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Hello everyone, welcome back to the Conscious Success podcast. I'm so happy to be with you all today. So today I wanna talk about a practice that I deeply believe is one of the most powerful and free tools that we all have access to and yet very few people consistently use. It will, without a doubt, improve your relationship to yourself and your overall life. And yet the second that I tell you what it is, half of you are going to want to skip the rest of this episode. I'm talking about journaling.
But stay with me because I know what most of us think when we hear that word. It feels like another thing for your to-do list, another thing that's peddled in wellness culture that leaves you feeling bad about yourself for not making time for it. You might have tried it a few times. Maybe you bought the cute notebook and you wrote for a few days and then life got busy or you didn't see the immediate value and the notebook is still sitting in a drawer somewhere with five entries from three years ago.
or you've never even started a journal practice at all and you just decided it's not for you before even attempting it. But here's the thing. So many of the high achieving women that I work with spend their entire waking lives focused on things outside of themselves. We're constantly responding to our kids' needs, our colleagues, our email inbox, our Slack. We're jumping from one meeting to the call, to the to-do list item, to the next all day long from morning until night.
And even when we do find time to, quote unquote, relax or shift out of productivity mode, whether that's going for a walk or watching TV or scrolling on social media, our focus is still focused outside of ourselves. On that walk, we so often listen to a podcast like this the entire time, or we place our attention on what's on TV or what's on our phone as a way to numb out and essentially go comatose at the end of a long day.
or rigor mortis, as one of my clients hilariously said to me recently. We're so busy doing, doing, doing all day long, and our focus is always on someone or something else until we crash out or pass out. But the problem is that there is no time or attention left to bring our focus into our internal world. There's no room for the sense of interiority. We can't hear ourselves think anymore because there's no space.
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to listen to that voice inside. But that voice exists within all of us. That calm, unshakable, wise voice. It never speaks the loudest, but it is there to offer us guidance when we get quiet and still enough to actually listen. We all know the saying shower thoughts, right? Isn't it funny how our best ideas don't actually reach us when we're working harder or combing our way through our email inbox?
but when we actually have space to listen to ourselves think. And so often the only time that we make time for that, the only time those thoughts can actually find us is when we're in the shower or maybe driving in our car. And let's face it, for many of us commuting time is also now a thing of the past or we have little humans that we're playing music for instead. And this is a major, major problem. In order to be consciously successful, we have to counterbalance.
all of the doing, all the external focus with some space to just be. And that space is not wasted or unproductive time. That is space where our most strategic ideas and clarity can actually land, where we can allow the wisdom of our subconscious mind to come to the surface and all of a sudden have that aha moment that informs everything that can come after all the doing that follows.
And like I talked about a while back in the time traps episode, you can't run a marathon and play chess at the same time. Journaling is one of the ways that you actually stop, journaling is one of the ways that you actually step off the treadmill long enough to see the chessboard in front of you. If we're always in go mode, if we're always hustling, if we're always focused on crossing off the next to do item and running the next mile, we're never stepping back.
and pausing enough to see that 30,000 foot overview. We're not tapping into or accessing our inner wisdom and figuring out the most effective, empowered way to get from where we are to where we actually wanna be. We're just in constant execution. So one of the biggest unlocks to creating more useful success is to make time to not only zoom out and see the bigger picture, but to hear ourselves think.
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to allow our innate wisdom to come online so that it can better inform everything that we do. And I believe that one of the best ways to accomplish this, one of the best ways to see the full chessboard and to take conscious action is through developing a journaling practice. Time that we intentionally set aside to foster that interiority and let our inner voice speak, where we can work through any of the...
mindset or energetic blocks that are taxing our creative capacity and our clarity so that we're actually acting in intentional ways that are truly aligned and supportive with how we want to show up in the world and that will help us to achieve our goals. So today I want to walk you through what it actually looks like to create a supportive effective journaling practice that truly connects you to your sense of self, your clarity, your best ideas, and ultimately the source of all your power.
