Hope you had a good weekend.
Fortunately I managed to catch up on a bit of sleep this weekend after we had Spark last Saturday and Sunday – it was such a great event but it did wreck my sleep score a bit 😅 (btw if you missed Spark, you can still get the recordings here).
I’ve actually just finished a bit of a journalling session in one of my favourite cafe spots in Hong Kong and it’s got me thinking about why this habit has been so transformative for me over the years.
I know I’ve talked about journalling before (probably to the point where some of you are sick of hearing about it 😅), but I reckon it’s worth revisiting, especially at this time of year when lots of you are trying to make progress on your goals for this first quarter.
And I thought I’d start today’s email with a question: if you were designing a bridge, would you try to do all the calculations in your head?
Hopefully we can all agree that this wouldn’t be a very wise thing to do. Bridges are incredibly complex so you’d probably get a team of people together, and crucially, you’d put everything down on paper.
But the thing is, most of us don’t do this with our thoughts and feelings. We let them bounce around in our minds (rent-free), never bothering to offload them, and then we wonder why we feel anxious, stuck, or unclear about what we actually want.
Now this might not seem like a big deal but those thoughts and feelings are literally running your life – your actions dictate your outcomes, upstream of every action is a decision, and upstream of every decision are your thoughts and feelings.
In other words, some combination of thoughts and feelings leads to a particular decision, which leads to actions, which change your life.
For example loads of people have the thought: “I want to start a business.” In fact, when I polled my audience on Instagram last year, 78% said they want to start a business… but most haven’t.
Why? Because they had other thoughts and feelings that held them back like “what business idea should I pursue?” or “what if Max at work sees that I’m starting a business?”
All of these thought-feeling combinations end up blocking people who genuinely want to change their lives and become financially free from ever taking action.
And what I’ve realised is that when thoughts stay in your mind without being written down, they have way more power over you.
Your mind is an expert at taking you down these rabbit holes because as a survival machine, all it wants to do is keep you safely inside your comfort zone…even if that means being miserable for your entire life.
So this is where journalling comes in.
Most of us, unless we have a strong journalling (or meditation) practice, take our thoughts way too seriously. We let them run rampant, spiralling into rabbit holes and making decisions based on fear, anxiety, or what we imagine other people might think.
But journalling lets you see your thoughts for what they actually are: just thoughts. Patterns of energy in your brain that aren’t real in any meaningful sense, and they certainly don’t have to dictate your decisions and actions.
So if you’ve been thinking about journalling but haven’t started yet, hopefully this is your sign to give it a go this year.
The good news is you really don’t need anything fancy – just a notebook and a pen. You can of course use any digital tool, where you have the benefit of being able to search through old entries more easily instead of busting out the physical journal. But there is something nice about doing it with traditional pen and paper.
I’ve actually ended up with a bit of a hybrid approach – I’ll write in my physical notebook when I’m out and about (like right now), and then I take pictures of those entries and upload them to my digital journal so I can search through them later.
If you’re totally new to journaling, you don’t need to journal for an hour every day. Just 2-5 minutes works really well because this builds the habit of getting your thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can actually see them for what they are.
Hit reply and let me know if you do start journalling (or if you’ve been doing it for a while) – I’d genuinely love to hear how you’re finding it.
And just as a reminder if you missed it last week, we’re running a limited time discount on LifeOS where you can get the whole course for just $197 by using the code SPARK100 at checkout – you can enrol here.