Caitlin’s Creative Business Bookshelf - Episode 5: Journaling and Me
One activity I will always recommend to get in touch with your creative self is journaling - for so many reasons!
In this week’s episode, I dive into the benefits of journaling as well as how to introduce it in a fun and practical way.
Listen below or read the episode transcript underneath too…
My absolute favourite low key way to get creative is to journal. And I love journaling for so many reasons because you don't need any skill to journal. You don't have to be "good" at journaling in order to do it, which I really, really like.
And I think it's quite refreshing in this day and age where we kind of feel like we have to be good at things in order to do them. You also don't really need anything to get going with a regular journaling practice, you literally just need, obviously, something to write with and something to write on. It's also an activity I really recommend for everybody really, but especially if you're someone who doesn't think of themselves as very creative, journaling is a really powerful one because it really encourages us to get in touch with the part of the brain that is creative.
The benefits of journaling
I think I've kept a diary or a planner or a journal or whatever you want to call it, on and off for most of my life, I think, and I definitely found it especially helpful and useful during my adult life as well. And in recent years, what I kind of wrote about in whatever planner I was using, whether it be something like a Passion Planner that has set things to write in it, or whether I'm just kind of journaling in a notebook is that actually, I've moved away a lot from writing about the things that I'm doing and actually way more about how I'm feeling and the kind of things I'm going through.
I try and journal every single day now, just because the benefits for me have been absolutely massive and it's really been a game changer, especially as I started running my business. As my business pivoted and changed and grew, it was a space for me to explore what my changing business would look like, but in kind of a safe way that wasn't kind of high stakes. Journaling is great because we can kind of explore all those feelings, all those ideas, all those dreams, in a space where we're free of any judgement, we're free of any kind of external validation.
And it's a space where we can just be and I don't think we get a lot of those these days. I don't think there's a lot of space in society to kind of just be ourselves and just have something like a sacred space to hold our thoughts and hold what's going on in our brains. If I am ever overwhelmed or anxious about something, I always feel better after making some time to journal and making some time to just get all the crap out of my head and to just put it down on paper. Nine times out of ten, if I'm stressed about something, I will go to my journal and nine times out of ten, I will feel much better about the thing and won't be so worried about it no matter what.
I always find it tends to get my creative juices flowing and it helps with things like idea generation too. So if you're listening to this and thinking, I don't want to write about my feelings, it's a really good idea to have some kind of journaling practice merely for the idea of just generating ideas and to let yourself be wild and free with your ideas.
I've written stuff in my journals that will probably never happen, but the fact that I even have somewhere where I can have those wild, big dreams is really, really powerful.
Journaling also encourages us to not self edit. Depending on your relationship with perfectionism, you may be thinking or you may have even done this in the past, I know I certainly have, where we've written something down and we think that doesn't sound right. That’s bad or whatever kind of not helpful thought we're having at that moment and want to cross it out.
But following our intuition and just writing and not self editing is really powerful because it encourages us to move beyond that sense of perfectionism. And like I said, it's just really a good space to just experiment and to play and to do those things in a low stakes way. Like not in a high stakes, this feels dangerous way, but in a way that kind of feels like it's just for us. Because obviously you can show your journals to whoever you want, but you don't have to share anything if you don't want to.
But in a time where we're encouraged to share all our thoughts and all our processes and everything that's going on in our brains all the time. It's nice to have a space to do that, where you know no one's watching you and you can just evolve your thoughts, change your mind on things, move through things, process things without anyone else watching, which I think is quite powerful.
How to journal more? Just start!
So now that I've talked a lot about how amazing I think journaling is, because I do, you might be wondering, well, okay, that's all very well and good, but how do we get going with it? And I'm going to give some really annoying advice now, which is advice I hate, but unfortunately, it works.
If you want to journal more, just start. Like I said, you don't need much to get going. You only need a pen, a pencil, whatever, and something to write down on and you're good, you're away. That's all you need.
Ignore the journaling prompts
If you're struggling with what to write, there are plenty of prompts online that you can go and find. But I do find that looking for writing prompts tends to send us down a not very helpful rabbit hole where we're looking for the perfect journaling prompt to get going with, which I don't always find incredibly useful.
