The Power of Journaling - Reflection in Product, Design, and Life

We're going to let people in and just get started here shortly. First, I'd love for you to introduce yourself. This is your very first growth group. If you've been here before and you've been using Growth Day too, just love to know once you use the app and what you've been up to and what's up, John? What's up? What's up, team? What's up, Kiki? And we're just going to wait a few, probably like a minute just to let people in. And while we do that, go ahead and introduce yourself if you feel comfortable in the chat and we'll just get this ball rolling. My primary goal and objective today is to get you up to speed on the latest and greatest about the Growth Day journal. But I also want to share just some of the big things that, that I like to think about when I journal and then also journaling in my practice. So I'm a, I'm head of Product and design here at Growth Day. So when I think about journaling, I'm not just thinking about the journaling that I'm doing for my life. I like to really think about how I'm using it to my greatest advantage. So I'll talk a little bit about that. John, this is your first growth group. Awesome. Great. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate you. Appreciate you being here. Awesome. Now we. Now I'll be hosting these growth groups for the next, let's see, counting this week's 11 weeks and every week, we're going to dive deep into a product pillar. And through these product pillars, my goal and objective is to just help level you up in how to make another perspective or another idea of how to approach using the tool. And also just feeling a lot more confident just with your network here and group. Awesome. All right, all right. Let's just get the show on the road. So I've prepared, I prepared a couple prompts, but I just want to dive right into it today, get you right after it. And if you want to join along, we have this really cool thing inside the app, which is called a mini player. Now, a mini player is if you're inside of a growth group or if you're inside of a course. And if you browse away from the page, you're going to be seeing the mini player. So I'm just going to dive right into that and you can follow along with me and go to the journal page. Right now, the journal is if you click on your keyboard, number two on your keyboard, you're going to get direct access to it. And here I'm just going to share my screen and you're going to see double for a second, and then we're just going to bounce over to the Journal. Okay? Okay. Okay. Everybody's heading over to the Journal. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, y', all, if you want to find my replays, go to the community section and search for my name in the search bar box, and you'll see all the past replays of all the activity of everything that I've done in there. If you still can't find it after that, then just find me in the community and DM me or just find me on social media and I'll help you out there, too. But really quick again, for people that just joined, my name is Drew Bridewell. I'm head of product and design here at Growth Day. And this whole series, I put this series on just so you can get more comfortable and confident about using the Growth Day tool. But also just we're going to be doing some work today. We're going to be doing our personal development as well. We just came off a really strong Wednesday workshop yesterday, and we're talking about adversity and resilience. And I think this is. This is us doing our work, us getting better, us trying to elevate what we're doing in our lives and just having some fun doing it. And I'm just really excited to walk you through the Journal today. So what you're seeing right now is a journal, so I'm going to command plus a few times just so you can see this a little bit bigger. And the first thing that I. Oh, sweet. Love it. So the first thing that I want to dive into today is that the Journal, like the journal, is not just a. It's a tool. It's a tool that we need to consider using. The research shows that just journaling every day or every other day, it increases your productivity because you're increasing your awareness. You're increasing your awareness about the things that you know are getting in your way. The challenges, the obstacles, things that really we wear or we feel inside. But maybe sometimes it's harder to express that through words. And the Journal is a way for us to express that on paper or through this digital medium. And over the past, the last. I can't remember exactly when Brennan released his High Performance Planner, but the High Performance Planner is having that planner where you can write things down. You know, what we did with the app was we digitized it, brought it in here, but we also combined over 1500 writing prompts in here. Because sometimes you just don't know what you want to write about. Sometimes you need a little bit more guidance, a little bit more structure. So that's why we have these journal prompts over here on the page. So the first thing that I literally just before the session, I was just writing a journal prompt and I was doing the morning mindset. Now you can do the morning mindset anytime you want. And. But the morning mindset is a way for you to start and anchor your day. Now, if you are not into the morning mindset and you're not into the evening review or the growth prompts or the weekly review or the monthly review, it's completely fine to just go in here and start writing about what you're doing. But what I want to challenge you to do today and to start thinking about is writing inside of your journal can be like this, this first entry point for this intention of where you really want to go, not just how you're feeling, but you want to move that emotion and move that energy into the next positive, meaningful next thought or the next positive next action. And then it can tie right into your plan or right into your next action plan, which is what I typically do. So when I'm thinking about my journal, I have this open throughout the day. So when I first step into the day and I start my work, I'll have the journal open and I'll immediately start thinking about, okay, what do I want to feel today? What do I want to achieve today? And I, I do have, like my journal, like my actual print journal, which you guys can see. If you can still see my video, I still use this because I still like the feeling of writing things down. Just a lot of members told us this at the Growth Day live event. They still like writing in their journal, their. Their paper journal. But I think it's still really powerful to be able to have this digital tool that you're using for going through each of these different prompts. So when you're in the morning and trying to get your mind right and thinking about the types of questions that you can ask yourself, one thing I can get excited about today, another word that would describe the type of person I want to be today. These are just affirmations and re confirming the types of things that will help get your