I'm going to walk you through how to do it and the tempting lies that are likely to come up as you start to build this practice so that you don't quit before you get to the good part. Because creating conscious success requires consciousness. That is a prerequisite. And in order to be conscious, it is absolutely imperative to create space to connect with and to listen to that voice within. We first need to know what we want, what's working, what's not working, what's getting in our way.
and how we're empowered to solve the challenges in front of us. So unless you're currently crushing every goal and feeling so centered and so lit up and energized and fulfilled, I strongly believe that creating a journaling practice is something that you can't afford to not prioritize. Okay, so if you're still with me, let's talk about what this practice actually is and what it isn't. Most of us, I think when we hear the word journaling, we think dear diary, right?
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Like, dear Diary, today I went to school and Sarah was mean to me at lunch and then I came home and watched TV. Like, that's how I actually thought about it for most of my life. Like, I was reporting my day to some imaginary friend named Diary. I had no idea who I was writing to and so it just kind of felt performative and I was basically just summarizing the things that I had already lived and processed. So,
It is no wonder that I didn't find journaling to be a valuable practice for a long time or didn't stick with it. But that is not what we are talking about here. The journaling practice that I've been devoted to for the last five years is based on a book that you might have heard of called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. If you haven't read it, I cannot recommend it highly enough. The premise is so simple. She refers to journaling as the morning pages, which are essentially three pages which you write out longhand
first thing in the morning in a stream of consciousness style of writing. Whatever is going on in your mind goes on the page. You do not edit, you don't censor, you don't judge, you don't even reread it for at least eight weeks. And you just, and you definitely don't share it with anyone else. It's for your eyes only. Now, this might sound simple enough in practice.
Now this might sound simple enough, but it can be very challenging for many of us in practice. Because even when we consciously agree with the premise that journaling could be helpful and understand how to do it quote unquote correctly, lots of shit comes up to keep us from actually doing it. So I want to talk about the three most common lies your brain is likely to try to tell you to get you to quit journaling, which I see come up all the time with my clients. So the first lie is
I don't have enough time. And look, I get it. We are all busy. Carving out 30 minutes a few times a week can feel like another thing we have on our to-do list, which is already way too long and it's so easy to convince ourselves that we just don't have the time. But I want you to be really, really honest with yourself for a second. How many minutes or hours a week do you scroll on Instagram or TikTok?
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How much time do you spend listening to podcasts or reading sub stack pieces or LinkedIn posts? How much time do you spend watching TV or working out or even reading a book? And it's not that all of these things are bad, but you find or make time for all of these other things in your life. And if you have the time to binge two episodes of whatever show you're watching, you have the time in your week for a journaling practice. Time is not actually the problem. Prioritization of your time is.
So deciding this practice is worth it, that spending time hearing yourself think and processing those thoughts is valuable and that you're worthy of that focus. That's the first issue. It's not, I don't have enough time, but I get to be really intentional with how I spend my time and this is a practice worth investing in. The second lie your brain is likely to tell you is, I don't know what to write. Now I hear this from my clients all the time. They sit down.
They open the journal and they freeze. They ask me for a prompt. They ask if they should be writing a gratitude list. Like they want to know what to write and how to do it correctly. But here's the thing. There's no quote unquote right way to journal. The only thing you need to do is to keep your hand moving across the page. Whatever thoughts are pinging around inside of your brain, conscious or subconscious, get to come out onto the page.
Very few of us, unless we've done a lot of deep work and deep meditation, are truly able to access a fully quiet mind. No, instead our monkey mind is always going off with random thoughts pinging around in there, right? shit, you didn't pick up the dry cleaning. Wait, did that friend get offended when I said that thing? Was that weird? Why didn't I think before opening my mouth? I'm so tired. I'm so sick of being pregnant. All of those thoughts are filling our mind constantly.
