Hello, friend, and welcome to my new podcast studio. I am recording indoors for the first time in... I literally have no idea how long it's been. I think at this point it has been years since I used to record the podcast inside. I've been in my minivan or in my garage podcast studio for... Some amount of time.
I literally have no idea. I just know that being inside feels simultaneously amazing. So relaxing, so comfortable. So temperature controlled, and also a little bit weird. I mean, it's odd and there's a whole, there really is a whole topic to be had here about how something that you've been working towards for a long time feels a little bit different when you actually get it than you anticipated.
And. And you know what, I'm gonna put that on the list of podcast topics. What I really wanna talk to you about today though, is [00:01:00] something a little bit more, a little bit more immediate. While you are still on your way to getting your goal, you probably, no matter what your goal is. I mean, whether you wanna write a book or run a race or navigate through grief or lose weight or run your own business, you probably describe yourself the way that I do that you have more things on your to-do list than you have hours in the day.
And I want to talk with you today about how to get things done, so you can get your goal. All of us. I'm just gonna say that all of us have a to-do list. I don't know if you necessarily have like an actual list or a mental list. If you are the kind of person who loves to have a day planner or a calendar or some kind of digital to-do list or some kind of something. You very likely have
some sort of list of [00:02:00] things that you, and I'm gonna say have to get done in order to get your goal. I'm not gonna quibble with you about that phrase. Well, no, that's not true. I absolutely am gonna quibble with you about that phrase because there is nothing that you have to do. There are things that you actually want to do, and part of the problem of having a to-do list that is as long as your arm or longer than the hours of the day, is that some of the things on that list feel deeply unpleasant.
Like things you don't really want to do. And so I wanna talk to you today about not how to make yourself do something that you don't wanna do, or how to make yourself do things that you have to do, or even like how to be more productive necessarily, even though that is the byproduct of what I'm gonna talk about.
I mean, the, the thing that I'm gonna show you today is that you can be more productive than you [00:03:00] realize right now, that you actually can get everything done that you want to get done, and that this is all doable in a way that does not have to feel like self-discipline or willpower, or making yourself do things.
There is a kinder, gentler way to get your goal. And here it is. I'm gonna tell you like the, the bare bones of it, and then we're gonna dig into it. The bare bones of how to get stuff done is to ask yourself to do only what you actually know you are going to get done, and then to acknowledge that you did exactly what you wanted
to do. And yes, what I'm gonna tell you is that the Daily 3 journaling formula can help you [00:04:00] get things done. And I just realized that I called it a journaling formula, and I've really been going back and forth on this one. I feel like I have referred to it as a journaling formula as often as a journaling framework.
They both start with f, one of my favorite letters, but I really want to remember to refer to it as a framework more often than a formula. It is both. I'm gonna pick this apart really briefly because I, it's not important necessarily, but I love to, I love to tell you the why behind things. I've always assumed that you are a why girl, just like me.
When you understand why something works, it's a million times easier to do the what. So here's the thing about the difference between formula and framework. Formula to me sounds very prescriptive, and I will tell you that when you watch the Daily 3 [00:05:00] masterclass, I lay it out for you in a very prescriptive way.
Like, here are three types of journaling. Here's how to get them all done in five minutes. You spend one minute on future self, you spend three minutes on metacognitive, you spend one minute on success journaling. This is like, this is how to do it, and I want you to know that that is a suggestion. The reason you would do the Daily 3 is because of the types of journaling, the future self, the metacognitive and success journaling work together synergistically to create your goal.
They are the three types of journaling that help rewire your brain away from procrastination, which is what we're talking about today, away from trying to do things with willpower, away from trying to just push yourself through and away from never really seeing the results that you wanna [00:06:00] see, into
having the clarity to be able to see where you are going and what you want. To be able to have the connection with yourself and your body instead of always overriding your feelings and to actually see your success. To have the capacity to create the success that you want by acknowledging the success.
