All right, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. And today is Friday and I want to talk to you about stuff related to your lifestyle. And I think one of the best ways to increase the quality of your lifestyle is through journaling. So I want to talk to you today about journaling and maybe give you a few different ideas and tips and things on how to have really a lot of results come from your journaling because I think a lot of people think of the idea of journaling as a task and I think that they think of it a certain way and I always like to be very specific with my intent with things. So let's be real clear. Your lifestyle, it depends and it relies on some structure. Most people think lifestyle is carefree, whatever you want to do, but lifestyle is really creating a life that you love. And the quality of your life requires some structure and it requires being present. And, you know, there are science and thought leaders alike across the world that have absolutely said that there are benefits to journaling. And it's absolutely part of one of my morning routines, sometimes the evening routine, but it's part of my daily rituals. and I want you to understand that there can be seasons to your journaling and cycles to your journaling. Maybe sometimes you're journaling about certain types of things we'll talk about today and other times other types of things but the bottom line and sometimes it's in the morning sometimes it's in the evening but it's a great topic for you to have inside your daily rituals. So let's talk about the benefits of journaling things that you may not even really be aware are there to help you. First of all it's going to help you achieve your goals because you're going to be writing things down and achieving your goals is what most passionate driven entrepreneurs and high achievers are all about. It's also going to help you track your progress and when you focus on something where energy goes, attention goes, energy flows, right? And so tracking your progress and what you're focused on by writing it down is going to really help you. It's also absolutely without a doubt can help you increase your self-confidence because confidence comes from taking action and awareness. And the simple fact of doing journaling is going to help you to increase your confidence, believe it or not. Another thing, it's an intangible benefit that most people don't realize is journaling can help you with your communication skills because your writing skills being developed will help you. So let me give you an example. When I am struggling to try to figure out what I want to say or I'm dealing with a situation, a lot of times I will journal about it because when you have to put your thoughts on paper it's a whole different deal right it it helps you not only to be able to translate your thoughts into you know these random crazy thoughts into specific clear words but it going to help you with that communication skill which we all know helps you in business and life in general Another benefit is it going to help to reduce your stress and anxiety So many people suffering from depression stress and anxiety right now And the idea and the act of journaling can help you to take these random emotional thoughts and concepts and start to become more logical about them and start to write down what they are. And when you can objectify emotions and thoughts, they become easier to handle and you get out of this feedback loop that sometimes our minds put us in. And so reducing your stress and anxiety is a real big benefit. It also by that helps you to create solutions because when you're doing some specific thinking on a topic, you're going to create solutions. I also love that journaling can help you practice gratitude. You know, it's one thing to be grateful and to prioritize gratitude, but do you practice gratitude? Do you write down the things you're grateful for? I've had people do this exercise before and they've written down, you know, three or four things they're thankful for. The next day they write down three or four things they're thankful for. The next day a few more things. But what's interesting is you have to start thinking about it. And when you start thinking about it and you think about this practice of gratitude, what it does is it gets you better and better and better at gratitude. It's the same reason that journaling helps you to train your mind for success. Because when you're writing down things you're succeeding at, it will help to train your mind to notice those things. So practicing gratitude is a big benefit. And another thing it does is it helps you to capture memories. One of my biggest primary goals in life is quality of life. is to create memories. And when you write them down, they lock into your conscious. They increase your memory and the vividness of those memories. And that's a huge, huge benefit to you to increase your quality of life. Another thing that journaling will help you to do, and this is something that people like myself that like to multitask, it allows you to stack your daily rituals. Because sometimes journaling is about writing your affirmation. We'll get into a whole bunch of ways to journal, but it helps you to be consistent with several things like gratitude, journaling, recognition, success, you know, whatever it is you're focused on, your affirmations, your goals, whatever it is. Journaling allows you to be consistent with that, but stack these rituals that you might be doing separately. So those are a lot of benefits. I'm sure I could go on and on, but I do that because I want you to really think about all these benefits that are there for journaling. Now, let's talk about the way to journal because most people think about just writing down what happened in their life. I want you to think about journaling like I do with most things. I want you to have specific objectives with your journaling. I mean, if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. So let's talk about what types of journaling there are and I want you to be thinking about what best for you I don want you to take all these ideas and try to implement them all I want you to say what do I need in my life What do I need help and focus on For example you could be keeping track of fitness or food journals And if you're really one of your number one things is to get in shape, then tracking your fitness and food in a journal is a