Techniques to power-up your business strategy

I killed another ghost last week.

I did it with a notebook and pen, and the deed was done in half an hour.

A business journal is one of the most powerful resources in your business toolkit:

• It tackles self-sabotage, procrastination, and ghosts
• It stops your business or career glooping into a splodge of “meh”
• It keeps you on track and accountable

You’re about to find out:

• Why your business needs a journal
• How to start your business journal from scratch
• What to focus on to give your business success-orientated boosts
• Powerful business-focused journaling techniques that you can start using right away.

1) The Dance of Strategy Inside Your Business Journal

Don’t be intimidated by the J word

A Business Journal is a place to gather your thoughts and prepare a plan of action

• Yes — Journal is another word for diary
• No — It’s not just for angsty teenagers, artists and writers
• Yes — It really is more than a diatribe of inner thoughts and ramblings

In my article, How to Think Like a Business Owner, you learned that business is a dance of strategy.

Today, you’ll see that by turning your journal into a dance partner, you don’t have to dance alone.

Your journal becomes your advisor, your therapist, your accountant, your designer, your shopping list, your receptionist, your memoir, and even a guardian of sorts.

Keeping a business journal gives you a roadmap:

• Visualize your dance: Identify your business vision and the journey ahead
• Lay out the steps: Map your goals, milestones and tactics
• Clear the floor: Get your motivation and abilities on-side
• Shake off your nerves: Discard limiting beliefs and attitudes that hold you back
• Dance: Get busy “businessing”

At some point, people will see you scribbling and ask, “How important is journaling?”

You’ll reply, my business journal is housekeeper to my brain, a comforting arm in the night and the general of my army.

2) Q&A: Setting Up Your Business Journal for Success

There’s a lot of information inside your head that impacts your business in good ways and bad.

Your journal helps you make sense of it and stay focused and on track to progress your business.

Do I have to be a writer in order to keep a business journal?

Writing is just a way to get your thoughts down. You don’t need to be a writer or have any special skills. You can write in shorthand, code or bullet-points.

Journaling is more about exploring your mind — so if you’re happy doing that, you’ll enjoy journaling.

What’s the main advantage of writing in my business journal?

Writing makes you slow down. It gives you access to your subconscious and you make connections that you’d normally miss. When you’re using it to analyse, reflect and think things through, the process of journaling becomes a meditation that has a certain strategic advantage.

You also build up a repository of ideas, milestones, hopes and visions to work on when the time is right.

What do I write on the first page of my first-ever business journal?

1. Today’s date
2. The name of your business and when you started
3. A description of what you do
4. An overview of who your customers are
5. Write about the hopes you have for your business
6. A bullet point list of achievements you’re happy about
7. A bullet point list of challenges and problems

If you’re not ready to stop, choose an appropriate technique from section 4 and use it to analyse one of the points you’ve identified.

Protip:

The blank page of a brand new business journal can be scary. If you feel like you can’t write, flip the page and start writing on the second page. Come back to the first page and fill it something when the time is right. Or just leave it blank as a symbol of overcoming problems.

How do I decide what to write about the next day? And the day after that?

There are four areas to cover daily.

The order does not matter. Neither does word-count. Sometimes you’ll have a couple of sentences, other times you’ll run into pages. Simply write until you feel you’re done.

The 4 areas to cover daily (the order does not matter):

• A review of outstanding work
• The good and bad things that happened in the day and the impact they had, or will have, on your business goals
• Issues and challenges that might be coming up
• Any worries — real, imaginary, business or personal

Protip:

When you journal issues, challenges and worries, it’s a good strategy to journal possible solutions too. It gets your brain used to thinking in a solutions-orientated way, keeps it flexible and protects against the shock factor

How do I keep my momentum going?

It’s a matter of training yourself to treat your business journal as an essential part of your life.

Your enthusiasm makes it easy in the beginning. Build on that by putting in some habits that’ll help you once the novelty’s worn off.

