117: How Journaling Can Help During Divorce

• Transcript

  (Unedited Transcript Below)

  [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. I am excited today to talk to you about journaling, which is something that I really haven't talked about, on this podcast. I definitely talk about thought work and how to capture what we're thinking and to question our [00:01:00] assumptions, question our unconscious thoughts, but I've never really talked about journaling.

  [00:01:05] And I had the chance a couple months ago to meet Amanda Stern, who is a big enthusiast of journaling. And we got to talking and I wanted to pick her brain for you all. So I invited her on the podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Amanda. Thank you, Meg. I am so, so delighted to be here today.

  [00:01:26] This is going to be a fun one. Let me introduce Amanda by reading her bio to you all. She has been journaling since she was an angsty teenager. Love that. She credits her practice in journaling to helping her thrive through a divorce she didn't see coming, discover her voice, and become the person she always wanted to be.

  [00:01:46] And now she empowers her clients and community to embrace journaling as a path to self discovery and personal transformation so they can own their worth, find success on their own terms, and write their way to a life they [00:02:00] love. So awesome! Tell us a little bit more, Amanda, about how you got so into journaling and why you love talking to people about it.

  [00:02:11] Yeah, absolutely. Like you said , I found journaling when I was an angsty teenager. I remember coming home from school one day, just really worked up with all of the big angsty teenage feelings. And none of my friends could come to the phone, and I didn't know what else to do with all of this.

  [00:02:30] all of these feelings. And so I grabbed a notebook and a mechanical pencil and I just started to write. And I can't tell you what I wrote, but I can tell you that I wrote for a really long time. And when I was done writing, I felt better. I felt lighter. And I thought, Ooh, there's something here. So I picked up my pen the next night and again, the next and the next.

  [00:02:53] And before I knew I had this really beautiful journaling practice that I used to [00:03:00] really not just offload my feelings and process what happened during the day and what I was thinking, but also to really witness and attest that I was here, that I was living this life and that there was a place here for me.

  [00:03:15] And the proof was in what I would document each night before bed. And I journaled that way for a really long time. And then I got married. And I had some kids, and it's really hard to spend 30 minutes at night journaling when you have all of the people, right? And I was busy, I was tired, and I honestly thought I would remember all of the wonderful, cute, and funny things my children did, because how could you forget those things?

  [00:03:43] But I did because I didn't journal enough and that is my one regret in life because not only did I miss out on documenting all of those things, I missed out on a whole lot of years of getting to know myself, who I was, what I wanted, what I needed. And I [00:04:00] should not have been surprised years later to find myself facing a divorce that I did not see coming and didn't want.

  [00:04:07] But there I was. And on that day when he came home and he said, I finally decided I'd be happier not being married to you. I knew I had a choice to make. I could allow myself to spiral into negativity or I could reach out and grab hold of people Every good thing I can find. And that is what I chose.

  [00:04:26] And it started with my journal and I picked up my pen and forced myself to write what I was grateful for. And Meg, I will tell you, it was really hard because I did not feel very grateful in that moment, but I came up with eight things and I thought, if I can be grateful for eight things on the hardest day of my life, I am going to be okay.

  [00:04:47] So I used my journal to really write my way. back to myself to discover who I was, how in the world I had gotten so off track, but then to also decide who I wanted [00:05:00] to be and make a plan for how to get there. And so journaling for me is not just a nice to do if I have some extra time, it is a critical daily activity that keeps me grounded, rooted in myself, and keeps me moving in the right direction.

  [00:05:17] Thank you for sharing that. And I think thank you also for just your honesty and vulnerability around. It's not something that you've done every single day of your life, right? It's a practice that you had, that you lost for a while, and then you, you turned back to. And I think that's always such a great example for all of us that there might be things in our life that we did at one point, then we stopped, and we don't have to beat ourselves up that we stopped.