really smart way to do that. Another thing is you might need more clarity on your vision. And so you could keep a dream journal. Really clarify what you want your life to be like. What type of things you want to have? What are they going to look like? be very clear and be very vivid by writing it down in a journal. You also might write your affirmations every day in your journal. That's a way to lock in for your mind, your identity, and your vision and clarify what you believe about you in your life. Another thing you can do is just be consciously aware. Sometimes writing your thoughts down helps to ground you in the present moment. So that's a good thing. I already talked about gratitude. You can keep a gratitude journal in order to be very aware and specific and intentional with your gratitude. You know, you could do to-do lists, but the two favorite of mine are, I, every day, well, actually there's three, I always like to write down what I'm grateful for. I always like to write down my success for the day. Train your mind. Now, I know some of you are like, wow, today was just a shitty day. I didn't have anything going. No, no, no. You have to train your mind to see a success every day. And there's no better way to do it than to do it with a journal. So I go down and I write down three things I'm grateful for. One big success, little success, whatever it is, I'm looking for success. And the other thing is I capture a memory. If you can capture a memory and get in the habit of capturing a memory, it grounds you in the present moment. It increases your gratitude, your quality of life, your fulfillment. And so these are all types of journaling. And I wanted to make sure you knew all these so that you could start to say, what's best for me? Is it being aware, doing affirmations, food and fitness, gratitude, successes, memories? What am I trying to capture in my journal that are going to give me the benefits that I mentioned a little while ago? And then finally, I want to talk to you about how or your best practices for journaling. If you're going to journal, I think it's very important for you to understand what's the best time of day for you to journal. Some people like to get up in the morning and journal because it gets them focused on what they need to do. And that's great, especially if you want to practice gratitude journals or you want to do things like goals for the day or stay focused on priorities. But the evening might be better for you if you're trying to keep track of your food or your successes you had for the day or capture memories that happened in the day. So do what's ever best for you, time convenient for you. And I'm telling you, there's absolutely no excuse not to even just have a 30-second window to write down something in a journal every day. It's going to be one of the biggest lifestyle increases activities you're going to have. But remember, consistency is the key. And if you take a chapter out of what we talked about on Tuesday with the Atomic Habits book, if you haven listened to that podcast it was a really brief summary of Atomic Habits There a technique they use called piggybacking habits I don know if that the name of it but the idea is if you have a difficult time remembering to journal, either set an alarm or piggyback it on a habit. A lot of times I'll sit down to read in the evening and I piggyback journaling on that because then I know if I piggyback it with something I'm consistent with, I'll be consistent with the other. And so that's an idea there. And then also I want to recommend, look, There's a lot of different types of things you could do to journal out there. I do believe heavily in writing down your journal, but I also stay pretty consistent with a mobile app on my phone. So whatever is easiest or most convenient for you, I use the Day One journal because it allows me to capture video, audio. I could grab a picture from my phone and drop it in and then write a journal entry around it. So I like the Day One journal. It syncs across all my devices. But sometimes I use the Lose It app, which is for meal tracking. And sometimes I just do my journaling in Evernote, which is a program that I use that records my meetings and priorities and things. So there's a lot of programs, but find something. Because remember, the key to creating a habit is to make it convenient, easy, and automatic. And so that's really, really important. And I want to end with one final thought. And it's a kiss. Not the kind of kiss you're thinking of. It's that acronym, keep it simple, stupid. Keep it simple. Don't overwhelm yourself. I know there's a lot of great ideas we shared in this podcast, but I'm telling you, you need to keep it simple. 30 seconds, one minute, two minute, whatever you can get in there. Consistency is the key because if you make it a habit, eventually you'll be able to spend more time, more quality time journaling. But consistency is the key. So that's my message for today. I think your life and your lifestyle will take a huge leap if you start a regular practice of journaling. and if you have any questions or ideas, thoughts, things I can do to help you, hit me up on the Daily Mastermind on Facebook or Instagram. We have a lot of little training and strategy snippets and tips that are gonna start to hit our TikTok channel, so go check that out. But also, I really wanna recommend you go to the dailymastermind.com website, click on the journaling tab, I'm sorry, I'm on journaling, click on the mentoring tab and schedule an appointment to talk with me. It's free. There are not very many mentors out there that are just going to do a free appointment to talk with you. And it'll be short and there's only a few available. If they fill up, they fill up. But I would love to hear what you're working on. I'd love to hear what you're doing and what I can do to help, what I can do. Because the point of the Daily Mastermind is to give you a daily ritual that you can always plug into and get book summaries and life hacks and business and money and mind and motivation and inspiration. And you can check that box every single day in less than 10 minutes. And so I want to know what it is I can help you with. So go schedule an appointment. but that's the message for today. We're out of time. Have an amazing day and I'll look forward to talking with you again on Monday. This is George Wright III and this has been The Daily Mastermind.
