want to share with you some concrete information as found through research of why journaling is so effective. As I said at the beginning of the video, writing fundamentally is an organizational system. So when we Journal about our feelings, when we write about what's happening at work, we are organizing all of this information and we're beginning to make sense of it. So for example, you might have a lot of different separate jumbled thoughts about something. You might have many different feelings about something. And only when you sit down and you write about it, you are beginning to strengthen these different pieces of information together, we begin to make sense of that information. As we do that, our working memory, the part of your memory that deals with processing information, reasoning, decision making. That part of her memory is freed up. So because we are sitting and we are consciously processing all of this information and we are organizing and we're making sense of it. And the subconscious mind doesn't have to do the work anymore. So we're quite literally freeing up our minds. Now, when it comes to journaling, there's one thing that many researchers agree on. The key to the effectiveness of journaling is in how we use it to interpret our experiences. So venting about something, whether it's in person or on a piece of paper, is simply not enough. If we say, oh, you know, this is what's happening at work, this is what I'm feeling and we kind of forget about it and we don't do anything with that information. That is not very helpful. If we really want to tap into the powerful practice of journaling that will allow us to gain some real insights. We need to use the information that we gather to learn from it, right? So it's not an approach of right and forget. It's more of a write and reflect, right? And learn. We need to learn from our emotions, our beliefs, our behaviors, the different events that we are faced with. So the journaling practice really is about gathering all of this information, making sense of all the different information, and then seeing how we can learn from it. The most incredible thing about journaling is that when we begin to gather all this information about ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors, we begin to see a pattern emerge. And that's what I see in myself all the time. You might think that, you know, you felt a certain way here and then you felt a certain way there and it's all disconnected. But when you do journaling for long enough, you begin to see that there is a pattern, there's a thread, there's almost like this repetitive cycle through which we go and we're not aware of it most of the time consciously because we forget about it right on Monday. How was I feeling on Monday? I don't quite remember. And then it's Sunday and you forgot how you were feeling on Wednesday, it gets lost. But when we Journal, we keep track of all this incredible information about ourselves. And we begin to see patterns and we begin to understand why we feel the way we feel and why we react the way we react in certain situations. So journaling is incredibly powerful and it's not difficult. But all I ask is that you are open, honest, and vulnerable with yourself. This practice and the answers to the three questions that we're gonna be working with are for you and your eyes only. So really just open up, be honest, be vulnerable with yourself because that's where all the good stuff comes out. And now that we've covered the basics and a little bit of information about journaling, we can go ahead and learn the three questions that we are going to be working with them. 3. The 3 Questions: Alright, so now we're going to learn the three questions that we are going to be working with for the next seven days. And they are fairly simple questions, but the amount of information that you're going to be able to learn about yourself and gather is incredible. So really don't underestimate the power of a simple question. And unfortunately, I cannot take credit for these questions. I wish I had come up with them, but I heard about them first from Alex benign a year and a half ago. He's the author of the third door and he heard it from somebody else. So I am just passing on this information to you. And before we begin, I feel like I need to put on my glasses. Not that I need them because they are computer glasses. I just feel like they make me look very smart and just helps me tap into the teacher mentality and that makes sense. So I wrote my journal, and this is my actual journal in which I write very often. There's a lot of information here. And I am going to be writing down the questions as I share them with you. So if you want to pause the video and grab a piece of paper or your own journal, please do so. So we are going to start with question number one of course. And question number one is what filled me with enthusiasm today. So howard journal, Law Journal or anything, you can write down this question what filled me with enthusiasm today? So probably by the question, you can understand that we are going to be doing this practice in the evenings at the end of the day. So we are going to be reflecting on our date. So question number one, what filled me with enthusiasm today is meant to help you reflect on the really great things that make you happy, make you excited, fill up your cup, and fill up your soul that really, really kind of make you feel better, right? So it doesn't have to be big things. And it can be something like having a really nice cup of coffee or going for a nice walk with your friend or, you know, going for a jog. It's really not complicated information at all. And it doesn't have to be that you went to this extravagant dinner. It's simply there to help you see the things that fill up your cup, that fill up your soul, that make you feel so excited and fulfilled and grateful and happy. So what filled me with enthusiasm today is here to help you gather all the information and all the evidence about yourself that makes you happy, makes you excited, makes it feel fulfilled and joyful and grateful. So the first question filled me with enthusiasm today. Question number two, as what dreamed of energy today? So we can write that down. What drained me of energy today. So obviously this is the opposite question of what filled me with enthusiasm today. And it is meant to help you gather evidence about the things that Make you feel like it takes energy out of you in not a negative way, but it really feels like it drains your right and doesn't fill up your cup. It actually drains your cup. So what are the things that make you upset, made you frustrated, wasn't something that'll work, was it something, you know, in a personal relationship wasn't that you didn't, for example, go to exercise in the morning and you feel like, you know, that really dreaming of energy because it didn't help me fill up my cup. So kinda the opposite. So this question is really here to help you gather evidence about the things that dream you that deplete you that feel like, I don't want to do this. I didn't want to do this. It makes me feel so tired, makes me feel so weak. What are the things or what are the things that happened in your day? Whether it's, you know, tangible things or if you know, for example, having to travel or commute or talking to somebody, or maybe even it's simply something like the thoughts in your head or something that you know. What's more self created about maybe how you feel about yourself. This question is here to help you gather evidence about the things that dream do of energy. Now, question number three is, what did I learn about myself today? So we can write that down as well. What did I learn about myself today? Now, this is the golden questions. So this is kind of where you can take question number one, question number two, and bring them together and reflect upon