• Write during a natural break in your day — before bed or last thing before you leave your desk.
• Keep your business journal with you at all times so you have a place to pop your thoughts in as they arise
• Review your journal from time to time to remind yourself what you’ve been doing, the problems you’ve been facing and the journey you’re on
• Use material in your business journal as a basis for blogs and talks

3) Select Your Journaling Tools

When I started keeping a business journal, I thought accessing my subconscious should be a dignified and sacred act. I got myself kitted out like some kind of Ernest Hemingway: leatherbound notepad, quill pen, blotting paper. The works.

A week later, my notebook remained pristine. I was too scared to mark the pages with the dumbness of my thoughts.

I brought a 5 pack of A4 Black & Red notebooks, a 50 pack of Bic pens and haven’t stopped writing since.

Don’t choose tools that clip your wings. Choose something that makes you want to write (if you’re a leatherbound notepad kind of person, I might have one going spare.)

Paper or Digital?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter and you should choose whatever makes you want to write in your business journal. Here are some advantages of each:

• Paper and pen forces your brain to slow down so you can pull the thoughts out and mull on them
• Paper lets you flick back and forth to look at things you wrote previously
• The physical act of writing generates new connections, especially if you spend all day at your laptop
• A digital app or a google doc is always with you. Many work offline so wifi isn’t a dealbreaker
• A digital app lets you password protect your work

You can even carry a paper journal for the bulk of your work and use apps like Workflowy and Evernote as supplements in different situations.

Protips:

– If you’re including illustrations and design in your business journal, get a paper quality that supports your watercolors and inks. Alternatively, you could paste them in.

– Use a bound book because you’ll want to save your notes. Loose-leaf needs a filing system which adds an unnecessary step.

Privacy

Your business journal will be home to half-baked ideas, prototype drawings, stream of consciousness ramblings, lists and questions you’re trying to figure out the answers to.

Password protect your digital journal and keep your paper journal safe at work. Create an environment at home where privacy is respected.

Sometimes, you’ll write something that sounds awful to your own ears, let alone anyone else’s. There’s no need to tempt fate. Write down the edited essence of what you’ve said and use clever squiggles to block out the offending words.

It’s the essence of the message that’s important anyway.

4) Power Techniques to Journal for Business Success

While business journaling is a personal activity, it’s not a random one.

The techniques in this section help you journal in a business-orientated way to:

• Build trust in your leadership, vision, and ability
• Remember your perspective and purpose
• Plot milestones and goals
• Confront personal demons and regain your confidence and energy

The techniques move you away from self-sabotage, helping you design and build the business you want.

Writing with intention helps stop self-sabotage

Journal to Build Trust in Your Leadership, Vision, and Ability

Somehow it feels safer to trust the world outside of you, rather than the universe inside you.

But if someone offered you the opportunity to dump all your problems in exchange for taking on theirs, what would you do?

Yep, decline the offer and keep your own.

Here’s the thing.

You already have an implicit trust in yourself.

You might be rough around the edges, feel a little inept at times and be hating that procrastination kills your days.

But deep down, you know your current situation is of your own making, and, even though you have no idea how or when, you know you have an innate capability to pull yourself out.

Just as you are your own problem, you are also your own solution.

Your business journal’s going to let you get in touch with your innate capability and start building solutions.

The technique to build self-trust

Identify something that’s really prickling you. The prickling means your subconscious is supremely bugged and wants to work on a solution.

Here are some examples:

• Why am I so rubbish at getting followers?
• Why is everyone making more progress than me?
• No-one takes me seriously, I’m just a fraud.

Write your question at the top.

Now write what you want: use language that doesn’t blame others and be honest with what you want.

Example:

• Why am I so rubbish at getting followers? I wish I didn’t talk like I have a rod up my u-huh
• Why is everyone making more progress than me? I know I shouldn’t compare but for once I wish I could succeed in just one thing
• No-one takes me seriously, I’m just a fraud. How can I up my profile and come across better?

Then, just write.

Don’t worry if you start shaky, it’ll settle. Be aware that it can take several sessions for the answer to come. Sometimes new questions come up and you have to take a tangent.

Stop when:

1. You’re tired: start up again when you’re ready
2. You’re bored: you’ve probably got the answer or found that the question’s not important anymore
3. You’ve got clarity: jot down your next steps. Make them actionable in some way.

