Welcome to the Get Your Goal Podcast, the place for ambitious overthinking women to explore the mindset, emotions, and daily practices that actually move you forward. I'm your host, Pahla B, master certified life and goal coach, author, ultra runner, entrepreneur, and journaling expert. I'm here to help you understand the science and art of rewiring your brain for success so you can get your goal.
Ready to dive in? Let's go. Hello, friend. I'm gonna warn you right here at the first 10 seconds that I think this is gonna be a pretty quick episode. Today I am recording with, essentially all new equipment today. I have a new microphone. I have a new studio sound audio thing. Can you tell, can you tell i'm working with brand new equipment today?
I am also recording in a new app because of the new microphone [00:01:00] and the new studio thing. The old app that I used to use doesn't work anymore. Some, for some reason, it doesn't interface. I got a lot going on with the podcast. I wanted to be able to have a conversation with you today, and I think this is recording and I've run a couple of tests.
It seems like the sound is good, so I'm going to keep this relatively simple so that if it's terrible, I won't have just spent, you know, 45 minutes talking to you about something that I then have to recreate later. This is gonna be quick and it's gonna be practical. I've actually, the last couple of episodes I have kind of come away from it feeling
like, okay, that was really conceptual. And I know that the conceptual podcasts are helpful also. Like I am at my core, a person who loves to like dive deep and really understand the concepts of mindset work and really like turn it over and I mean, hello, I'm an overthinker, so of course I love to think [00:02:00] about things. But I also know that sometimes what you
can really use today that can move you forward right now is a conversation about implementation. So I wanted to have a conversation with you today about implementation. I am coming to this particular conversation assuming that you have watched or listened to the Daily 3 masterclass. The Daily 3 is my...
it's my proprietary journaling formula, which is not a formula. I was trying really hard to use the correct word. It's a journaling framework, so I I present it as a formula, there are three types of journaling that actually help you rewire your brain away from just spinning your wheels and procrastinating and getting stuck in perfectionism,
and towards actually getting the success and forward momentum that you want in order to actually get your goal. There are three types of journaling that rewire your brain and during the masterclass, I explain it. I'm gonna talk about it a little bit here [00:03:00] today too, but I really do encourage you to go watch the masterclass.
The masterclass is for people like me, is for overthinkers like me, who love to understand why. I tell you what this is a podcast within a podcast. But here's the thing. If you don't understand why you are doing something, you will struggle to be able to execute on it and to know whether or not what you're doing is working.
And you and me overthinking things, you will second guess yourself constantly. That is why I love that is why I love to explain the why behind things. Like if there's science, I love to give you science. If there's a mechanism, I love to give you the mechanism. I personally believe that when you understand like the background, the mechanics, the why of it all, it makes the how so much simpler to move forward with.
So the masterclass, the Daily 3 masterclass, and there's a link in the show notes. Uh, there's in fact [00:04:00] a link for the show, in the show notes for both the private podcast version, which means that you can just listen to it and also the video version so that you can see my face and you can watch the slides and you can learn all about it.
Both of them are like 23 minutes long. You can listen to them on double speed if you wanna get it, you know, get moved through the information more quickly. But here's the thing about what we're gonna talk about today. Today is a little bit more about implementation, and in fact, I give you, um, I give you a great way to implement the Daily 3 in the masterclass
also. I have guided journaling experiences that help you truly use what you learn immediately. And today I'm gonna share a little bit more about how I use the Daily 3 with my six favorite.... in fact, I'm switching to my notes here. Sorry. My six favorite journaling questions. Here's the thing about journaling.
I. Let me, let me start this sentence again. [00:05:00] I am a curious person. And I can hear that both ways. Like I'm a little curious, you know, of those of you reading the transcript later, like I'm putting a little bit of inflection on that. Like I'm a bit odd because of my overthinking tendencies and my, my need for depth.
I am a curious person also in the sense of I am driven almost constantly by the feeling of curiosity. The feeling of curiosity, wanting to know why, wanting to know how, wanting to know what, where, when, who. I always want to know. That feeling of curiosity means that. Well, it means that I ask really good questions and I ask a lot of them.