mind in a positive place and help you think a little bit more strategically about who you want to be, how you want to show up, how you want to interact with other people, and what success looks like for you when we go through these Things. And I'll give you an example of what I just wrote this morning. So today I was excited about today's growth group. I think it's going to be awesome. And it was. And I was doing a quick prep session in my notes before the session. One word that I could describe that I want to the kind of person I want to be today, I want to be presence. Like, today I got a good run in. In the forest, no bears, which is good. But I also was able to have an additional walk with my wife. It felt really. It felt this beautiful. It felt calm, cool, collected. And I was thinking about, okay, who needs me on my A game today? My family needs me on my A game. My team needs me on my A game. And I need myself needs me on my A game. And I was thinking about this, and I typically am thinking about, okay, I'm thinking about my wife. I'm thinking about. About my son. I'm thinking about my team. I'm thinking about, like, myself and what I need to do for myself to take care of my body. Today I got a workout in. Okay, I'm gonna. After this, I'm gonna have a nice meal. I'm gonna recharge. I'm thinking about, you know, the different things. That's exactly what the whole purpose of journaling is to do. It's to help you reflect. Because reflection is the entry point for your growth loop. And how many of you have started to hear this terminology of the growth loop? And the growth loop is. Oh, yes, absolutely. This growth loop is a mechanism for you to connect to the four or five key areas of growth in your days and your weeks and your months. The reflection is a really big part of growth and reflection. We do this inside of growth day with your journal and with your life scores. So when you think about this, it's like just that intention is helping move you in the right direction. So it's super important. Someone I could surprise with a note, gift, or a sign of appreciation. I was seeing about my wife. One action that I could do to demonstrate excellence today. I wanted to write about all the release notes in the product that we had today. So I'll share actually today with you live one of the new releases that we had today with, which was pretty, pretty exciting. It's tied to the referral program. So I'll talk a little bit about that today, too, just in the spirit of sharing. And then you just go through these things. You go through these actions. It's a really positive thing, really helpful. The other thing that you can do is when you're going in and you can toggle through these things and you can go through different journal prompts as well for the evening review. Another thing that kind of closes out the day really, ends the day really well. Also, in your growth prompts, you can sort through and filter through these growth prompts as many times as you want. And these are really nice. When, let's just say there's a situation throughout the day, you feel a little lost, maybe you feel a little just disconnected from who you are and like, what's going on in the moment. That's a good opportunity for you to shift in and come into the app and come into the journal and just hit one of these growth prompts. And if you're like, oh, this one's really not tapping into how I'm feeling or what I want to write about right now, you can just hit it again, come to the growth prompt. Because what this is doing is this reprogramming or retraining your mind to think about what's happening right now and what do I need to do about it? Not what is happening right now. And sitting in this, it's good, important part of feeling the emotions and feeling what's going on in your life, but thinking about, what is it? This emotion is right here. The journal allows you to put that down on paper or pen or digital form and look at it and from a different perspective. And then taking that perspective and thinking about, okay, what can I do about this? To really move it forward in a positive route. And I think that's. This is. It's really simple. It's a really simple mechanism, but it's a really important part of our growth. The same thing with, like weekly reviews. These are typically more a good Friday or Saturday or Sunday. What did I do this week? Four, three great things that happened to me this week. And then you can go through. And this helps you recap your week too, because oftentimes you might go through your whole week and be like, what did I even do? What did I do yesterday? And journaling also helps with memory. It helps you with trying to re remember and regurgitate, like, what happened in your life. And it's a really good practice to be in. So I know this might be like a big refresher for a lot of you, but it's still, yeah, of course I know this. But again, is it a practice as you have you made it into your practice? I think trying to learn about how you can be better at journaling is going to Be. It's just going to be lights out. Super important. Now I want to talk to you too about this new feature that we had in the journal which allows you to search. So if you wanted to search your journal, you can now do that. And this is important because if you're writing in your journal and you're saying, like, today day, it's Thursday, May 18, it just came off like last week my wife had her birthday. It was Mother's Day. So we're going after all these really fun, just fun memories and thinking about what we've done. When you have birthdays too, you're like, oh, my gosh, can't believe we're a little bit older. But there's so many great things that have happened and you can reflect about them. You know, you could even, like, do like birthday reflections. And you can almost put these little, like, tags in here because when you go back through and you start writing about it, like, you can search for these keywords so that you can bring them up at a later time. So this past week's birthday experiences, love, connecting with my wife, son and my cats. Learned. I could say I learned. I could just really go in. I don't want to go into too much detail here because we're on a call, but I could really go in and just reflect about it and share those details. And then when I submit that, I'm going to get a little notification about that earned a growth coin. But the cool thing about this is if I wanted to go back in and search like birthday now, I could just type in and search the birthday. And look, it's already in that first reflection. And then I could see, okay, in February 8th, Jude's birthday was February. February. And I was celebrating that. So there's different ways to be able to come back into this and surface it up. The other thing, and I want to move the menu over here, is every day that you journal, you can see your activity, but you can also see what you were doing on that day. So you did a daily habit score. You gotta have a journal. And I can go back through and see. And I haven't done my journal yet. And I got a 92 yesterday. And