Journaling 101

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 Masterclass Series. Today I'm thrilled to have my standing desk rolled up. We're going to go behind the scenes today. We're going to Talk about Journaling 101. How to create a foundation of clarity, confidence and consistency by using a journal pen to paper is going to be my recommendation. We'll go behind the scenes and look at my actual journaling and give you some tips on how to go about optimizing your process. As always, we've got 10 big ideas. We're going to take a quick look and then we'll dive in. Alright, so our first big idea could be a class in and of itself. We're going to talk about what I call the five Minute Foundation. It's what I do every single morning for anywhere between 2 minutes to 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Again, science is unequivocal here. Creating a journal in which you imagine your best self in the future and then you kind of look at the steps between here and there is one of the most robust ways to boost your optimism, hope, et cetera. I'm actually going to talk about the 10 principles. We come back to a lot in our work throughout all these classes in this one big idea. This one first big idea could be its own class by itself. Take a quick look. So here's my journaling literally from this morning. There's my journaling from yesterday, Five Minute foundation style. There's the day before that. There's the day before that. Right. What we'll find is in that we're going to go into detail on each of those little quick journaling Sessions, looks at 10 basic ideas that science says we want to be thinking about if we want to optimize. Going to look at hope, we're going to look at love. We're going to look at virtues and self, affirmation theory, setting goals, having grit, gratitude, perma, which is Martin Seligman's concept around the science of happiness. Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement. Then we'll look at the importance of process, priming ourselves and then intrinsic versus extrinsic, all in this first big idea. All of that is captured in this one page journaling that I do every morning. That's our first big idea. Alright, so with that five minute foundation in place, we're going to go to our second big idea, which is masterpiece days. You know, I talk about masterpiece days all the time. Really. If you want to create a great life, it's all about one masterpiece Day after another. But that begs the question, how do you create a masterpiece day? Well, we're going to talk about how to do that with this journaling process. Specifically, we're going to look at this and we're going to look at your a.m. and, and your p.m. bookend. If this is your day, right, we want to create a masterpiece day out of it. What's your AM bookend look like? What's your PM bookend look like? As Darren Hardy says so wisely, in the compound effect, you have more control over this and over this than you do over this. So what are you going to do to start your day? What are you going to do to end your day? We want to create something that gives us a map, but we want to maintain flexibility. And then within the main part of the day, we're going to talk about what I call super cycles, where you're intensely on and then you're intensely off. On, off, on, off, making waves. That's our second big idea. Alright, our third big idea. We're actually going to bust out my wall calendar. Pulled it off the wall. We've got it here. You're going to look at my wall calendar to this day in October when I'm recording this and see how I see things. I'm all about super low tech to the extent we can and we're going to talk about high tech versus low tech as we go through the class. So here she is. Here's my wall calendar. We're going to unpack what all these little squiggles and hash marks and smiley faces are all about and why. I see this as one of the core aspects of my optimizing practice and why checklists are so important in how I use this simple wall calendar to do so. I'm going to encourage you to think about getting a wall calendar or perhaps just use a day runner or day planner, whatever. But also we're going to talk about being more low tech than high tech. But whenever possible, alright, our fourth big idea is going to be the big three. You've also heard me talk about the big three. Well, I like to journal this. I'm going to show you how to journal and how I personally journal energy, family, service, the big three most important roles we have in our lives. Alright, so here's what it looks like from my journaling on the big three. We've got energy, family, service, we've got who I'm committed to being, why that's important to me and then what I am going to do, who, why, what we'll walk through this, help you get clarity on who you are committed to being and what you're going to do to optimize that and show up like that consistently via journaling. Then our fifth big idea is the keystone initiative. We talked about this in Productivity 101. I want to bring this to life in Journaling 101. If this is the only thing you get out of the class, identifying the three keystone habits that you engage in when you're at your best, then you're going to get a lot out of this class. I think this is super powerful. We want to make your best your new baseline and that requires some reflection. So we're going to hit the journal, we're going to look at it and see. Look, what is my, what are my keystone habits? 