10x Your Self-Awareness with This New Journaling Method

As the founder and CEO of a scaling software agency while also building our own platform, life is good, but it can also be stressful sometimes. And one of the things that have helped me a lot managing this stress and basically helping me with overall personal development and growth is journaling. Journaling as in writing down what I'm grateful for or things that are— that I'm stuck on. And even though this has helped me so much, I recently basically quit this traditional way of journaling. Not because I don't think it is powerful and helpful, but because I found a method that is actually allowing me to go way deeper and grow more. And in this video, I want to explain this method to you. And it's basically an AI-powered method of the traditional journaling so that you can go a bit deeper and basically get guidance and make it interactive instead of just dropping your thoughts. I will explain the benefits of this AI system that you can use and also take you step by step into the steps on how I implemented this into my life, share some examples, and just basically share my overall thought process while going through this step. So hopefully you can learn something from it and maybe start using it yourself as well. So let's dive into the video. Starting off with the traditional way of journaling. So what we see here is a physical journal and Even though I think it's a bit outdated, it can also be a nice traditional way because I do believe that writing things down is also able to help you in a physical way with a pen. Something that a lot of people do. Another method is doing it digitally and maybe also going a step further with, for example, a journal template. And that is what you see over here is a Notion template with some questions and some instructions for the day. That is something that I also used. I pick a template from the internet, customize it a bit, and then at specific periods or specific moments in time, I changed it and yeah, basically written down questions that were more in line with where I am. In a specific period. But it's still all just static. It's static information and it's not adaptive in a way that it understands you. And it's always the same until you manually change the template. But there's another way. If we, for example, look at this example where I used OpenAI ChatGPT as an example to demonstrate in this video, and it gives some highlights from a chat. So the AI prompt: Good morning, Jim. Based on your recent entries, you've been feeling more grounded but slightly restless about direction. Let's tune in. It gives me an AI-generated insight mentioning that I've been deeply creative but didn't really take the time to celebrate it. So today actually might be a good day to pause and gives the intention, does a check-in around mind, body, spirit, and gives a suggestion for a self-reflection prompt. So that's all very specifically personalized for my situation based on the things that we discussed in this chat. So that definitely goes a step further than just filling in a standard static template. Then if we look over here, and what I wanted to explain with this image is you cannot see what you can't see. Basically, until you saw it, you didn't know it exists. And that is something that's quite interesting, what AI is actually able to do. Having the ability to chat with a model is basically allowing you to go a bit deeper and spot blind patterns that you're not able to see for yourself. And let's dive into this by giving an example. So above, I already showed that the AI basically mentioned that I've been deeply creative lately but haven't taken time to celebrate it. And what I did afterwards is I was basically asking it how it came up with this, because this was something that I didn't write down myself. It was basically the AI that generated this insight. And then I asked it how it came up with this, and it basically explained to me that this connects to the burst of ideas and structured work you've recently shared, like the InnerSides onboarding and video scripting. Video scripting for a video like this and also for InnerSides. And for those of you who don't know what InnerSides is, it's the startup that I'm working on with my team, and we are basically, basically building an AI self-reflection platform. You can check out the link in the description, and if you join now, You can access it for free. You can also just continue watching this video because in this video I won't be using InnerSights. I will just share the process of how I use AI journaling and the examples I will give will just be in OpenAI ChatGPT. But if you want to go a step deeper and further, you can also check out the InnerSights. All right. So that is basically what it mentioned. So it noticed that I was spending a lot of time and energy into this startup and making personal content, making videos. And it also recognized that I have a tendency to keep pushing forward without recognizing progress. And that is something that I also mentioned already in the past. So it basically linked a specific pattern of me wanting to push forward without basically celebrating the small wins. And now it basically recognizes maybe it's time to take a step back because you're a lot focusing on output, being creative and just delivering. But we haven't spoke about gratefulness, for example, and standing still with the things that actually are going great at this point. Then the final example is basically having a physical journal or even a digital one. To be honest, for me, I