Well, maybe not the pregnant one for you, but it is for me. And it's like static on the line. And it's so important that we just get that shit out of there. Because once we do, once we can actually move all of that onto the page, we can start to hear deeper truths and our wiser self who gets drowned out by all that noise. So write it all down. If you don't truly have, and if you
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Truly have absolutely no thoughts going through your brain when you come to journal. Just write that down. Literally write, I don't know what to write, over and over again until another thought enters your mind. Because trust me, eventually it will. Okay, the third block that most of us aren't even consciously aware of, but is perhaps the biggest challenge of the three to overcome on our way to building a consistent journaling practice, is the fear of self-intimacy.
actually slowing down enough to consciously acknowledge and commit to paper all the shit that goes through our mind from one moment to the next feels deeply vulnerable. It is an act of radical intimacy. And the way I always like to put it is that intimacy means into me see and the practice of slowing down enough to see and name the things that go through our heads, including
All the petty stuff, all the bitchy stuff, all the dysregulated stuff, the victim-y stuff, the boring stuff. It's hard. It requires a willingness to be with all parts of ourself without making any of it wrong. So often, we only want to put the conscious, enlightened, brilliant stuff on the page. But that's unfortunately just not how it works. In order to ever get to that stuff, first, we have to actually meet ourselves where we are.
We have to recognize what's really going on underneath the busyness and the pursuit of achievement and perfection and the complaints. We have to allow ourselves to be human and to be messy and to get curious about it rather than critical. And another part of that fear is that we're so scared that by actually putting that down on the page and by naming the truth, that we'll be required to actually do something about it.
to change something that we don't feel ready to change or acknowledge. So we stay numb, we stay busy, we stay distracted, we stay disconnected. But if we can see this fear and this pattern for what it is and see how it's keeping us stuck, we can finally make a choice to return to our power. We can see the truth on the page and then we can realize that we're actually ready to do something about it.
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I started building a journaling practice sometime around 2021 when I was deep in my corporate season, stressed out of my mind, living in a foreign country without my regular support system or social life to process everything with. And my nervous system was really activated pretty much all day, every day. And I was looking for a way to process it all. And I had heard of the artist's way a few times. So I decided to finally read it all the way through and commit to putting it into practice.
And I'm not lying when I tell you that this simple practice changed my entire life. No, not overnight, not with one journal entry, but with consistency and time, it rebuilt my relationship to myself and it returned me to my power. It raised my awareness enough to begin taking aligned actions and doing that again and again, returning to the page, getting clarity and acting on it, changed the trajectory of my entire life and career. I really put it up there with
going to my coaching institute and doing deep trauma work in terms of the impact it has had on who I am today. But here's the thing about journaling. It is not one specific entry or insight that changes your life. It is how these small redirections and seemingly insignificant choices stack up and can lead to massive change over time. I don't think I'd be sitting here recording this podcast today if I hadn't built a journaling practice first.
And this isn't hyperbole. Like that's the reality. Because as I was in my season of stress and burnout, I was listening to a podcast called Over It and On With It hosted by a coach named Christine Hassler. And Christine is an OG coach in the biz. She's one of the co-founders of the Coaching Institute that I eventually trained at. And in this particular episode, she mentioned that they were enrolling the next cohort of students for the year ahead in this Coaching Institute. And immediately,
I felt this ping of excitement and energy and like this full body yes. But if I hadn't had a journaling practice, I probably would have moved right past that feeling without ever letting that insight land or acting on it. I would have been too distracted to actually catch that nudge from my intuition or too busy to actually honor it. But because I was journaling, I started to ask myself like, why did I have this response? And I...
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question whether enrolling in a coaching institute was really an aligned next step. And I realized that logical or not, this was something that I genuinely wanted. I wanted to be a student again. I wanted to learn more about how to be a great coach and a great leader. I wanted something outside of my work that felt energizing and inspiring. So I took action, I signed up for the program, and that decision ultimately led me to redesigning my entire career. So
If you are still with me and your curiosity is piqued and you're willing to try a journaling practice, here is how to actually build one that will serve you in the same way that it has me. Now we've already covered the basic mechanics of the morning pages. Write three pages, longhand, ideally first thing in the morning. Now let's talk about why. Why three pages? Well, three pages is enough to actually get past the monkey mind and the surface level BS and into something deeper.
