Transform Your Life with This Simple Tool

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. 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 investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Welcome back. Look, I wanted to share with you this last few weeks, kicking back into the year or a couple months in now I've been getting on stages again, connecting with incredible audiences. Maybe I've even seen you. If you've been in one of those audiences, it's been amazing. Talking about self mastery, personal leadership, and of course, high performance. It's what I enjoy. And when I travel, there's one thing I always bring with me. I never forget it and if I did, it would be like I'd lost a limb. But this is the one thing that has helped me to navigate many years ago. Separation, ill health, stress. It's also helped me navigate big decisions with my business and life. And this one tool is the one tool that I come across. Most people that I interview, whether they're billionaires running large teams, maybe they're running countries. The one thing they talk about is having a journal. They have a place where they capture their thoughts, emotions, gratitude, challenges, opportunities. It's the one thing that they carry with you. So I'm just for those that are watching this rather than listening, I'm just holding up a very simple black journal. For me. I love the Moleskine journals. And no, I don't get any kickbacks, commissions or royalties from them. I just love them. They feel good. They're a great size, they're very functional. So I always have one of those on hand. Now I've been journaling for years. Why do I journal? Well, because I enjoy it. Because there are benefits to it. I really don't believe in doing anything like this. That doesn't have a. That's right. If there's not a return on your investment of time or money, then why do the thing? To me, journaling has such a significant ROI that people who don't do it, I'm scratching my head going, why would you not do it? It's such a great tool. Now, I want to share a couple of things because of course you're going, but why? Well, I always ask why too. And I'm going to encourage you to always challenge people when they've got something they're encouraging you to do. Why? So let's look at the gratitude side of it. Look, many of the elite special forces give their graduates a journal and they ask them to do one thing in that journal. Simply write three things that they're grateful for every single day. Why? When you look at the neuroscience, when you practice gratitude, so you write down, I am grateful for. Could be my bed, it could be my partner, could be my pet, could be the socks that I'm wearing, could be the pen that I have, could be the money that's coming into my bank, could be whatever, right? You get to write that. When you write it, and you take a moment just to reflect on that thing and think, how does that make me feel? What does the gratitude feel like? For that specific thing, you actually create a sensation in your body which releases chemicals which make you feel good. And those feel good. Chemicals reduce stress, those feel good. Chemicals will reduce any of that anxiety, therefore having a massive impact on your neurology and, of course, your physiology. Just a simple gratitude practice. Why would the elite military forces give it to their graduates? Well, they're going to face a lot of adversity when they're at war or doing their job day to day. And when we face adversity, and for you and I, if you're not at war, that might be stressful. Drive to work because you're running late, it might be kids that are driving you up the wall. It might be that you didn't get your exercise in because you're too busy. It might be that you've got 553 unread emails. They are all stressful events, never mind the bigger ones, like ill health, death, loss of a loved one, you know, financial crisis, pandemics, right? When we face those obstacles, if you've developed a gratitude of a practice of gratitude, you're going to really have much more resilience levels to deal with it. And that's why these elite forces, they've done the math, they've done the studies to know that practicing gratitude on a daily basis has a significant impact on your life, on how you feel, on how you look at the world. That's first. And I actually took some notes. I want to share them with you as well. There's the other side of this. So this was a 2013 study published in the Psychosomatic Medicine Journal, and they were looking at very certain specific type of journaling called expressive writing. And they actually said, we believe this may help in healing physical wounds. Right. This specific type of journaling. So what happened was investigators asked healthy adults aged between 64 to 97 years of age to journal for 20 minutes a day, three days in a row. That was it. 20 minutes a day, three days IN A row. Not everybody used the same journaling practice. Half were encouraged to write about the things that upset them, honestly discussing their thoughts and feelings about those events. The other half wrote about a much drier topic, how they manage time during the day. Two weeks later, all participants had a tiny biopsy performed on their arms, creating a small wound. Researchers then tracked how that wound healed by taking a picture every single day. By day 11, a full 76% of the group who wrote the more genuine journal about upsetting life events had healed, compared to just 42% of those that wrote about time management. Look, that's quite significant. What we write is equally as important as actually writing. Writing about your time and how you spent it is going to be good. But actually, if you want true impact, write about your feelings, your emotions, how you feel about what's happening around you. Now, look, day to day, is my life perfect? No. Do I have stressful days? Yes. Do I say things and do things that I wish I could have done better or differently? Absolutely. That's the stuff I journal about. I don't journal about all the rainbows and