almost never read back the things that I entered. Yeah, I just didn't really find a reason to dive into my old journal entries and analyzing manually how I felt one year ago. Because it's a lot— takes a lot of time. It's time-consuming, especially if you journal every day. You really have to manually search for specific entries, which takes a lot of time. So mostly it's just you filling in that journal either physically or digitally and never looking back at it again. But what AI allows you to do is basically build an interactive mind map, because this is in the back end how a model like ChatGPT works. It connects the dots between specific information, and this information can be your behaviors, your habits, your feelings. And it basically builds this— yeah, you can basically see it as a big spider web. Where it connects the dots between it. And it is also able to zoom in really deep and fast on a specific pattern or a specific part of this graph. And you can basically just start asking questions with natural language just by typing it in. And the AI is basically doing the hard work for you, searching back in the patterns from one year ago and what you've entered then and linking specific patterns or behaviors without you having to do a manual analysis. So that's basically summarizing the power of traditional journaling versus what AI is actually allowing you to do and go a step deeper on it. That was the first part of this video, and now I want to zoom into the second part where I will be basically displaying these 6 simple steps that we will walk through together to show you how I actually use this. So it starts with you either sharing something, so maybe a thought, emotion, or challenge that's on your mind, and give the AI some guidance onto what you want to talk about. Or you can basically ask the AI itself to start with a journaling question without you having to give input on what's on your mind at this point. So if we go to ChatGPT and we start a new chat, we can basically just either share what I just mentioned by, yeah, for me, for example, I didn't take time to celebrate small wins recently. Can you create some journaling reflection prompts to zoom in on this? So this is just on the spot, me thinking about something from recently that popped up and then asking the AI to basically guide me. And now it's zooming in on small wins can be powerful to rewire your brain. So it's explaining why it's actually important. And now it's also recognizing what's working. So it basically recommends 3 questions that allow me to recognize what's working. Then it's zooming in on the impact. So how did one of these small wins positively impact my day, mood, or progress? So it's very broad. It's not just one question. You really get specific angles with specific different prompts and probably also insights that will be generated from those prompts. So you can just look at this and feel what resonates with you and then fill that in. So I'm not going to do that in this example, but what I could do is, for example, pick the 3 or maybe 5 questions that I think most resonate with who I am or where I want to go, and then fill those in and basically spit those back into the AI. And that is also something that is allowing you to go a step deeper. You don't have to follow this full prompt template. You can also just pick specific parts and zoom in on them. Connect with your history. Let AI reference your past entries, patterns, and emotional themes to give you to give your current reflection deeper context. So without actually filling in those questions, without filling in those questions, connect recent things we discussed to what I mentioned in the start of this chat. And because I use ChatGPT and OpenAI a lot for this type of reflection, it understands a lot about who I am because I myself allowed the platform to basically save my personal information. Because yeah, I'm, to be honest, just not scared of what they would do with my information. I would just share the things I'm comfortable with. And there are no secrets for me in that. But here it is basically reflecting on behavior from recently and things that it noticed related to the question that I asked in the beginning. So you've been navigating deep shifts from feeling lost and unfulfilled last year despite external success, to slowly rediscovering your rhythm through personal growth, new projects, and vision alignment. But you didn't really stop to acknowledge how far you've come in this inner revolution. That's a win. So this is a huge thing. It's basically reflecting back to information from over a year ago. That's huge. You're building InnerSights, a visionary platform blending AI, spiritual intelligence, self-reflection. You've structured a working onboarding flow, personalized AI chats, and daily insights. You're close to the public launch. Yay! And that's not just a small win, that's multiple milestones. So what it actually is doing now without me even filling in one of those earlier questions, it is basically giving examples of things that I should be grateful for and things that I actually should be celebrating. So me, myself, when I would normally journal, I maybe wouldn't even come up with this because those are things are somewhere stored in my head deeply, but I already forgot about a year ago because I'm really living in the moment and I'm not looking back that much. But now it's like, hey, looking back one year ago and checking where I stood back then versus where I am today, I made huge progress. And that is something to be really happy about. So yeah, that's