Good Life Project - Katie Dalebout: Why Journal?

Episode Date: April 15, 2016

Today's Guest Riff is brought to you by Katie Dalebout.She’s the author of the book Let It Out: A Journey Through Journaling.Katie helps people develop a positive image of their bodies by embracing their creativity and personality outside of their physicality. She’s on a mission to share journaling tools that invoke deeper authenticity and self-awareness.And, today's short and sweet GLP Riff is all about, you guessed it, journaling, what it is, what it isn't, what it does for you, why you should never edit when journaling and she even offers some tips and prompts to get you started. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's Good Life Project riff is a guest riff featuring a friend Katie Dale about who's the author of a book called Let It Out, A Journey Through Journaling. And not surprisingly, this riff is all about journaling and how it can be a really powerful tool that is accessible to pretty much anything to help you process, to help you be creative, to help you do a lot of really cool things in your life. Turning it over to Katie for a conversation about journaling and life. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. So basically a couple years ago, I was really in this unhappy place with my body and healing my eating disorder and feeling really uncomfortable all the time. And I wandered into a bookstore and I had a gift card and I saw across the way this really beautiful journal. Nobody told me to start journaling. Nobody told

me that it would be helpful. I just gravitated towards it. I walked over to it and I picked it up off the shelf and took it to the park and just started writing. And I remember it had different colored pages. So the first few pages were yellow and then orange and then blue. And I remember I thought to myself, by the time I get to the blue pages, I'll be writing all really positive, happy things about myself and I'll be feeling completely different. But right now I'm going to just be real and authentic and let everything about how I'm feeling out of my head onto the page and just sort through it then. And I did that and it felt so cathartic to get it out of my mind and see it all in front of me on the page. And by the time I got to the blue pages, there were still negative thoughts that I had, but I felt better just because I was processing them and because I was writing

them and I would still go to the park and do that journaling every single day. And back then I thought everyone else could be themselves, but I had to hide or change because I wasn't smart enough or cool enough or pretty enough. And the big one for me was that my body wasn't enough. I thought that if I could just manipulate my body to become thin enough, then I'd be accepted and loved and I could be my real self. Eventually, I learned that I can be authentic and real regardless of body size and that people don't actually care what you weigh or how you look as much as they care that you're being real with them. But the thing was, I had no clue what real for me actually was. I had no clue who I was. I'd been hiding behind who I thought I should be, and I had all these mean voices in my mind telling me I wasn't good enough

that I had to sort through. So eventually, I discovered journaling. It was a way for me to figure out who I was beyond my obsession with dieting and health and weight. Journaling gave me the self-awareness I needed to find my worth outside of my physical appearance, my career, or even my relationships and get to the core of who I was as a person. Back then, I was healing my eating disorder, so I was surrounded by the support of coaches, therapists, and mentors, but what I really needed was to become my own mentor. Journaling has become my free therapy and my security blanket in all my crucial moments. Writing became something I could turn to to process my life. I found that writing for just a few minutes a day allowed me to sort through all my emotions and skim the pond off the top of my monkey mind so I could get to all the clear thought forms underneath all the negative ones.

I still have bad body image moments all the time, but the difference now is that I don't allow them to turn into bad body image days or weeks. I can soothe myself by journaling to sort out what the funky feeling underneath my deep insecurity is. My journal has become my GPS system to bring me back to sanity. As one of my favorite authors, Dani Shapiro, said on her episode of Good Life Project, I too don't know how I'm feeling unless I'm writing. It's a way that I process the world. What I realized is that you don't need to be a professional writer to get the mental benefits of writing. You can simply buy a journal and write. After journaling helped me so much and I raved about it to anyone who would listen I got a lot of resistance from people saying that they

wouldn't have anything to say or that they weren't good writers. But the thing is that you don't need to be. I'm not either. I realized journaling didn't have to feel like you're writing a five-paragraph essay for English class. It just feels cathartic when you're vulnerably unloading on a very nonjudgmental close friend. This type of writing is innate to us as humans. It's simply writing as we speak. If you can send a text or you can write an email, you can journal. Some people still weren't convinced they could do it, and they needed even more hand-holding,

so I wrote a book that guides people through it exercise by exercise. But anyone can get started with journaling right now just by asking yourself a question and allowing your intuition to respond on the page. If you ask yourself a good question, you'll get a good answer from your intuition. But if you ask a negative question, your brain will find negative evidence to support that. For instance, if you ask yourself, why is everything falling apart? Your mind will come up with evidence to support that. But if you rephrase your question to focus on the good and ask something like, how can I make this situation better? Your intuition will help you see ways you can improve from right where you are.