When you are reading the transcription, I cannot wait to see what any of that sounded like. To see the success you have already created. Sometimes words are hard. Here's the thing about the Daily 3 journaling framework. It literally could not matter less how you do it. You don't have to do the [00:07:00] one minute, three minute, one minute thing.
You don't have to do all three of them together at the same time. I actually, uh, there's an argument to be made to doing them backwards, like starting with success journaling before thinking about your day. There's an argument to be made for starting your day with future self, doing metacognitive at any point in time during the day when you notice yourself really struggling to get something done and then ending your day with success journaling. There's an argument to be made to spend more time on any of the individual pieces.
There's an argument to be made for any way that you personally want to do the Daily 3. There is literally zero argument to be made that it has to be done a certain way. I will gently suggest, not that you have to do all three things, but the three things work together for greater [00:08:00] success than, for example, like I did for years only doing one kind of journaling.
For years. I just told you this story recently. I don't know if it was the very, was it the last episode? It probably was. It's been a while, and I apologize for that. I moved my son out of our home and into his home and, and frankly it was exhausting, like on every level. It was physically and emotionally draining, and I have really, I have honored my own creative energy and really allowed myself the time
and space to recover and be where I am with the energy that I have, which is part of what we're gonna talk about today with only asking yourself to do things that you know you are going to get done. I, over the course of however long it's been since the last time I podcasted, I knew that I didn't have the energy to have this kind of a conversation and bring what I wanted to, to the [00:09:00] podcast.
I know what I want this podcast to feel like while I am creating it, and I didn't have that in me while I was doing other things. That wasn't where I was going though. I was someplace else in the conversation and I don't remember what it was. So I'm gonna pick up in a relatively new spot. Here's the thing about the Daily 3.
It can help you get things done, and let's really talk about how and why. Here's where I used to be. Oh, this is what I was talking about, how I used to only do metacognitive journaling. That's where I was. Okay. So I love metacognitive journaling and I realize that it is not everybody's favorite. Like I think if I had to pick,
I think that success journaling is probably the hardest for most people. I think that metacognitive is the second hardest, and also in many ways the one [00:10:00] that is least familiar, which is part of why it is difficult to kind of wrap your brain around, because it's, it's not what, it's not what most people think of when they talk about journaling.
When you talk about journaling, I, I think that the, the common idea is simply that you, you just get it all out of you, you know, you just vent or that you ask yourself to, you know, look for something positive or gratitude, or you write down like scripting affirmations or something. I think that that's what most people would consider journaling, but metacognitive journaling is you write down a sentence and then you look at that sentence and recognize that it is not a fact.
It is not a truth. It is not a statement about who you are as a human being. It is simply a sentence in your brain right now, and that sentence is either taking you towards your goal or not. And it's very different to [00:11:00] think about your thoughts like that. Anyways, I love doing metacognitive journaling. I think that future self journaling is the easiest of the three, and all of them have their own challenges.
In any event, I love metacognitive journaling because I took to it like a fish to water. Honestly, the very first time I ever had any inkling of this was back in 2019? 2019. Like January of 2019, I first started listening to the Life Coach School podcast and Brooke Castillo's thing, like her, uh, intellectual property is called the Model.
And it is, I mean, it's cognitive behavioral therapy. It's not, it's not that she made this up out of nowhere, but it's that she packaged it in a way that makes a lot of sense for life coaching. To coach yourself or for people who want to be life coaches, [00:12:00] to think about your thoughts creating your feelings, your feelings driving your actions, and then your actions getting you results.
The first time I heard that and really understood it and put it into any kind of use in my life, it felt like coming home. Like this was the piece of the puzzle that I had never ever understood. My behavior had always felt like such an absolute mystery to me. I had no idea why I would do things or not do things, and so understanding that everything came from my thoughts creating my feelings, and then my feelings driving my actions as opposed to from circumstances or just from, I don't know,
I guess I just act this way. Or even believing that I personally had some kind of like character traits that made me do things or not do things. [00:13:00] Really understanding that it's all, I'm gonna say manipulatable, like you can see your thoughts and recognize what they are bringing you in your life and not just like choose new ones and make yourself think new thoughts, but like actually untangle yourself
from those thoughts. That is really the essence of metacognitive journaling, by the way, which I teach inside the Daily 3 masterclass, is that rather than recognizing a thought, seeing, okay, this isn't getting me where I wanna go, and then demanding that I think something new. The mechanism that releases an old unhelpful thought from you is simply to feel the feeling of that thought and not behave from it.
