Introducing your Story of My Life Journal

We’re excited to finally introduce to the world your Story of My Life Journal, but like any new introduction, we’re sure you have questions.

So, what should you expect from the world’s newest goalsetting and mindset journal and planner?

Let’s dive in.

The nuts and bolts

Let’s start with the simple stuff – what will you physically receive, open, and use every day for the next year?

Your Story of My Life Journal is a personal development, wellbeing, and goalsetting daily journaling system.

It has been developed using authentic psychotherapeutic tools and strategies, with almost 600 full-colour pages that include pre-work exercises, and daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual check-ins.

The ‘why’ behind the ‘what’

Your Story of My Life Journal is a daily goalsetting and mindset journal and planner, but it also comes packed with a stack of information in the pre-work section.

That’s because we’re firm believers in the idea that knowing the ‘why’ behind something is the biggest motivational driver for our commitment to that thing.

In this case, that ‘thing’ is you and the ways in which you view and act in the world. The ‘why’ is the mechanism that underpins that viewing and acting.

So, your Story of My Life Journal provides you with the tools, but it also provides you with understanding – not just of HOW to use those tools, but WHAT they help you achieve, and WHY you might want to use them.

You are also provided with a comprehensive list of references at the back of the journal, and the sources are also noted where appropriate for each tool, so you can feel confident in the system you’re using.

The ‘what’ (and what it’s not)

Your Story of My Life Journal is designed to support you in living a life of meaning and purpose, and it does so with authentic psychotherapeutic strategies and tools.

It’s important, though, to set expectations about what your Story of My Life Journal is not.

Some journals set out with the mission of improving your happiness or productivity or use new-age-sounding concepts that promise to deliver enlightenment by reuniting your chi with the universe – or some sort of thing.

Your Story of My Life Journal is not one of those journals.

That’s not to say those journals are inferior – everyone is unique and is searching for their own unique answer.

The difference is in the goal and the approach.

Your Story of My Life Journal does not set out to make you happy, or improve your productivity at work, or find balance in the universe.

It supports you in digging deep into your psyche to understand and influence the foundations that underpin those aspects of your life – it addresses the cause, not the symptoms, so to speak.

It employs the concepts of Narrative Psychology – hence the name ‘Story of My Life Journal’ – and is designed to help you discover what is meaningful to you, what you truly want out of life, and then helps map out a plan to achieve that.

That process certainly creates the conditions that facilitate happiness and inspire you to become more productive by using your time more efficiently, as you work towards goals you actually care about, but those could almost be considered happy side-effects of your pursuit of meaning and purpose.

The power of handwriting

So, why a physical journal?

It would have been FAR cheaper for us to make an app, but we’re genuine about our desire to support you, so it needed to be a physical book.

As you’ll discover in your Story of My Life Journal, we prefer to let the experts do the talking when it comes to matters of science and fact.

So, the following is an excerpt from the Forbe’s article, “Neuroscience explains why you need to write down your goals if you actually want to achieve them”.

Writing things down happens on two levels:

External storage: you’re storing the information in a location that is very easy to access and review at any time. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to know you will remember something much better if you’re staring at a visual cue every single day.

Encoding: the biological process by which the things we perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus, where they’re analyzed. From there, decisions are made about what gets stored in our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you write it down it has a much greater chance of being remembered. Neuropsychologists have identified the “generation effect”, which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve merely read.

One important note about your Story of My Life Journal

Your Story of My Life Journal employs an extensive array of psychotherapeutic strategies, tools, and concepts, but we are not psychologists.

The psycho-physiological benefits of values-aligned goalsetting are well documented and can have a profoundly positive impact on your mental wellbeing, which is why it is often used in approaches such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to treat anxiety and depression.

However, this journal is not a treatment for clinical conditions.

If you are experiencing challenges in your life that you feel are beyond your control, please consult a doctor or the most appropriate health care practitioner. We’ve listed a few numbers at the bottom of our FAQ page.