  [00:05:46] We, we can just choose to start again. I also want to just emphasize what I'm hearing from you is you were doing this. journaling practice, not because somebody else told you, you should be doing this, but [00:06:00] because you actually felt relief as you did it. And I think that's so important that sometimes we focus too much on what experts or other folks outside of ourselves tell us that we should be doing to get through something in our life or to process something.

  [00:06:19] And in reality, we have to find the thing. That works for us and today we get to talk about whether journaling would work for someone.

  [00:06:28] I love that you pointed that out because so often I talk to folks and they're like, you know I feel like I should journal. It doesn't really work for me or I've tried it and I don't like it or The worst thing is I've tried it.

  [00:06:44] It doesn't work for me. So there must be something wrong with me That is the worst thing and I hear it all the time. And it's often when I probe and we kind of look at it a little bit, it's just a mismatch between where we [00:07:00] want to go, what we want our journaling to do for us, and how we're getting there.

  [00:07:04] It's kind of like taking a road trip. If we get in the car and we think yeah, I'm going to take a trip. And without defining it, just kind of like have this vague idea that we're going to go to Miami, right? And we just start driving without be really thinking about where we're going. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in San Diego.

  [00:07:27] Now, San Diego can be a beautiful place, but if we wanted to go to Miami. We find ourselves totally off course. Just taking the time to really think about what we want our journaling to do for us, to define it, then find those strategies that'll help us make that happen is the best, easiest way I know to have a really sustainable journaling practice that feels authentic and true to who we are and helps us become the people we want to be.

  [00:07:58] Continuing on your [00:08:00] metaphor there, which I love, , if we got clear that, okay, we're going to Miami, but there's actually 100 different ways to get there. So, what might come to mind for me is, As the definition of journaling might be very different of what comes to mind for you of what journaling looks like.

  [00:08:17] Can you give us some examples of what, what is journaling? What different forms can it actually take?

  [00:08:24] Yeah. Oh, my gosh. The field of journaling is so wide. There's so much room for us to play and experiment. So there is stream of consciousness journaling. This is just where we sit down with our journal in front of us and write out whatever comes up, whatever's in our head, whatever's in our heart, whatever we need to get out of our bodies or out of our brains, we can just put them on the page.

  [00:08:49] I love doing some of this every day because it frees up space in my brain. My brain can do a whole lot of wonderful things, but it can't do everything at once. [00:09:00] And so when I'm trying to remember everything I have to do and all the things I have to be and, process the events of the day.

  [00:09:08] That's a whole lot of work for my brain. So if I can park some of that somewhere, I just have so much space to be able to think and to be. That is one way our journaling can look. Another way to journal is gratitude journaling. What I turn to the night my marriage ended in just It can be as simple as making a list of what we're grateful for, or we can go a little deeper and give ourselves some prompts to answer.

  [00:09:34] I love this particular sequence, which is what am I grateful for? Why am I grateful? And how can I show my gratitude? Because I find for me, that really deepens my practice because so often I talk to folks and they're like gratitude journaling doesn't really do it for me because they're like every day.

  [00:09:53] I feel like I'm, being thankful for the same things and it starts to lose its magic. [00:10:00] Unless we give ourselves an opportunity to really dig deeper and feel the weight of our gratitude, that's really when it's the most powerful. There are journal prompts for every possible situation you can imagine. I love sitting down with a specific question in mind, even if it's something simple like, how am I feeling?

  [00:10:20] Or, what do I need today? What is the most important thing for me to do today? Giving ourselves a direction and a mission for our journaling gives us a container to be able to collect our thoughts and be creative within that.

  [00:10:35] So those are three of my absolute favorite ways to journal, but there are so, so many more.

  [00:10:41] What comes to mind for me is when folks think about like learning how to meditate and the option of, well, you can sit down with a timer and just set a timer and be on your own and meditate, or you can use guided meditations, , that are really going to help you keep bringing your [00:11:00] attention back.

  [00:11:00] They're going to give you a focus and so forth. And there's just like a huge variation of them and you get to pick what you like. And that's awesome.

  [00:11:09] I love that you brought that up because meditation was always something that I had struggled with and for years thought I just couldn't do.