And then becoming a life coach and becoming a journaling expert means that I get to put this into practice like constantly. It is my favorite thing in the world to ask [00:06:00] questions. It's why I'm a life coach. It's why I have a membership where I get to meet people and ask them questions. It's why I created the guided journaling experiences for you so that I could share some of the questions that I have used in my own journaling for my goal getting for the specific goals that the guided journaling experiences cover so that you get a chance to practice. The thing about not just the Daily 3, but honestly the thing about any kind of journaling.
Any kind of, any kind of something new that you do ever is going to require that that period of time where you are doing something that you haven't done before or something that you've done before, but in a way that you've never done it before. Which means that there's going to be that, that moment or many moments of feeling clunky at it, of feeling like you're not good at it, of feeling like you're not really sure
[00:07:00] whether or not what you're doing is taking you, where you want to go. And then there'll be second guessing and doubt, and then lots of us will end up just saying, well, maybe this isn't for me. What I really want to offer you today, and with the guided journaling experiences that I mention in the Daily 3 Masterclass is the chance to implement
in a way that acknowledges that, yes, of course you're going to feel clunky, but also gives you kind of training wheels. I am an expert question asker. It's literally what I do for a living. So offering you some examples of the types of questions that I ask myself that I have asked myself in my journaling can help you move through that awkward phase while you are
assimilating the why behind it all and practicing the what, and then moving forward [00:08:00] into what really works for you. Because make no mistake about it, this is why I call the Daily 3 a journaling framework versus a formula. First of all, it's incredibly versatile. You can use the Daily 3 a million different ways, probably 1,000,001 different ways.
Not that I would count, but you can use it so many different ways and you personally will use it your way. Because your way, the way that works with your brain, the way that you understand it, the way that you personally manipulate it and move it around and make it work for you, that is hands down the best way
to use it. And also the only way you can get there is by practicing with different ways. And some of them will feel amazing and some of them will feel awkward. Well, they're all gonna feel awkward at first, but some of them will continue to feel awkward. And those are the kinds of [00:09:00] ways that maybe you can sort of weed them out.
So what I'm offering you today are six of my favorite journaling questions that help me use the Daily 3. And I really wanna clarify here that I am not always talking about written journaling when I'm talking about journaling. I am a big proponent of any time you are in your brain, thinking about your thoughts, recognizing yourself, seeing yourself, and
with the intention of gaining self-awareness, like having a conversation in your own head or out loud or in any manner. I count all of that as journaling. I am very loosey goosey with the word journaling. Sometimes it is written. I do a written practice every day, but I also do a lot of mental journaling, just thinking thoughts in my head and
seeing them from different sides and recognizing that what I'm thinking is a thought and [00:10:00] asking myself questions like this. I also often, and you've been privy to it more than once. I also verbally journal sometimes when I'm talking about something else, like when I'm talking to a person or when I'm here on the podcast, suddenly I'll hear myself saying something and recognize, oh wait.
I can turn this over and sometimes having that verbal component helps me quite literally hear something different. Where I'm going with this is that I offer you these questions for you to make use of in a way that really makes sense to you. You might use them written, you might use them in your head, you might use them for verbally journaling.
You can use them in whatever way suits you. So the reason that I had that whole preamble of these are related to the Daily 3 is because I have two questions for each different kind of journaling. There are three different kinds of journaling that we do with the Daily 3 framework. The first one.
And I say first as though you have to use them in [00:11:00] order. You don't. I put them in this order because I like to think about it this way. My brain loves to have this particular order. And your brain may or may not. So one of the types of journaling, the one that I personally do first, is called future self journaling.
That's the one where you quite literally picture yourself in the future, either fully with your goal or doing the things more immediately that are going to take you to your goal. It is that that planning part of your brain where you are thinking about and feeling, from your imagination, the future. The second kind or the another kind of journaling that we do is metacognitive journaling.
