81: Four Ways to Start Journaling Productively

Foreign.

Welcome to Grief and Guts. I'm your host, Melissa Dugulecki. It is my honor and privilege to serve you by sharing stories, tools, interviews and strategies that will help you transition from what do I do now? How do I get through this? Those feelings of overwhelm and uncertainty to truly standing in your power. From my grief journey in losing my daughter laden in 2014 that I learned, practiced, was exposed to all these tools, but they are not grief specific. In fact, they apply universally to all of our unique situations. You've already done the hard part by showing up, by opening up to something new. So without any further ado, let's get to the good stuff that's going to help you in your journey.

Let's dive in. If you have ever said, I've been journaling and it's not working, or I journal all the time but you still feel stuck or I don't have time for journaling, this episode is for you. I have said every single one of those things. And I'm going to help you flip the script, change that story, and learn four different types of journaling for four different purposes, all of which will serve you. Let's get to it. All right, guys, I'm going to be honest. I was not always into journaling. I didn't have time for it. I didn't see the point of it. And that might be surprising because you guys know how much I like to write and how much I like to process. And what I learned when I began studying it and coaching others through journaling and different ways of using it is that there are a lot of different purposes for it and a lot are really unproductive. So one of the biggest problems that I see is that people who I've worked with and beyond. Right. Are journaling in ways that actually affirm stories that are keeping them stuck. They're journaling in ways where they're just looping. They're looping, they're looping. They're falling into the back. Same cycle, right? And so what I want to share with you today is just super integratable, super practical strategies to adjust the way that you may choose to integrate journaling into your own growth into your own processing. Now, if you have questions on this, of course, send them over to me. I have a couple visuals, too, that I will be dropping on Instagram that will break this down for you. But this is a really, really powerful thing. And I also want to be clear. You don't need to journal for more than five minutes a day to feel the Results. And what I think will happen for you is if you begin journaling five minutes a day or so, you're going to feel results and it's going to grow, right? When I first started practicing, it was five minutes a day. Maybe I'd do every other day. And now it's just a huge part of my routine and I look forward to it. Another thing that I really struggled with. If I go back and read some of my old journals, well, no wonder I didn't want to journal. I was literally self reporting. I was like, dear journal, I did this shitty thing. I fell short here. I didn't get all my workouts in. I had extra tacos and I didn't have any salad. Like I was lit, Like I was reporting to myself. And, you know, that's kind of an interesting introspective into my former relationship with myself, right? And so journaling can tell a lot about our relationships with ourselves. Now at that time, like, I did not embrace, you know, my mantra, be your best observer and quietest critic, right? And you can practice doing that through journaling. So if when I say, be your best observer and quietest critic, you're like, yeah, easier said than done. Believe me. I was my loudest critic, worst observer, and I would report the hell out of myself into my journal. So it is possible, guys, but it doesn't just change, right? You got to create change. We got to create momentum. You got to do it slowly. Which is exactly why I want to share these types of journaling for you now. The first type of journaling is one that, you know, definitely was a huge part of my grief journey. This is going to be. If everything is really heavy, you can barely, you know, think. It's overwhelming. You're maybe foggy, feel like you're going to snap. Your capacity, think about it this way. Your capacity feels really strapped. I often say it's kind of like that feeling of when we're holding a hot potato and we just want to, like, toss it, right? We want to toss it. That anxiety, it's that discomfort, it's that unknown. For me, it was intense pain, it was shame, it was guilt, it was loneliness, it was emptiness. So this first type of journaling is called what I call releasing, right? So we're literally releasing. I want you to transfer this heaviness, this muck, this gunk, all of this stuff right onto paper, onto a Google Doc, a notepad. It is important to note that while I think pen and paper journaling, and there is research that shows the act of actually Writing imprints in your brain differently if you are at a limited capacity. This might be voice to text. When I did a lot of my releasing journaling, I would do voice note because writing or typing was just not going to happen. A lot of times I would pull over in the car because that's when things would really come to me or stop when I was running. That's when things really come to me and I would just kind of like dump it out. So think of this first type of journaling releasing as dumping. Like you're literally, you're just dumping out all this heaviness. It's a safe place. No one else is going to see it. And what you want to achieve is a sense of relief, right? You want to achieve a sense of relief. You want to achieve this sense of lightness. Now you're not going to feel better. It doesn't make everything go away, but it will alleviate some of the heaviness because we're transferring energy, right? Energy grows where energy goes. And so