  [00:11:18] So I would say that journaling is my meditation. It was a way for me to get started. still to listen to what was inside to really tap into my intuition until I had a transformative experience with meditation. I also had a transformative experience about the same time with yoga, finding the style that worked for me.

  [00:11:37] But with meditation, I kept falling asleep. And I thought, oh, well, clearly I'm doing it wrong. And this is so embarrassing. I can't go to a meditation class and be that person who's snoring on her mat, even though no one else around me ever made me feel bad. And then I discovered sleep meditations. And I'm like, oh, well, this is what I'm doing.

  [00:11:57] Anyways, I might as well embrace [00:12:00] a way to do it that makes me feel successful. And journaling is exactly the same way. When we find ways to journal that feel good to us, that we want to do, that we clearly see the value in, that's where the magic really starts happening.

  [00:12:17] Yes. I just want to reiterate that like finding the style.

  [00:12:21] That works for you so important and that there's going to be some some trial and error to probably find that . I know I went through a phase where I did a lot of stream of consciousness journaling to the point where I would have myself right. And this is a practice that I was made kind of popular by the artists way, Julia Cameron, and, handwriting writing three pages.

  [00:12:48] every morning. And sometimes I would have nothing in my brain and so I would literally write, I have nothing in my brain, I have nothing in my brain, I have nothing in my brain, until something else popped in and then [00:13:00] I would write about that. And That definitely felt like that was a muscle that I had to build.

  [00:13:08] And I also felt so much clearer afterwards. Now, just to share a little bit about what my journaling practice is these days, I do a lot of tracking. So I'm tracking what day of the month it is, what day of my cycle, I'm on, how I'm feeling if I've exercised, if I've done some, some different things that I have goals around, and and then three wins for the day.

  [00:13:41] So literally like three sentences that I'm writing about what I want to celebrate for the day or what I consider a win. And I've been doing that, form of journaling now for probably about six months and it's really working for me.

  [00:13:58] That is so [00:14:00] beautiful. I love how you really thought through what you needed and tailored your journaling to that.

  [00:14:06] And that is what I advocate for everybody. And What I love to be able to share with folks too is that our journaling doesn't have to look the same every day. My journaling does not look the same every day. I like to think of my practice kind of as an accordion that can be very large and expansive or it can be very small just depending on what I need.

  [00:14:27] I sit down in the morning and usually the first thing I do is open my journal and do some stream of consciousness journaling. Sometimes I write a little. Sometimes I write a lot. I never give myself a quota. Sometimes I write the date and then I sit there for 20 minutes before I move on. And sometimes all I do is write the date, but I count it just as much as I do the days when I write pages and pages. Then I have a practice that's very similar to yours. This is my one pager I'm showing you here. So it's a [00:15:00] place for me. To gather information, to track, to plan, so I have my schedule for the day, a short to do list a place to write who I need to get in touch with, my habit tracker.

  [00:15:12] I always start with the date, and I write the day of the week, the month, the date, and the year, because if I don't do that, I'm not grounded in space and time these days. I write my word of the year, It used to be I would select one and then put it in a safe place and tuck it away and forget I had one until I went to select my word for the next year.

  [00:15:35] So I have realized that if there are things that are important for me to remember, if I write them out every day, that is my reminder. So I write my theme for the year. I write my Ikigai verse. which is my personal purpose statement that I created for myself. I write that by hand every day. And my new moon intention, I track the weather and the phase of the moon because , I've seen [00:16:00] a lot of patterns with my mood and just different things happening in my life.

  [00:16:05] So I usually jot those down. And then I give myself some journal prompts that serve to really help me start my day with intention, because I tend to be a morning journaler. Some days I do all of this, some days I do part of it. I love that I get to choose, that I'm the boss of my journal. And then I have a self coaching with tarot cards, practice that I love to do.

  [00:16:30] And I do that as part of my morning journaling block as well. And again, some days I lean heavily into one thing, some days another. I love that there's no right way to do this. And there's no wrong way to do this, that it's an opportunity for me to sit with myself and really think, what do I need today?

