Why You Should Journal

I know. No, really. Trust me - I know. I have resisted daily journaling for 25 years, ever since I learned about The Artist’s Way and morning pages.

All of my friends (most of them actors, at the time) were doing morning pages and noticing huge results.

I resisted.

Just like I resisted creating a schedule for myself in my business, even though the course I was taking was advocating it heavily. Even though other people in the course couldn’t believe the results.

I resisted.

I’m a bit of an asshole rebel. Authority is not easy for me, and I tend to think that if I do it my own way, it will be better.

But the truth is: I wasn’t actually doing something better. I was just resisting other stuff.

Recently, the coach I’ve been working with (Jerico Mandybur) suggested that I incorporate journaling into my daily tarot routine. She suggested I start with a commitment statement and go from there. I’m happy to share the trajectory of this with you, because it’s been pretty incredible.

“I commit to trusting that what I put out will come back to me.”

This was after I had a month of zero new clients.

The truth is that I wasn’t too upset about a month of zero new clients. I was working at the College, I’d been building some new programs. I’d been cultivating new relationships and trying to find people who needed me.

I started with a commitment to trusting myself. Because even though I was feeling not terrible about that particular issue (the zero month), I had been facing some mindset challenges around this whole thing not working.

Mindset work is a bit of an enigma to me, and I see a lot of it advertised in ways that do not resonate with me at all. Some of it feels like a “fake it ‘til you make it” mentality, which I am wholeheartedly not into.

But, committing to trusting myself? Hell yes. Committing to believing in myself and working through (painstakingly working through) all of the nagging challenges that come up from past “failures”? (i.e. never quite getting as far ahead in my music career as I had once hoped. Giving up acting.)

And here’s what happened, even though I didn’t know this was going to happen. I did begin to trust that the work I was putting out would find the people who needed me and make their way to me. And it started to work. People were finding me. Effort started to equal efficacy.

Now, it started to work because I made it work. But making it work was simply committing to committing to trusting. Haha. It begins to get a little bit convoluted to a certain degree.

And once I could see that it was working, that not only was stuff happening but I was also feeling more confident, we decided to up the ante and add a part 2 to my commitment statement. It started to read as follows:

“I commit to trusting that what I put out will come back to me, and I commit to ever expanding [expansive] growth.”

Growth meaning of mind, of spirit and of material (i.e. financial growth).

And every morning at 6am, that’s how I’d start my day. My commitment statement, overview my dreams, thoughts, bothers, problems, business forecast, personal issues. And then draw a daily card and ruminate on that and poof ! 30 minutes have passed and my daughter is ready to start her day.

Recently, once I felt like the commitment statement was really becoming truth for me, I decided to up the stakes again. And now it looks like this:

“I commit to trusting that what I put out will come back to me, and I commit to ever expanding growth.

I commit to doing something that scares me or pushes me outside of my comfort zone today, and that is ____________________.” And then I pull a tarot card to help me figure out the one thing that I should do.

Because pushing past fear always equals growth. And it can be small (like finally calling the Doctor about something that was bothering me), and it can be big (like pitching my workshop to somebody I really admire, or talking about a difficult subject with somebody I love).

And in this vein, I encourage you to take a look at the blog from last week 10 Shadow Work Questions, and start your own journaling, uh, journey. You can use tarot or oracle, or not. In fact, you can use any tool that you think would help to enhance this practise for you. Or you can simply write, because frankly, that’s enough.

What kind of commitment statement would work for you? What would you like to commit to every single day? And what happens if you make it real by writing it down?

Little bit scary, right?

But that’s ok. Scary is fine. Growth is scary, and growth is good.

Want some help getting started? Shoot me an email and let me know what you need.

Are you going to try journaling? Let me know in the comments below!

——————————

Did you like this blog post? I have so many more! Look below to browse through the recent ones, or just click here to see ‘em all!