the more we hold that in, the more it's going to grow within. And we want to get some of that stuff out. So, you know, you can do pen and paper, you can do Google Doc, or, you know, typing. I am going to say, in my experience, this is where voice to text, you know, use that little note app. If I can figure it out, you guys can figure it out. That's where this can really come in handy and be really beneficial. The second type of journaling is building awareness. So becoming really clear on, you know, what is happening. We know we don't feel good. We know we feel stuck. Now, this can be really common if we're angry with a significant other, if we're unhappy in a job, if we, you know, are not feeling good in our finances. So two different prompts. I'm going to give you here two different prompts that I like to use a lot. Very simple, guys. We do not need to complicate this stuff because you know what? Our emotions and our emotional experiences are complicated enough. Let's keep this shit simple, okay? Shall we? So an awareness prompt is I am blank because I remember doing this. I am angry because I am sad, because I am lonely, because I am satisfied, scared because I am hurt because. So you're really building awareness. Now this is two parts. So first, you're going to release and you're going to release and you're going to let this be a little bit of a rant. That's fine. Another prompt for building awareness is to write a Letter to something that your relationship isn't great with. So, dear money to me, you are this. You bring me this. I've learned this about you, and you're really understanding your relationship, right? Your relationship with whatever it may be. Now, that second prompt is actually going to be two part, and I'll get more into that later. But just know these are two different ways of building awareness. Now, I want to go further because we want to build awareness, but we want to get a little bit more curious. So if you are doing the journal prompt of, you know, building awareness, where you say, now I am angry because I want you, without any boundaries, to just let it all out. Now, this is where I do think writing. And a lot of people I've coached have chosen to use Google Docs for this. And I will explain why in a second. You're just going to let everything out, all the reasons that you're angry, everything that's going on. Right? Just like, get it out. Now we're going to go a little bit deeper. So here is where I want you to begin to use Google Docs and that quick, cool highlighting feature where you can highlight one line yellow, one line green, one line blue, and begin to highlight and categorize. Okay. Again, might listen to this podcast episode a couple times. No worries. You might pause it right now and take notes. You might try it. Go for it. This works. It has helped, honestly, hundreds of people that I've worked with at this point, just myself. So what I want you to do is begin to look at, am I angry because I am scared? And everything that is comes back to fear. I want you to highlight in yellow and then label yellow fear. If it's because you're embarrassed. I want every. Everything about being embarrassed to be, I don't know, green. And then you highlight at the bottom. Green is embarrassment. If it's hurt, if it's. You feel neglected, you feel unseen. Whatever it is I want you to highlight. What you will likely find is that in an entire page, two pages, three pages of what you're angry about, it's going to come down to three or four things. Three or four things, guys. Why is that important? Well, that's really where the work is to be done. Those three or four things. Anger is the surface level. It is giving you a lens, a scope into something much deeper. Okay. Much deeper. So really understanding the different ways that you can journal and go deeper, doing this introspectively, I am always going to be an advocate for you to have a coach. I always have one. I Am always going to be an advocate for you to have one. If you are in a place where you can't have one or you are doing work between coaching, this is a great way to do it. Now, another part. So if we're writing that letter to whatever we are trying to identify more of our relationship with. So we're building. One is building more awareness around a response to a trigger, probably, right? A response to a trigger or an emotional state. The other one is building awareness around a relationship. So a relationship with a person with finances, with fitness, with health, with self worth, right? You're going to begin to identify the core beliefs within that. So there will be core beliefs likely that were handed down to you from people who impacted. You know, your belief system could be parents, it could be aunts, it could be uncles, it could be siblings, it could be mentors, teachers, friends. But somehow you've created these beliefs, these agreements around whether it's. We'll just use finances, right? Whether it's around finances. And I talked about this in a recent Money Mindset podcast. This is an activity I really use in coaching, Money Mindset. If you want to hear more about that, let me know or go back and search Money Mindset. It's definitely worth the listen. So I want you to begin to look at what are the core beliefs within your relationship. Is it that people who make money are bad? Is it that good people don't charge? Is it that, you know, money has to be a struggle? Is it that money needs to be hidden? Is it that money makes you valued? Money belongs to a certain type of person. Money makes you worthy. So all of these things, right? And I'm picking more unproductive relationships because typically when we do this, it's because we're stuck in our relationship with money or whatever it may be, right. And we've got to become more productive in it. Okay? So, you