If you are really, really struggling and you're like, I'm just getting lost in a sea of journaling prompts, it's very easy to do. I've done it! Just get like a blank piece of paper in front of you or everything you're writing it down on and just ask yourself, how are you feeling today? What's going on? How are you feeling? are questions that are quite potent, actually.
And a question that if someone asks us in real life, how are we feeling? We might just rush to give an answer that isn't necessarily our truth. I mean, think of the times as business owners, right? People ask us how business is and we immediately default to it's great, I'm really busy, which is there's a lot to unpack there and I still do this. I'm trying to get out the habit of just defaulting to that answer because businesses ebb and flow, right?
That's just how it is. And maybe I'm not always busy. And also, why am I defining my business and its success by whether I am busy or not? I don't always want to be busy. That's why I started a business, because I wanted more free time and time to do what I love.
So when we're asking ourselves that question and when we don't have to rush for an answer, what can come up can be really, really surprising. I have found in the past that writing down how I'm feeling, uncovers things that I didn't even know I was feeling and gives me space to kind of process all of it and to be really honest and not to come up with a solution or to come up with an answer that I think other people are going to want to hear, but to just really get down to the root of how I'm feeling, that makes it sound quite like, intimidating and full on.
But I've definitely found running a business has really encouraged me to delve into my own personal development and self development. I think it kind of forces you to because you're doing a lot of things that are very uncomfortable, you're doing a lot of things that involve you stepping outside of the status quo and adding journaling as a thing to help you move through it can be really good for your business, actually.
It can really encourage us to get real about our business and to generate ideas and be honest about what we want our businesses to be. I have gone off on a massive tangent on this tip, but if you're struggling with what to write, just ask yourself how you're feeling and see what comes up.
Experiment with free writing
Another thing you can do if you are struggling with what you're actually going to write as well is free writing, which is what I personally do most of the time and which I find really, really effective.
I'll be talking more about this in more detail in a later episode of this season of the podcast, but the Morning Pages exercise from The Artist Way by Julia Cameron is just fantastic.
If you're unfamiliar, this essentially involves you just free writing for three pages first thing in the morning, but I don't personally do it in the morning. It's essentially three pages in your notebook of just writing. It can be about anything. Don't self edit. I love the way Julia Cameron talks about it in her book because she really gives the pep talk that I think a lot of us need, where she talks a lot about how it doesn't matter if it's crap. It doesn't matter if what you're writing is self absorbed. It doesn't matter if it's, like, whinging about your partner not doing the washing up or things like that, because you're being creative.
You're using that part of your brain to get in touch with all the things you're thinking and you're feeling and getting them out rather than just kind of keeping them quiet. So that is one practise like I absolutely love.
I think it's really a refreshing one to really move past that perfectionist thing, because who remembers the bullet journaling craze, right? Do people still bullet journal? If you do, let me know. But I always found that so difficult as a thing to get into because you go on Instagram, you look up like the Bujo hashtag, and it's just full of these picture perfect journals, full of beautiful writing and loads of colour, and everything is perfectly placed. And I don't know about you, but there is no surefire way to make sure I don't do something than to see an absolutely perfect version, because you kind of think, well, I'm never going to match up to that.
What's the point? So my bullet journal phase was very short for that reason, which is why I find free writing now so effective, because you don't have to be perfect. You can just be and just being is something that is so, so good for us because we don't really get a chance or a space to do it elsewhere and yeah, it's just great.
Plan how and when you’re going to write
Despite me talking about not having a plan for what you're going to write, having a plan for when you're going to write is quite useful.
I usually write in the evenings just because I find I have a little bit more time for myself then and I find it sets me up quite nicely before bed as well. I know a lot of folk, Julia Cameron included, say to do it in the morning and I can absolutely see why because I think it's a really nice intention setting exercise to kick start your day with. But if it doesn't work for you, I would say don't push it. I know mornings can be quite stressful for a lot of us, especially for example if we've got kids or if you're someone listening to this who has like a nine to five job.
It's all about finding ways that work for you. I will always say this when it comes to practising creative self care, it has to work for you. Like, first and foremost, it doesn't matter what I tell you to do what you want to do, if it's not going to fit into your schedule, then it's just not going to work.