you can go through the history of what you did. And I think this is a really helpful reflection tool. But then we'll make it better over time. But just another way for you to build this in. You can also still journal during, like, listening to a course. You can journal while you're listening to the daily fire. You can journal while you're if you've tapped into, if you're an all access memory, you tapped into Ed Mylett's new Monday motivation. Only on Mondays that will be released. But you can go in and be journaling about what you're hearing, what you're seeing, what you're listening to. And that's really super helpful. That's so good. Yeah. So in your search, you can also filter by the different types right here to the right. So I know it might be small, but you can filter by each of the different types as well. You're welcome. Most of the things that you think about, can you do this? Most of you can. And I think there's just gonna be more and more opportunities for us to make this better. So please, if you do have feedback about the tool, you can go to the feedback section or hit 8 on your keyboard and it will pull up a lightbox or a modal is what we call it. And then you can give your feedback directly to us. And we read that feedback as well. So feel free to do that. All right, so we got the journal. It's a pretty straightforward foundational element. Right. When you're thinking in the morning, you're set trying to set your day up for success, or when you're closing out the day, you can come back and do an evening review. Other times where I have the journal open, like I was telling you, I have it open during my meetings and sometimes I'll have my journal open in paper so I can take notes and I'm like reflecting on the intention of what I'm trying to do. But I'm also, sometimes I just want to have it open in the desktop and I'll just be typing and what I'm hearing, what I'm seeing, what I'm observing from the situation. And the great thing about that, even though it's like, it could be scrappy journal or scrappy notes, meaning it's not like perfectly formatted and you're just taking notes. The thing about that is, again, just by reflecting what you're hearing, seeing and writing it down again, that's helping with your memory. It's helping you have a way of interpreting what you're hearing and seeing and writing it down so that when you restate it back to your. Maybe if you're in a design review or if you're in a business meeting, you can restate what you heard and make sure that you're on the same page. This is a really good communication practice where you are restating what you're hearing and seeing and it makes your audience know that you're listening, you're present and your focus on what it is that they're communicating. So I think that's a really helpful thing. Now, I know that some of you are also with your very first growth group. So just so you know, your journal is completely private. It's obviously exposed right now because I'm sharing my screen. But we do have a little badge here that just re emphasizes if you want to understand how we protect your data, you can go and check that out in the privacy, but it is 100% private. Now, even if you wanted to share, you could share that you are journaling inside of growth day because as you go through, you'll notice that we've gamified the tool where if I come over and I go into my achievements and if you click your growth coins in the very top, you can see your achievements. I'm just going to scroll down here. Now there are what we call journal streaks. Now journal streaks are really fun because it helps you build that muscle of journaling. Now like I just hit one of my seven day journal and doing journaling for seven days and writing and journaling every day. But sometimes I don't do it in the app, sometimes I do it on my paper and sometimes I come back to the app. But I just got my 7 day journal streak in the app. I was pretty stoked about it and I got, I got seven, seven more days to my next level. And I can see these journals, these journal streaks right here. I can also go into my badges and I can see all of my journal streaks. I got 15 five day journals. I got 14, seven days. I've gone 14 and I've gone for 30 days straight one time. And it's hard to be consistent with these things, but this is a good fun way of seeing those. And if you do click on them, just it's There we go. I can still go and see this journal stream and I could share this to social media if I wanted to. So if I wanted to share this, say on LinkedIn, I could just share it to LinkedIn and write a post about it. I just recently did this and it's just a way of celebrating your journaling inside of growth day. And then we have a little badge and a little visual for you to share. You can also always come back to that and to see that. So these are your achievements and then we've designed different badges for you just to find this experience for you. Makes it fun, helps build that muscle, build that Habit of personal development. Yeah. So all of the morning evening prompts, they all count a part of your journaling streaks. And the journaling streaks are from your. Let me just zoom out a tad bit here. They're accessible from your growth profile. So you can click your profile up in the very top. Right. And you can also go to the growth coins that are being earned in the top and it will just link you right back to these things. All right, cool. So I'm going to stop sharing for a second and then I'm going to come back to you so really quick. You just got a quick overview, a quick little crash course of the journal. And I know it's not. It's not rocket science for how to use it, but sometimes it's about, like how you think about using it, how you enter into that and the intention that you bring into the journaling process. Before Growth Day even existed, the way that I did this was I would just have a Google Doc open and I would be journaling about the things that I'm accomplishing every week in my projects because again, I'm project. I'm a product designer, a product manager. So I'm thinking about like building things and making things. In my previous history, I was at LinkedIn, I was at Facebook, I was@like Linda.com. so I was in these learning environments, in tech environments where a lot of people are making things. And I think there's so many things that happen throughout our weeks and our days. There's so many things that happen. And if you don't capture those little magical moments throughout the day days and that intention that you have throughout those moments, it just, it's like it didn't even exist. If you don't have a way of capturing and reflecting, like even be before, before I was in, in the tech industry, I carry, like growing up, I'd always carry a camera with me. I'd carry a camera and I just always snap in photos. It's like a thing that I always did and shooting video and I look back and I think about that was really great, but a lot of that old footage was now just on those old hard drives and it's really. It was really difficult to find. So now I'm really grateful