Please Make a Note of It: Journaling for Self-Aware Leadership.

The focus of Skills Lab is practical skills and tools that will help your journey in tech leadership. Sometimes I feel like I am telling you about things that are too basic and too prosaic, but I am doing that because these things are proven to work.

I think you should start journaling, to increase your self-awareness as a leader.

When I am starting to coach someone, I always ask whether they have a journaling practice. I usually get some sheepishness or eye-rolling in response. We’ve all heard that journaling is good, but often when we try it there’s some discomfort with seeing what shows up on the page. That’s the whole point! The brain is off doing all sorts of mysterious things, and it is helpful to shine a light on that activity.

Self-awareness is critical to good leadership, because you can be both an effective business leader and a good human. You can lead your team to audacious goals and not burn yourselves out. This requires that you take care of yourself and know what’s going on for you first and foremost. The more awareness you have of your own thoughts and emotions at any given moment of your day, the more agency you have in deciding how to act in each moment. It is possible to react to stressful times with equanimity and humor, keeping things on a hopeful & positive note even in the face of adversity. But all of this requires that you tune into your thoughts and emotions, which is something you have to train yourself to do. Journaling is an excellent way to expose your thoughts and emotions to further inspection over time.

There is bountiful scientific evidence that journaling can alleviate stress, reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, lead to feelings of calm and relaxation, improve emotional regulation, foster critical thinking and develop self-awareness. Let’s get these advantages for you!

I firmly believe that any level of journaling is helpful and there are many different approaches you can take.

Structured journaling

If you don’t know where to start, you can purchase a journal that has prompts built right into the pages. Structured journals offer a myriad of styles and themes:

• Want to be more intentional with your time? Self Journal – Best Self
• Very short on time? The Five Minute Journal
• Feeling the need for more gratitude? One-Minute Gratitude Journal
• Feeling tired and angry? Fuck This Shit-Show! A Gratitude Journal for Tired-Ass Women
• If you googled it, you could probably find a structured journal based on any theme you like.

Deliberately unstructured journaling

The gold-standard for unstructured journaling is the Morning Pages approach outlined in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Her basic instruction is to write freehand for three solid pages every morning, as messily as need be to keep up your momentum, and as if nobody will ever read the pages, including yourself. I think the theory is that going for volume over legibility will unearth some interesting new material, and I did find that to be true in the few months that I used this technique. If this approach sounds appealing, then I recommend you pick up Cameron’s book & read her full instructions.

Somewhere in the middle

I’m presently using the delightful Japanese journaling/calendar system called Hobonichi Techo. It has a combination of a monthly/weekly/daily calendar, with a journal page for each day. It contains enough structure to satisfy my systems-brain, and enough real estate on each daily page for the free-form journaling from which I derive most of my insights over time. Hobonichi Techo is a stationery-nerd’s dream too – with many formats and add-ins available.

More than words

You are not constrained to just writing words! Sketch in your journal. Paste in your best fortune cookie fortunes and horoscopes. Stuff memorabilia in between pages. You will enjoy looking back on those things later.  I highly recommend Wreck This Journal as a creative way to move beyond words in your journaling practice.

I also suggest writing by hand vs. typing into a device. Your brain gets more exercise & better retention from hand-writing something, and I think that’s important in this activity.

Getting started

In Skills Lab I will always suggest that you start with the smallest possible experiment when you begin a new practice. For journaling I recommend doing three things to get your practice started:

1. Decide on an approach, assemble your tools & find a good, quiet space.
2. Set aside 15 minutes at the same time each day, for one full week. Write whatever comes up during those 15 minutes.
3. On the 7^th day, look back at your journaling for the week. Look for themes, insights, and trends about what comes up for you each day.

That’s it! Rinse and repeat. Tweak the formula based on how all of this felt, and then soon enough you have added a new tool.   Give yourself a month of journaling and then see how the new insights you derive impact how you show up at work, as a leader, and in your life.

Why this matters

Seriously, there is a lot going on in the world right now, but one of the things you can control is where you put your energy and mindshare. Start journaling today to build an awareness of where you spend your time, and where your default thoughts and emotions take you each day. This level of self-awareness is critical to your growth as an effective leader in tech.

If you already have a journaling practice, the Skills Lab newsletter audience would love to hear about it - chime in here and share your experience with others.