Building Your Forever Business – Step 6: Journaling
In Step 5, we looked at the Philosophy of Success and why it’s an important factor in building your forever business. In this step we’ll look at journaling and why its one of the most important tools for aligning and reinforcing your purpose, goals and desired state while marrying these with the philosophy of success and disciplined attitude. The journal can be used as a tool for each of the forth coming steps along the happy path. So its now time to introduce it and start using it.
For those just joining us at this point, you can continue, but it’s worth starting at step 1, My Current State, to give you better context. And its the starting point of this adventure.
Let’s get started. In our Happy Path Flight Plan illustration, we are touching on Journaling, in orange and bold below.
The Biggest Barriers to Success
The biggest barriers to success are doubt, self-destructive behavior, and lack of motivation. If a person doesn’t believe in themselves, they’re less likely to persevere through difficult situations.
Negative behaviors impacting your success are chronic procrastination, such as bad habits and not investing in your growth. Fear leading to no action, such as uncertainty, past negative experiences, fear of failure and criticism. Conformity such as not willing to step out of the comfort zone or not willingly take risks but follow the norm.
Getting stuck in this rut leaves us feeling anxious, depressed, frustrated and in self-doubt resulting in personal stagnation.
If a person is stuck in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, they’re less likely to put themselves in a position to succeed. If a person doesn’t have the motivation to keep going, they’re less likely to persevere through difficult situations.
While there are many different things that can prevent you from achieving success, there are also many things that you can do to prevent them from happening in the first place.
The best way to prevent the above issues from holding you back is to make sure you’re taking care of yourself both mentally and physically. This means staying positive, regularly practising self-care, and setting yourself up for success by investing in yourself.
The main reason for this behavior is an imbalanced Philosophy of Success & Disciplined Attitude. A key to overcoming the obstacles before you is to align your conscious and subconscious minds. This was briefly mentioned in the Philosophy of Success article before this.
In Step 5, we said that the Philosophy of Success is your subconscious mind, and the Disciplined Attitude is your conscious mind.
Your Disciplined Attitude influences the right actions that leads to successful decisions. Your Philosophy of Success is what motivates you and therefore influences your conscious mind in decision making.
The Conscious and Subconscious Mind
The conscious mind is the part of your brain that you’re actively using. When you’re doing math, driving, or reading, you’re using your conscious mind.
The subconscious mind, on the other hand, is the part of your brain that automatically runs in the background even when you’re doing other things. For example, you’re using your conscious mind when you’re practicing a new skill. However, you’re also using your subconscious mind to record what you’re doing, how long you’ve been doing it, how often you’ve done it, and how you feel while doing it.
The subconscious mind is responsible for more than 90% of our daily actions and decisions. It’s your autopilot: it helps you to stay on track, finish what you need to do, and move towards your goals. The subconscious mind is the goal getter.
The conscious mind, on the other hand, is responsible for the small details of what you’re doing. The conscious mind is the goal setter.
Your subconscious is out to get for you whatever you need and want in life. But it must be aligned with your Disciplined Attitude by forming positive habits. If you do not develop these positive habits your subconscious mind will keep delivering what you weren’t expecting. Leading to frequent disappointments and despondency.
Success is something that many of us desire, but not all of us are able to achieve it. But what separates those who succeed from those who don’t?
The answer lies in the power of the subconscious mind. If you want to maximize your success, then you should learn how to utilize the power of the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is a type of automatic, or unconscious, brain process.
This process helps you respond quickly and instinctively to things you see, hear, smell and touch. When you are exposed to something new, your subconscious mind responds by comparing it with past experiences and storing this information for future use.
This means that when exposed again to a persistently similar stimulus, such as a repeated pattern of words or images over and over again for a long period of time, your subconscious mind begins to recognize these words or images as ‘keywords’.
When you consistently use keywords in positive ways – such as visualizing yourself achieving your goals – your subconscious will begin doing its job at transforming you into the person that you want to be. By using the power of the subconscious mind effectively, you can increase your confidence level and self-esteem simultaneously.
Once operating efficiently on an unconscious level within your mind, positive thinking becomes second nature so much so that dwelling on it doesn’t even occur consciously anymore.
Techniques to communicate with and reprogram your subconscious are Visualization, Precision Affirmations, Meditation, Forming Positive Habits, and Journaling. These are active learning techniques. Active learning is doing meaningful learning activities & thinking about what you are doing.
This means you will actively use the Conscious Mind to plant your ‘Philosophy of Success’ into your Subconscious Mind.