that I can at least have my written word in my planner and I can search back and then I think we'll be able to do some really creative things with this over the long term inside of the Growth Day app. But I think it's just now that I know that I have a Single place that I can go to just reflect, release the tension, or just capture some big wins and put them inside the tool. It's a great thing. And because I didn't have that before, I was just using my Google Doc and I would just capture my accomplishments every week. I would capture the challenges and obstacles that I have every week. I would capture the people that I need to, like, connect to or reach out to or the things that I just need to do. And it was just my reflection practice, and I did that every week. And then I would use that to share in my status updates to my management teams wherever I would go. And that was just a really great practice. So now we have that. We have our teams do that similar thing in our status updates, like on Fridays when they send them, and it just helps everything keep moving forward. And it also helps you celebrate those wins, which is also something that we've turned into a ritual on Fridays to celebrate the wins. I still use my paper journal and. Absolutely. So sometimes I really need to. I really need to just use my pension. I really need to use these things because I like drawing and I might be like drawing boxes or little wireframes or little sketches of things. And I'm already, like, halfway through, like, this paper. It's not like, too thick, but I'm already, like, halfway through it. And it's only been the. Yeah, the month of May. And I'll go through one of these probably every month. So I go through a lot of paper and. But all the people that I'm supporting, all the initiatives that I'm moving forward, I tend to. That's how I use my plan. Where I. I talked about the plan last week. If you want to go check out the plan talk that I did last week. It's just. You gotta find. And this is the same thing with growth systems, right? You've gotta find your own rhythm and beat for how you want to, like, accomplish things and how you wanna move through things. I think what we've created at Growth Day is creating these growth systems in one place so that you can still have a journal, you can still have your plan, you can still have a benchmarking reflection practice. You can still have training courses and learning environments like social learning with the Wednesday workshops or the learning on demand with courses. But there's still the things like, we gotta take action, we gotta do these things, and that's where the plan comes in. But the plan is for you to have that foundation structure for you to build those better habits of the actions that you want to take every week. Super helpful. You can absolutely use the keywords in the journal search. You could just make sure that if you're writing like little tags or little keywords inside of the inside of your prompt, it will just. You'll be able to search for that later. But so essentially it's whatever written word that you make in the journal, you can search for that later. So we do like exact keyword searches for you in there. We don't like guess what you're writing and propose like relevance inside of the journal. It's exactly what you wrote. So super helpful there. All right. So kind of want to shift gears a little bit. And I have like just some key takeaways and some things just to remind you about. I know you all know this, but it's just, just re reiterating if you want to drop it into your notes. So the journal, what is this doing? What is this actually helping us with? This is helping us enhance our clarity. So what it is we're seeing, what it is that we're observing, being, getting way better at being able to articulate and write out what we're seeing, feeling and observing. And then what that does, it helps us focus in on really what's going on. And it's another perspective, right? You might be thinking it and feeling it and being in that moment and feeling so much emotion. But then when you can write it out, you might be like, huh, it's not actually, it's actually that bad. It's not actually that big of a problem. Like I was making it a big thing in the moment, but it's actually, this is how I observed it and this is how I reflected back. So that's a really good way to enhance the clarity and focus. Second one is just improving your self awareness. Self awareness comes from just, okay, I five people in the room right now, or we have all of we, all of us inside of this growth group right now. How are we feeling? What's going on in the room? What is Drew talking about? What is, what are people commenting about in the chat? What are we seeing? And being just aware of your environment. And it's the same thing when you're going into a building. It's the same thing when you're going into the office. It's the same thing when you're going into a zoom room or a meeting room or whatever. You know what is going on in the environment and you want to be super self aware. So journaling can help you actually do that as well. It reduces stress and emotion it helps with that emotional well being because you're not wearing all your emotions on your sleeves. You're actually writing them out. So you can look at them and observe them, but not put them all on your shoulders. So it gets super heavy and super intense. You can also use journaling to help with your goal setting and achievements. So like reflecting and celebrating your wins. And sometimes even a goal could start from a journal. Like how you're feeling and what you're excited about and what something you want to accomplish goals can start from can be born inside of a journal. Or when you're looking back and be like, oh my God, I just had this idea, this epiphany just hit me. And you want to just scribble and write it out, write it out super fast. And then you may document it inside of the Growth Day app and then you're coming through and be like, whoa, I want to do this. And then I can jump over into the plan tool and make it into a plan and then I can go learn about how I can achieve this even more through the courses or the learning content. And then I can come back and journal and share my notes with community. It's just a cycle of growth, creative inspiration and problem solving. Again, because I'm a user experience pro professional and I've been trained in user centered design thinking and product thinking and building products. This is an important skill to have journaling and reflecting back because we do a lot of what we call usability tests and we also do user research where we were listening about like how people are experiencing our product, our tool. Like we learned a lot from the Growth Day Live Austin event about how people are using the product, what they wish was different and what they wish we continue to do because they're enjoying it. But it's like thinking about, okay, what are we, like, what kind of problems do we have? What needs to be solved and how can we just be super intentional and super aware