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I hope you and yours are well as we move into the last quarter of the year. And today, I want to talk about an amazingly useful topic and strategy for business owners: journaling.
Before we do that, if you’re new here, welcome; great to have you. [There will be a direct transcription on the website; excuse any weird typos for those who like to read.]
If you are new here and ready to make marketing a priority download our marketing checklist here – www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/mcl; pop your name and email in there, and we will wing it over to you. Thirty pretty straightforward questions, which will inform where you are as a starting point with your marketing.
Do not be fooled by its simplicity. By actually printing this bad boy or bad girl off and filling it in, it really can help to inform you on, “I’m doing okay on this bit, but what about these bits I’m not doing so well on. I wonder if that is why I’m not achieving some of the things I want to achieve.”
Let’s talk about one of the most useful tools to create your business success, and that is journaling.
What is Journaling?
Let’s get into talking about journaling. As many of you will know, I am a writer; I do a lot of content writing for our clients, our content in Superfast Circle and various other things. However, I want to be really clear on remembering that journaling isn’t just for writers; journaling is a superpower.
I’ll be honest and say I am a human being. I have journaled at various points in my life, and I can trackback to my biggest successes around the time I have been journaling, where I’ve been using it as the superpower that it is, and getting my thoughts onto paper. I can point my brain in the direction that I want to go in, that I want my life to go in, that I want my business to move forward in as well.
I first started journaling back in the day when I studied for my NLP practitioner qualification. That is, neurolinguistics programming, a lovely jargon word, all about working with your mind and achieving the results you want to achieve.
As part of that course, it was suggested that we might want to journal because if we journaled, it’s a way of thinking on paper, which has always stuck with me. It’s a way of getting what’s going on in our heads out.
Have you ever had that situation where you think my head is so full, it’s going to explode? I used to have that a lot, particularly in my corporate days. Then someone gave me this gift and said, why don’t you think about journaling, Denise? I could get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper.
Journaling Can Help With Future Planning
One of the things I focused on by doing this was looking at what I wanted my future to be like; what exactly did I want to achieve in my life? How much money did I want to earn? How successful did I want to be?
I started my journal thinking about my role. At the time, I was a sales manager, and I knew I’d been pretty good. I would often be given the team that nobody else wanted to manage or the team that wasn’t performing. I remember at the time; I had a team that wasn’t exactly doing well.
I journaled a lot about being successful with this team, about what we would achieve. It was very much future-orientated, future-focused.
Journaling Helps You Recognise Negative Thoughts
I also had a few negative thoughts when I could see them on paper; it helped me dismiss them because I realised what rubbish they were, which is one of the real benefits of journaling.
You start to look at the words, and for me, I asked myself the question is this real Denise?
When you start writing things down, it gives you some perspective. I started doing that, and over the years, I became the number one sales manager in the UK. I was one of the top three sales managers in the whole of the EMEA region, and life was tickety-boo. Then I started journaling about other things that I wanted, which didn’t involve working with my current employer. It involved creating my own business.
Journaling Helps You Build The Future You Want
Journaling has worked for me, as I shared; I managed to exit my corporate career. I started my business in my late forties, where most people thought I was bonkers, but I used to journal about why I wanted the life that I wanted, where I wanted to live, and this went on and on and on. Cycle to today, am I a multimillionaire? No.
Do I have a great business and a great life? Absolutely.
I put my actions down to writing down what I wanted in life, so I was able to start to direct my brain to start looking at the things that I wanted.
I wanted to live in the country. I wanted to work for myself. I wanted to have this type of lifestyle that other people only dream of. That’s how I started with journaling.
The Evidence For Journaling
Now, interestingly, I stopped journaling about a year or so ago for various personal reasons. I started again this year, and wow, what a difference it is making. But let me share with you some of the data and facts around journaling and the evidence around how useful it is for you to direct your thoughts—a little bit of a brain physiology lesson for you here.
For those of you that are maybe a little bit cynical about journaling, as you will be aware, you’ll have heard me talk about it before; our brain has that conscious element to it, which is the Prefrontal Cortex. The conscious brain is the seat of our decision-making and something we want to channel and get focused on what we want in our lives.
We also have the lovely, amazing habit brain, which keeps us alive. It keeps our liver livering; it keeps our heart hearting; it keeps our breath breathing. It keeps us going.
The challenge is that our habit brain’s key role in life is to keep us safe. As it’s our habit brain, it hasn’t come on an awful lot over the years because its function keeps us safe.
Back in the cavewoman days, if I were a cavewoman, my habit brain would want to make sure that I wasn’t going to be killed by the sabre-tooth tiger and that when I went out picking berries off the tree, I would choose the good berries, not the poisonous berries. That I wouldn’t drink the terrible water that was going to kill me, but I would drink the right water.
