Journaling

One of the most important things you can do for your business and your life is just get your day started off right. What do most of us do? The first thing we see after we open our eyes is we get our phone and we look at our first text, first email, or first social media post and we let that drive our day. You need to take more control of your day. If you don't take that control of your day from the beginning, you could spin out of control very early on and have that impact the rest of your day or the rest of your week.

There's a whole host of things that you can do around meditation and exercise, but what I want to talk specifically about is journaling. Journaling is one of the things I do religiously every morning, Monday through Friday. I've played with a lot of different ways of journaling over the years, and I've really settled in the last bunch of years into a very simple way of journaling. After a four mile walk in the morning, I sit down and journal by figuring out what my major outcomes are going to be for that day. What outcomes am I committed to? Not my to do list, not the 12 or 15 or 75 things I've got to do, but what are the three or four outcomes that I'm committed to achieve? Not a meeting that I have to go to, but the outcome from that meeting. Not a phone call that I'm going to have, but the outcome of that phone call. It's not to conduct a sales call, it's to close the deal. So I start off by listing the three or four or so major outcomes for that day.

The only other thing I put in that journal is something called "wins." Initially there's nothing there, unless I want to call waking up a win, which is not a bad idea. But wins is there so that throughout the day, no matter what I'm doing, no matter where I am, if something good happens - big or small - I put it under the wins. I find that by doing that, I never have a day where I feel like “man, everything went wrong today” or “nothing went right today.” I can always find at least one, usually more wins throughout the day, and every once in a while, when you do have that bad day and there are no wins, at least you could flip through your old journal pages and see all the wins.

So throughout the day I'm adding wins to my list, going and making notes next to my outcomes, where I've achieved them, and it's interesting. I find that on those rare occasions that I miss journaling in the morning, it's a tougher day because even if I was really busy, maybe productive, I get to the end of the day but I'm not sure what I've really achieved. I'm not sure if I had a good day.

By journaling those outcomes at the beginning of the day, it really puts my head on straight, allows me to say no to the things I need to say no to and yes to the things I need to say yes to. At the end of the day, I know whether I've accomplished my outcomes or I haven't. It's that simple. So if you're not journaling already, or if you are journaling but it's not going real well for you again, real simple version of it: outcomes and wins.