of the things that are happening? And I think journaling is also a way to be able to just write those things out and reflect back on those and it's just super helpful. So it's another. So just some key like reminders for you. Now I want to shift into like from a product and design, my product and design hat. And I know that all of you aren't product and designers, but I think this is still going to be relevant for you because whatever your discipline is, and I want you to think about what your role is in your discipline, in your company or in your entrepreneurial adventure or whatever it is that you do even if you're retired. Like, what is the thing that you're doing right now? And I'm going to focus it first on what I call design energy. So if you even think about energy in itself, from Brendan's High Performance Habits book, right. He's thinking about, okay, how's my physiology and my psychology and my energy of how I show up every day. Am I feeling encouraged, am I feeling excited? Am I feeling like I can take on new things and I can take on even challenges and obstacles that hit me in the face and I need to be able to move through these things. Energy is super important. But let's just take a step back and look at like design energy. Now. Design energy for me is thinking about how we are architecting and designing that energy so it can take place in how our teams perform, how we show up to be able to get through things and execute things. I'm going to show some visuals here in a second to walk you through this even more. But here's some examples because you can actually go through. And I'm going to copy and paste these from my notes to you, so you can copy and paste them back into your notes. But here are some things that I like to think about, and these are like journaling prompts that I typically think about when I'm coaching in product and design. But I also want you to think about. You can create your own prompts for how you're showing up in your work, for how you're creating more energy so that when you're showing up to execute or you're showing up to create a new plan that you have the energy and stamina to actually do it. So, like, what activities and practices energize, inspire me to do my design work. So, like what activities? Well, we have brainstorms, we have practices where we do sketching in the sketchbook, we do research, like what's out there? And the same thing can be coordinate, like triangulated back to what it is that you do in pretty much any discipline. But it's like thinking about, okay, what activities do I do? And that could be a journal, that could be a journal prompt. That could be something that I do. How do I prioritize my self care and manage my energy levels but still maintain high performance design? So we have a series of objectives and goals that we need to accomplish for say, the end of the week, end of the week, the end of the month so we know what the goal is and the achievement is. So this is why due dates are so important and you can create those in your plan. But thinking back, how do I prioritize? Like I was talking today, I got out in the woods, went for a run, got to connect with my wife. Like thinking about those moments in a way where am I prioritizing self care? Am I prioritizing get a good breakfast in get getting a good amount of water intake? Am I prioritizing getting stretching and just getting outside time so I'm not always inside just looking through at my desktop? Even though I love my station, I love my work studio, I could, I just love it. But thinking about, okay, am I prioritizing these things? This is another journal prompt that you can do. And you can create these for your role or for your discipline, depending on what it is that you do. Another example is, am I infusing creativity and passion into my design process when I show up today for my meetings or showed up today for the daily standup that we had? How was I, how was my energy in that moment? And could I increase it? Could I do a better job? Could I be more aware for the people that are in that room? Could I have prepared all these people in this session for a better experience? Again, these are reflection practices. You can use the journal to be able to write about these things. So you can raise your intention in these moments, because it's not about, it's not about being perfect. This is about raising the intentionality. When you can raise the intentionality, you can raise the overall quality of the experience. And that's what we're really trying to do with this app. We're really trying to raise the intention level for you, coming in and getting everything that you need to be supported, to be guided, to be directed, to be encouraged. Have a little bit of empathy for all the things that you're going, that we're going through, but be able to come in, reflect, and take action. Okay, what obstacles are in my way? What are things that are draining my energy and how can I do this? Typically, like, things that drain energy are meetings that don't matter. Like, meetings that like, kind of take the life force out of you because you don't really need to be there. Or the people that are in those meetings maybe are communicating or they're condescending or they're just not being very supportive in those meetings. All those things. Right? If you can reflect about it, then you can be able to give feedback about those moments. You can change the direction of where those things are. There's been many times where I get into a conflict with an engineer or a product manager or another designer. But over the years, I've learned to step back and be very observant and inquire about what's going on. So I'm not very reactionary. And Brendan talked about that too, at the conference. Where you're reactionary or are you observing? And there's just different ways to look at this. But I think this is another part of us leveling up in our maturity around how we journal. Because when we can journal and we can tap into this awareness, then we can just live a little bit more harmonious. Okay, great. So how can we support in environment? The energy in an environment is so critical, too. So that's just an example of just design energy. I got a couple more for you, and then I'm going to share my screen and give you some visuals to look at. So the next one is like design clarity. Design clarity. So energy is just like about how we move through projects, how we get things done, how we do it in a great speed and velocity, because time is money and energy, but energy is super critical and important. This next one is, like, around the clarity of the things that we're building, the clarity of the things that we're doing in our life. Now. What creates good clarity? I think journaling helps with bringing that awareness, but a plan helps you create really good clarity. So when we're building products and services, especially here in growth day, design clarity is an essential ingredient to making sure that the team knows what it is that's getting built, why it's important, who's going to be working on it, what is the deadline