If you just write half a page, you're still in your to-do list and the chatter in your head. And that's not a problem. Like it's important to get that out. And I often go back and capture the various to-dos that I wrote down and put them into my task management system or prioritize time for them on my calendar from there. But three pages forces you to keep going long enough to then actually drop into the deeper stuff that sits just beneath the surface. Why longhand? Well, because
When you write things down by hand, it forces you to slow down the pace of your thoughts enough to become conscious of them. There's actually neuroscience behind this that indicates that writing things out by hand activates the theta and alpha frequencies in our brain in a way that typing does not. The controlled hand movements involved in handwriting are what trigger the deeper processes in our brain in a way that pressing keys on a keyboard just doesn't.
Handwriting forces us to actually process our own words, which is what leads to shifts in our learning, our awareness, and our level of consciousness. And why first thing in the morning? Well, because this is a liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, where we have the cleanest, clearest possible access to our internal world and the best opportunity to listen to ourselves. Our phone isn't buzzing yet. The kids aren't yelling yet.
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We are not expected to be elsewhere or responsive to other people's needs yet. It's just us in the page and our own voice. But look, if the mornings genuinely do not work for you, doing your pages last thing before you go to sleep can also work. The principle is the same. You are tuning out the external world to tune into the internal one. But I find that when I do my pages in the morning, I get that added clarity and focus that benefits me for the rest of the day.
I prioritize my time more effectively. I feel more energized, more creative, more empowered. My days just tend to go better when I start them off by journaling. So if you can, I really do encourage you to try to prioritize time in the mornings, even if it's only a couple times a week that you can swing it. Okay, and then what do you write about? Truly anything, everything, whatever is on your mind, to-do list items, complaints, petty thoughts, big questions.
Dreams, fears, the things you're avoiding, things you're excited about, random observations that thought you had in the shower yesterday. Nothing is too small.
Nothing is too ugly. Nothing is too embarrassing. The whole point is to get it out. Answering or judging it. Don't try to make it sound smart or kind or evolved. Stop performing entirely and practice just being authentic if no other place than on these pages. Lastly, I really encourage you to build a ritual around it. Choose a notebook that you love and a pen that feels easy to write with.
Consider habit stacking journaling with something you already do every day. So I get up and I go get a warm cup of coffee and then I go back in bed where I'm cozy under my covers before my kids wake up. And this makes the practice something I want to come back to. It feels like a little gift I'm giving myself. So think about what would make this feel good for you, like a ritual instead of a routine or another to do. Okay.
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That's the whole practice and the whole list of instructions. Now, I wanna tell you what's likely to happen as a natural byproduct of consistently writing these pages. Because in the early days,
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In the early days, most of what you write is probably going to be that mindless chatter or thoughts from your survival brain, random gripes and fears and complaints. And that is an expected and productive part of the process.
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Make yourself right for this, not wrong. It means that you are not self-centering.
It means that you are not self-censoring and that you are building true intimacy, which as we talked about before, is really hard to do. Let yourself be petty and immature. Let yourself be messy and rant. Make that right, not wrong. Just get it out of your body and onto the page. And as I mentioned in the last solo episode,
And as I mentioned in the solo episode about fear, this is an act of self-compassion, to be with your own suffering, to witness it and allow for it rather than suppressing it or criticizing yourself for it. And if you just let yourself vent, at some point, the energy will start to dissipate, your hand will slow down, you'll have said all you need to say on that topic. And you'll start to feel, and your energy will start to settle and you'll
start to feel a gentle exhale. Once that happens, a perspective shift becomes possible. Once those scared and immature parts of you have been fully heard and met with compassion, a door opens where we can begin to shift from survival mode back to creator mode. So here, we can get curious about why all this is coming up for us and what it might be trying to teach us or what action might be required of us to address this challenge or problem. Because
When we let those survival parts of ourself speak first and get it all out, then our conscious self, our inner parent can come online. The part of you that is wise, that can access a broader perspective. And from here, we can become our own best coach. We can see what is being asked of us, what we are being called to do, what the situation calls for, what action we might need to take, even if it's uncomfortable.
