Journaling as a HyperGrowth tool

• it has saved my life

• personal musings

• struggles

• ideas on artistry

• deeper insights & difficulties, processing through pain

• writing about my hopes

• mind mapping

You want your journal to be very very intimate and

What if someone finds your journal?

So what?

So what if someone finds your journals,

they are gonna see a person on the path, a person trying to get better, see a person who is doing the work required to be a genuine hero.

There is a movie, Shoot the messenger and one of the lines in the movie is look inside anyone's life and you will see a three-ring circus. We are all just a bunch of humans. We have all been through great times and we have all been through difficult times. We all have flaws. We all have things that make us very human. So people learn about that and just to me that it makes them more real.

1) Promotes clarity

When you write in your journal you might write about:

What you are going to do to be more productive in the day ahead.

Close my doors, turn off all my digital devices, I am not going to be available for meetings, I am going to go into focused state and I am just gonna do work that’s real work v/s fake work.

The process of writing brings you to a place of clarity where you go ohhh! all that vague thinking is creating clarity because you have processed through it.

2) Hope & Inspiration

Write in my journal about my travels, my family, or my take on the state of the world & what I could do in my own small way to make it better.

I write my goals all the time.

[Mind Map]

• Center: Today

  
  

  • Connected to: Family, Spirituality, Adventure, Craft, Fitness

  
  

Incredible hope & inspiration

3) Journaling provides you a place to capture insights

You might be having coffee with a mentor.

He or she says something really interesting,

I mean all it takes is one idea/insight from someone who is wise or super successful or deeply insightful for you to change the rest of your life.

Gotta act on the idea consistently until that really changes the game.

Look at all the insights & study them & deepen them into your consciousness so that you can act on them.

4) Increased Gratefulness

Pretty much every morning, I write lists of what I am grateful for, often they are the same things.

My family, where I get to live in a safe country. The fact that I did a nature walk the evening before. My library. It might be seemingly small things, Sonja Lyubomirsky is a prominent positive psychologist & she has written about deliberate gratitude.

Most optimistic people—

They practice it on a consistent basis.

It gives you perspective.

Deep change in the world now.

There’s a lot of uncertainty that could really mess you up.

More energy, productivity & get big things done.

5) Journaling helps you process pain

Write about sadness or disappointment, or maybe some resentment. And I just write about it, “ok, this is how I feel & here is why I feel it & I decided to try to not get into the head and intellect and instead I stay with the feeling.” Because as you know to heal a wound you need to feel the wound. A great place to feel the wound is in through journal writing. You won’t take all this repressed emotion that are activated during the difficult times & repress them. Because if you are going through a trouble or a tragedy & you repress those emotions by doing what the society / culture suggests, which is: “Oh! Just be busy.” “You know, be strong.” “Don’t feel those emotions. They are not important. Don’t be weak.” Then we repress them and we create that field of hurt—that, you know, I talk about.

And that field of hurt is energy. It’s the toxic emotions stuck within you that are frozen & ignored. This field of hurt is the reason why we are not intimate with our primal heroism. That field of hurt, that energy is why we could read all the books on productivity, or kindness or mastery or time management, or being optimistic. So, intellectually you try to be optimistic but emotionally, in our head etc. we are full of all this anger or shame or guilt or disappointment or sadness.

And we wonder why the book we read & the courses we watch or listen to never work & our growth path is never sustained & it is because of that field of hurt. So writing in a journal allows you to tap into those frozen emotions that might be activated during the difficult time. That’s why difficult times are often actually massive blessings in disguise; they can bring up the old repressed emotions from past, perhaps childhood or a past hard time & you can write about them & feel them through your journal & release them so you become lighter, more intimate with who you truly are, healthier, less inflammation in your system, more creative, more productive and more automatically positive.

What I mean by automatically positive is not dysfunctional optimism: fake it till you make it. It’s you’ve done the work to clear steadily repressed emotions & that increases your energy which automatically makes you feel more positive.

6. Journaling allows you to record the beautiful journey of your life.

• Difficulties

• Beautiful times

• Happy times

• Successful times

• Your failures

It’s all necessary to live a wonderful, colourful life, so writing in your journal about your days is great:

You have a great meal with your friends

You have come to Rome

You have a big win at work

Write about it, record it, then you’re gonna have this incredible series of journals of your entire life.

7) Journaling reshapes your self-identity

I write a lot about the human being I want to become constantly. Values I wanna live by:

Honesty. Patience. Justice. Compassion. Servant. Leadership.

I write constantly, sometimes two paragraphs.

And that practice is so powerful that writing about the leader you wanna be & the business builder you wanna be & the athlete you wanna be & the friend you wanna be & the family member you wanna be & the human being you wanna be on a consistent basis will serve to reshape your self-perception & your personal identity. And our daily behaviour always reflects the way we see our selves. And writing in a journal is a brilliant way to get that done.

extracted from Robin Sharma's - Your magnificent year mentor