Journal to Remember your Perspective and Purpose

There’s so much star-spangled success out there that it’s easy to hitch up to someone else’s cart, even though they’re not going in your direction.

Example:

• Top influencers inspire you to concentrate on your social influence — even though they’re selling $2000 courses to a worldwide audience and you’re an independent boutique serving a local clientele
• The artisan baker making lots of dough in affiliate sales makes you spend weeks pumping your site with affiliate offers that don’t do much for your audience— what you don’t see is that she hired a marketing team to do that while she blogs and bakes
• Your direct competitor’s got in on the YouTube game so you feel you must too — even though you want to eke more family time into your day.

The way to beat this seduction is to take on the mindset of a window shopper.

Admire what’s around you. Look at their success the way you would look at something over-priced but gorgeous. Pick out the bits that would look nice in your home and see how you can introduce them.

The technique to remember your perspective and purpose

Every so often, write about what’s going on in your business through these filters:

1. Business perspective: What is this doing for your customers. Remind yourself who they are and what they want.
2. Business purpose: Where is this taking you and your business? Is it in line with your values and needs? You’re entwined with your business so where it goes, you go.

Ask yourself trigger questions to make sure window shopping isn’t tricking you into buying.

Example:

• You’re chasing followers: Why? Who are they? Why do you need them? What are they going to do for you? What will you do for them? Which demographic? Which platform? How will you fit it in? Is it a good return on your time? Are you doing it because people are saying you should? How will you create a social media strategy that fits your vision and resources?
• You’re chasing affiliate income: Can you get your reader base to respond to offers? What will you promote? Can you promote without losing credibility? What do you need to get started?
• You’re chasing a You-tube audience: Do you have the time to learn everything from the ground up? What are your success markers? Are you copying someone’s actions even though you don’t know what resources they have? What’s the opportunity cost of doing it yourself vs hiring someone to make videos that fit your brand?

Writing in your business journal involves analysis. You’re challenging yourself to think about the deeper reason, rather than chasing whatever glittery bauble floats by.

Journaling Milestones and Goals

If you don’t plot your journey, you won’t know when you’ve taken a wrong turn.

If you write your ideas, do-lists, visionary goals and notes on any old bit of paper that happens to be lying around, you already know about the it’s-here-somewhere syndrome.

Symptoms include:

• Spending hours hunting for that tagline you came up with. Did you write it down or put it in an app? Which app? Was it on this phone or the one that’s gone in for repair?
• Not knowing what to get on with first so you do a bit here, a bit there and hope for the best.
• Shrugging in resignation. Never mind, if it was that important, you’ll think of it again.

You want to get organized, but that’s a four-letter word and your mama told you not to swear.

The technique to journal milestones and goals

There’s no easy way to say this.

You’re going to have to pretend you’re a mega-successful entrepreneur who gets to keep his riches only if he submits his receipts to the accountant every night.

In your case, your receipts are all the ideas you’ve had during the day that you haven’t already written in your journal.

That’s it.

Once they’re in your journal, you timeline them. And check in to your progress regularly. Journal successes as well as difficulties.

Protips:

– Keep your goals and timeline at the back of your business journal to make them easy to find.

– Your business journal’s a living book so keep it with you to jot things down when the thought strikes. It’s okay to glue post-its etc in too.

Journaling your goals frees up your headspace. You gain mental clarity to make real progress because everything’s always there when you need it.

Journal to Confront Personal Ghosts and Regain Confidence and Energy

There’s a reason it’s easier to plow headlong into life when we’re young.

We haven’t had time to shackle ourselves down with limiting beliefs, made heavier by past failures.

But you know, so many insecurities and confidence issues get set when we’re young that we grow up thinking they’re part of our personality.

In reality, they’re alien entities placed on us by the events, circumstances, and people from our formative years.

They’re clinging to us but we can get them off.

Your business journal moves you towards business success by allowing your notebook to be your therapist in a way that stops the issue impacting your business activities.

The one thing to bear in mind is that if your issue is complex, or stems from trauma, you should work with an actual therapist initially.

The technique to journal your ghosts

Your ghosts don’t know they’re imaginary.

They arose due to a real “thing” and stayed because they thought they had to. Sometimes they stayed because you thought you had to let them.