Metacognitive journaling, I, I, sounds dramatic, but I'm gonna say it anyways. Completely changed my life. It changed, [00:14:00] gosh, everything. Everything. So for me, metacognitive journaling has always been the easiest. Like I love it so much. I do it every day. It's always been, not always, it was hard when I first started learning it.
It was difficult to like understand the mechanism of it, but the more I practiced it, the easier it became. It's been a part of my daily life since 2019. So for me, doing the metacognitive journaling was fantastic, but it wasn't until I added in the success journaling and the future self journaling that I really started to see myself getting things done.
Doing the daily three over the course of the last seven or eight months has created for me. Uh, so many things. Uh, number one, such a deep and incredible self-trust that I will [00:15:00] actually accomplish what I set out to accomplish. And also the ability to accomplish things. And I know that sounds so funny, like I was the kind of person up until this year, I was the kind of person who
over promised myself on the daily. I would make a list of anywhere from like five to 55 things that I knew darn well I wasn't actually going to get done. I mean, even on a, a short to-do list of only five things, generally speaking, it would be five, like huge things. It wasn't just like five little things.
And every single day when I was over promising myself that I would get these things done, I was actually eroding my self trust. I had gotten myself to the point where [00:16:00] while I was writing my to-do list in the morning, I was thinking to myself, well, that's not gonna get done. Well, that's not gonna get done.
And all day long I was berating and judging myself, not even for what I, well, some of it was for what I was doing, but also for everything that I wasn't getting done. And then I would go to bed at the, you know, end of my day and be like going over in my mind all the things that I didn't do and wasn't gonna do,
and what a terrible person I was for not getting those things done. And then trying to figure out where in the world am I gonna ever find the time? And this was this really ongoing, and I'm gonna call it like low grade frustration. Because it was so constant, I didn't realize how frustrated I was all the time until I started doing things
differently. The release of that frustration, like not feeling that way anymore has [00:17:00] opened up so much space in my brain and so much space in my schedule that it's almost ridiculous.
The crux of the Daily 3... Well, the point of the Daily 3 is to help you get your goal. Let me start with that. The point of the Daily 3 is to help you get your goal by getting really clear on what your goal is, like the big picture of your goal. And in the masterclass I talk a lot more about that big picture, like that vision of the thing that you want.
And coming back to the whole framework versus formula conversation, the reason I really want you to think of the Daily 3 as a framework is because you can use it in so many different ways. Like there are nuances to future self journaling and to metacognitive journaling and to success journaling [00:18:00] that you can really use in ways that make sense to you
from day to day or from project to project or from goal to goal or, or in, I mean, I can't even enumerate all of the different ways that you might want to subtly move them around or change them in ways that make the most sense to you. You do not have to use the Daily 3 the same way every single day.
For example, one of the things that I like to do in the Daily 3 on a day when my goal is feeling just really far away, but I feel pretty solid on, you know, here's what I'm gonna get done today, or here's what I have the energy for, or here's, here's what I've already decided and I know this is gonna, this is gonna be the thing that gets done.
I like to spend more time thinking about that big picture, like, where am I going? What is this all adding up to? And sometimes when the big picture [00:19:00] actually feels like really clear and really like hot in my body, but I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do today or this week or this month, then I spend a little bit more energy on on that, on the nitty gritty, on the details.
