A Full Guide to High Performance Journalling (5 Minutes a Day to Change Your Life) - 1:1 with James Laughlin

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Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now executive coach to global leaders and high performers. Each week I'll publish a solo cast where I'll share my top high performance habits and methodologies to supercharge your life and career. If you enjoy the show, please take a short moment to subscribe and leave a rating and review. I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages co NZ High performance Journaling have you ever done it? Well, I meet so many people who talk about wanting to journal. They've done it for a bit and they've given up. Has that been you? Has that been your experience? Maybe. Well, look, I know for a fact that journaling is an incredibly powerful tool for ultra high performers. The vast majority of the people that I've coached and the people that I've interviewed here on the show have been journalers. And there's a difference between journaling and high performance journaling. As you know, I geek out on high performance. In fact, I've got a book coming out with HarperCollins. Actually, they're publishing it later this year, later in 2025, all around high performance a big part of becoming a high performer and sustaining that level of performance journaling. So I want to share with you exactly how a high performer journals. So please take notes on this and give this a crack. I'm going to get into the nitty gritty of what high performance journaling looks like. First up, let me get clear on what it's not. It's not journaling about butterflies and rainbows and pots of gold. It's not using it just as a place to put all of your negative thoughts on a piece of paper and dumping them there, leaving them and doing nothing with them. It's not something where you doodle and draw. If you want to do all those things, that's awesome. But for me, high performance journaling has a structure and it has an outcome. And so if you want to be a high performance journaler, I promise you it's much easier than you think and it becomes addictive. I am a habitual journaler. I love it. Why? Because it has an roi. There's a return on that investment of time and it has transformed the way I think. It has massively multiplied my income. It has helped me get all these ideas and distill them from my head onto a page and turn them into products, ideas, processes, models. So I'm really encouraging you right now to become a high performance journaler. The reason you probably checked in on this episode, if you're a return listener, it's because you focus on personal growth, personal mastery. This is your first time here. Welcome hit, subscribe. Make sure you come back and listen and share. But this is all about your personal growth plan. So becoming a high performance journaler. Number one, you need a journal, right? You don't need to go out and spend a fortune. And no, I don't have one to promote and sell to you. You just need a journal. Go and buy one. Get an old school one. If you prefer to go digital, go to notability and use that on your tablet. But I like to go old school. I go everywhere with my journal and once I fill that one up, I get another one. My favorite journal. And I'm going to tell you, this is not a promotion. I don't get any commissions from these people. But my favorite journal that I keep going back to and have done for years is the Moleskine journal. Love it. Just something about it. Love carrying it, love writing in it. The quality is awesome. So get yourself a journal. Step number one. Step number two, get yourself a nice pen. You might think this is silly, but these things matter. I've got a pen. It's a really thin pen that I like to use. There we go. You might like a big thick one. You might like a ballpoint. You might like a calligraphy one. Whatever works. Get a good pen. There. Two simple things, right? Common sense isn't always common practice. Sometimes we get a journal that's too big or too small or a pen that doesn't flow. Get the simple stuff, right? Let's remove all that friction. Okay? What does a high performance journaler do? Well, they journal. So first thing you need to do is identify with an identity of a journaler. So say to yourself, I'm a journaler. Even if this is the day one. You're a journaler now. That's what you do. You journal. You write notes on a piece of paper. Okay, next, what does the structure of that look like? Well, I look at it in two halves. One, you got the morning journaling session to the evening journaling session. Two different sessions with two different focuses. In the morning, very first thing. Great. Being grateful, Being, you know, thankful, showing gratitude. That's the very first thing I do. I write the date, you know, whatever today, you know, the 18th or the 19th, whatever it is, write the date. Then I write I am grateful for. And I'll name something incredibly specific, the bed I've just slept in. And I'll think about that and experience that gratitude for a second. I am grateful for Finn and Caroline. And I'll think about those two amazing humans that I love so much. I am grateful for. And I might name the piece of clothing I'm wearing, or the food that I'm about to eat, or I had last night. But expressing gratitude creates a deep well within us to set us up for the day. So actually expressing gratitude, you can go and do all the research you want on it. There's incredible peer reviewed studies around gratitude practice and how that helps us build resilience, helps us perform better, helps us when we need that big well of resilience. So gratitude practice. First thing I do takes 30 seconds. Do you have 30 seconds in the morning? I bet you do. Many people reach for their phones. Don't do that. Ditch the damn thing. You don't want to be reaching for your phone first thing in the morning. When you do that, you're wiring your brain for stress. So many people literally wake up to an alarm on their phone and then go straight into social media, straight into email, texts. You are wiring your brain neuroscientifically for stress. Don't do that. Reach for your journal. Get the journal up. What are you grateful for? Okay, that's the first thing. Second, mvp. For those that have been following for a while or you've been to any of my high performance events, you'll know that I talk about MVPs all the time. Most valued priority, One for your personal life, one for your professional life. In your journal, written down. Once it's written, it's a commitment. It's cemented. So what's your most valued priority today? Personally. Could be fitness related, it could be nutrition, it could be relationship related, and then professional. What's the most valued priority? Is it a task, a project? Getting rid of some of those things that keep getting procrastinated on what is it for you. But get clear on what you're grateful for and what your MVPs are. The last thing I do is write out my goals for the year. I've always got anywhere between three to five goals, and I write them out every morning. Why? What you focus on, you draw towards you. What you focus on, you become. So writing your goals out keeps them front and center. Why you're turning up every day to take the small steps is because you're moving towards something of substance, something that matters and is meaningful. So those in the morning are the things I do now, if I've got more time. All of that takes about five minutes. Do you have five minutes to be a high performer? I bet you do. So that's it in a nutshell. In the morning, sometimes, if I have more time, I will journal a little bit more about how I'm feeling. You know, whether emotions are showing up. Fear, excitement, joy, worry, imposter syndrome. I'll journal about those things and ask myself why and go deeper and then look at, well, what more could I focus on that can help me move forward? I look at journaling as a tool to help us with progress. It's not a tool to trap ourselves. In the past. High performance journaling, remember, is different from other forms. Now you go and do your day. Go about it. Have fun. I keep my journal close. Why? Sometimes something comes up and I want to capture it. If I don't want to get my phone out and get distracted by it, I'll pop it in my journal. Nighttime in bed, before the light goes out, journal gets opened. I've got an alibi on this one. Who can confirm. Caroline can tell you. Every night the journal gets opened, and then I reflect on these things. These questions are critical. If you want to be a high performance journaler, this is what you've got to do. Answer this question today, what went well?