Example:

15-year-old Emma gets “dumped” by her wealthy best friend, Mel. Emma’s shock is overwhelming because they’ve been friends since they were babies! She sees Mel hanging out with the other rich girls and blames the breakdown of the friendship to the wealth divide.

As the years go by, she subconsciously develops “them and us” thoughts about wealth as a way to protect herself from being rejected by money. Her friends, behaviors, and lifestyle reflect these thoughts.

When she starts her own business, she finds she has difficulty with charging a fair rate and spending on quality resources.

When you start writing about a ghost in your business journal, you don’t know what it is. You can only see the symptom: Trouble charging a fair rate and spending on quality resources.

This is what you do:

1. Write down the symptom and notice how it makes you feel
2. Get yourself into a calm frame of mind and think about when in your life you’ve had a similar feeling. The objective is to feel your body’s inventory of all the times it’s ever felt that feeling. You’re not filtering by events that caused the feeling, you’re filtering by the feeling and then noticing the event that goes with it.
3. Choose the earliest memory that comes to mind and get ready to write about it in whatever way feels appropriate
4. Before you start writing, generate an intention of “fixing” your sympton and then put this thought to one side while you write. Your subconscious has picked up on it.
5. Just start writing what comes into your mind. Don’y worry if you start shaky, you’ll soon settle into a flow.

Stop when you feel like stopping and know that it could take several sessions.

Sometimes your beautiful complex brain makes you stop because it feels that you’re making it give up a safety blanket. Othertimes, there’s an interconnection of events and you have to explore other feelings and timelines too.

In the above example, Emma (not her real name) was a client I worked with. She discovered that the friendship didn’t break down over a wealth divide. It was a values divide since the two girls were going different ways.

Through writing in her business journal, she understood Mel had always wanted to have a good time while Emma had more reserved and studious. The only problem was that neither girl knew how to talk to each other about it. Emma said the closure “gave me an emotional mending.” She started thinking about money without resentment and no longer had issues with pricing.

Your breakthrough will often give you an emotional release.

Journaling for business success will often help your thoughts and behaviors align with your business needs.

5) Five Mindsets for Business Journal Mastery

These mindsets help develop effective routines to log and chart your business journey. It’s the advice I wish I’d started with:

a) Make it a habit: Write often in your business journal and date each entry. Document everything from goals, achievements and aide memoirs through to blockages and dilemmas.

b) Be natural: Don’t worry about being neat and tidy. Don’t worry about your language or grammar or the structure of your sentences. Let your hand work at the speed of your brain. They’ll synchronize.

c) Identify patterns: Go through previous entries from time to time looking for patterns and ingrained habits. They’re often more visible on a page than in real-time and a way of discovering where you’re stuck and what you need to work on.

d) Whinge with purpose: Filling your business journal with woe-is-me writing keeps you stuck in the past. When you write about darker moments, have “how do I solve this?” in the back of your mind. Let your subconscious work on a solution while you’re having a whinge and more often than not, you’ll find your hand writes you into clarity.

e) Style isn’t important: Diagrams, sketches, color, and doodles are all fine if they represent something to you. Don’t journal in pretty calligraphy and draw cartoons just because you’ve seen someone on Instagram do it. You’re not writing for social likes and you can’t tap into yourself if you’re copying someone else.

You’re Not Just Keeping a Business Journal – You’re Writing Your Life’s Work

Turn to a fresh page and write today’s date.

Start with the name of your business. Add a tagline. And an elevator pitch.

You don’t have an elevator pitch?

Use the rest of that page to craft one. An elevator pitch isn’t just a marketing gimmick. It’ll remind you about your vision for your customers.

And as your vision changes, which it will over time, your pitch will change too.

Your journal is a living book that chronicles your business journey right from the point you’re at right now.

One day, you’ll touch the pages and feel the rush of all the hard work, tears, desperation and joys that were the dance steps of the incredible ballet that you call your business.

You’ll use your learnings to teach others. Pull out ideas for blog posts. Cringe with shame at how naive you used to be. Feel a surge of awe at how much you overcame.

You’ll look through the pages and see the life you built because you didn’t let self-sabotage, ghosts, and insecurities get in the way.

Start yours today!