Because when you start journaling regularly, that's when the magic happens and that's when you kind of start getting deeper and deeper and deeper and get more and more of the crap out of your brain, all the stuff that's just saying up there.
On a similar note as well, if daily journaling doesn't work for you, again, don't push it. If you're not loving it or you're like, oh, I'm just getting used to it, don't push it. It can be very extreme to start any habit and do it every single day and sometimes it kind of puts us off doing the thing completely, trying to put that pressure on us to do it every single day.
If we're really not in the mood to do it every day, things come up, we're busy. Even if you can start with a weekly journaling session for yourself or every other day, that is a fantastic place to start and I guarantee once you start doing it, you'll want to do it more anyway and you'll want to find pockets of time to fit it in.
Have fun!
Another tip I want to share as well is to make sure that you're having fun doing this. I've talked a lot about, obviously the benefits that journaling and writing stuff down has on our mental health and obviously all that is true. But I don't know about you, sometimes I tend to resist things that I know are good for me.
How can you make it more fun? So can you buy yourself a cute notebook? But also, don't spend forever buying a cute notebook. There is no such thing as the perfect notebook.
The notebook itself will not change your life. What you write down in there will change your life.
So just make sure it's cute. If you want to go and get like, a kids one, because sometimes the kids ones are really, really cute. Do that if you want to get like, a nice bougie one. I have a spiral bound one from Papier, and I'll link to it in the show notes, actually, because it's such a nice notebook and I really like a spiral bound one and because it's so beautiful to look at, it always makes me want to write in there anyway.
Can you take your notebook to a cafe? Get into a fantasy of being a bougie writer with your notebook and your French pastries. Lean hard into that if that's what makes it fun for you. Can you combine it with like, a nice thing? If you're doing it in the morning, can you have your coffee next to you? If you have a garden, can you go and journal in the garden every morning?
Use stickers liberally. If you're like me and you have a lot of craft stuff, I'm sure you'll have like, a mountain of stickers that you're like, well, I've got to put them somewhere and it's not perfect and blah, blah, blah. This is your sign to just use the stickers. Use the goddamn stickers. Stick a PSA over also to start wrapping things up here. If you're hearing this and you're thinking I'm more of a visual person, really visually journal instead, this is my real permission is up to you to just make this work for you. There is absolutely no right way or wrong way to do this.
Again, yet another reason why I recommend people journal just because. It's really helped me move past some stuff. It's really helped me get clear on things that I don't normally kind of think about. It gives me space to think about things that I don't always have time to think about in my day. And it allows me to practise not being a perfectionist, which I think is vital if you're a creative person or if you're a person who wants to be more creative. Binning off the perfectionism is always what's going to get us practising all the good things that are good for us.
One final tip for getting started
My final tip, my absolute final tip is when you get your notebook or whatever you're going to write in, if you're getting blank page fear, just do big scribble on the first page.
I do this a lot. It works. And as soon as we put pen to paper, the scary bit is done. So that would be my final tip for you. It sounds like a bit of a silly one, but trust me, it really, really works. If you're getting the real, oh my God, I've bought the perfect notebook and I can't write anything in it.
You can just do a big cross, do a scribble, do like a silly drawing of your pets, do whatever. Once you've put pen to paper the first time, it's a hell of a lot less scary to continue putting pen to paper.
If you want to delve deeper into the journaling thing, I actually ran a workshop on journaling for creativity last year where I delved more into journaling, talked about why it's so amazing and good for us, and I also gave lots and lots of prompts, prompts that are fun, they're a bit silly.
They're designed to kind of help you move through creative blocks and to just take the whole journaling thing a bit less seriously. I hope that's one thing I've managed to communicate is that whilst it has all these massive grand, great benefits for us, it doesn't have to be serious. If you want to be silly in your journal, get silly with it. I actively encourage that.
So the links to buy the workshop recording is in the notes. It's really flipping good, if I do say so myself. So if you do want to check that out, I will leave the link in the show notes. It comes with a recording of the workshop and an ebook as well with prompts and space to write the prompts as well, if you so wish.
Have an amazing week and if you do get journaling, please share, please let me know. I would love to hear your journaling, practise, how it goes for you, like if you've got any tips you'd like me to share or if you just want to chat with me about it, you can email me or visit me on Instagram.
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