What happens with our brain is that it’s very much default thinking in how it works, and it’s there to protect us. But if we are not careful, this habit brain takes over. I think we have just over 60,000 thoughts a day, and because our habit brain is trying to control us and keep us safe, a lot of those thoughts tend to be a tad negative, as many of us have experienced.
Journaling Gives You Clarity
Now, as you get into journaling and you start free-forming and writing down your thoughts, you will notice that quite a few of them are pretty negative and that they need to be switched around and they need to be directed. That is the amazing power of journaling because it gives us that element of controlling what we want.
We all know about the law of attraction, and what we focus on grows. Journaling about what we want to do and what we want to achieve starts to draw ‘things’ into our awareness that we probably hadn’t considered before.
One of the reasons it does this is that it gives us real clarity and focus because when you are, and I suspect if you are a business owner or a marketer, you will have a lot going on in that head of yours. When you can get things down on paper, you can start to get clear on what you want and options for achieving that.
Because, here’s the thing, when you think about the default thinking that many of us go into, that’s the whining part of the brain starts saying to you;
“Oh, let’s wait. Let’s not move on marketing just yet. Let’s wait until we’ve got this quarter out of the way, or let’s wait until the new website goes live. No, we’re not going to do anything now because we’re alright now we’re all nice and safe, we’re in the cave, we’ve got jobs on the board, we’ve probably not got many candidates, but this is happening. We’re all right; really, I’m okay.
Unfortunately, our brain does this to us all the time, and it’s our default thinking, and the challenge is that unchecked, it will just continue to do that. I was chatting to a friend the other day, and you think, my God, it’s September, what’s happened? How did we get here? It’s like we get into autopilot, and we don’t start thinking and putting some control on our lives.
There are multiple ways to do this, but actually, getting your thoughts down on paper and journaling about your business, your life, what exactly you want and how you want it to look makes a huge difference.
Journaling Challenges Your Thoughts
It’s funny; I commented on somebody’s post the other day in a Facebook group – he was talking about some of the classic mistakes people make, and often people think they’ve got ‘everything’ sorted.
Oh, how our minds like to deceive us!
Usually, the challenge is that with a lot of our sales calls, when you start to talk to people, they say, yes, we know how to do social media, emailing, etc.
Yet when we start to drill down, there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on. People realise that actually, they don’t know about social media and well, oh, my word, I didn’t realise it was two years since we uploaded a blog, and oh yes, all our social media is just, oh, well, it’s just job ads.
This thinking, which is our habit brain, takes over, and it tries to tell us, look, we’re okay, don’t put yourself out there, don’t do things like that.
But imagine if you’ve got a process that journaling will give you, where you can start planning for your future. That is something worth investing some time in, don’t you think?
Journaling Works and is Backed Up By Endless Research and Data
I’m going to give you some practical tips. It’s very easy to do, and there is a lot of documented evidence and research about the many things it will help you with, for instance, reducing stress and anxiety. There’s a lot of data recently about the fact that it’ll help you strengthen your immune system, something that might be important for all of us currently with what’s been going on with the coronavirus for the last couple of years.
It’s well documented that journaling helps you improve your memory. It will also help you sleep better and quite a few other things apart from that. It helps you get clarity on your thoughts; it’s good for stress management, it enables you to learn from your experiences because when you see things on paper, you’re going, ah, right it seems to be when you engage with the conscious mind, it starts to trigger more things.
It’s even helped people who are suffering from various illnesses.
Journaling helps you get clear on where you are and where you want to go.
Imagine that this is an inexpensive way to put new thoughts into your brain and start rewiring what you’re thinking and what’s possible for you. I’ll probably do another podcast on this, or Sharon might do a video around how as human beings, we’re very past focused. It’s very easy because, of course, all those memories are there to keep dragging up the past.
Oh, when I was a sales manager at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Oh, when I worked for AstraZeneca.
Oh, when I lived here.
All that data is there clogging up our brains, to be quite frank. Whereas thinking about our future self, we have to engage with the prefrontal cortex, and we have to start thinking about it, and we have to start planning it, and that is the real gift of journaling.
How Do I Journal?
Let’s think about some practical things around journaling, what you want to consider; how could you start, what do you need to do? What are some of the things you want to journal about?
I journal about various things, but here are three areas that I strongly suggest that you consider.
1. Gratitude
One is gratitude. The evidence around gratitude journals – if you’re having a bit of a, I call it a whiny bitch moment, if I’m having a whiny bitch moment, I’m a human being, yes, it happens to me. Journaling about, well, actually I’ve got hot water, I’ve got a lovely fire, I’ve got steps down to the river bank, I’ve got beautiful trees surrounding me, I have money in the bank. I can go to Mark’s & Spencer; I can go and book a holiday. I can do this. I can do that. When we embody gratitude, there are so many things that can make a huge difference and shift our mindset.