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will have the clarity that it's time to set a boundary or have a hard conversation or ask for more support or leave the job or the relationship or enroll in the program. And yet oftentimes we will still choose not to act, not immediately. Sometimes that clarity feels too confronting or we may need more support before we can shift into empowered action. But here's the thing, when the same complaints keep showing up on that page again and again,
the same frustrations, the same limiting beliefs, the same stuckness, the same longings, the same questions. When you see those patterns on the page week after week, month after month, at some point, you are going to feel compelled to take action. You're gonna get sick of your own shit. You can no longer pretend that you don't feel the way that you do and you can't gaslight yourself that it's not actually that bad or that things will magically get better.
You can't tell yourself you're fine, everything's fine anymore when the words on the page are clearly telling you for weeks in a row now that you aren't and that it isn't. The pages provide us with perspective. They hold up a mirror to what's working and what's not. And then eventually we'll actually do the work and take the actions to address the patterns that keep coming up again and again. We'll clear out that backlog of complaints and misalignment and we will return to our power.
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And that's when the pages become a direct line to our wisest self. We're able to hear that inner voice without all that static on the line. It becomes our inner guide and our best coach. We have direct access to our most creative and strategic thoughts, shower thoughts on demand, if you will. That really does become possible. But I want to be really honest with you. That is not how it's going to feel at the start. The journaling practice often does not feel good at first.
In the first weeks and months, you'll feel scattered and disempowered and in avoidance of putting that on the page. All your shit will come to the surface and it will be deeply uncomfortable. You will want to avoid that self-intimacy. You'll want to believe the lies that your brain manufactures that you don't have enough time or you don't have anything to write. It's going to feel pointless if you're blocked and confronting if you're not. That is the exact point that most people quit. But if you keep going,
You will reach a level of awareness of what you must do to solve the challenges that you're facing that you can no longer ignore. You'll be compelled to act. You'll start setting that boundary, having the hard conversations, leaning into your growth edges rather than your fears, and you'll start to see the results in your actual life. And when the cumulative power of the practice starts to compound, you will start to trust yourself more. You will see and believe that you can create the change that you wish to see.
And that's when your journal becomes the place where you go to get your best ideas. It is where I can flesh out an entire solo episode in five pages before my kids wake up. It's where I get clarity on what makes, it's what.
It's where I get clarity on my next good business idea or what the next right step is to coach a client through. In time, the pages become this direct line to our creative capacity, our strategy, our wisdom.
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It's where we are not forcing the writing anymore, but we're actually just allowing the download. Now that's not to say you won't still get dysregulated or have chatter in your mind or petty stuff to process, but you'll move through that so.
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Now that's not to say you won't still get dysregulated or have mind chatter or petty stuff to process, but you'll move through that so much more quickly and you'll be able to shift back into connection with the wisest part of yourself so much more easily. So here's what I want you to do to integrate this life-changing practice into your routine. Start by ordering a journal, one that you think is beautiful and that you would be so happy to write in. I love the magic of iJournals. I think that they are beautiful and
I love the magic of iJournals, so I will link them in the show notes if that makes taking action feel easier for you, but buy whatever speaks to you. And while you wait for your journal, figure out where journaling will sit in your week and how often you are committed to practicing it. Journaling daily is best, but don't let perfection get in the way of building a practice. Commit to maybe three days a week.
Figure out what time you'll need to get up or what conversations you'll need to have or what support you'll need to ask for in order to protect this practice. Think through your routine and where you want to write and the ritual that you'll create. Then once you have your journal, start journaling. When your survival brain says, I don't have time, call BS. When it says, I don't know what to write, write that down. When it says, I'm scared of what I'll find, acknowledge the fear and write through it anyway. Expect.
Stage one to feel hard, keep going. Let the page surface what it needs to surface and trust the practice because you do have access to a universal intelligence within you. And when you learn to harness its power, you will be truly unstoppable. So if you want to grab my guide to the morning pages, you can print it out and keep it in your notebook or to refer to next time you need it.
I will include a link to download this resource for free in the show notes as well. I hope this served you and I would absolutely love to hear how building a journaling practice goes for you. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me on IG. I'm at Conscious Success Co. And if this or any other episode has really resonated with you, it would mean so much to me if you would share it with a friend or leave a review for the podcast. It really does make such a difference. So as always, thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.