“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and emotion will one day become a reality.” A quote by Earl Nightingale.
Journaling
By far the most powerful and effective active learning technique to align your conscious and subconscious mind is journaling. This is why I am going to focus on it now.
Journaling is the practice of keeping a journal that explores thoughts and feelings surrounding the events of your life.
The benefits of journaling are:
- The key to learning is to stop passively consuming information and start actively engaging with your ideas you encounter. Writing clarifies those ideas
- Channels ideas allowing your creativity to bloom
- Direct way to communicate and engage with your subconscious. Done repeatedly reprograms it. This sets up goal getting expectations in your subconscious that are aligned to your goals set in your conscious mind
- Improve decision making and critical thinking
- Enhances the brain’s uptake, retaining, and retrieving of information
- Is a self-improvement tool to manage yourself
- Promotes the brain’s attentive focus & boosts long-term memory
- Gives the brain time for reflection
- Trains our attention and strengthens neural pathways
The benefits of journaling are too big and too many to ignore. What we shall be doing next is discussing a structured method to journaling that is specific to you focused on your desired future state, the place you want to be, we call this the Desired Future Journal. It is specific to reinforcing the philosophy of success and disciplined attitude so that you conscious and subconscious are aligned.
Desired Future Journaling – Conscious & Subconscious Engagement
Journaling is an active learning power tool. Your subconscious mind has a limited ability to learn new things. If you try to force it to learn something new when it’s not ready, it will simply shut down and refuse to do anything.
So, instead of trying to learn new things when you don’t have the mental capacity to do so, you should engage your subconscious mind with activities that it’s already familiar with. For example, you can use visualization to help you improve in your sport of choice, or you can use imagery to help you fall asleep more easily.
Once you’ve engaged your subconscious mind with these activities, you can then use active learning to try and teach it something new. This way, you’re not overwhelming your mind with new information when it can’t handle it.
Journaling is a great way to get your thoughts and feelings out of your head and onto paper. It’s therapeutic and can help you gain a new perspective on your current situation.
Journaling is also a great way to engage your subconscious mind. You can use journaling to help you solve problems, gain clarity on your goals, or discover new ways of thinking that can help you reach your ultimate goal.
There are many types of journaling you can try, such as daily reflection, mind mapping, creative visualization, or goal setting. No matter which type of journaling you choose, it’s helpful to have a notebook and pen with you at all times. This way, you’ll always have it on hand when you need it.
In this article we are going to cover how to do one specific type of journaling that is specific to you achieving your desired future. We call this the Desired Future Journal and it’s broken into 2 sections, a morning section and an afternoon/evening section. Let’s have a look. By the way, this template is available in the @LightSpeed Toolkit.
Let’s break each page down.
On page 1 of this journal, we start with the handwriting of your Desired Future, Ultimate Goal, Purpose Statement and Core Values. Reinforcing these daily hard-wires these into both your Conscious and Subconscious Mind and need reinforcing daily to ensure they stay top-of-mind. We have already spoken how these two need to be aligned for ensure we start on the happy path towards success.
Once the first section has been completed, which should take you a few seconds, we move into the journaling. The first part is a morning section that should ideally be completed before noon but can be done whenever you have time. This starts with a brain dump to get what is on your mind onto paper. This does not need to be structured but a flow of thoughts that you have bottled up. If you run out of space, then continue your thoughts on the back of the page.
The following sections are a structured approach that needs to be specific to your business, the philosophy of success, disciplined attitude, the happy path and desired future when being completed. When completing sections of the journal that entail achievements also remember to think “Doing Simple Easy Productive Actions Repeated Consistently Over Time.” Avoid overwhelm by not planning overly ambitious goals especially if you are pursuing your own business while working a full-time job.
Once the ‘before noon’ section has been completed, the next is ‘late afternoon/at night’ section. This is reflecting on what has been accomplished for the day.
The final section to complete is understanding if today did take a step towards your desired future state, or not, that you wrote down at the top of your journal. Each day does not need to be a step closer so don’t feel you have to be pressured into making progress daily. It’s very unlikely you would make progress daily given the numerous life pressures and other activities we engage in. I need to emphasis that this adventure is about not being overwhelmed and needs to enjoyed. The age old saying, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’, holds true.
In order to keep the positive habit of journaling ongoing then this should be completed daily, no matter what. Even if it’s done in one sitting a few minutes before going to bed. This brings us to the close of this step, so click this link to download @LightSpeed Toolkit. Find a printer and print copies and start your journaling adventure towards your desired future.