That is one where you ask yourself to see what you are telling yourself as a thought, as a story, as an option as as opposed to a fact. Metacognitive journaling is where you come up and [00:12:00] out of your thoughts and your stories and the things that you are telling yourself, and really recognizing that this is only something you are currently telling yourself, and it is not the only way to describe the situation.
This is honestly, it's my favorite kind of journaling. It's the one that I've been doing for years. I wrote an entire book about metacognitive journaling. It is my favorite, but I know it's not everybody's because part of metacognitive journaling is actually feeling the feeling of your current story to release it and let go of it.
The third kind or another kind of journaling that we use to rewire your brain for success is success journaling, where you ask yourself to recognize that what you are currently doing, what you have been doing in the recent past or even in the distant past, that what you are doing is taking you toward your goal.
Now I find this one [00:13:00] actually to be... I... do I wanna say it's the most difficult? I think that it is. I think that it is the most difficult for the most people, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's hard. It means that it's something that we don't do naturally. It's something that we have not been socialized to do. And the reason why we do all three of these things here, let me just give you most of the masterclass right here in the podcast.
The reason why we do these three types of journaling really is to rewire your brain. Your brain has efficient ways of moving through the world. Your brain is always going to try to keep creating in the future what it has created in the past. The mechanism for creating a different result, having the end in mind, is how you get there.
Your brain left to its own devices will continue to believe what it [00:14:00] already thinks. Asking yourself to come up and out of it and look at it as a story, and then feel the feeling of it releases that story from you. Success journaling rewires your brain away from negativity bias, or thinking that nothing is ever going to work, or what I had done isn't really good enough because I don't really have my goal yet.
It takes you up and out of that kind of repetitive, I'm gonna call it negative thinking, even though don't, don't take that as any kind of a judgment. Your brain does this naturally. It takes you away from that negativity thinking and into success thinking. Recognizing that you are currently having success, first of all, can help motivate you to do more of what you're doing, and second of all, creates the capacity to continue creating more success.
Okay, without further ado, because I promised you that this was gonna be a short [00:15:00] podcast, and then now I've been talking for a while, but here are my six favorite journaling questions. I have two of them for future self journaling, and this one, the first one is my hands down favorite question in the entire world.
What do I want? What do I want is one of, well, it's one of my six favorite journaling questions because here's, here's specifically why I like this question. Because it helps me interrupt my brain from the constant loop of reminding myself of what I don't want. You and I both do this constantly, all day long.
We butt up against our current reality, or at least the story that we're telling ourselves about our current reality, and we are constantly inundating ourselves with, I don't want that. I don't want that. I don't want that. I wish I didn't have this anymore. I wish I wasn't still here in my current reality. [00:16:00] Asking yourself what you want and holding yourself to an answer that starts with I want, as opposed to continually repeating all of the I don't wants, helps you go to that place in your mind, in your imagination, where you have, I'm gonna say the vision of what you
want. I think about this all the time when I used to sew a lot and I, you might be unsurprised to learn this. I didn't love following a pattern. I, I am just the kind of person who... I am gonna say has to reinvent the wheel. I don't have to, but I do so frequently reinvent the wheel, and one of the greatest achievements of my life is that I have stopped shaming myself for that.
I used to have a lot of judgment and a lot of shame. Like, why can't I just [00:17:00] follow a pattern? Why can't I just have a boss? Why can't I just do what people tell me to do? Because I can't, that's why. I, I just, I, I have released all of my judgment and shame and I freely hand this to you as something that you can do also. If you find yourself to be the kind of person who reinvents the wheel or can't follow a pattern or doesn't want a boss.
You and me, sister, you and me both. Here's the thing. I used to sew quite a bit, and one of the things that I did, we lived in a house that had very odd shaped windows. And I wanted to create window treatments, so I wanted to make like valances and I wanted to sew them myself. I enjoy sewing. I have a fun time, or I don't anymore, but I used to have a fun time sewing. So I, I'm gonna say, had to know what I wanted in order to
create that thing. Because I wasn't [00:18:00] using a pattern and because I couldn't find something pre-made that was exactly what I wanted. This was back in the, gosh, like the late nineties. Do you remember poof valances, where you used to like literally crumple up newspaper and put it into the, the balloon of the valance?