know, you might have a totally different relationship with money. You probably wouldn't be bringing awareness to it then, right? Because it's functioning well. So second type of journaling, guys, was awareness. So we're bringing awareness to either an emotional reaction, a state, a response, or we're bringing awareness to a relationship. The important part is once we do that first kind of dump, we go deeper and we kind of begin to process and organize. That is going to lead us into our third type of journaling. Now, this is definitely the most challenging to grasp on your own. This is something I do with people that I work with. But what we're going to begin to do is take triggers or experiences and organize them to find what is common. So let's just say there are 10 things that you're frustrated with, right? Somebody didn't call you back. Somebody took too long to text the tone in an email, canceled plans, didn't pay you back. Whatever it may be, you're going to write out all these things that you're feeling frustrated or annoyed at. And this could be years of stuff, guys. This could be years of stuff. It could be one relationship, one conversation, and a lot of things that were said that you want to tease out. So you dump all that out, and then we begin organizing it into commonalities. So I like to make webs. So in the center of the web, you might have frustration or relationship with this person or relationship with self. Then you'll do a line coming off of it, and perhaps it's felt unseen. And anytime you felt unseen, you're going to take that list and you're going to go put it on that section of the web and you're going to start to notice like, ooh, is it really those things or is it this feeling that I have of being unseen? Maybe it is that you felt, you know, taken advantage of. Anything on that list where you felt taken advantage of, you're going to be in the go here. This can go in a lot of different directions. This can be in relationships and things that are popping up. It could be communication. So let's say you're working through a challenging relationship with somebody and you've got that at the center, and then you put one arm out, and that could be communication. And any frustration on that list that comes back to communication, you're going to go put it there. Maybe another one is respect, right? Maybe another one is the amount of time you spend together. Maybe it is boundaries. So these are all going to be little areas that come off. And then all of your instances, all your experiences are going to get categorized under those. What does that do? That lets you see again what it's really about. Remember the surface level. The surface level is just an opportunity, right? It's just an opportunity to go deeper and figure out what's really going on. I've talked about playgrounds. Think of the surface level essentially as a playground, right? For the bigger stuff, for the big picture stuff, right? So somebody sends you a text message, that's annoying. That annoyance is actually the deeper stuff I want you to dive into. The text is just the playground to do it. We're not really worried about that text, honestly, we're not all right, this is the fun stuff. So fun, right? All right, last type of journaling, guys. If you're steering the course, you got grit. I love that. This is the most productive, forward moving type. But you, you can't do it until you release, until you bring awareness, until you organize, you know what you're really dealing with. Now. You write a new story, right? So this fourth type of journaling is an affirming type of journaling where you write your new story, you write your life how you want it to be. Now, a lot of this is inspired by energy work, law of attraction, manifestation, affirmations, mantras. If you aren't familiar with the work of Abraham Hicks, if you haven't read the Vortex, a lot of this will come back to that. It will come back to the Secret. It will also come back to work by Dr. Joe Dispenza and Becoming Supernatural. One of the things that he teaches in there is that our minds don't know the difference between a perceived experience and an actual experience. What does this mean? This means that our minds don't actually know if we're perceiving something to be the way it is or it's actually that way. When that's shitty is when we're perceiving things to be a heck of a lot worse than it is when we're catastrophizing, when we're letting, we're projecting, we're putting our insecurities, we're carrying all of our baggage. Then we perceive it and we think that's really what it is. So we act on that, right? And our vibration is going to drop. The good side of this is that if we affirm and put our energy to a place of where we want to be, our minds don't know, like vibrationally, that that's not actually where we are. So now we're going to align as if that's actually happening. So in affirming type of journaling in the beginning, you might just be stating affirmations. In fact, most likely you are just going to be stating affirmations in the beginning. And I don't even mean just because that's. That's not easy. When I first started saying affirmations, I was bawling. I was bawling, looking myself in the mirror and saying, you're a worthy mother. That was not. Wasn't sitting well. We have to tell ourselves these stories over and over to feel it, and we have to feel it to live it. And we got to do affirmations looking ourselves in the eye in the mirror. I know a lot of people that will say them out loud and they have a hard time looking themselves in the eye. That's going to be step one, guys. That's going to be step one. Now, if I hear, you know, I'm a worthy mother, I'll think to myself, I am a worthy mother. I'm a worthy mother. You know, took me a long time to get here. I'm not the mother I want to be. In