Are You Writing It Down? Why You Might Miss The Patterns of Your Life

[00:00:01] Welcome to Business Finance and Soul. My name is Shaun Enders and I'm a curious entrepreneur. I love exploring business, personal finance and consciousness. I'll jump around topics, offer my opinions and occasionally interview interesting people. Looking forward to going on this journey. Let's be curious together.

[00:00:29] Hey, welcome back to Business Finance and Soul. So today I want to demystify journaling. And I think when people hear the word journaling, I think they sometimes make it more complicated than it needs to be.

[00:00:47] And let's be truthful here. Many of us have thought about journaling and you picture someone sitting quietly after meditation, waiting for some profound thought to arrive. You might think that you need to be going through something difficult or you're searching for some kind of clarity or working toward a major breakthrough.

[00:01:09] And truth is, that can be helpful. I mean, for me personally, some of my best sessions of journaling have been after I've had some breath work. Maybe I've had a cold plunge and now I'm sitting down and things just kind of pour out of me. But that's not required. It's not something that you need to prime in order to be successful.

[00:01:34] You know, journaling can be a lot simpler. It's just writing things down. It's just the act of writing down your life. What happened this week? How'd you feel? What excited you? What frustrated you? What are you worried about? What are you looking forward to? You don't need to have something important to say. You're simply creating a record of who you are at this moment in your life.

[00:02:01] And I personally know it's incredibly valuable because life is happening so quickly. I mean, most of us dramatically underestimate how much of our lives we forget because weeks blend into months. Months become years. And then we remember some of the major events, but we lose many of the smaller moments. It kind of gives those years all the color.

[00:02:28] I know a lot of people, especially when you're on social media, they'll say, where did the time go? Our kids are now 16 and 13 in my own personal life, right? And I could easily just go, what happened? How did they get here? Where did all the years go? But I can go back and look at what I've been writing down, and I know where those years went. I know the vacations we took, how I was feeling.

[00:02:55] I know the frustrations when they were younger, the time commitments, the money and financial responsibilities. And I also know all the great times, all the little moments where we celebrated just the simplest things in life. Because I can go back and reread how I was feeling in that moment.

[00:03:19] And I think when you remember things like, oh, that was a very difficult season, but then you forget exactly what made it difficult. You know, that's something extremely important. It's almost like, you know, when you're arguing with someone, your spouse or your partner, and you both forget why the argument's even happening. I mean, that's in a real time moment.

[00:03:47] But imagine 10 years from now, you can't remember all the little details. You know, we remember that we're happy, but we might not remember what we were doing, who we were spending time with, or what we were excited about. So when we look backward, you know, we have entire periods of our lives that really can start to feel gray. So my belief is that the writing brings the color back.

[00:04:15] You know, a journal allows you to return to a specific Monday afternoon and remember what was happening in your world. It reminds you what you were thinking before you knew how everything would turn out. And it really, it captures the uncertainty. It captures the anticipation, maybe the disappointment, the excitement that hindsight tends to erase.

[00:04:41] I think one of the biggest things for me is. I get a chance to consistently. Meet former versions of myself. I get to see what used to bother me. I get to revisit the goals that felt, you know, extremely important at that time and maybe are still important. But. I think one of the most.

[00:05:12] Important parts here. Like probably one of the best hacks of writing down your life is that you can recognize the problems. That either you've solved or that you're consistently resolving. Now, this is one of the things that I find most fascinating is a lot of people will struggle with the same things. They'll repeat the same mistakes.

[00:05:40] They'll have the same arguments and they're on a loop. Have you ever seen anybody in your life not be able to make progress because they're on a loop? Typically, you can see it in family because you have more intimate purview. Right. You can see what they're experiencing and how they're making progress in life. You know, you can actually pull back the covers on family. And I would see that in my own family. Where. And I didn't know it at the time, but.

[00:06:09] You know, as I got older, I would look and I would see family members. Just kind of solving for today. But they had already solved some of the problems. They're just consistently solving the same problem over and over again. So they're not really using the power of compounding. You know, they're not actually growing. Their problems just were the same problems they've always had. And patterns are difficult to recognize when we're living inside of them.

[00:06:38] It's almost impossible. So writing puts those patterns in front of you. And you may, you know, read something that you wrote two years ago and then realize, oh, my God, I've grown so much. You may also read it and realize that you haven't changed as much as you thought. And I think both discoveries are super valuable. You know, one gives you an opportunity to feel very proud. The other one gives you an opportunity to be honest. And speaking of being honest, I wish I had started earlier.

[00:07:08] I wish I had been writing down my life since I was a kid. Because I would love to know exactly how I thought when I was 10, 15 or even 25 years old. You know, what was I afraid of? What did I believe success would look like? What did I think about my parents, my friendships back then? How did I think about money when I was a kid and work and my own personal future? And would I even recognize that younger version of myself?

[00:07:38] Because I sit now and I think back and I've replayed this a few different times. Because I have kids that are teenagers and I think of myself at their stage in life. And I think of how I felt about myself as the main character in life. Because we all have, you know, that main character syndrome, right? You know, we believe the world is moving around us.