  [00:16:49] And then give myself exactly that.

  [00:16:52] I want to just emphasize that you have this beautiful structure, like almost this beautiful set of options [00:17:00] that you, can use and you just meet yourself where you are every day and we just drop judgment around it. There's a level of self trust that I'm going to show up and I'm going to do what I need to do today.

  [00:17:14] And I trust myself to do that. And I just so appreciate that.

  [00:17:19] And I will say, I journal every day because I need to journal every day. I do not believe that everybody needs to journal every day. And every time I talk with folks and they hear what my practice looks like, you know, I always see their eyes pop wide open.

  [00:17:34] And I was like, no, no, no, no. Like, you don't have to do this. I never make people journal. And I hope that Everyone listening will feel curious about journaling and feel curious about how it can help them. But know that whatever works for you, works for you, and that is the right way. There are people I know who journal [00:18:00] every day, like myself, and it's beautiful, it's exactly what we need.

  [00:18:03] I have friends who journal every weekday. I have friends who journal every Thursday night with me when they show up to my journaling group. I have people who journal just on the new moon and the full moon. So whatever consistent looks like to you, you get to define it.

  [00:18:21] You're in charge of this practice and make it a tool that really helps you. And to do that, we have to suspend the judgment. We have to get rid of censoring ourselves. We have to be willing to be honest.

  [00:18:39] I always tell folks that I work with that I need three things from them. I need them to be open. To be brave and to be kind and actually I don't need it from them. They need it from them but that is what I ask everybody because We never know what we're going to find on the other side of our pen Sometimes we think we know and there are a [00:19:00] whole lot of days I look at what i've written and my jaw drops because I had no idea it was there there.

  [00:19:05] So be really open to what you find. Be brave because sometimes it doesn't feel good. Let me tell you, journaling through my divorce about how in the world I had numbed myself so much I didn't see it coming, that was not easy stuff to write about, but it was very important. And when I was brave enough to take a look, to really put some, put some air around what happened, to bring it to the forefront.

  [00:19:34] It gave me enough space. I always say there's just enough space between my brain and the page to get the perspective I need. That that's so, so important. Yeah, we can unearth scary things, but then we need to trust ourselves that we're brave enough and smart enough and resourceful enough to move forward and figure out what to do with them.

  [00:19:55] And then be really kind because this is hard work. Any kind of inner [00:20:00] work is work for a reason. When we are kind to ourselves, it just makes the process so much easier. That includes not judging ourselves for what we write or how we write it, including our spelling, our grammar, our handwriting, how straight our margins are, any of that.

  [00:20:19] That also includes if we miss a day, right? It's today's Friday and I didn't journal today. Oh, no. Well, I could beat myself up for it or I could just jump right back in at the soonest interval, and instead of apologizing for how long it's been to realize that it's not confession, I don't have to start my journal with, well, it's been six weeks and four days since the last time I journaled.

  [00:20:44] My journal doesn't know. My journal doesn't care, and that only starts my journaling from a place of shame, which doesn't make me very enthusiastic about journaling, but when I can just jump right back in and give myself that grace, then [00:21:00] that practice and all the benefits that it brings is available to me.

  [00:21:04] I just want to circle back to that word about being brave. Because that really lands for me, and especially as you were talking about journaling during divorce, and so many of my listeners are either thinking about divorce in the middle of it, or, are past it, but it's still in their lives in some way, that sometimes there is a fear of of seeing it all on the page.

  [00:21:31] Like what, is going to come out? And there's a great quote from John Acuff, who is a writer who I just love. He said, paper shrinks fear. Isn't that good? Paper shrinks fear. So good. What I like to remind folks, because I will often have them write down what's going on, especially if you can't sleep at night, .

  [00:21:54] And your mind is spinning about some future conversation that you might. [00:22:00] have with your co parent or some hypothetical scenario that might happen in the future. I'm like, write it down. Let the paper hold it for you. Because we are worrying about something, or if we are digesting something, our mind will have the tendency to want to keep bringing it up so that we don't forget that thing.

