 Journaling seems to be one of those topics that is trending these days and for good measure because in my mind, it is one of the fastest ways to get clarity on the patterns in your life and to figure out ways to reach your dream life in the future, the combination of the past and the future. Now in this video, I thought I would share five lessons I've learned from a decade of journaling. What's up guys? It's Alex Hine over at Modern Health Monk, author of Master the Day and Milk the Pigeon. And before we jump in here to this video, there's a very important link I've put together right below the video which is for a free journaling worksheet. So if you're trying to figure out how to get your life together, how to figure out what you really want going forward and plan a path to make that happen, the journaling worksheet is the first link below this video and it will help you do just that. So the first thing that journaling can really help with is an observation I made that most people live their entire lives basically every year the same year and they call it a life. So when you look at the way the average person lives, is there really any improvement in terms of their fitness, their financial life? Are they complaining about their career less and doing more jobs and more work that they love? I don't really see it and I've lived now 35, 36 years and I don't really see that people get better with age and with time. One of my first mentors said to me, he said, you know, the thing about human lives is that people repeat the same things over and over and over again only because they don't learn. So the only reason someone keeps dating the same person, someone keeps spending the same way or doesn't earn more money is they haven't paused, reflected, learned and then changed. And in my mind journaling is one of the best ways to do that. I mean, when I moved back from China in 2011 or 2012, I mean, I came home to no friends, no career, not knowing what I wanted to do. And in general, I was so miserable that all I could think was that I don't ever want to repeat this year again for the rest of my life. And journaling was the main thing that helped me sit down and think, OK, what did I do and what can I do differently this time? The second thing is that journaling is about self insight or self-awareness. I'll never forget, I was once talking to a woman who said that she had married four alcoholics in a row. So she was 65 at that time. It had been married four times, divorced four times and all four were alcoholics. Now, I'm not here to judge the woman. I'm just here to make an observation, which was that she didn't realize that she was really marrying and dating her father, who is the exact same guy with the exact same patterns. Now, maybe again, there was a way that she could have prevented this if there was some self-awareness and some self-insight as to why she even did it the third time, right? That these guys were all the exact same. And in my mind, journaling is one of the best ways to develop insight into your own life. One observation I've made about humanity is that lots of us repeat the same patterns. Now, those patterns may be financial, they may be relational, they may be health wise. You know, it's pretty common to see people who are out of shape stay out of shape. It's really common to see people who chronically overspend, overspend, even if they get a million dollar inheritance from their mother who died. It's really common for people to have the same issues with no friends or the wrong friends or whatever it is. And the only reason is because we don't have the self-awareness and we haven't learned from that lesson. So what are your patterns? In my mind, journaling is one of the best ways to unpack those patterns. You know, if you're self-employed and you're earning the same income every year and it's not the income you want, in other words, you want to be earning a lot more money, that's because you're probably doing the same thing and hoping something will change. And if you're eating the same way and moving the same way and you don't have the body you want or the health you want, or if you're doing the same thing in terms of your personal habits and you're always complaining about not having friends or not having fun things to do, there's only one person to blame. Just look in the mirror. The third thing that journaling can really help you do in my experience is that it can really help you design your life rather than be a victim of life. You know, I'll never forget there's something really magical about spending one hour a day working towards a goal. There's a story I tell here that comes from Earl Nightingale, the personal development speaker, where he says this guy passed a bunch of unemployed steelworkers during the Great Depression. And these guys were all complaining that they're out of work and they can't find jobs, yada, yada, yada. They've been doing this career for 20 years. And you know, he went home thinking and thought, man, if these guys even dedicated one hour a day to working on a craft or another skill, in literally one hour a day, over 20 years, they could have become an open heart surgeon and had a whole host of other skill sets that would have been valuable in the Depression. So they never would have been out of business, in other words. And I've thought about this quite a lot because I've applied this to my own life since learning about this lesson, where, you know, if you want to become a YouTuber, this was never a vision of mine, right? I never had the idea or the thought because I never followed YouTubers. So when I learned that I liked teaching and I liked doing it in the form of video, I just dedicated one hour a night to testing out this new medium. Now, at first it was just researching what works, how do people edit, how do I edit? I had never pulled out a camera and shot a video before. So after planning content, shooting content, scripting content, editing content, uploading, all of that was done in about an hour a day. And really, that one hour a day led to basically hundreds of thousands of followers and this business here. So I'm sometimes surprised by how often it just takes an hour a day to actually improve or change your life. Now, the fourth benefit of journaling is that it helps you understand your stories. You know, when I first became self-employed, leapfrogging off my last comment, one of the frustrating aspects was just figuring out why I was never successful. I felt like I had a good work ethic. I felt like I was doing things right. But in general, it just wasn't working out financially. So I couldn't really quit my job for a long time. When I was journaling about a lot of beliefs I had as an entrepreneur, the main thing that I had learned was that I had all these negative beliefs. You know, I'm not a businessman. Other people just have a business interest or business expertise or that's what they like. That's what they're good at. And I didn't have that belief. But basically I observed through journaling that the belief that I'm not a business person, I hate business, I'm not into money, I don't like money. Basically those beliefs were preventing me from becoming successful because how can you have a belief that is directly in contradiction with the life you want? If you say I don't like money and yet you're trying to be successful, you have a contradiction going on in your brain. There's cognitive dissonance. That's not going to help you be successful. So it was really from trying to unpack these stories that I realized being successful in business to really just a skillset. And it's a series of stories and it's a series of skills and beliefs and mindsets. And if you view it like that then there's something you can learn. So when I learned that this is just a skillset, I was able to learn those skills and be successful. Now the last benefit of journaling is that it gives you clarity on your days. You know, there's a great story about most people being like ships without a rudder. And I love this analogy of the metaphor of like if you're a ship and if you don't know where you're going then it doesn't really matter what direction you sail in where the seas are bringing you where the wind is bringing you. It doesn't really matter because you're not going anywhere in particular. But if you know where you're going and you're trying to go from New York to Tokyo then every time your ship goes off course 1% you can always course correct it because even a 1% off change in course is way in the opposite direction, right? But if every time you go off course a little bit but you know where you're trying to go you can just know yourself in that right direction. And a journal entry is one of the best ways to do that. Not only to plan what you want, where you wanna go but even just reflect. You know, I said in a year from now I was gonna have lots of friends be working on my book and be a YouTuber. Well, a year from now am I there? Am I 10% of the way there? Am I 20% of the way there? If not then something has gone wrong and I need to reflect on what that is and I need to work on that and find a good way a good path going forward to actually make that happen. So it's one of the best ways to not be a ship without a rudder but to be clear on what you want and once a month or once a day course correct to make sure that's actually happening and not just be delusional. So in my mind, journaling is one of the best ways to prevent having a midlife crisis because you're always clear about the life you want and the best direction to get there. All right guys, that's all I have for today. Before you go, check out the free journaling worksheet right below this video and I'll catch you soon.