Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker

I have always enjoyed writing and would occasionally write down how I was feeling and what I was thinking, but I hadn’t regularly journaled.

Given everything I’d been going through and the changes I’d been making in my life I thought it would be good to journal to have a qualitative account of how I was doing to go along with the quantitative journaling I was doing through all of my vitals, exercise and nutrients I’d been doing.

Getting started

The first entry that morphed into my daily process was about coaching and the benefit I gained from it that I learned by hearing a story about my dad. He said he tried to learn something from the kids each day.

From that short post, I started writing a reflection on most days, then for about a month I wrote an entry per day, open ended. Realizing I wanted to do more, I purchased a subscription for the DayOne app. 

It has templates which can be modified. Today I have three short daily templates along with a week end and month end retrospect templates.

The templates provide comparison and focus. Three sounds like a lot, but they are to the point. One asks what three things I’m grateful for, what three things were good yesterday, and what I’m going to do today to spread kindness. For the last one it is usually the same everyday, but writing it down puts me in that frame of mind at the start of the day and it is simple. I will smile. I will say Hi. I will be polite. And I will be positive.

One is for my daily goals. These are simple and accomplishable for that day. I look at three areas in my life and sometimes there is something for each, but more often there are two or three things across the three areas.

In doing this I know I’ve done something toward my bigger life goals. This is incremental, continuous improvement.

The third template is one I add throughout the day. I ask myself if I had dreamed and if so did I remember it. Why? Mostly curiosity. I’ve recognized the importance and value of sleep. I track each night how much I got and how much of it was deep sleep. This is one more way of better understanding my sleep patterns.

I also ask what happened. Here is where I try to jot down the little things that made me smile, made me think, wish I would have done better or differently. They are observations and insights.

At the end of the day in a word or two I ask myself how I felt.

I’ve done this for six months on a daily basis. Very occasionally I don’t do all three, but I at least get one entry in. Emotionally and mentally this practice has been very positive.

It is easy to forget all the good things that happen in a day as we tend to over focus on what we didn’t get done. By setting goals and recording little victories you start to see even on so so days, you get a lot done.