 So chances are you've seen videos on journaling and you know that a lot of the world's most brilliant and successful people have done it, like Einstein, Da Vinci, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Franklin. But you may be trying the journal and you open it up a journal and you're like, what do I do now? In this video, I want to share three kinds of journaling exercises that can help you not only break down your goals into actions, but also overcome your own personal problems. What's up guys? Alex Hein, author of the book, Mass to the Day. Now I'm actually starting to put together a free email course on journaling, all right? So it's Success Journaling 101. It's a free email course. You'll also get notified when my actual journaling course and my Mass to the Day journal come out. So enter your name in the description box there below your email. It's the first link in the description. You will get that beginner seven day journaling course. So the first exercise here is called the look and feel of success. And really what it's about is you basically write down how you want, quote, success to look for you and then the thing that people don't do is write down how they want to feel. So for me, for example, one of the things I wanted to do was build a business five years ago. And I knew only certain aspects of what that business would look like. Like I knew I wanted it to be online so I could live anywhere. I knew I wanted it to be audience based because I love interacting with you. And I love building a community around something. I also knew that I wanted it to involve me being like my own brand. So I wrote down all these things how I wanted it to look, the little things that I wanted to do. But then also I wrote down exactly how I wanted to feel because the whole point was we achieve these goals because we think they're going to make us feel some way. For me, I wrote down how I wanted this to feel was I wanted to feel like I had an audience so that I felt like my life had meaning and purpose and was impactful. I wanted to have my business online so that I could feel free in the event that I had to move or I wanted to start over or I wanted to travel. The second journaling exercise is called five years from today. Now five years from today is literally just this kind of creative directing or director meditation where you are guiding your conscious and your subconscious towards the vision that you want to build. So I'll go through this on my own because I did this creative visualization five years ago. And I've also done it every single year since and I'm always updating that five year vision ahead of me. So walking through what my goal was five years ago, the five year vision was five years from today. I want to have my own online digital business with a huge audience that's big enough and impactful enough that every day I get emails from readers and people that have read my books saying how much it's helped them. I want to be able to live anywhere I want. I want to be making a full time income doing exactly the things that I want. I want to be going back to school to do my doctorate in Chinese medicine because that is the thing that I'm most passionate about more than anything. I want to be 15 pounds heavier. I think at the time I was like 150 pounds and I want to have my digestion being the strongest it's ever been so far. I want to have a friend circle that's like Turk and JD and scrubs like people in the Big Bang Theory where you always feel like you have a core crew of people to hang out with things to do and you feel like you have your own tribe of people. I want to get enough sleep every night. I want to travel to one new international destination every single year and in general I want to feel like every day I wake up and I'm doing exactly the things that I've always wanted to do in my life so that each day for the first time in my life I'm actually excited about the day ahead and I'm not going through this whole rigmarole routine where each morning I'm depressed and I've got to just push throughout the day because my life is purposeless and meaningless and I don't even know why I'm working 40 hours a week and most of all each day at the end of the day I go to sleep and I feel like I just did the things I always wanted to do and I'm living the life that I wouldn't change if I won millions of dollars so that's kind of how I started with my five years from today vision and the point is just that you journal this out and then you can just look at it or think about it every day and you'll notice that you start subtly taking action steps towards that vision now the third journaling exercise is called the barriers journaling exercise this is what has kind of precluded or come before my strategy page is journaling and basically you're taking one of your goals let's say you want to write a book and you're breaking it down into every single barrier that comes up how do I write how much do I write what do I use to write like where do I even write my book in do I use some special kind of software or something how do I edit it do I hire an editor how do I get a book cover done how do I find an agent how do I market it how do I sell it every single one of these can become a barrier and then from there what I want you to do is you just write down each barrier on the piece of paper and you're writing down tactically as best you can what's coming up okay writer's block I don't know how to write I don't know how to start the book how do I come up with the table of contents and for each of the barriers you're just generating 5 to 10 ideas for how you can overcome it so how do I write how can I overcome this barrier I'm going to pick a few books that I really like that were bestsellers and I'm going to study the writing style okay how do I come to the table of contents well maybe I'm actually going to google some tips on actually writing a book okay how do I market and launch and sell my books I'm going to google and study the bestseller campaigns of people that have launched and sold New York Times bestselling books so now you're breaking down each barrier and you could just as easily do this with finances with dating with weight loss with fitness you're introducing all the barriers and then idea generating to figure out how to overcome those barriers so those are a few introductory journaling exercises now before you go don't forget I've included a brand new free email course on how to journal a success journaling email course you'll also learn about my paid journaling course and when my master the day journal comes out if you are on that list right there in the description box below so make sure you go check that out and of course you can grab my last two related videos right here and right here