and how are we going to stay Frequently updated, the roles and responsibilities, the disciplines, and the important areas of what needs to get done. Now, obviously, when you get a bigger team, you have to have more design clarity because there's more pieces and more things moving. So if you are starting a business or you're an entrepreneur, if you're working through this, like building, design clarity is an incredible skill to have. Because when you're building fast and you're building incredible experience, you want to be aligned on your core values and your principles so that you can guide the design decisions and the product decisions in congruence with what's most important to your company. Like, our company is about encouragement, about empathy and excellence. So when we're building things, we need to make sure that those are at the forefront. But we also need to be thinking about our strivers, like all of you, and making sure that we're building things in congruence through making sure that you are encouraged, that you are guided, and that you're supported as you use this tool. Right? That's why we have the daily fire. You get that daily touch point. That's why we have the money motivation now with Edmilet. So you now have two coaches to help give you that motivation. But now we're leveling up all the pillars in the tool to be able to help make sure that you have additional support and guidance. And we're building these things directly integrated into the tool. The second one here is how can I enhance my communication skills? Convey design concepts and ideas more clearly. Now, obviously, like, when you're building things or you're creating things, whatever it is, like I'm saying this, I'm trying to be open about a lot of different areas. But the thing about communication is, like, the way we communicate our priorities, our life priorities to our management, our team, those things really matter too. So if you're journaling about things that are going on in your life, then it's a lot easier for you to articulate back to your management or to your team. This is what we're focused on. These are the priorities. And if you can't even level it up even more, where your management or your team understands what you're trying to do in your life too, like your life goals, your project goals, your career goals, your passion goals, then they can better support you in that. I know not every team or not every company thinks that way, but that's how I think. And so if my team is listening to this, I want to support you in all those things. And for all the strivers out there and for all the strivers that are here on this call, I want to support you too. Making sure that you have that holistic view of your project, career passion and life goals. Like, it's super important. So, like, being able to communicate what those things are, you can get better at that through journaling. What steps can I take to simplify complex design challenges and improve clarity and problem solving? When you have a very complex idea or very complex system, how do you break it down? You have to write it out. And what we do in product design and building products, product management is we do this exercise called mapping to learn. Now, mapping to learn is a ability for you to take all the ingredients and all the complexity and all the things that's going on around a project, around an idea, around maybe a business idea, whatever it is, and you start mind mapping this out. So you start Write the core thing that you're trying to do, and then you start writing out all the nodes that are connected to this main thing. And when you have that, then you can start thinking about, okay, I'm building, say, a search experience. The search experience needs to be able to search everything inside this product. What are all the types of things that we would want to be able to search inside this product? And then you could break it down into a smaller chunk. Instead of just thinking about, oh, my gosh, this is gonna be such a big project. This is gonna be huge. You can break it down into a smaller thing and then break that thing into a smaller thing and keep breaking it down until you got to the least common denominator. And then you can start looking at it into little micro pieces, and it doesn't feel so big or overwhelming. Journaling is also a great way to do this. I wanna. What do I wanna be able to do? And you can. It's just maybe not in additional will format. You maybe are sketching this or you might be using a design tool, but it still is a form of reflection and it's still a form of documentation, which that's what you're doing, reflecting and documenting things inside of your journal. So, again, the same mentality, same principles, just different formats. How do I align my design goals with overall vision and mission of the project organization? Like, when you're doing design clarity and you're practicing this, it's like when you think about all the things that you want to achieve in a project or in a week or even in one day, when you can think about what it is, what the end goal is, what the achievement is, and you can start writing down, what am I envisioning to get there? What. What kind of a mission am I gonna have? Like, how am I gonna make that happen? What's gonna motivate me to do this? Being able to know how to write those things out and to focus on that project or that organization. Journaling, again, is the entry point to all these things. Like, growth day started from a journal. Like, it started from a reflection. Brendan had it, and then I had a reflection around. Okay, how could I help my eye reach out and connect with this organization, with this team? How might we bring a personal development app to life? So what are the key areas of improvement in my design process? So thinking about your processes and the people, relationships that you have. And I have some visuals that I'll share about this. I know I'll get to that really soon. But the ways that you can Improve your processes, you know, starting to reflect on what's working. Write down five things. What's not working? Write down five things. This can happen inside your journal. You can also do this. Even if there's like things that you're not enjoying throughout the days or throughout the weeks or throughout the months, writing them out. What am I not enjoying? What would be a better feeling thought or what would be a better experience? And how might we try that out? How might we integrate a new method or a new practice that we can test and verify and see if this is going to be something that is going to work for us? Reflection is the gateway. Journaling is the tool for this. So I'm going to drop in another one, which is another way to think about it, which is design productivity, another major thing about productivity. But thinking about how you design productivity, like what strategies can I implement? How can I leverage technology and tools to enhance my efficiency and productivity? AI right now, and ChatGPT is a really helpful tool that you can use to help accelerate your