What actually went well? Name a couple of things, or even just one that went well. Maybe you got to work, maybe you ate the food, maybe you drank the water you said you were going to drink. But what went well today? Maybe it was a big presentation. You know, some days big things happen after that. What didn't go so well? So get honest and candid with yourself. What didn't go so well? Name one or two things that maybe didn't go as you planned, or you didn't fully focus the way you'd intended, or the thing didn't work. Out exactly the way it was. And it could be very personal, it could be cooking related, it could be relationship related, it could be you didn't read the book that you said you were going to read, or it could be that you failed at the exam you flopped on a big public speaking thing you had to do. These can be small things or big things. And then the last but the most crucial question, if you want to be a high performance journaler, you've got to identify this every single day. Don't miss this one. This is the most crucial1. Tomorrow 1% better would be.

What is 1% better tomorrow going to look like based upon what went well today, what didn't go well, what would a little bit better tomorrow look like? That's manageable, that's doable. We can be 1% more focused, 1% more intentional, 1% better with our nutrition, whatever it might be. But that in a nutshell, is high performance journaling morning and evening. And when I have more time or I feel like I write lots more often, when I'm traveling, I express lots about my priorities. I like to write out my values often and just reflect on them and ask am I actually living up to that? And often I'm not. And that's why the journal is important, because it helps me to step up and hold myself to account. So high performance journaling is intentional. It's structured and it's daily. It's not a nice to have. It's not. I'll think about it. It's something that high performers just.

So I hope this has served you. I would love to hear. If you're starting, please take a photo of your journal. Tag me on social media, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, whatever. I'd love to learn about it. Let me know how your journaling goes. I promise you there are benefits to journaling. I'm not going to tell you what those benefits are right now. Why? I want you to uncover them and experience them. It's totally worth it. So folks, thank you for tuning in today, but for now please get out there and lead your life on purpose. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out@nzmortgages.co nz. Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button and I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks and leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.