hello everyone and welcome back to the keep productive youtube channel it is francesco here
today is going to be a different video because i'm passing over to ali abdal and also sam the
stoic teacher to dive into a lesson from their course their brand new course the stoicism master
class this course is available through skillshare and these guys have been fantastic in sharing a
lesson with us all about journaling now inside of the course which is available below where you get
two months free it dives into the area of stoicism and how the ancient emperors were able to embrace
all of the difficulties in their life using these philosophies they share some fantastic
workbooks and resources throughout and cover topics ranging from wealth all the way to anger
and criticism and much more this lesson is about journaling and how to effectively embrace it so
i'll pass over to these guys alright so the final kind of concrete practical technique in stoicism
is the idea of journaling absolutely writing 2 000 years ago seneca one of our three key authors
he wrote about what he does when his wife's gone to sleep and it's now dark he sits down and he
examines his entire day when was i a bit too harsh when did i do well so that the following day
he can reflect upon this in the morning and then have a wonderful day and actually 2000 years later
there's a plethora of journals on the market plethora yes big word there
so many of these uh journals around bullet journals and actually it's a really
really powerful tool simple yet powerful when i first found myself doing it i remember uh
realizing that i'd been unnecessarily angry whilst driving you know how dare that person cut me up
and getting it down on a piece of paper like i said about one of the earlier techniques getting
it down on a piece of paper and looking at it you honestly think to yourself what was i thinking
and it allows you to just plan properly for the day ahead absolutely um and there's like so many
like basically the whole modern day productivity guru has taken over this idea of journaling and
applied it to so many different spheres there's a few a few a few different techniques that i kind
of dabble with from time to time um the one that i do most days is called morning pages
and the idea behind morning pages is that at the start of the day you take a notebook
and you just write three pages by hand of whatever comes to mind and you're not allowed to get up
until you've written three pages and for example one way of starting that off is to say today is
going to be an awesome day because dot dot and that's like a good prompt to get you started
and it kind of primes you into being in a kind of gratitude and generally optimistic kind of
kind of mood it's just like really nice and it's it's kind of hard to describe how useful it is
until you actually do it so that's one technique another one is as our friend seneca has talked
about kind of doing a journal at the end of the day and so if i look on my notion i actually have
a journaling template for this that we'll include down in the project section below nice it's under
my life operating system while you're loading that can i just say how amazing it is to see
that stoic ideas are now on our macbooks on notion i mean honestly two thousand years ago these guys
uh gave us the answers all right so on my notion life os thing i have this uh i have
a weekly review template and a daily journal template i'll show you the daily journal one
this is based on my friend valentin perez's thing and we have a a deep dive live stream
on my youtube channel that you can check out uh that has more about why this is the way that it
is and so we kind of have a morning and an evening journal so on the morning we have what did i dream
because you know i'm trying to remember my dreams three things i'm grateful for
looking forward to what under my control would make today even more great you know cheeky bit
of dichotomy of control right there very nice idea for experiment to run it's a bit weird um
uh if i lived even more consciously freely freely and courageously i would do dot dot i am you know
this is where you can put some affirmations if you want and the most important thing to focus
on you know it's important to have this idea of a daily highlight and then at night we've got three
wins one two three one thing that i learned is it a breakthrough idea uh more on that in the other
video here's a good one one thing i could have done to make today better and how can i apply
it tomorrow something i could have said better for example and that's that thing if you said you know
kind of reflecting on your day and figuring out you know what were the moments where i maybe could
have acted in a slightly different way not in like a self-critical way but mourinho oh you know you
know being kind to yourself and recognizing that you can always do something differently the next
time am i resisting something if everything of my day short story of a moment today quite
like that experiment slash hypothesis from today what could i do tomorrow that is high leverage
and request for the subconscious mind to sleep on i don't do this every day but you know there was
a time during lockdown where i i was doing this like actually consistently every single day and
i really found that it helped one of my friends matt tyrella a fellow youtuber you might have
might have seen his videos he has a video called um i journaled for 30 days or something like that
and over the course of the year last year he did like a load of these 30-day experiments and at
the end of the year on his roundup he said that journaling was one of the ones that stuck the most
for him and even though he doesn't do it every day he finds that when he gets to a point where his
tranquility is disturbed you know classic stoic idea he then finds that doing his journaling and
he uses just a physical journal really helps with that this is the self journal which i've been kind
of dabbling around with it's got like a guided stuff and in the daily journal it talks about okay
you know in the morning it says this morning i'm grateful for and it gives you space for one two
and three and then at night you write down lessons that you've learned wins for the day and tonight
i'm grateful for one two three and then at the end of the week you do the weekly journal which says
what is the happiest event that happened this week what were my three big wins for the week
um you know reviewing goals assessing progress what's the biggest lesson that i learned and so
you know all of these kind of modern day productivity tools
it's all based on this like 2 000 year old concept of journal language the stoics i guess pioneered
and this is why we say stoicism is sticky because journals will come and go
but these timeless techniques will be there as the kind of inner they call it pierre hedo calls
it the inner citadel the inner fortress that helps you uh to move forward and live happily
and healthily so that was the fifth principle of statism that is journaling thank you for watching
and we'll see you in the next section of the class where we're going to talk about how we
actually practically apply these theories into different contexts that we'll find
ourselves facing in everyday life so thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video
you