  [00:22:21] Oh, remember how he did X, Y, and Z, or remember when she did X, Y, and Z. And so we keep thinking about it versus writing it down, putting it down on paper and being like, okay, the paper is going to hold it. I don't have to think about this anymore. If it's something that I want to discuss with my coach or my therapist or my lawyer, it's down on paper.

  [00:22:45] I won't forget. I'll make sure I talk to them about it, but it allows our brain to just be at ease. Like, all right, All right, we've noted it. It's it's official. It's on a piece of paper Now I can just rest.

  [00:22:59] Yeah, [00:23:00] and when I think of all of the emotional energy I have spent over the years replaying conversations or imagining conversations that i'm going to have with somebody playing both sides thinking I'm doing myself a service because then I'll be prepared for whatever happens.

  [00:23:18] And really, no, I'm just tiring myself out before I, before it even happens, because it might not even happen. I'm just catastrophizing in my brain. And somehow, catastrophizing doesn't, it doesn't happen the same way on paper. It just doesn't. And I think some of it is because we're getting the stuff out of our brain.

  [00:23:43] I love that quote you shared, because things always seem bigger and scarier and tougher when they're in my head. Once I put them on the page. Then I'm like, oh, this is what I'm dealing with, now I can make a plan. We can't make a plan for those [00:24:00] imaginary monsters in our head until we know what kind of monsters they are.

  [00:24:05] You know, do they need light? What makes them go away? We need to be able to see what we're dealing

  [00:24:11] with. When we do write this kind of stuff down, , say we are doing a little stream of consciousness, here's everything I'm thinking about my ex, or here's everything I'm thinking about how the divorce is going, or what they're going to ask for, and we put it all down on paper, sometimes, like you're saying, , it tends not to be quite as catastrophic because we kind of do a reality check.

  [00:24:36] As we're writing it out, okay, he's going to ask for 100 percent custody. Well, is that like, does that, is that really going to happen? You know, we've, we've been good parents this whole way through. Is it really any chance that either one of us are going to get 100 percent custody? Hmm. I mean, You know, I can take it to my lawyer and ask the question, [00:25:00] but in the light of day, when I shed light on it, I'm like, well, probably not.

  [00:25:06] That's probably not going to happen. So, I think just putting it down on paper, really, it kind of forces our brain to be like, is this real? Is this true? How true is it?

  [00:25:20] Absolutely.

  [00:25:20] you have posted a lot about journaling and how, how it helped you get through your divorce. And co parenting and how, how your relationship with your divorce and that, that period of your life has evolved recently.

  [00:25:40] And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share the story that, that you shared on, on some of your posts about how, how you view your divorce now and What do you think the future is going to look like?

  [00:25:55] Yeah, so I've been divorced now for about nine years, just over [00:26:00] nine years. And again, this was a divorce that I didn't think I wanted, that I did not see coming because I was not paying attention.

  [00:26:08] And I worked so hard to make it an amicable divorce. Amicable divorce, because we had three children who at the time were twelve and ten and seven. I wanted things to be as smooth and calm for them as possible, to the point where I I allowed myself to be taken advantage of financially, emotionally, all the ways, in my attempt to just Make things super smooth.

  [00:26:38] Journaling for me was a way to express what I was feeling when I couldn't express it anywhere else. That it was my safe place to be able to comfort myself. Like this is happening now, but it's not going to be like this forever. Cause you know how we have these days where you're like, Oh, it's so overwhelming, it's [00:27:00] terrible, it's awful.

  [00:27:00] And it's always going to be that way. It's not. I have probably the same story of divorce that most people have, where I had difficulty with my co parent he did things I didn't like my kids would come home upset, I had to fix the problem And I would stew and stew and stew. Journaling was a way for me to stop stewing, to move forward.

