My Kind of Morning: A Journal, Coffee, and Solitude

A cup of coffee, a journal, and a pen.

Some of my most enjoyable mornings involve these simple things – along with solitude and a relatively quiet environment.

My method for this is really simple. 

• writing out my thoughts
• Noticing the emotions; pausing my writing to feel them
• Listing the questions that come up
• Underlining and aggressively circling  the big takeaways (these usually come at the end)

I write whatever I’m thinking, name the emotions that are coming up, and scribble down questions that I’ve been pondering, or questions that I need to be aware of.

It’s an opportunity for me to create clarity. To allow my mind to “catch up” with life.

This is the time that I get to sit and reflect and ask myself questions. It’s not important whether or not I have the answers – sometimes they aren’t answerable anyways. Important thing is that I am asking the questions and letting the universe know that I’m thinking about them.

I’d go so far as to say I get more out of asking questions than I do coming up with answers.

When the thoughts that come up, bring up difficult emotions – doubt, fear, insecurity – instead of following those thoughts that often lead into rumination, or telling myself a story about the future that doesn’t exist, I pause writing, set down my pen, close my eyes, and focus on the emotion that’s coming up in my body. 

Feel the emotion as if that were the solution, instead of having to do anything else, and that allows me to move through the intensity of it. The problem doesn’t go away entirely, but the the emotional baggage that accompanied it fades, and I can then move back other thoughts.

This last part, noticing and processing in the emotions as they come up – has been truly transformative to my life over the last couple of years. It’s a skill that I had to develop from scratch. When I was younger, my default was to outwork the feelings and to change the external circumstances that caused them. Now, 

I’ve given up the illusion that I can control everything, and the solution is instead to change my internal response to the external situation, rather than change the external.

For most of the guys that I talk with about mental or emotional well-being, inevitably part of our conversation, steers back to this concept. For man, it’s often very difficult to do this. But the results it brings are life-changing.

I’m curious – does this make sense to you?

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• What if I prioritized myself instead of my business?

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