basically showing the power of how it's connecting the dots between a year ago and now. You've connected your personal development, quantum conscious mindset, well-being, tech agency. So yeah, it's doing a lot of cool things here. And giving me some insights to basically start reflecting on. So that is step 2, connecting with our history. And you might be wondering, well, the AI doesn't know a lot about me. How do I do this? And this is where it gets a bit personal. And for some people, they might not be comfortable. Maybe you are not comfortable with sharing a lot, but there is some basic information that you maybe can share that will allow the AI to better understand who you are. And a great example of this is basically a personality test or something like that. So maybe for school or for work or whatever, maybe you're interested in yourself. You had to do a personality report. And you can basically share this report with the AI so it better understands who you are. And I personally recommend 16 Personalities, which you can do for free. It's a test online. Yeah, that you basically can, can just do in— I think it takes like 10, 15 minutes and then you get the personality profile. And this report is something that you can share with the AI by just making a screenshot or uploading a PDF. And then the AI better understands who you are as a person. Another thing that you, for example, can add is your CV. So your work experience. Yeah, you can basically go as deep as you want to go or Keep it really broad and not personal. But of course, the more you share, the better the AI is able to understand who you are and help you. So that's for part 2. Another thing you could do, but this is of course really only if you are okay with it, is sharing past journal entries. So if you already have a journal in Notion or in Word or whatever, you can make an export, share it with the AI, and the AI will find patterns. It is something that I did personally myself, but of course, if you are not comfortable with it, then just keep it simple. Then invite the AI for reflection. AI scans for contradictions, blind spots, and recurring emotional loops. So I think we should just test this out live in a moment now. So I'm going to create a prompt that is basically going to do this for me. So scan for contradictions, blind loops, and emotional loops for me. And now again, it's probably going pretty deep because it has a lot of personal context about me. Yeah. Otherwise you can also let the AI maybe ask questions. So now, because it knows a lot of context about me, it doesn't have to ask a lot of questions back. It basically can go deeper based on what it understands. So here it's coming up with some contradictions. So these are areas where your intentions and behavior seems to be in conflict. You crave meaning and flow but focus on building systems. Quite an interesting topic, quite an interesting one. Um, so it's basically explaining that I'm deeply moved by spiritual ideas, personal transformation, and helping others live more with alignment, yet you often go into building complex platform and business systems. You're building a temple but getting lost in the bricks. So you feel disconnected from work that you intellectually believe in. Yeah, blind spots, undervalue your internal wins, something that we just discussed. You may be overrelying on systems to create transformation. You might be spiritually bypassing your fatigue. You've processed a lot through reflection and mindset, but the emotional weight of transition, grief of identity loss, and creative fatigue may not have fully landed. Quite heavy, but yeah. Emotional loops, the loop of high vision, momentum, disconnection, guilt, rebuild. You start with clarity, excitement, push hard, then feel a drop in energy or doubt, which triggers guilt or confusion until you B-frame again. So all examples of quite heavy and loaded things, but that is because I asked for this and the AI basically understands that I want to go deeper, so it goes deeper. Of course, you can also use this in a more surface-level way by, yeah, just, yeah, asking not that deep questions. Okay, so that's another example of how the AI is basically able to do reflection of the things that I've shared. And now I want to request for deeper prompts. Get thoughtful questions tailored to you, not a generic list. It's like a coach, but one who remembers everything you've shared. And that's already what we quite demonstrated in this video. But what I'm going to do now is, in this chat, based on everything we discussed, create some prompts that can help me work on this. So now I'm basically asking, take all the context of everything we discussed in this chat. So there's a lot of insights and information about me and the things that, yeah, basically we discussed. And now it is giving some suggestions. So let's create your journaling prompts designed to help you move through the contradictions, eliminate the blind spots, and gently exit the emotional loops. These prompts are organized thematically and designed to go deep without overwhelming. From doing to being. So it's basically giving me some prompts. Where in life am I trying to prove instead of express? What do I feel when I do nothing but sit with the energy of my creations? What is one moment lately where I felt truly myself? So yeah, these are all things that really resonated with me. And now again, I can pick the ones that I like and maybe save them. And for example, tomorrow I could go in another chat and start with those questions. Extract powerful insights. So that