You just got yourself a gorgeous new journal complete with gold foil lettering and the most perfect embossed pages. Yup, you’re about to journal the shit out of your life, and you’re gonna do it in a way that makes you reflect on each day in real-time.
And you believe it’s going to work because that’s what all the experts and gurus say, right? If you journal it all out: your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, then it’ll all make sense. It’ll all fall into place.
Only, that’s not how things work. At least not the way you think they might.
In fact, the way most people journal does nothing more than spiral them in the same bullshit they’re trying to get away from.
What Typical Journaling Looks Like
You know what this drill is like. It’s the same thing you’ve been told a billion times before: Journal your thoughts out.
So you pop open a shiny new journal straight to the page with today’s date and do a little reflection. It’s something along the lines of “Dear Diary, today was hard. I worked my ass off and still don’t know if it’s enough.”
When you slam your pen down on the last period of your last sentence, you close the book. And then what?
Well, you haven’t exactly solved anything. You didn’t do any real reflection. There’s nothing to even say what you want. If future you goes through this journal, she won’t even know where to start combing through that shit, because there’s nothing to tell her how the patterns fell into place.
So typical journaling looks a lot like surface level reflection. And as we all know, if you wanna get real shit done, you have to dig deeper than the surface.
Getting Deeper
Right now, I’m sitting here, typing to you as someone who has understood and believed in her own magic of manifestation in the depths of my everything.
But even, then I still go through shit.
Which means that no matter who you are, there will always be a time when you need tools to dust yourself off and get back in the game of your own life. Tools like journaling…for real.
So I say, go ahead and grab that journal. But go hella deeper than what you’ve been doing. Record what you wanted out of the day. Who you were around. What you thought. How you felt. Record who you were being during the day and really ask: “Is that aligned with who I want to be tomorrow?”
Then record the future.
Because the whole point of this thing isn’t to record your daily schedule. It’s to work through the now to get to a better future. And you can’t do that if you don’t keep your future narrative in mind.
Go a Step Beyond
10 year old me comes out once in a while. And every time she does, she’s fucking scared. She points out how doing what I’m doing now is in no way a possibility based on the way she knows to do life.
There’s a reason she comes out. And I acknowledge that. But I can’t stay with her when there’s someone else I’m working toward: Me, 10 years in the future.
Future me is waiting. And my journal is the most perfect place for her to find me because it’s where I can plant the narrative that I get to decide she will live by.
Whatever I want that to look like, feel like, and be like… I can place inside that journal so that she knows I’m not going to be complacent with whatever I could be settling with now.
And you don’t have to be complacent with whatever you’re settling for, either.
Let Your Journal be a Conversation with Future You
I don’t believe that journaling should be stuck in the past, looking back as to whatever was happening at the time.
Remember how I said future you is looking at that journal? She’s not only looking at it, she’s actually creating herself in it. She’s diving into the details that you choose to give her and using them to morph into a future version of yourself that will align with it all.
So if you give her things that are stuck in the past, she’s going to stay as the you from the past.
But if you give her images and thoughts and ideas of who she’s to become in the future, well, she’s take it all and run with it even further than you can imagine.
Let your journaling be that conversation. Because she’ll end up looking at it as you’re writing, and tell you how proud she is of who you decided to become.
And if that’s the kind of magic writing you’re after, I invite you to reach out. We can talk more about who you’re becoming through the manifestations you’re putting on p