Journaling can be so therapeutic if you let it. I invite everyone listening to this to try journaling ASAP. Journaling can be as simple as letting your pen flow on the page, being raw and honest and vulnerable with yourself. The nice thing about journaling is that it's completely for you. Even with a therapist or a close friend, you might filter just a little bit for fear of judgment. But when you're writing for yourself, you have the freedom to express whatever you've been hiding in your mind. Being open and vulnerable with yourself can be a practice for allowing you to open up more deeply with other people, too. If you're apprehensive to start journaling or you're a professional writer, journaling is really for everyone. There's no way to do it wrong except not doing it at all.

As long as you're writing for yourself and no one else, you're journaling. It can be done on your phone while you're walking down the street by voice journaling. It can be done on your computer or in your favorite notebook. Just be sure to be authentic and that you're writing for yourself and no one else. I found when I was writing in a beautiful journal that someone gave me as a gift, I started to feel this pressure that my words needed to be as beautiful as the beautiful journal I was writing in. That's when I decided to always keep a couple legal pads on hand. Because in the cheap legal pad, I could write down my deepest insecurities, my fears,

my embarrassing thoughts. I could cross off and not feel like I was defacing something so beautiful. When I was able to do that, I was able to let out my shame and my guilt out of my head onto the page. So I was able to sort through all the negative beliefs I'd been carrying, many of them about my body, and decide which ones were true and which ones were lingering old beliefs I'd picked up that were just holding me back from living my life to the full potential. Since these had such positive benefits for me, I just want to make sure that everyone listening to this really does try journaling ASAP. Here are a few tips from my book to get everybody started. Tip number one, get curious. Approach journaling like it's a scavenger hunt for your mind, one that will lead

you to your innermost feelings. The journey ahead will be thrilling, but it's also new territory, so be gentle with yourself. Slight curiosity is all you need to get going. Get inquisitive and don't rush the process. It's not about where you end up, although I'm sure that's incredible. It's much more about what you discover along the way. Savor every feeling, every emotion that comes through. What you will find will be different every day. Tip number two, dance with resistance. Resistance is inevitable. It'll arise when you're journaling because you'll be starting to feel emotions that you don't want to feel. We often numb those feelings with anything from food to TV, even by consuming self-help or spirituality as entertainment, which I used to do. By learning to look at your discomfort is the only way to truly change. Next tip, don't edit. We're taught

in English classes to analyze our words and sentence structure, not to mention punctuation, spelling, grammar. However, none of this matters here. The best part of journaling is that you can let all of your grammar and language skills out the window and freely write as you speak, rather than how you'd write for someone else who's reading. It's liberating, but can feel scary and odd at first. If you're used to constantly editing your sentences as you write them, even when you're writing an email or a text message, you'll learn to stop filtering yourself and allow the words to just flow. You can always go back later and edit if you want, but just let the thoughts come out as soon as they come out. Last tip, just keep going.

When you're doing things that are new and uncomfortable, it's inevitable that you'll feel like you're pretending. At least I always do. When I started teaching yoga, I felt like I wasn't actually a yoga teacher, but I was just pretending, mimicking my own teachers. But as Kurt Vonnegut says in Mother Night, we are what we pretend to be. So be careful what you pretend to be. Basically what he's saying is fake it till you make it.

You might feel like fraud. Don't let that stop you. Everyone feels like they're pretending when they start a new routine. When you haven't done something before or you haven't done it consistently, it's not as ingrained. This new way of expressing your feelings fully as a writer is uncomfortable. You may feel like a ball of emotion when you begin the process. Perhaps you rarely ever allow yourself to feel uncomfortable emotions. And feeling uncomfortable is when most people quit. So when you reach this point, you must ask yourself,

do you want to feel the full spectrum of emotions or do you want to numb out? Journaling is a practice that puts the mirror in your face and shows you what going to a deeper level can bring you. Allow yourself to examine your feelings authentically as they flow out of you. Obviously, simply writing gave me so much clarity and self-awareness. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, and now I basically am. Writing gave my life meaning. Every experience could become art, even if it was just for me and my journal. But sometimes I would notice a gem or two within all the muck on the page.

And that becomes worth sharing. But if I hadn't let it all out on the page, I would never have noticed the good stuff. This is Katie Delbaugh signing off for Good Life Project. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real, unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to, I'd be so grateful if you would take take a few seconds and jam over there. And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just

be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.