People might still do that. I have no idea. I don't have valances on my windows anymore. But this was, this was not what I wanted, but it was the fashion at the time. And I wanted something that was actually a little bit more sleek and a little bit more straight. And so what I did was I started essentially with this question, what do I want?
So I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted, and then I had to figure out how to get that on paper. And I am not necessarily an artist who can draw, so I had to be able to get that on paper. And then imagine how I was going to put that together, like how I was gonna sew that, where the seams would be, what the structure would be, [00:19:00] how I was gonna attach it to the wall.
I mean, my process here took, I'm gonna say weeks, but it might have actually been longer than weeks. It might have been months. This is what I offer you as the architect of your goal. Not that you have to start from scratch, not that you have to do all of the mechanics and all of the figuring and all of the engineering.
There are plenty of people who can help you, like put together some kind of a strategy. There are plenty of people who have plenty of information about how you might get where you want to go, but you do need to know where you want to go before you can really get started. This question, what do I want helps you both in the, the macro, the big picture, and also the micro, the what do I want today?
What do I want right now? In service of that big picture, what do I want to do with my day? What do I want right now? What do [00:20:00] I want to create in the near future? What do I want is, again, one of my six favorite journaling questions, but also one of those questions that can really help you put your brain
into that space where you are rewiring. Where you are picturing something that you do not currently have. This is the mechanism by which we get what we want, is by defining and seeing and visualizing and feeling the feelings of what we want. Second question that helps you, that can help you with future self journaling.
And this one I find to be a little bit more immediate, a little bit more situational. And I love this because I literally just asked myself this question today. How do I want to show up? I had, I'm gonna call it a situation today where I was being asked to do something that I didn't [00:21:00] wanna do, and I really didn't wanna do it, and I had so much resistance to it, and I was sitting in my car and I was fuming with anger and resistance, and this is ridiculous,
and why in the world would anybody need this particular thing to be done? And I asked myself, because I was mentally journaling at that point, I did not have a piece of paper. I was mentally journaling. I was like, how do I wanna show up? Because the truth of it is that the person who asked me to do a thing is a person that I love.
It is a person that I want to show up with love with. I don't know if that sentence was grammatically correct, but we're gonna go with it. I wanted to show up with patience, and kindness, and generosity because these are things that I love to feel towards the people that I love, even when they are asking me to do a [00:22:00] thing that I believe is ridiculous, that I have a lot of judgment about and a lot of resistance to. And the reason I'm telling you this story.
It is because asking yourself how you personally want to show up. What it did for me was it took me mostly, more or less, you can still hear the resistance. You can still hear that I think this situation was ridiculous. But it took me, in that moment, it helped me interrupt all of that resistance, all of that anger, all of that frustration, and just ask myself what I want? Like what kind of feelings do I want to have, which was my answer there, like, I wanna feel generous, I wanna feel kind, I wanna feel loving.
So. Therefore, knowing that what I want, there's the end in mind. I want to feel generous and kind and loving and patient. Once I know that answer, it gave me the answer of what I should do, [00:23:00] not should do. You know what I'm saying? What I wanted to do. Even though, and here's the thing, without asking myself that question, what I would've continued to tell myself was, I don't want to do this.
I shouldn't have to do this. It is ridiculous that I've been asked to do this. But when I know how I wanna show up, it makes it an easy step to realize that what I wanted to do was honor the request, and I did. And when I honored the request and handed it back to the person, what I actually felt was. Okay.
What I felt was generous and patient and kind, and also kinda like the better person.
I will admit that to you freely. I felt like I was the person in this situation who had managed their mind and who had asked myself the tough journaling question of how do I wanna show [00:24:00] up? And I got to actually feel, and we'll get to it in just a minute, the success journaling of I am a person who follows through on what I intend.
I intended to show up with generosity and kindness and patience, and then I did. And it wasn't really about the action. It really was about me setting that intention for myself and then following through. Okay. I'm not gonna go to the success journaling just yet. Let me tell you two more questions. The two questions that I love, love, love from metacognitive journaling.