For me, future self can mean any point in time in the future. Maybe it's literally in the next hour, or maybe it's this day, or maybe it's this week, or maybe it's this quarter, or maybe it's this whatever. You really can use the, the future self journaling any way you want to. For the purposes of this podcast, the part that I'm talking about is that day to day to do list, I'm gonna call it grind. That,
what do I want to get done today in service of my big goal? Part of what I'm gonna say works [00:20:00] is having the clarity of what your big goal is. The more vague and amorphous your goal is, the less motivated you will feel to do anything towards it. If your goal feels like super far away or way out there, or, well, I mean, it might be this or it might be that, you know, maybe I'm writing this kind of book or maybe I wanna run a business, but I don't know what it is.
Like the more you find yourself having that sing songy, I don't know, voice in your head, the harder it's going to be to make any sort of decisions about what you want to do in the more immediate future to move towards that because you don't know what that even is. Having [00:21:00] that, that moment of "here's the big picture," helps motivate you and helps clarify what the steps are to actually getting there.
I think lots of us come to our goals. I'm thinking of weight loss specifically. Lots of us come to our, our goals thinking, oh, well here are just these tasks and I have to do these tasks, and it'll all add up, and I'll know when I get there. I, I actually think about this for business too. When I first started in business, you know, there's
there's no end to the number of people who wanna tell you how to do honestly anything. If you do even the most rudimentary search, you will find thousands of people with thousands of strategies for every single goal you could possibly come up with. So when I first came into business for myself, you know, I would Google search something like how to be in business.
And it's so [00:22:00] vague and so amorphous that I found all this advice about, oh, you know, here's how you do social media marketing and here's how you make sales calls, and here's how you, you know, set up a website. And so I just kind of started doing the tasks because I thought I had to, and I know that, I mean, having been a weight loss coach for many, many years, I, I hear people say things like this all the time.
Well, okay, I have to count my calories, or I have to watch my portions, or I have to eat this way and exercise this way, and, and it's all gonna add up. I'll get there. But if you don't know where there is, it's really hard to post on social media. It's really hard to write another chapter. It's really hard to eat in a way that's going to create weight loss.
It's really hard to do the things if you don't know where you're going. This is why Future Self [00:23:00] is, i'm gonna go ahead and call it essential. It's not pressure, I swear you don't have to do anything, but it makes everything easier. When you have that moment of seeing and feeling the big picture of where you're going, it makes it easier to see what you want to do today. And I'm really gonna emphasize that word want.
One of the things that I used to do when I used to over promise myself was I spent literally zero minutes noticing what any of those tasks felt like in my body. Meaning that I would put something on my to-do list. For example, during the entire 10 months that I was not podcasting, "record a podcast" was on my to-do list,
not every day, but at least once or twice a week. And I spent zero minutes [00:24:00] noticing how terrible it felt in my body to even write that down. I kept promising myself because I thought I had to do it. I kept promising myself I was gonna do it without paying attention to any of the signals that I had at my fingertips
telling me this doesn't feel right right now. Taking that moment to feel what you are promising yourself. To imagine, because that is the crux of future self journaling, to imagine yourself actually doing it. That is the thing that changes what you promise yourself. If you cannot see yourself doing a thing
today, this week, this month, this year, whatever, like whatever your timeframe is. If you are about to promise yourself "today, I'm gonna record a [00:25:00] podcast," and you can't imagine yourself recording the podcast, if you can't imagine, okay, well, you know, it's like seven o'clock and I've just come in from my run and I'm gonna sit in my podcast recording studio and I'm gonna have a sweat towel behind me because it's hot and I'm gonna have the fan on and I'm gonna like have my drink beside me,
and this is what I'm gonna talk about, and this is like how I'm gonna write the notes for it. Like if you can't imagine yourself doing that thing, don't put it on your to-do list. It's a really shocking mindset shift, right? We have all been socialized to believe that there are things you have to do, so therefore you write them down and you make yourself get them done.