butterflies. Some days I do, but I always take the time to write about how I'm feeling. And it's amazing seeing studies like that, that back it up in terms of physical healing and I imagine emotional and spiritual healing. Journaling has a really powerful way of helping you with that. Now you might be asking, where do I start? Well, look, the best way to start with journaling is to start today. Grab a notebook, go and buy yourself a nice journal. What I would encourage you to not do is go and get one that has a hundred things that you have to fill in on every page every day. You've got to answer these 55 things that becomes a chore that becomes sometimes a little monotonous and stressful. I'm going to encourage you to let it be free flowing. I always start my day and something you might want to consider trying by writing three things I'm grateful for. So this little journal here sits beside my bed and I write there. What are the three things I'm grateful for? Then I'll actually feel each of those things. I'll take a moment to actually close my eyes and feel each of those things. So there's an emotional connection to that gratitude. I'm starting my day off with an attitude of gratitude. Secondly, all right, what's my mvp? And for those people who I work with or have been to my events, you'll understand what I'm talking about. It's your most valued priority. Why is that? Because we want to prioritize our priorities. If we don't, we will be busy being busy and we don't want to do that. What's my mvp, my most valued priority? I do one for work and I do one for life. Once I've done those two things, if I feel like there's emotions I need to write down or think about or something that's on my mind, I will. Other than that journal closed on with the day. The journal will travel with me. If I'm say going to speak, it'll come with me. If I'm dropping Finn into school, it'll come with me. And if things come up during the day, I'm like, oh, I need to write about that sometimes. It's an emotion, an event, an aha moment, a creative idea. I put everything in that one area. And I probably go through four, maybe five journals a year, but I capture everything there. At the end of the day, my journaling practice is simple again, what was I grateful for today? What did go well? Next most important question. What did I learn today? What did I learn today? That's crucial because we are not the finished product we have to learn. The journal could become your greatest coach, a free coach. What did I learn today about myself, about others, about society, about money, about work? Like answer just one of those. What did I learn today? Think. What was the thing I picked up today? Might have been that you went to a keynote and heard someone speak about personal mastery. It might be that, you know, you were driving to work and you learned that letting people in rather than cutting them off feels so much better and less stressful. You might learn about some new food. You might learn about your family or your emotions. One thing a day that you're learning. The very, very last thing I do is called 1% better. 1% better. And in the journal I write, what would 1% better look like tomorrow? And I look at my five priority areas. My areas of priority will be different than yours, possibly, but mine are family, fitness, finance, learning, and business. So those five things, what would 1% better look like in each of those tomorrow? 1% is easy. It's achievable, it's doable. I write them down, and then the next day, I make sure that I actually complete them. And I track them and I physically score them off and tick them. There's a feeling, again, emotional release of dopamine that goes, ha accomplished it, and that encourages me then to do it again. So I build this string of habit. So I journal twice a day. I remember I was in Queenstown early, maybe mid last year, and I was speaking at an event, and the person who was organizing it picked me up from the airport, and we're chatting and we got talking and journaling came up. She says, oh, you journal. I was like, yeah, I do. How often? I was like, twice a day. So I did the event, we spoke at the event, and then on the way back to the airport that afternoon, she went, you don't really journal twice a day, do you? Just said that. I was like, oh, no, I'll grab my journal. So I grabbed my journal. It was in my bag. I was like, look, there's yesterday twice, the day before twice. It's a habit. It's not some thing I find difficult. It used to be difficult. It used to be horrible. I hated it. It was like, why am I doing this? I don't know what to write. But I promise you, if you get into the habit of it, the rewards from journaling are significant. Anybody that works with me one to one, I'd say, hey, please, if you want to get the most out of this, get a journal and commit to it every single day. Put it in a place and take it with you that you simply won't forget. Would you forget your phone when you're going out for the day or you head up to bed? Because it's probably your alarm, you know? Or would you forget your wallet? No, you'd carry it and keep it in a safe place. Do the same thing with your journal. It's going to be a place for self reflection, self evaluation, self discovery. Honestly, it's the greatest investment you can make. So for those of you over the next few weeks and months, if I see you at an upcoming event that I'm speaking at. Please do come and say hello and for those that are enjoying the show please hit like leave a comment maybe even share it with a friend. I'd greatly appreciate it. And don't forget we've got that incredible free resource for you in the description where I shared 11 of the top personal leadership strategies from some of our guests from last year, some of the heavy hitting guests that we have on the show. So please grab that, it's yours for free. Hope you enjoy it. But for now please get out there and lead your life on purpose.

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 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.