 Journaling has been one of my favorite ways to start a morning routine in recent years and one of the reasons for that is that I love being able to see what my mind is thinking and ruminating about. So I typically will use certain different kinds of journaling routines but in this video I thought I would share the journaling technique I've been using for almost the last 365 days in one tiny little notebook and how it's helped me. What's up you guys it's Alex Hein here so before we jump in I've put together a free journaling worksheet right below this video and that journaling worksheet will help you figure out what to do with your life get your life together and plot out how to build the most incredible life possible. So check it out it's a free worksheet it's the first link below this video. I like to keep one little notebook for each of the journaling techniques that I try so I've been keeping this tiny red little moleskin notebook for literally a daily journal for almost 365 days and I've just been really tracking this idea of resonance or dissonance so it's an idea that inspired me from Susie Patisse the founder of Pupuri where she said that after multiple bankruptcies almost multiple suicide attempts and just thinking she was the worst entrepreneur ever she decided that she was just going to try to figure out what made her happy and made her heal ironically the more that she felt better and the more that she healed the more successful she became and that next business that she launched was Pupuri which became a 500 million dollar business so pretty incredible story but the exercise is pretty simple basically you just write down what are the things that drain me that make me feel like I'm going to die in the situation jobs people aspects of your business aspects of you aspects of your life your office your home whatever and then what are the things that give you more energy and make you feel more lit up and make you feel more inspired and just more on so every morning I start with this exercise basically all I do for the first let's say 10 minutes is I write down well number one what do I really want to be doing on a daily basis like what do I actually want to be doing if I did in every moment what I actually wanted to do what would that be because a lot of the time you can really do that like as an entrepreneur I can take Monday off and decide I want to just go sit at the coffee shop in my neighborhood and just drink coffee and read a book and do nothing because I'm not feeling excited about anything as an entrepreneur I can take off every Monday and Friday and I can take a cheap weekend trip somewhere every weekend for three or four days if I want to so I find that so much of our lives we're doing things that we feel obligated to do because society or our parents or some advisor told us that's how we have to live and the funny thing is you really don't you really can design whatever kind of life you want so sometimes in that morning I write down you know I'm excited to go do a bachata salsa club tonight I'm excited to just sit down and study my craft for a few hours I'm excited to go for an afternoon hike I'm really excited to get dinner and a glass of wine or two with some good friends those are the main things that are really exciting me right now and this has just been a calibration exercise for me over the last year to try to really rediscover what I'm excited about now the second thing I've been doing in this journal is called I call it the hunches technique so hunches as in a gut hunch or an intuition and basically all I do is I write down what does my gut say and I just do that day after day after day after day I like to title the page inner directive meaning what is my insides what are my insides telling me I should be doing is it saying I should date that girl is it saying I should go out with that buddy for beers and a drink because we're having a great kind of synergy we're new friends where it's not quite a friendship yet but maybe I should say hey man let's grab dinner somewhere and let's chat we'd love to see what you're up to you know whatever it is it's completely illogical it doesn't have to make any sense but some interesting things have happened from writing down this gut exercise you know I decided to pick up of all things Latin dance bachata sensual and the salsa and through that I met some of the best friends I've had in recent years of my life I met the woman I'm dating I met these amazing people when I'm going to Croatia on this bachata festival for two weeks all these things that never would have happened if I was logically trying to figure out how do I make friends and how do I date and how do I travel they all came via a way I could never have predicted through this nonlinear aspect of trusting your gut so I place a high emphasis on this gut exercise that I do every morning but these two things resonance dissonance and the gut have really changed the game for me especially in these last years where just feeling good is often difficult for many of us so that's what I got for you guys try out those exercises all right guys I hope they help you they've really really helped me a lot and I'm almost done with a full year and then there's also that free journaling worksheet right below this video and I'll catch you guys soon