them. For example, if you learn something new about what a drains, you can definitely take that information into question number three, but also this is sort of like an open space for you to really reflect on anything that happened during that day that might have not been related to filling you up with enthusiasm or draining you of energy. I want to take on these glasses because I don't know. I feel like I really don't mean them, but I just thought it looked cool. So what did I learn about myself today? Think about your day, go chronologically about your day, or maybe there's one event that stands out, you know, like a bigger event, a meeting, a conversation that you had with somebody or something a little bit smaller, but just think about your day and think, okay, what's there's something new that I learned about myself today. Maybe the way you communicated with a friend, you could have been a little bit more gentle, a little bit more softer, or maybe you've got a little bit more defensive. Just really think about what happened in your day and try to look at it from a different perspective, sort of like an outsider perspective. Because a lot of the times we get so attached to our own personal experience, and that's why we get defensive. What we want to protect ourselves, but really from a loving and beautiful and compassionate place. Just take a look at your day and the events that happened from an outsider's point of view and think, Okay, what can I see here? What did I learn about myself today? And I want to share my own personal experience with doing these three questions. I started doing them as I said, about a year and a half ago, two years ago. And I actually did them in 30-day chunks. So I answered these questions every day for 30 days. And I remember at the time when I started, I was still living in New York and I was doing a lot of freelance work. And I was working with this one really difficult client. And as I was doing these questions every single evening, I saw a pattern after doing it for about a week and a half, I saw pattern that on the question, what drained me of energy today? My client kept popping up over and over again. And I was thinking, This is so interesting because at the end of the day I feel so drained because of this conflict. And just like not smooth communication and things not going really well. That after I finished my last project with that client, I decided to let him go and I said, hey, thanks so much. It was great working with you, but unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to work with you on future projects. So I saw a pattern emerge and it was really eye-opening because it seems so simple yet I didn't see it just every day. I was getting frustrated about the same thing and it made me think, okay, if this is the one thing that keeps me frustrated day after day, do I want to change it or do I want it to repeat over and over again? So as you answer these questions, you are going to begin to see some patterns, right? The things that excite you and fill you up with enthusiasm are going to be similar or they're going to be repetitive the same width. When trained you have energy and hopefully every day you're going to be able to learn something new about yourself, no matter how small or no matter how big. Now that you know the three questions that we're going to be working with in the next lesson, we're going to talk about the seven day journaling practice that you are going to take on for the next seven days. I'll see you there. 4. Put It Into Practice: As you already know your class project is to put these questions into practice for the next seven days and then share some of your insights and discoveries with the community. Now I understand that the information that you're going to be about or the insides day you're going to be discovering are going to be fairly personal. So you don't have to share very personal information. However, it would be great to just hear from you and how you found the experience of journaling, how you've enjoyed it hasn't been beneficial. And also this is something that you would want to continue in the future. I also want to share a couple of tips with you that make journaling very effective and also that help stay consistent with journalists. So first things first, you need your pen and you meet your paper or your journal. Because there is an incredible connection between the mind and the hand. So the act of journaling is very wrong. You can't really censor your thoughts by pressing the delete button. So you have to do this exercise with pen to paper. And the best thing is if you have a journal, because it keeps all of your information in one place rather than having separate pieces of paper. However, if you want to write on different pieces of paper, that's totally fine as well. But the most important thing is half pen and some paper. Now, you're going to be answering these questions at the end of the day because the questions asked what's filled you with enthusiasm today, what dreams you have energy today and what you've learned about yourself today. So you're going to be working with them in the evening. Number one, is that in order for you to not forget to Journal, Of course, you can set some reminders on your phone. You can put it somewhere on a visible place, on a post-it note. But for me, what I found the most effective is actually putting my journal with my pen on top of my pillow. Because this way I am not going to forget it at all. Because when I go to bed, it's right in front of me. So put it on your bed or write a note somewhere in a very visible place that will remind you, and there's going to be no way that you're going to miss. The second thing that I wanted to mention is that please do your best to journal about your day at the end of the day. Now I know sometimes you might be a little bit too tired or you're like, oh, I'm not feeling it, I'm gonna do it tomorrow. That happens. However, I found that journaling is not as powerful and as insightful The next day when you have to journal about the day that you had yesterday. Because at the end of the day, especially if you have really heightened emotions, whether they are good or they are more negative, this is very valuable information because it's still very raw and it's still very present. The next day it's going to be after like seven or eight hours of sleep, everything all the all the information I'm older feelings would have been processed a little bit more and they're not going to be as heightened in the way or is wrong. So we would do your best to journal at the end of that day, put it somewhere on your pillow, on your bed, Post-it notes, and be consistent because consistency and sticking with something for a long time is the best way for you to gather incredible and valuable information. Because sure, you can learn quite a bit by doing this exercise one day and maybe for two days in a row. But time is your best acid here because you are going to be thrown into different situations. Every day is not the same, right? So how you feel today is not going to be how you feel in six days or even in two weeks. So stay consistent. And I'm really looking forward to hearing all of your experiences. 5. Closing Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you found it valuable. I hope it got you excited to journal and gather more information about yourself. As I said, I've been journaling for so many years and it is one of my favorite practices and I've been able to learn so much about myself through journaling. So I cannot wait to hear about your experiences and to read all about your discoveries. If you have any comments, questions, concerns, if you simply want to say hi, please feel free to reach out. I am here. I am here for you, I am here for the community. And thank you so much once again for joining the class. And I will see you in the next 15.