How to Keep a Journal | Robin Sharma

Hi, it's Robin Sharma, the author of the Leader who had no title. Welcome to my hotel room here in Luanda, Angola. I just finished Lead Without a Title presentation for about 500 leading executives here in this amazing country with incredible opportunity. Businesses from around the world are pouring into Angola and I had a great presentation, a great time with them. I've got my water filled with some vitamin C, one of my secret weapons. On the road, I'm on this 10 country tour. I'm getting ready to go down to the gym to have nice workout where I not only get my cardio going and do some resistance training, but also put on my ipod and go through audiobooks. But this video is a very special one. First of all, I want to express gratitude to you for being with me on this video. I appreciate your time. I want to give you some great value. And this video is about a subject that a lot of people have been asking me about for a lot of years. Why keep a journal? And I talk a lot in my books about journaling and from the stage. I really evangelized the power of journaling to keep your mindset positive, to reconnect you with your goals every morning and your mission, to keep your productivity high and to keep you nice and happy. And towards the end of this video, I'm actually going to let you inside my own journal and show you what I wrote this morning. Just to give you a really crisp and clear example of the kinds of things you can do in a journal. But let me get right into it with why you should keep a journal. Number one, writing in a journal allows you to record your daily progress. There's a lot of scientific research on the small win theory and what it says is this. If every single day you record small daily acts of progress, you actually dump dopamine, a neurotransmitter, into your brain. And that is a great source of motivation. You feel happy and you feel strong and you feel inspired. So every single morning in your holy hour, from five to six, take 20 minutes, record your wins of the previous day in your journal. It'll keep you motivated, it'll make you feel like you're making progress, it'll keep you inspired versus always feeling like you're never achieving enough. Second thing that you can do in your journal, record daily insights. So every single day is a platform for learning more. I mean, if you just learn something, but you don't really record it, you really don't deepen the learning into your mindset. So part of what I do in my Journal is I record daily learning in my journal, and that just increases my awareness. So if I'm reading a book or in an audio. Listening to an audiobook by writing it down, it increases the stickiness of the learning. And I can actually go back a week later and highlight the learning so it becomes more powerful and I can act on it. Because, you know, this ideation without execution is delusion. So you want to be executing constantly about what you're learning. What else? Writing in a journal is a great way to record gratitude. So, you know, I think about that Persian proverb, I cursed the fact I had no shoes until I saw the man who had no feet. What am I suggesting to you? Well, the third reason to journal is so that you heighten your blessings, the good things in your life, in your mindset. I mean, most of us have food on our table. Most of us have fresh drinking water. Most of us can breathe fresh oxygen. Most of us have people we love. Most of us have work that matters. Most of us have all these incredible blessings that most people would never imagine having. And yet we curse the fact that there's too much traffic.

We get upset about a difficult conversation with a hard customer. We stumble as we move towards closer our goals or our mission. And we get frustrated, and we make little things into big things. And we start developing this mindset where little problems become problems. And as you know, a problem is only a problem if you choose to see it as a problem. And what I'm suggesting to you is recording gratitude in your journal shifts your mindset so you start to see things you didn't notice around you. And everything becomes a miracle. And even this day becomes a blessing. And even a customer or a teammate or your child in front of you becomes this incredible blessing. I mean, I remember when I was in South Africa on a previous trip and I was talking to someone driving a cab, you know, who was driving us around from event to event. And I said, you know, where do you get your positive out, your attitude from? He was always smiling. And he said, you know, every person in front of me is a blessing. I said, why? He said, because it's not a dead body. He said, most of my life, I've seen so many dead bodies around me. And he said, when I see a person in front of me, I smile because it's life. It's a human being in front of me. It's not someone dead. And to me, you know, that's the kind of thing that you can write about in your journal. What else can you write about in your journal. Well, you know, Bruce Lee, when he was worried, would dump his worry out onto pieces of paper and then he would light those pieces of paper onto fire. And he said that little trick allowed him to clear out the worry from his mind so he could focus on what's most important. Now there's a few lessons in that idea. I mean first of all, creativity needs a space to present itself. If your mind is full of worry, then there is no space for the muse, the creative goddess to show up with your game changing ideas that you can then act on to get you to world class. So again, creativity needs space. But if your mind is so full of worry and different ideas, then creativity will not present itself. The neurobiology or neuroscience of it is alpha state. I know I'm giving you a lot of information here, but your brain needs to let go of the worry and relax so it can rise to the realm of genius, which is called alpha state. And that's the state you have. We all have the realm of genius, but you need to create a space for that genius ideas to present themselves. So writing in a journal allows you to release your worries, at least all your sort of mundane, trivial ideas that are swirling around your brain. So then you can create that space to get those game changing ideas that get your career, your business, your life, your fitnesses, your finances to world class. And what I'm simply saying, this comes from the Ohio State University. They're realizing that thought thoughts are almost like material things. And so when you write in a journal, you take these so called almost material things out of your mind, pour it out into paper, you're then free to focus, to create, to relax and to feel peaceful. What else? In your journal you can write and record life's daily progress. I mean, you have a great meal in a restaurant. Actually take the business card, I'll glue it in with my glue stick, I'll put it right into my journal and then I'll write about the food, the space, the chef, the conversation, how I felt, what I learned. I mean your life is worth living. Your life matters. Your life is legendary. Your life is epic. Record it every day. If you were to come into my home and walk into my study, you would see tens and tens of these leather bound journals where I've recorded my days, my victories, my lessons, quotes that I love, pictures that I sometimes take on my phone, and then I print out and put in here. I've got my collages in here of what? The places I want to ski, the places I want to visit. The things I want to have, the impact I want to have. It's all in the journal. Which brings me to my journal. I'm going to let you in it. This morning's recordings right now.