[00:08:06] That's the power of ego. It's not a bad thing. You are playing out your own life. You can't live somebody else's life. So when you get outside of you, when you see yourself almost as an avatar, the only way to do that is to be objectively honest with yourself. But the only way to be objectively honest is to have real data. You've got to be able to know who are you, how are you thinking, and what were you doing?

[00:08:36] And that comes from documentation. Nobody's going to document for you. Nobody is, you know, narrating my life or nobody is journaling my life. Nobody's documenting that for me. I have to do that. And I've realized that memory can't answer all those questions accurately. Because memory changes right with us as we're getting older.

[00:09:04] You know, we unknowingly rewrite parts of our own story based on what we now understand. Man, it's very common to be a revisionist of our own lives. It's very common to think you thought one thing now that life has changed. Maybe we were intolerant to something when we were younger.

[00:09:28] But now that we accept the way the world is, maybe now we're tolerant to it because we're changing. And we think, oh, I've always been tolerant. Maybe you've changed completely. And are you okay with that? Is that a good thing? Or are you disappointed? You know, a page written in the moment doesn't know what happens next. And I think that's what makes it so interesting.

[00:09:54] So I'm not suggesting everybody needs to sit down every morning and write five pages. You can, but you don't have to. I'm just advocating for start by writing once a week. You know, even once a month would be meaningful. At the very least, sit down once a quarter and document what's happening in your life. I'll give you some starters. What's going well? What is draining you?

[00:10:25] How are your relationships? How do you feel about work? What are you doing with your free time? What do you want to change? Then every few months, go back and read some of your older entries. Look for progress. Look for patterns. Look for the things that you keep avoiding. Richard Branson is, you know, obviously an amazing entrepreneur.

[00:10:53] He's started from so many challenges, dyslexia, dropping out of high school. And he's grown multi-billion dollar organizations. And he's long talked about carrying a notebook and writing down ideas, conversations, observations. And then he's credited those notes with helping him develop businesses and return to those very ideas later.

[00:11:24] And I think he's been doing it for 45 years. I think he keeps a library of all of his journaling on Necker Island. Now, I think that's, it's crazy because we all would love a life manual, but people around us are doing the things that if we incorporated them would be amazingly profound for us.

[00:11:51] But we don't know what to say or we don't know where to start. So, how about this? Don't try to say anything profound. You know, start with a Monday. What'd you do? Who'd you speak with? How did you feel while you're doing it? Were you energized? Were you bored, anxious, inspired, frustrated? Just write it down. If you were bored and uninspired all week, be honest about it.

[00:12:20] You know, the page doesn't need you to be performative. You don't need to sound optimistic, successful, or wise. That's true. It just needs you to be honest. But the cool thing here is over time you might see a pattern. Every time you spend a little time with a certain person, you feel better. Maybe every Sunday night you feel anxious about the week ahead.

[00:12:49] Maybe you keep writing that you want to exercise or start a business, repair a relationship, spend more time with your kids. Once you see the pattern, then at that moment you can decide if you want to change it. You know, I believe we often measure our lives by what's missing. And that is a daunting task because something is always missing. You know, maybe we think about the goal we haven't reached or the problem we haven't solved or the person we haven't become.

[00:13:20] Okay. Writing things down, journaling, leaves behind some evidence of how far you've already come. I was just sitting down with my wife and we were taking stock over the last five months for our kids. You know, just we were going back to old entries just literally in February of this year. And we were blown away at how much has already happened since February.

[00:13:49] We were talking about, I can't believe we were uncertain about schooling for our kids and where they were going to go. And, you know, there's a whole nother pod on that. But we were looking back at what seemed like some unsolvable questions just in February. Fast forward to today, you know, five and a half months later.

[00:14:17] And all of these things are in place. We actually have answers. We know what's unfolding. And it's because of a lot of little actions. But, man, going back over that five months and looking at the documentation of that journey has shown us both how far we've come in a short period of time. And I think sometimes we think, oh, you know, what could possibly change in a short period of time?

[00:14:46] Or why take a small step? Because that journey is going to take forever. Truth is, we didn't have a timeline. We just kept putting one foot in front of the other. But because we documented it all, I now believe and it reinforces my belief system that little things equal big things. Small steps every single day can equal huge ramifications over the course of compressed time, like five months.

[00:15:12] You know, so my journaling left behind that evidence of how far we've come. That's really, really cool. You know, I don't take little things for granted. It proved to me many, many, many times over that the challenges that I once felt were going to be overwhelming, they eventually just became part of the story, the fabric of my life, you know?

[00:15:38] And so I know that writing things down will help you appreciate your progress while being honest about where you're stuck. So if you get anything from today, it's write down your thoughts. Write down what happened. Not because every day is fascinating. It's not. Not because every day is going to be profound.

[00:16:06] Write it down because your life is happening. And it's happening faster than you think. Someday, even if it's not today, you may want to remember who you were before you became who you are. And the question is, will you have that opportunity? Because you cannot rewind time. You cannot get those memories back.

[00:16:34] And you will not get the real truth of who you were or who you're becoming unless you yourself take full advantage and take action. So thank you, my friends. Stay curious. And until next time.