Diane GardnerFounder, Adept Business Solutions · Profit First Professional

The REAL Power of Journaling

17 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:47

In this brief conversational excerpt, Speaker A shares his personal journaling routine, describing how he originally thought a journal was for noting daily positives but, after advice from his friend Joe Spano, learned to use it as a tool for expelling any thoughts—especially negative emotions during periods of depression and financial stress. He recounts that writing down anger, disappointment, and other challenging feelings helped release the emotional "steam" and provided relief. Speaker B affirms this, emphasizing that seeing thoughts captured on the page can be a transformative experience, even though people often resist journaling when they feel down. The exchange highlights journaling as a daily, therapeutic practice for emotional processing.

Chapters

Another thing is journal. Journal, journal, journal. I do it every day, pretty much most days. I did a paper journal. What I thought a journal was, wrongly, was write down like, what's the good things of today? Self-positive talk. And a friend of mine, Joe Spano, said, "Mike, a journal is about expelling any thoughts." So he goes, "It doesn't matter what you write, it matters that you let it out." During periods of depression, I sometimes put angry thoughts. When we're going through this challenge, this financial challenge a year ago, I would just lay out my thoughts about this and it'd be, anger and disappointment and all those things. But what was fantastic was once I wrote them down, the steam was out.
Yeah. It's like they get captured there in the words on the page. It's a big transformative moment. And I know it's so easy to say, do it. And when you're feeling down, we sometimes resist these kinds of things. We do. But once you do do it, it is transformative. Transformative.