productivity and your awareness. The last one is Design Impact. Design impact is really important because this kind of comes back into how you reflect and how you benchmark the things that matter most in your life. So we have benchmarks already integrated into the tool. And this is around the life score. So if you do your daily, weekly or monthly life scores, these are helping you understand the impact of what it is that you're doing. And an example of that is what are my goals and objectives? Maybe for my life scores, it might be like I want to increase my relationship score, my whole life assessment, or when I increase my clarity score, maybe it's been like a C and I want to get to a B or an A like up in a 90% tile, because I'm feeling a lot better from doing this work and I can just track it. Now. Design impact is about measuring that success. And in design world and product world, we do this with metrics, we do this with OKRs, Objectives and Key results. So like measuring the stats of what it is that are really moving the business forward. And if you're running a business or a tech company or if you're an entrepreneur, you need to be able to measure these things. And the same thing goes with skills. What skills and knowledge do I need to learn or acquire to be better at this? And when you're doing that, you can actually be journaling about these things early on and then move into that direction just from journaling. So I hope these are super helpful. Now what I want to do is shift gears. I want to share a couple visuals and here I'm going to set my timer for 10 minutes on my time timer because I want to make sure that I come back to. I already showed you and I talked to you about a high level about the journal and. And the journal enhances 20, 30% enhancement in your creativity, reduce stress and improve memory. Like straight up. The research is there, but the thing here that we're really trying to do from, you know, when I was talking about design a product perspective, I also want you to think about this for your business, for your team, for your project. How do you integrate intentionality into all that you do? Now this intention, this power of intention is so important because what you're also doing is thinking about it, of how the journal is going to support you in getting that intentionality. So the first things that I like to think about is like your priorities, your efficiency, which is how you're going to do things. Your speed, which is like when you're going to do things like what's the speed look like? And then what are the skills necessary for you to move these things forward? Right. You are using the Growth A app. But think about outside of the Growth A app and the things that you actually want to get done, what skills do you need to build and craft to be able to really advance your growth this year? And then from an efficiency perspective, like the how you're gonna, you're gonna leverage those skills, but you need to know how you're gonna do it. And then the priorities are, you gotta so many priorities and so many responsibilities. What's the list? What's the top of the list? What's the bottom of the list? Know what those things are? We do this in growth day in three different ways. Through routines, through rituals, and through building and integrating those things into our life cycles of a product and design. From a routine perspective, you might have morning routines, evening routines, but here is an example of the types of routines that we have in product and design. So we have like standups, we have product reviews, we have all hands, we have squad calls, design jams, interviews, status updates. These are examples of routines. We also have rituals which are ways for us to celebrate. These help us get into a sequence. So each one of these things, we're still taking notes, we're still journaling, we're still planning about these things. Rituals are important because you got Friday shout outs, you got Friday finishers, you got design clarity. Wednesdays, you got the download meetings where you're learning about new things. Research Mondays, continuous feedback just always on. And then building and integrating is more about this like efficiency and skills about we're still doing service and diagrams and design maps so we understand the design clarity of what it is we're building. We have knowledge sharing, excellence, so we know when we're sharing something. We're very clear and articulate about what it is that we're doing and sharing. We have continuous design systems that support the things that we're building and executing. We have design and product maturity around, okay, we know where we're currently at and we know we have a long way to go to get a lot better. We going to continuously working on that and we know what those triggers and mechanisms are to get better at those things. We also have performance management internally and externally, so we know what we need to do to get better as a team, as an individual and as a company. And that's what performance management's all about, right? So also looking at continuous feedback so that we can have really solid mechanisms so we can constantly get better and better at things. But again to do that you have to have reflection practices and that starts with journaling. What are we seeing in this meeting? How can we be making it better? And then we also need continuous planning which you have a plan tool to do. Build your growth systems inside that. Super important. So I'd like to think about these two in two sectors, right? We have all the people we work with, but we have the processes that we use and leverage to be able to make sure that these people are set for success. Where we intake information and we work towards milestones to the achievements. Now for processes I like to think about in a process we have plans, craftsmanship, knowledge transfer, collaboration, communication and clarity. Always on, always in the works. We also have people which in your circle you might have different disciplines and rules, but still the same principle matters like business, engineering, marketing, content, product design, all of these things still play a part and play a role. Now what we're really trying to do is create that growth loop around these things so that we can build better systems, build better routines, build better habits and work towards our achievements not in a super stressed way, but in a harmonious way. We're trying to create harmony. We could do that by really understanding like our processes. Now if you have like product, like we have product building processes where we're getting started. We're working through these experiences. Now I'm sure you have those for things that you do in your life, but just think about how you might be able to document what it is that you do on a recurring basis. What are those patterns? Break down those stages. And this is again what I was talking about with mapping to learn. You want to know what those things are for your business. So when you go into journaling or when you go back, journaling is the