the capacity I want to be doesn't mean I'm not worthy, right? I love my daughter more than anything in this world. I just mother very differently. So, you know, thinking about something I couldn't even believe or say or say it without crying now I feel and I'm like, yeah, like hell, yeah. Yes. It has come from this process, right? I had to release what was getting in the way of that. I had to organize what other stories, what baggage I was bringing in. And now I affirm a new story. Beyond affirmations, if you want to do affirmative journaling, this is when you're going to write in the present tense rather than I want to feel a certain way. It's I feel joy. I feel joy for the work that I do. I show up at work powerfully and I make myself meaningful impact. I connect with my colleagues. I communicate productively with my boss. I establish boundaries when I leave work. I am proud of the way that I show up at work. Now, that is a great way of affirming the relationship that you want to have in work. You could do the same thing with a romantic relationship, with a family relationship, with a relationship with yourself, with your fitness, with your health, with your finances. This is an abundant world, right? You can just write and write and write. And I want you to see what happens as you begin to do this. Like, at first, it feels silly. Like, ooh, I'm writing this false. This fantasy, right? This fiction. You're not writing fiction by any means, right? You're writing your story. And I'm going to be honest, it's no one else's job to write your story. So go write your damn story and have fun with it. So another example of affirming could be, I'm in a relationship where I am co creating the life that I want to live. My partner and I are mutually expanding. I give love and I receive love. We share joy, right? We share excitement, we share intimacy. We exchange meaningfully, right? I give love and I receive love. You can state your partner's name or the partner that you want to Create a relationship with. Right? We create in a way that is spacious. Right? We honor each other's needs and we grow. That is mutually productive and only as long as it is mutually productive. Right? We let go of control. This is one thing I want to be aware of for my fellow type A's out there. We do not want to bring our urge to control into our affirmative journaling. Right? We don't want to try and manipulate and control other people. We need to. How are we going to show up for ourselves? How do we give? How do we receive? Only so long as it benefits that person and aligns with them, right? Not not to control them. So important distinction. How are you guys? How are we feeling? Guys, that was a lot on journaling and I want to point out this is a lot more than just going and dumping things down. It's a lot more than self reporting. It's a lot more than just letting things out, right? This is why I coach and I haven't seen this created out there. If you have, let me know. I have not seen this organized this way. I like to organize shit. You all know that. If anyone doesn't know, when I was a kid, I used to go to my aunt and uncle's house and visit and I would organize their fridge. Like just completely organize everything. I used to color code and organize my closet. Some might call it ocd. It's fine. I like organization and now I like to organize stuff like this. So how are we organizing the way that we're growing? How are we organizing the way that we're journaling? There are different types of journaling for different purposes. What I don't want is for you to self report. I don't want you to go journal about how nobody loves you and you are never going to be happy and you're broke and you're scared because you know what you're doing? You are recreating that story. You're recreating that story. Now you may need to let it out, but then we let it out and we move forward. We do not recreate it anymore. So we've got to go through the process. Guys, this follows the four step method that I coach, right? It's funny how this four step method, it pops up every freaking way, guys. Because it works, right? So we build awareness, we release, we affirm and we sustain and maintain. We create new relationships, new narratives and places where we can truly step into our power freely. With excitement, humility, of course, gratitude and possibility. So I hope this helped you guys. Let me know which of these four resonates most with you? Check out on Instagram for a visual I'm putting together for you guys. Shoot me dm. I love connecting, I love learning, I love hearing what's supportive and thank you for sharing. If you guys are, you know, feeling inspired or supported by this, if you would give back that inspiration and support by rating and reviewing this podcast, that's going to help spread this work which is going to help get this out there, help me shine my daughter lady's light, and hopefully help other people, including you, shine their lights as powerfully and brightly as possible. We will talk soon.

Thank you all so much for being here at Korea Grief and Guts as Layden's mom. Being able to spread the stories, the strategies, the lessons I have learned through Layden and from Layden is the thing that means the most to me in this world and allowing my daughter's short life to have long and lasting impact.

By shining her light.

Truly, nothing means more if you align with and believe in the work that we're doing here in these messages. The best way to give back and to spread this out into the world is to rate and review on Spotify and on itunes. Thank you for taking just a moment to do that. Feel free to shoot me a message. Let me know what you want to hear more of, what you want to see more of. I am here to serve. I'm grateful to do so, and I'm cheering you on in your journeys.

Always.