The the first one, you've certainly heard me ask this one before, and if you haven't then I apologize for just assuming that you have before. What do I think about, and then there's a blank line there. The thing that you are currently struggling with, whatever it is, like truly whatever it is, the reason you are struggling is because you have a thought about it.
This is, this is just mindset work 1 0 1. [00:25:00] When you find yourself struggling to complete a task, when you find yourself struggling to move forward, when you find yourself struggling to make a decision, when you find yourself in a position where you don't seem to be moving forward, the reason why you are not moving forward is because you are having a thought that is creating a feeling that you are very likely
avoiding or resisting or trying to shove down. This is why we ask ourselves this question, what do I think about? And then when your brain answers you, you feel the feeling of that thought. That thought is creating a feeling that you would rather avoid or resist or shove down. I mean, right there, you already know that you don't want to feel this feeling.
That's why this, that's why this metacognitive work can feel pretty tricky. You already have a lot of evidence that you would rather not feel the feeling of the thing that you are thinking, and that really is the work here. [00:26:00] It's how we rewire your brain is by hearing what you are saying to yourself and feeling the feeling of it.
Because when you feel a feeling without doing the behavior, your brain can't complete its own internal circuit, so it will find a different thought for you. That really is the magic of metacognitive work is it literally releases your mindset blocks. Okay. The other question that I love, love, love to ask myself when I find myself, like again, like today when I was in the situation where I was being asked to do something that I thought was ridiculous and I had so much resistance to. One of the other questions that I asked myself that helped me interrupt my own loop of resistance and not wanting to do the thing, I asked myself this metacognitive question, what am I making this mean about me?
And here was the thing that I realized in this particular situation. I was being asked to do [00:27:00] something that I thought was ridiculous and therefore I felt like I was being taken advantage of, like I was kind of being manipulated. So needless to say, that is a feeling that was deeply uncomfortable, that manipulated or at the mercy of another person.
And really recognizing, oh, that's part of the reason why I have so much resistance to doing this task, because my brain is telling me that if I do this task that I've been, you know, a patsy, I've been manipulated, I've been, you know, turned into a pretzel for somebody else's whim. It is not. Let me interrupt my narrative here.
It is not easy and it is not immediate to be able to like find your thoughts and feel your feelings in the middle of a situation the way that I was capable of today. This is why I offer you the [00:28:00] first of all, the masterclass of the Daily 3, and second of all the ability to practice with the guided journaling experiences that I have.
This work is something that I have been doing now for years. It comes so easily to me now because I allowed myself to be awkward and weird with it and curious with it. I allowed myself to practice in ways that did not net me these kinds of results. Now I am literally in the middle of a situation where I'm being asked to do something that I have a ton of resistance to, and I can ask my brain things like, how do I wanna show up?
What do I think about this? What am I making this mean about me? This is, this is the end game you guys. This is where you are headed when you do this work. You can literally [00:29:00] interrupt yourself in the middle of an argument and see things differently and not have an argument with a person that you love, that you don't want to be arguing with.
And instead clear up your own brain. Not to capitulate, not to give in, not to compromise and ugh, just do what they want. But to really see that what you want matters. That what you want, how you want to show up, and how you want to see yourself, how you want to clear up your own mindset blocks is the piece of the puzzle that you've probably been missing up until now.
And then my friends, the two questions that I love, love, love for success journaling. Number one, what did I create? Here's why I love this. I have a bit of a rant here about success journaling because I do, I have been re I've been [00:30:00] requesting, that was a funny thing to say. I've been recommending that people do success journaling forever.
Uh, as long as I can remember, I mean, like we're talking way, way, way back. 13 plus years ago, when I very first became a certified personal trainer. In fact, even before that, even before I was in business for myself, one of the jobs that I had was was asking part of the job that I had, I worked at a, I worked at a women's fitness chain that I will never name because I don't wanna give them any advertising.
