The Journaling Key: Unlocking the Door to Personal Growth

Unleashing Your Inner Sage: The Journaling Journey

Building a journaling habit has been a transformative experience for me. This simple practice packs a powerful punch, with benefits ranging from improved mental health to clearer thinking and capturing life’s precious moments.

Harnessing the Power of Day One

I finally built a journaling habit when I started using Day One for my journal. Day One makes journaling super easy with daily reminders to write, creative prompts to push through writer’s block, and a voice-to-text feature for those days when typing feels tedious.

But here’s where the magic lies: Day One’s ‘On This Day’ feature. Each day, it resurfaces entries from the same date in previous years. This offers not only a dose of nostalgia and joy but also serves as a learning portal into past decisions.

I find it fascinating to re-read entries describing the stress and anxiety around decisions I faced back then. Now, with hindsight, I witness how I navigated those challenges. This treasure trove of experiences bolsters my confidence and helps me make more informed decisions today.

Building a Decision-Making Compass

This idea of employing past experiences as a guide for future success crystalized when I read “Principles” by Ray Dalio, a billionaire investor renowned for his his corporate philosophy and management principles. He unveils the principles that propelled him to extraordinary heights and encourages us to learn from history and our own journeys.

Here’s the essence of his insights:

• Your Past is Your Playbook: Utilize past experiences to devise principles that will steer future actions.

• Document Your Principles: Writing down your principles gives them clarity and strength. Write down challenges or critical decisions in various facets of life – parenting, career, finance, social interactions, and reflect on how you tackled them.

• Be Open to Learning and Evolve: Continually refine your principles through application and experience. Be receptive to new insights and perspectives.

• Celebrate Mistakes: View mistakes as learning opportunities. Dalio says, “Pain + Reflection = Progress”.

• Be Objective: Challenge yourself. Ditch the ‘I’m right’ mindset, and play detective with your own thoughts. Ask hard questions, and be nimble enough to tweak your principles. This helps in avoiding unexamined assumptions that could lead to pitfalls.

Chart Your Course to Personal Growth

By pairing personal journaling with the wisdom distilled from Ray Dalio’s “Principles”, you possess a powerful toolkit to unlock untapped potential. Journaling transcends being mere words on paper - it becomes a conduit for personal evolution and sound decision-making.

Five Facets of Health: Week 5

If you're new to the 5 Facets of Health, learn more here. Avoid trying to implement everything at once! These suggestions are meant to spark ideas. To build healthy habits, focus on one or two aspects over the next week.

Mental Health

“The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down… If you don’t look at yourself and think, ‘Wow how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

Action: Start a journaling habit. Document your decision making and principles.

Physical Health

When something tastes delicious, I often eat well past the point of being full, simply because I love the experience my tastebuds are having. The problem is, obviously, that overeating has a lot of negative consequences. One thing that helps me is to eat more slowly and mindfully. When I give my food time to settle, I give myself space to realize I’m full and usually eat less.

“Mindful eating is about awareness. When you eat mindfully, you slow down, pay attention to the food you’re eating, and savor every bite.”

— Susan Albers

Action: Slow down while you’re eating this week. Ask yourself if you’re actually still hungry or if you’re eating just because it’s delicious or because it’s convenient.

Emotional Health

One of the values at a company I used to work at was to ‘assume positive intent’ in others. I love that. Most people don’t intend to cause harm. We can avoid a lot of unnecessary conflict when we give others the benefit of a doubt. This mindset has made me a much better colleague and friend.

"Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different. When you assume negative intent, you're angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed.”

— Indra Nooyi

Action: The next time someone says or does something that causes a negative reaction in you, assume positive intent and see how that changes your response.

Financial Health

My wife and I have started doing a daily check in on our spending for the day. It doesn’t take long, usually just a few minutes. But knowing that we’ll be accountable to each other at the end of the day for what we spent has helped us spend less than we used to on frivolous things which gives us more to spend on the things we actually want.

"Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can't measure something, you can't understand it. If you can't understand it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, you can't improve it."
- H. James Harrington

Action: Take 5 minutes each evening to review the day’s spending with your significant other.

Spiritual Health

Learning about the spiritual practices of other cultures has greatly benefited my own spiritual practice. In nearly every corner of the world, people have developed rituals and practices to help them connect with the divine. When we make an effort to understand the significance and purpose behind those practices, it opens up our minds and hearts to new ways we can connect with a higher power.

"People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what – and who – we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings."

—Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations

Action: Study spiritual practices different than your own and find something you can apply to your own practice.