so a friend of mine asked me the other day is journaling valuable or is it just a waste of time you hear all this stuff on the internet about how journaling changes everything and it almost feels a little fake well back in 2020 when we had all the shutdowns I owned two in-person businesses that were generating all my income and they were closed for three months I had lost a third of my customers and I had real concerns about how I was going to make rent and I turned to a journal as a way of
getting all my swirling thoughts out of my head and down on paper I had no idea how I was going to get out of the mess I was in but I knew I needed to get my thoughts and my struggles and my goals out of my head and over the next two years my business went from almost shutting its doors to over a million and a half in Revenue so yes journaling does work here is the exact steps that I followed in my journal to turn my business around and take back control of my life
step one take an emotional dump so before I even bought a journal I just took out a piece of paper and I started writing I started writing all the problems all the complaints all of my goals just anything that was on my mind I just wanted to unload everything onto a piece of paper so a friend and mentor of mine called this process taking an emotional dump with everything going on it's like there's this backup and the only way to get it out is to put it on paper so I wrote down how unfair it
was that the government shut us down how people that I used to consider family had given up on us and how disappointed I was in myself that I had let this happen it was basically a Fest you ever have that friend that complains every time you see them and you're listening to it and you're thinking dude get over yourself life isn't that bad that's how you feel about yourself when you write all this stuff down and you read it back if you're gonna do this I would commit to writing three full Pages after those three
pages it felt like everything was clear and I was able to focus on what I wanted next so then I spent the next two pages writing what I wanted the next year to look like no matter where you are in life you always get to choose the step that you take next I felt like I was ready for a fresh start so I moved on to step number two which is the setup next I set up my journal I use the bullet Journal method which gives you a basic framework that allows you to customize everything
I prefer to use a paper Journal so that I minimize the amount of distractions every time I open my journal I use a looptherm 1970 notebook you can find it on Amazon or Barnes Noble usually a journal lasts me about 90 to 120 days so it's perfect for a season of your life I'll save you the time of reading the whole bullet Journal method I set up four different pages so the first one is the mission values goal page the second one is the monthly log the third one is the habits page and the fourth
one is the daily log the mission purpose goals page here's where I remind myself of my mission and the values I'm hoping to develop over these next 90 days and I also write down what my yearly goals are I usually have one to three goals no more than three but you're actually more effective if you only pick one I set a goal for myself to get a million dollars in revenue and to 5x my personal income at the time I was barely able to make rent this is the first page of the journal because I
want to remind myself of my mission my values and my goals every single time I open that journal and it's really the whole purpose of the journal get really clear about this before you move on to the next step the next page you set up is the monthly log and this is just a log of what has happened that month or what events you have coming up and this is really a great reference for you to see what's going on and where you're at in a given month and how close you've gotten to your mission
values and goals this the setup of this journal should take you no more than 30 to 60 Minutes don't waste time searching YouTube to try to find the perfect stencils to set up your bullet Journal really you want to get as fast as you can from idea to action a new Journal is like a fresh start and when you feel beaten down in life that's often when you need that Fresh Start the most but I've had a lot of Fresh Starts over the years the thing that really matters is connecting your dreams to your daily
actions and that's where step number three the habits page comes in what you do over the weeks and months and years matters more than what you do over a given day so the main focus is on showing up and the key is to Define what's showing up actually looks like so you're going to take your big goals and you're going to break it down into the daily habits that you need to do to achieve those goals over time so if your goal is to lose 15 pounds then you might need to eat right and work
out but you need to Define what eating right is does that mean you're tracking your food does that mean you're hitting specific calories are you avoiding certain foods and what does working out look like are you going to go to the gym and how much time are you going to spend at the gym are you going to do weight lifting you have to be really clear about what constitutes success for that daily habit so before I start my habits page I write down each habit and then I define success for each one of those habits
if you want to get up at 5am that means 5 a.m not 5 15 or 5 30 it means before 5 a.m you are up and if you did it then you get to color in the box and if you didn't then it's empty my habits around building a million dollar business were reading critical tasks working out and eating right every single day among a few other things so once I Define those then I had to decide what level of commitment am I going to have towards those habits at the time I was really struggling
so I decided to go 100 all in and be perfect on each one of my habits now you can go 90 or 80 compliance but you need to decide up front and then dial in your life according to this decision to focus on discipline commit to doing 100 of your habits for 90 days and if you fall off then restart but in practice you actually can get away with 90 or even 85 percent and still get the results that you want while balancing some of the other inevitable things that come up in life so this
is the day and this is the habit and on this page you can write up to 15 habits and visualize 90 days for each one I use these little marker pens by stud letter and every time I fill in the Box it's like a little win and if I can fill in all the boxes for that day then I've won that day you do that four or five days in a row and you get this winning streak going and it's hard to stop yourself the hard part is getting yourself started and that's where the daily
log comes in the daily log is like a meeting with myself where I clearly decks I connect with my goals and I create the critical tasks of the day so I start with the emotional dump and these are just three things that I'm afraid of or worried about or just just emotional about and it's just my chance to kind of whine a little bit at the beginning of the day and really clear the decks and get myself to neutral then I would write down three things I'm grateful for and this just reminds me that life
is better than my emotions might make it seem so I write might write down I'm grateful for this cup of coffee or the view or the chair that I'm sitting in so once I am there I write down three things that I want to brag about so these are three things that I am proud of that I've had something to do with over the last 24 to 48 hours and this gives me some confidence because really world is not as bad as you think it is there are some things to be grateful for and you've
done some pretty cool and so that reminds you that you're capable of doing cool and it motivates you to do more cool so after I've done those three things then I write down my three goals and I'll write them down either as I am statements or I'll just write down the goals to remind myself what the hell I am focused on after that I'm writing down my critical tasks of the day usually it's one to five things I have found that five is a good number but if I avoid the most important task then I
cut it down to one so I always kind of put a star next to the most important task and I make sure that that one gets done every single day the rest of the daily log is appointments that I might have notes that I might take notes from books that I read whatever it is I try to use that daily log for all the notes that I take throughout the day because every time I open that up it reminds me of my goals and my critical tasks for the day the stuff that I would write
in this journal is actually pretty mundane but it's the boring stuff that gets you to where you want to go and the more days you show up the more likely you are to reach your goals you know what's kind of crazy about this is looking through my old journals it actually looks like more work now in retrospect than it was at the time I was doing it the time I was doing it I was just showing up every day and just doing the things that I said I was gonna do didn't feel like that much
work but now looking back on it it's it feels like a ton of work and I remember at the time when I started it it felt like a ton of work to get to where I wanted to be so if you're watching this and you're thinking oh yeah that's fine for you you have all these advantages and all this experience and whatever just know that when I started this I had no idea how I was going to get to where I wanted to go I had no idea how I was going to turn my business
around I had no idea how I was going to get back on track with my life and be happy every day I just wrote things down and tried to show up every single day and then as things started to improve I started to make these little adjustments and keep going in the direction that I wanted to go the other huge benefit of creating a journal I've got stacks of these things is that you get to look back on what you were thinking back then what you were thinking two three four years ago and look back
at all of the things you've accomplished and you remind yourself like I did some pretty cool like I'm actually pretty great at this stuff and when you remind yourself of things that you've accomplished in the past and everyone has accomplished something in the past and it motivates you to do more cool in the future in fact just producing this video has me fired up about what I want to do in 2023 I want this for you so start keeping a journal for 2023. if you're new to this channel my name is Jay I produce one
to two videos a week on topics around Business Health personal development books and any other fun experiments in life if you liked what you saw please consider subscribing stay focused stay curious and keep showing up