2. Creating Your Future and Achieving Your Goals
The next couple of things are combined. One is creating your future, and one is about how you’re going to achieve your goals. It’s amazing: as you do this more and more and more, you get more clarity, you start to move forward. The brain’s reticular activating system kicks in, and all these different ideas begin to appear for you.
Now, don’t tell me you can’t create your future because you absolutely can.
If you’ve ever booked a holiday, and I know it can be a little bit challenging in the UK at the moment, but you start to future-plan. The other night I was looking online. We want to have a holiday around Easter in Scotland, and go to a part that we’ve not been to before, to the west coast and already we’ve got it booked. This is something I was journaling about as well, and I’m starting to plan. I need to take this day off work, and then we’ll do this, and then will we need to buy more internet when we’re up there? Where will we buy the food from? I talk about what we could eat. You may think she’s a madwoman, but I’m planning the future. I’m writing it down; I’m making lists.
Our brains are more than capable of planning our future. If you plan a holiday, you can plan your future. Imagine if you could tap into that and start planning what you want to happen in your life. It could be about how you are going to achieve your goals? What goals do you want to achieve? How will you create the future you want? Because we all know we can create what we want in our lives. We need to have an idea about what that is and why we want it.
3. Use Journal Prompts
Now, our brains are designed to answer questions, and this is where journal prompts come in – you can always Google journal prompts and see which ones resonate with you. I’ll give you some of the ones I use that you can also use to answer those questions.
I like to ask open questions like who, what, why, where, when because that drives me to write more rather than less because it’s easy to write a yes/no answer. That is a top tip, a hot journaling tip from Denise. I’m just looking at some of my different journal prompts here – what do I want now from the business?
How will the business look in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, whatever you want to do, whatever timeframe you want to add there, what can we do to attract more clients? What can we do to be recognised as a player in the market? What can we do to attract more candidates? What can we do to attract more recruiters?
You can see the theme here in the questions. You’re asking your mind, and your mind is going to go in there and help you come up with some answers.
I write my goal down every day—the goal that I have for this year, what I want to achieve. There’s a health goal for me, and there’s a financial goal. I write that down, journal around that, and start to ask questions about my future self.
What would the future Denise think when she achieved a goal? What would the future Denise be doing daily?
These are all journal prompts that will work for you around business. If you’re not sure, just Google’ journal prompts’. You will find a lot on Pinterest. Though I can give you mine, some of them might resonate with you; I would encourage you to look for your own and see which ones resonate with you because that will be a much more useful exercise. Let me finish up here because people are saying, “What do you journal on? Can I journal on my iPad?” You can journal on whatever you want. How long should I journal for? However long you want.
It is not about getting into the deep, deep, deep parts of your soul and journaling about that. Of course, you can do that, but if you have never journaled before, let’s start with some basics around asking those questions, journaling what you want your future life to be like. I would like to have a home in Carlisle; I would also like to have a lodge up on the west coast of Scotland. I would like to have X amount of money in the bank. I want a Volkswagen Touareg. I want a business where I could operate it from anywhere in the world. Do this in intense detail. Those are things that you can be journaling about.
4. How Long Should I Journal For?
Take as long as you like or as short as you like, but I would say start with a couple of minutes a day if you’ve never done it before. If you’ve not got a couple of minutes, you’ve got problems. You’ve got bigger problems than what you should journal about? Take the time. Some days, I have a set of questions, and I journal around those questions because I’m getting more and more clarity. I’m sending that signal to myself that this is what Denise wants; this is where we’re going. Some days, if I’ve got a bit more time, I spend 10, 15 minutes.
Now, I journal because I like the feeling, and I like that hand-brain connection of writing. It’s really weird. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a tool called Remarkable. These are electronic journals. They allow you to upload things online and various other things, but they’ve managed to get the feeling of actually writing on paper. I don’t know; there’s something about that.
I have a nice journal. I bought my journals from Beechmore Journals; you can get them on Amazon. They’re expensive, but they’re beautiful, and they are made in vegan leather. Being a writer, of course, I have a fountain pen. I have a very expensive pen. I like writing; it’s my time to do that. That’s what I use.
Journaling is a Super Power
Journaling is one of those counterintuitive things that people think doesn’t work, but it’s like a secret power for those who do journal. I’ve gone back and looked at some of my journals and gulped when I’ve seen how far I’ve come.
You remember Dan Sullivan always talks about the gap versus the gain. We’re always looking for what we haven’t done.
I remember writing that I would love to have a home in the Lake District. Five years after writing this, I ended up with a home in the Lake District. I wanted a home that looked out into the water. I probably should have got a little bit clearer because it’s a river I’m looking out onto at the moment when actually I wanted the sea!
That’s in my journal for the next place 
I want an online business, and that’s what we have. Journaling, I strongly suggest that you consider it as you take your business even further forward.
How We Can Help
We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see how SuperfastCircle can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.
Thanks,
Denise