entry point. Remember to a bigger reflection, a bigger aha, a bigger plan, a bigger moment. But if you're starting with the basic ingredients in your journal, then it can lead to these bigger operational successes and these bigger achievements. Same thing as like in this reflection. This is like a visual design reflection for me. I'm the maker. And then these are all the people that I'm supporting and all the people I'm working with. And this, I did this when I was at my time at Facebook. But I'm like reflecting about all the people and then I'm thinking about what I'm doing. On Wednesdays, I have two to four design topics to talk about. I have live reviews. And then each of these things I need to think about, like, how am I supporting it? What am I doing? This is a reflection practice, y'. All. And then thinking about what actions am I going to take to make this? I'm going to facilitate, I'm going to create workshops, I'm going to do research, I'm going to execute, and then I'm going to create strategies and weekly posts to make sure I empower these moments to get to that outcome of delivery of learnings, of insights and achievements. Same thing when we go into a growth loop and we're starting to think about how we build our growth loops in a reflection practice. Journaling is a key stake in this top left segment where I'm journaling in life scorings, I'm doing my one on ones and I'm learning how to do those things. This is the key ingredients to a growth loop. The same thing when I'm thinking about what am I trying to do in my reflection practices around my rhythms, around my rituals and around the leadership of how I wanna show up. And then I have reflection practices that I do for all of these things because these are what, these are what's needed to create that leadership and that practice that I really want to strive with. Super important for me. So I'm sharing this with you so you can see how I think about journaling, how I think about reflecting, how I think about putting these things into practice. The same thing goes for this whole entire environment that we're creating inside of Growth Day. So inside this you have that intention that need, desire to get to that next level to be a better version of yourself, to use the tool in a way that makes the most sense to you. You score, you have tools, you come in, you have vision board with your growth profile and you understand why am I here, what am I trying to do, what are my goals, what are my milestones, and then what are my notes to be able to help me keep growing? You have a dashboard, but then you have all these people that you support, that you want to have relationships with. Who are they? What are you doing to support them? Journaling practices. And as I'm going through this, I want you to think about any questions you have and you can put them in the chat because if you we can't get to them today, I want to make sure that we over the next 10 weeks that we're working through these questions that you have about the app, about the tool, and we're delivering on those questions. Same thing with this rhythm sheet. This is a rhythm sheet. When I think about the ebb and flow of my weeks, I want to really what's my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday look like? And this is happens from a reflection practice, right? You start thinking about what do I need to do to accomplish in my Mondays and then what do I need to do to accomplish so I can get into flow every single day of my week? And what does it mean, what does it feel like? And if you check out Brendan's Daily Fire today, you actually see his 11am rule, which is like doing everything for yourself before 11am and then not answering emails or getting on social media before 11am I think that's an example. If you dive deep into one of these little examples in this block right here. And the same thing like understanding how you prepare and go through your goals, your project, passion, career, understanding how you unleash your greatness with understanding how to do action planning and breaking these things down. It's just all like super important stuff. Same thing with integrating that intentionality that I was talking about. Elevate your flow. Think about all and this is just again, another reflection practice. And I know we're coming down to the last minute, so I'm just going to share this last thing because we're trying to get that prolific output to understand our priorities, understand our intentions, understand the people and the creation of what we're trying to do, bringing in gifts and presentations and content and coaching and designing how we're growing, how we're loving, how we're living, working through our support, advancements, our elevates and all those things. Because in life development, the reality is we have a lot of things going on throughout each of our days and our weeks and our months. And it's important for us to be able to reflect about these things and not get super stressed about them, because we're all going through things, but be there to support each other, be there to help each other. And I think that's just gonna be super important. I'm gonna come out of sharing real quick and come back to you how you feel about all this. Like, where are you guys at? And was this helpful? Are you thinking about journaling in a whole new way now? Are you thinking about how you can start implementing and start thinking about journaling? Are you in? Yeah. Let's go. Let's go. Because y'. All. Oh, yes. Let's go. Business and professional and personal. Let's go. Yeah. Gotta do the work. Just so you're aware, the biggest tip that I want to share about the release today, I'm gonna come over into. If everybody wants to click over into the earn 100. So we have this Growth Day referral program. If you did not know. And the important thing to know here is that we recently updated this, so it just started tracking our leads. So if you are sharing a Growth Day link to your growth group, if you're hosting a growth group, or if you're sharing your custom URL. So enter in your PayPal email, come over and copy your link and start sharing that. And when somebody joins, you can actually get paid if they come into the product and they sign up. And this just released today, so you're going to start tracking it today. And just Today I got 36 clicks on my shares, but it was just released like a couple hours ago. So people are clicking the links and you can actually see these now. If you want to get credit and you want to earn a hundred dollars every time somebody signs up, it's a pretty cool feature. And it's also super helpful to just bring more people into the tool so you get paid when people come in, which is pretty cool. Awesome. Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for just being there and showing up today. We're back next week. Talk about another pill. We're going to talk about the life scores, and I'll be sharing more tips and tricks about how I think about benchmarking and scoring. So have a beautiful rest of your day, and I'll see you in the next one later. See you.