It was the worst job I've ever had, and thank goodness it was my last one. I worked in a place where we helped women, you know, gain fitness and lose weight if they wanted to, and, you know, get their goals essentially. And so one of the, one of the parts of my job was helping them like celebrate like, oh, look at your progress here and let's celebrate this.
And, and so many women had so much resistance to that. And I have continued to find that [00:31:00] throughout my career. I have continued to find that in my own experience of myself. Celebrating your success, recognizing your success, and and journaling about your success, feeling the feelings of success can be very difficult. And one of the things that we do to deflect that difficulty is we start looking around us for things that have happened
to us that felt good or were good. Oh, you know, my, my son got a new job, or the weather was beautiful, or things all worked out, is how a lot of us try and skirt around our success journaling. It's why I love this question. What did I create? And if you need a little bit more specificity, if you find your brain still being able to squirrel away, you could even put more onto that.
What did I create for myself? [00:32:00] What did I create that I wanted to create? Asking yourself a question about what you personally created and then asking yourself to answer it with a sentence that starts with I. I created, I did, I managed, I whatever, whatever your action word is. Starting that success journaling sentence with the word I, brings it all home to you.
It is an acknowledgement of your autonomy, of your skills, of your intentional follow through. The feeling that that sentence creates very often is some version of pride, some version of successful or productive, [00:33:00] or some version of something that can feel kind of uncomfortable because you haven't practiced it before.
That really is the trick of success journaling is finding those manageable chunks of, I asked myself to do a thing and then I did it. And then here comes the next question. What kind of person does this? This is, oh my gosh, I love this question so much. What kind of person does this, meaning does what I did.
Like a person who asks themselves to create a sewing pattern for a valance for their window treatments. The kind of person who does that is a creative person, a person who's good at sewing, a person who cares about what their house looks like. Being able to start the sentence like that, a person who, can help you[00:34:00]
bring it a little closer to you in a way that maybe doesn't feel quite as scary, quite as big, quite as emotional. A person who does this is a person who. When you are success journaling, you are asking yourself gently to step into that identity. I am a person who follows through. I am a person who grants the request of somebody that I love.
Even when I think it's ridiculous. I am a person who hears my resistance and doesn't just react from it. I am a person who can interrupt my own anger while I'm feeling it. I am a person who examines myself, my motivations, my desires. I am a person [00:35:00] who honors my desire to show up a specific way. I am a person who can hear anything that is going on in my head, even when it's kind of yucky.
And I am a person who can feel my feelings because I want to, because I know that it takes me where I want to go. These are all suggestions that I lovingly offer you, are available to you. You are a person who journals. You are a person who listens to podcasts so that you can get what you want. And you're right, I could have said, get your goal, because then it would've been like a roll credits moment.
I know, because I am gonna roll credits on this one. I'm also, I'm gonna summarize really quickly the two questions, two of my favorite questions for future self journaling. What do I want? How do I wanna show up? My two... are they my actual favorites? [00:36:00] That's a good question. I don't know if these are my actual favorites.
I have never tried to rank my favorite questions. I have so many favorite questions because I am such a curious person. I am calling this my six favorite journaling questions. But you know what? If I do another podcast like this at sometime in the future where I tell you more of my favorites, they're all my favorites.
I love them all the same but differently. Two of my favorite metacognitive journaling questions are, what do I think about? And then fill in the blank with the thing that you're struggling with. And what am I making this mean about me? Two of my favorite success journaling questions are, what did I create? And what kind of person does this? My friend.
This did not end up being a very short episode at all, but I do hope that it was really helpful for you, and thank you so much for being here with me. I'll talk to you again soon. If you are getting a lot out of the Get Your Goal Podcast and you're ready to take your journaling and mindset to the next level you [00:37:00] belong in the Get Your Goal Membership.
Inside you'll find the expert coaching insights and interactive community of other ambitious overthinking women that you've been searching for. With weekly group coaching, an expansive library of resources, daily accountability, and a safe space to dig deep at your own pace, the Get Your Goal Membership has exactly what you need to get your goal.
Head over to get your goal.com/membership to learn more and join today. I can't wait to see you inside.