And if you don't, that you either beat yourself up [00:26:00] about it and tell yourself that you're a procrastinator or that you're lazy, or that you're just no good and you're never gonna get what you want. Or you pretend like you're not calling yourself all those names and you, you know, "give yourself grace"
that it didn't get done and "try again tomorrow." And yes, I'm using a sing-song voice. If you're reading the transcript, that doesn't translate at all. I'm I, I guess that's sarcasm. It's sarcasm because what I'm offering you is that giving yourself grace or beating yourself up, don't move you forward. The thing that moves you forward is considering
beforehand what you are promising yourself. I used to call myself all kinds of names, procrastinator a long time ago, but actually I don't even know if the word was lazy. I'm not even sure if I had [00:27:00] a word, like I didn't call myself a name necessarily, but I had a lot of judgment about how much I wasn't getting done.
The thing that I used to tell myself very frequently was it takes me so much longer to get things done than other people. I can't get as much done as I want to. I never get as much done as I want to.
When I started using the Daily 3 to see the big picture of what I want, that big picture, future self, and really feel that motivation, feel what I wanted to do towards it, and then took that moment to really see what I was going to get done during the day. That changed everything. That act of [00:28:00] actually asking yourself
what you are going to do is such an act of self-trust. Part of the reason that I used to over promise myself, part of the reason that I used to put so many things on my to-do list that I really knew in the back of my mind I wasn't gonna get done was because I didn't trust myself to get anything done
if I didn't write it all down and hold myself, you know, my feet to the fire and try and make myself do things. Ironically, that trying to make myself do things led to so much judgment and so much overthinking and so much taking longer to do every single task on the list because of all of that overthinking and judging going on. That was the problem and [00:29:00] not the solution.
The simple act of taking that moment and really asking myself, "what am I going to get done today? What can I see myself doing today?" has created a much smaller to-do list. Let's talk about that, because there was definitely some internal pressure about, okay, am I really only putting like two things on my to-do list?
That feels so unproductive. That feels so lazy. That feels, that's where I started calling myself names. That was really interesting too. Interestingly, this is, for me, the beauty of doing the Daily 3 all together back to back is because the act of doing the future self journaling, of picturing what I wanted to do in the big picture and also then [00:30:00] picturing what I wanted to do in the day, very frequently generated some thoughts about that to-do list that I could then untangle
with the metacognitive journaling. What am I telling myself? What do I think about this to-do list? was a frequent question that I asked myself when I first started using the Daily 3. Actually, one of the things and one of the thoughts that came up that I've untangled a couple of different times was, it's not enough.
That's a thought that comes up for me with some frequency. That's a note to the side. In any event, in any event. The shorter to-do list is going to feel very foreign and very odd at first, right up until it feels like total freedom. I cannot stress this enough. The thing, I feel like I've said that numerous times already in this podcast.
The many things that have changed now that I'm [00:31:00] using the Daily 3 is the ability to deeply celebrate that I did what I asked myself to do because I have only asked myself to do things that I knew I was going to get done. 'Cause here's the other problem that I used to have. I used to not be able to see that I was making any kind of progress.
Like my brain was so focused on, here's my list of 47 things I have to do. I only got three of them done, which means... math. That means there were 44 things that I still, you know, quote unquote had to do. My brain used to get so focused on all the things that weren't getting done, and that that negativity bias of, I'm not doing enough, I'm not getting enough done,
it takes me too long, I'm never gonna get there was all I could hear in my head. Once I had [00:32:00] the, I'm gonna call it brain organization, the focus, the ability to see where I wanted to go, ask myself to do very specific things that I could tell I had the energy for, it was so easy to see myself being successful at those things.
I'm trying to decide whether or not I wanna call that easy. It was easier. Here's the thing about success journaling. Success journaling really is rewiring your brain. Your brain very naturally operates from negativity bias. Your brain will always, left to its own devices, look at the 44 things that didn't get done versus the three things that did.
Your brain will always look at the gap between you and your goal versus the gain of you right now and where you used to be. [00:33:00] Success journaling is you asking yourself intentionally to see the progress that you are making, to watch that progress adding up, and to see yourself differently. It's identity work.