1, 2, 3. When I'm having a great day, I do these things. So what do you do on your best days and how do we make that best? Your new baseline? You can't just snap your fingers and come up with that. You got to reflect on it, you got to journal about it. From my experience, if you want to optimize it, then we'll talk about what my Keystone 3 are. For those of you who follow my work, you'll probably be able to guess. Alright, our sixth big idea is the whoop process. Gabrielle Oettingen Science of making your visions or your goals a reality. If there's one thing I've journaled more than anything else beyond my five minute foundation, it might be this. And another thing we're going to talk about at the end on purpose. Whoop wish, outcome, obstacles, plan. We're going to look at my number one goal right now and how I whoop it. And I hope that looking at how I approach this will inspire you to think about your number one most important thing, which again we talked about in Productivity 101. We talk about Impeached Performance 101. We got to know what we want. Wave a wand. If you can create anything in your life, what would it be? Then put it through this scientific process and use it for big things, small things. I use it for strategy, I use it for business planning, and I use it for phone conversations or whatever I have going on next in my day. Alright, Our seventh big idea is journaling the motivation equation. So again, going back to science, I journaled this a number of times. Motivation equals expectancy times value over impulsivity times delay. Might sound a little abstract. So we're going to go behind the scenes and actually unpack it. We need to look at this numerator of value times expectancy and activate our energy, we've got to get that Y really high if we want to sustain motivation. And then we need to protect that motivation by making sure our denominator is the impulsivity and the delay is as low as possible. We'll talk about how I do that and how I suggest you think about doing that to get your activation energy as high as you can and sustain your motivation as consistently as possible. And then our eighth big idea is journaling for creative thinking. So I've actually got a stack of papers that's just for this class preparation. In addition to what you see me leafing through here, I've got a ton of stuff that I work through to arrive here. Every single thing that I'm thinking about deeply. I do so with pen and paper. So I actually just threw away. We're going to talk about that too. Do you archive your journals and notes or do you throw them away? I actually prefer to throw them away. That's a very personal decision, but we'll talk about that. And I go through a ton of paper in pursuit of clarity on what's most important. I'll walk you through how I did it for this class and give you some ideas on how you might want to think about journaling for. For creative and strategic thinking. Our ninth big idea is going to have three parts. A fun do list, notes and capturing a fun do list. I don't like a to do list. I like a fun stuff list. These are the things I'm going to do and as I do them, I'm crossing them off. I'm creating micro wins again. Simple but powerful stuff that science supports the progress principle. We want to create that throughout our day. And then notes. I'm a big fan, as you've probably gathered by this point in taking handwritten notes and the research supports that going to have a deeper level of integration than if you're taking notes via computer. Fascinating stuff. Then the third facet is capturing ideas. This is the essence of getting things done by David Allen. Get things out of your head and on paper, captured or in whatever you have as a trusted system, as he says. And then in my interview with Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, he said that he has basically a stack of pads of paper within X feet of him, everywhere in his house, so that if he ever has a good idea for a cartoon or whatever, he can capture it immediately. We'll talk about how to go ahead and do that and again use journaling to Capture great ideas. Our 10th big idea is to get more clarity on your purpose. This along with the Whoop and the five Minute foundation is what I've done probably the most times. So we'll go behind the scenes on this. Again, we're going to look at those three circles I've drawn a ton of times. Jim Collins's hedgehog concept. Great businesses, great people have clarity on what they love to do, what they can be great at and what the world needs and is willing to pay for. We want to get clarity on that. That's how you get clarity on what your one thing is. We're also going to bust open our purpose 101. We had 25 journaling questions in purpose 101. We'll quickly flip through those and see if we can get any insight on that. And I'll encourage you to go back and through those as you hone your journaling skills to get clarity on what you're here to do. Alright then. Our 11th bonus big idea is five things. I call this stuff times five. We've got technology. What do you do? Do you do low tech or high tech? I've got some thoughts on that. What do you do? Do you archive or trash? We already talked about that a little bit. I'll give you my insights, quote Emerson a couple times of why I don't keep my journals. And then we'll talk about where do you find the time and what's the best timing to journal. Then we'll talk about priming. Right. And the fact that journaling isn't an end in itself, it's a vehicle to a destination, which is you crushing it. We don't want to get lost in journaling and forget to actually do the stuff that we are fired up about and the reason we are priming our conscious and subconscious minds. And then finally we're going to emphasize the fact that this is an idiosyncratic process. You need to find what works best for you. I've got my style. You're going to need to find your style. As Nietzsche says, there is no the way. What is your way? This is my way. What's your way? So we'll have fun with that in embracing the experimentation that's required to figure out how to journal to get a foundation of clarity, confidence and consistency. Now let's jump in.