is what we already started to do. So get clear on what actually matters, from emotional triggers to self-sabotaging beliefs. And that is also something that I can start chatting about. And yeah, now I already got some insights from this chat and I can store those and create a new template based on those insights and on those questions. And finally, create practices that stick. Transform insights into daily, weekly templates, healing prompts, or custom rituals. Build a system that grows with you. So what I did here is starting with an open question. But another thing I could do is start a new chat and, for example, instruct the AI to be my daily journal guide. So that is something that we're going to do now. Now. Act as my daily journal guide. Create questions that resonate with me. And now again, I don't have to share a lot of personal information here to make the AI go deep and personalize on my situation. But you could, for example, just upload here some personal information about yourself. Again, of course, only share what you are comfortable with sharing with an AI. But maybe a Myers-Briggs test that I just shared. So the personality test, or just some information that's on your head recently. So I could also share, for example, The current theme to focus on is balancing, that is balancing client work vs. agency products. So that is something that is playing in my personal life right now. It's basically the balance between doing client work, which is more financially stable of course, and also fun to do. But on the other hand, I also want to take time to innovate and invest more in creating our own products, which is more a risk, but it's more in line with my passion. So that is something that I'm sharing now and it's just some basic general information. And now it is able to create a morning reflection, midday check-in, and an evening reflection. And it already starts the first question with the balance between client work and my own products. So this is just an example of sharing just a little bit of information and allowing you to get a personalized journal. And the interesting thing is I can just keep this chat alive. And if we go here and we refresh this and we call this, for example, daily journal, Then you can just keep this chat alive over here and go back to it daily and fill this in. And you can do the same thing maybe for a weekly or monthly or yearly reflection based on your needs. So what I did when I was originally journaling, and most of the times I did them daily, sometimes when I felt it monthly, every month. So if you have a monthly template, you can create a chat, ask it for a monthly personalized template, and then maybe start the chat with some general information that you want to focus on for this month so that it is again personalized. Yeah, that is basically it. And here it's also saying healing prompts, custom rituals. So another cool thing to maybe do is here, give me some personal affirmations. So I went back to the chat that we started with, so about the small wins. And now I'm letting the AI generate personal affirmations for me. And those affirmations will focus on gratefulness and celebrating small wins. I'm allowed to build slowly, beautifully, and in tune with my soul. I don't have to choose between being visionary and human being. I'm both. So all things that it recognizes from the struggles that I recently had and basically translating them into affirmations that will help me build my mindset, my confidence, on basically transforming into the better version of myself. Yeah, so those are the 6 steps. It basically starts with sharing something or just going in open without sharing any information, but just asking for a journal template. Then start providing more context. For example, you can add history or you can let the AI, if you use a tool like ChatGPT, let check your history automatically by just asking it to do it, and then find specific connections, and then let the AI reflect on it so it can scan for, for example, contradictions, blind spots, and recurring emotional loops. What I just did in the chat. Then go deeper by providing, asking personal prompts that will go deeper on the previous step. So thoughtful questions tailored to you. Then finally you gain the insights, you save those, and you basically, yeah, convert those into a new template or save them somewhere so you can continue with them later on. And finally, this was basically the video. Now I also want to take a minute to share the InnerSights project that we're working on. For those of you that are interested in, yeah, going deeper with AI self-discovery, AI journaling, this is what we're building. It's InnerSights. You can go to the website by checking the link in the description. And if this video resonated with you, I highly recommend you to join the waitlist so that you can join the platform for free, because the first users that will be joining the waitlist will actually get a free account and access to all the material for free, where you can basically build your own AI journaling coaching tool and, yeah, discover who you are and also getting more insights in where you want to go in life and just getting general advice by the AI. So if this video resonated with you, I recommend you to join the waitlist for free, and then I would love to connect with you as well. Thank you so much for being here today, and I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope that you at least learned something that you can maybe implement into your life, and hopefully I will see you in the next one. Goodbye.