It's capacity work. Clearing your brain with the future self journaling, honing in on, here's the big picture of where I'm going, here are the specific things that I'm asking myself to do towards those things right now, already, you can hopefully, kind of imagine how that clears some space in your brain to focus on just those items.
When you have focused on just those items that you are doing right now, it helps you see, when you are doing your success journaling, that you [00:34:00] did those things. Asking yourself intentionally, asking myself, let me, let me stop making this a lecture and start telling you a story. Asking myself to see my success has been very difficult.
I am not gonna lie, I am not gonna sugarcoat this. I am not that kind of a coach. Yes, I want you to use the Daily 3. Yes, I want you to see it as like this tool that can make things better for you. But I don't wanna, I don't wanna over promise, I don't wanna tell you, oh, this is so easy and it's the fastest way and it's the best way.
Well, I do think it's the best way. But I also think that it's going to require you to practice a skill that you haven't practiced before, probably. I would say that success journaling is the most difficult for me [00:35:00] because of some of the deep socialization that I had that I really think is a pretty universal thing. That,
if you see yourself as a success that you will like automatically brag about it or you'll get too big for your britches, or you will be full of pride, you know, prideful. That you, I will become a bad person if you acknowledge the good things that you are doing. I think that this is really common, and it is one of the things that I offer you gently, that you can untangle with the metacognitive journaling, while practicing seeing yourself do what you ask yourself to do.
Building that bridge of trust with yourself, [00:36:00] to go a little bit layer deeper here will help you heal some of what you have probably experienced in your life of other people promising you things that they didn't follow through on. I suspect that it is very common for all of us, because I can't imagine
that you've never had somebody let you down, that you've never had somebody tell you that they were gonna do something and then they didn't do it. And for lots of us, part of the reason why it feels so easy to over promise what we're gonna do by writing a to-do list of, you know, hundreds of items and then not follow through, is because that feels so normal.
It just feels like, well, everybody says they're gonna do something and then they don't do it. When you say you are going to do something, and then you do it, and then you feel good [00:37:00] about it, it helps you realize that you are a person you can trust. You are a person you can rely on. You are a person that you can respect.
You are a person who does what you say you're going to do. The Daily 3 has helped me, first of all, be significantly more productive. Second of all, judge myself so much less than I used to and trust myself so much more. When I promised myself during my Daily 3 this morning that I was going to record a podcast today,
there was a part of my brain that was like, okay, I'm gonna make myself do this. Okay, i'm gonna, I'm gonna use my willpower. I'm going to use [00:38:00] my, my self-determination to do this. Self-discipline was the word I was trying to say there. And then I remembered, oh no, I know how to do this. I know exactly what this is gonna feel like.
I'm gonna sit in my podcast studio. It's gonna feel cozy. This is a thing that I want to do today and tomorrow, when I'm doing my Daily 3, I'll feel that satisfaction, that trust, that respect, that love for myself of being a person who says what they're going to do and then does it. The Daily 3 can help you do this too.
And the way to get started with the Daily 3 framework of journaling that you can use in whatever way feels best to you is to go watch the [00:39:00] masterclass. There's a link in the show notes. There's also, I mean, you can just go to getyourgoal.com. It's literally the first button right at the top.
Everything, everything I do these days honestly points towards the Daily 3. It has changed my life in big ways and small that it's the thing that I offer to you, it is the thing that can get you on the path to getting your goal. And yes, there are other ways that I can help you, like use the Daily 3 to really get your goal with Guided journaling and with the Get Your Goal membership where you can use the Daily 3 with other women who are on their way also. Who are working through their overthinking, overpromising issues is what I'm gonna say.
That's not the word that was trying to come out of my mouth. And I have no idea, I have no idea what else I was trying to say in that sentence.[00:40:00]
Oh, it is definitely one of those days. The Get Your Goal Membership is a place where you can see that there are other women exactly like you with busy brains and big goals, and they're working through their stuff together. That's where I'm gonna leave it for all of us today. Go watch the masterclass.
Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again soon.