  [00:27:24] And we had gotten to a pretty okay place. A place of understanding. I have the kids pretty much all the time. Now they're 21, 19, and 16. But even though we have joint custody, I've been the custodial parent this whole time. And I've had I've had them full time at least the last four years and we've gotten again to a very good place.

  [00:27:50] My kids and I have gorgeous relationships. My ex husband and I are amicable and civil and sometimes friendly. And then [00:28:00] last month, February he called me and he said, My mother is very sick. She's in the hospital. I don't know what it's going to look like. It would be really great if the kids could come see her today.

  [00:28:11] And I took that as, Well, people need to come up and say their goodbyes. It sounded that grave. And she was in critical care, and I can't just send my children, even at 21, 19, and 16, to the hospital for the first time to see their sick grandmother. So I went. I didn't really want to be there.

  [00:28:31] She was not ever the mother in law that I wanted her to be. I didn't on purpose talk to her for at least a decade. And I walked into her room with my youngest and her face lit up and she looks at me and she says, Oh, you came. I can't believe you came. And I was like, of course I came and I was feeling very responsible, right?

  [00:28:57] I am the mother. These are my children. This is [00:29:00] the responsible thing to do. But the next day I went back and I went back to meet with the oncologist to hear for myself what was happening. It was a meeting with my ex husband and his brother and my son. And I knew that people would have questions and I could answer them better.

  [00:29:19] If I could hear so it was very generously self serving for me to go up. But I soon realized I was needed that there was a reason for me to be in this meeting that I could see things differently because it wasn't my mother there that I could just ask questions no one else would have thought. And then I spent the rest of the day at the hospital.

  [00:29:42] I didn't plan to. But somehow in this, responsibility had turned into love. And after years and years 23 years now of just being disappointed that we never spoke the same language, we finally learned to. It was [00:30:00] hilarious because she introduced me to someone at the hospital as, this is my daughter in law, Amanda.

  [00:30:05] She used to be married to my son. Son, but now she's married to someone who makes her happy, which I absolutely loved. And so I spent almost every day for two and a half weeks with her at the hospital as part of her support team was there when she passed, and just found this whole experience so hard.

  [00:30:26] And so beautiful and so healing. And so out of this came better relation, a better relationship with her, of course, a better relationship with my ex husband who saw me show up for him in a way he never dreamed. And it modeled for my children that. Even when things are hard, you can show up. Even when there have been hurt feelings, you can still show up and still love and still care.

  [00:30:55] And even though the love I feel for my ex husband is so much different than the [00:31:00] love I felt for him when we got married, It's still there, and I will always show up, which shows them that I will always show up for them, and I can be counted on. But there's no way I could have made it through all of that without the support of my journal and showing up for myself and witnessing for myself the hard, brave things I was doing, not to pat myself on the back and, you know, make myself feel like I'm very wonderful and special, but also to pat myself on the back that I'm doing something hard and beautiful that I didn't think I could do.

  [00:31:36] I could not have done this a year ago. I probably wouldn't have done it a year ago, or if I had, I would not have done it with that same spirit of love. And that made all the difference.

  [00:31:48] Oh, thank you so much for sharing. That story, Amanda, even though I read it in your posts, I'm like still getting all weepy here because it's so beautiful and I think it's such [00:32:00] a amazing illustration of how Whatever our relationship looks like right now with our outlaws, that's what I like to call them, our outlaws, or our ex, or our co parent, it doesn't mean it has to stay that way forever.

  [00:32:19] And it doesn't necessarily mean that we need them to change in order for it to change, but that we can actually be the one, the catalyst that makes it change, as it feels good, I really appreciate you saying a year ago it wouldn't have been the same and I myself, I'm seven years out from my divorce and I've had realizations in the last couple years that, that, you know, would not have come much closer to when the divorce was.

  [00:32:50] I just wasn't ready. I wasn't healed enough. I hadn't created enough of a solid foundation for myself to have those new realizations come [00:33:00] about. And eventually they did. And one of my mentors, Karen Bonnell and I often will recommend her co parenting handbook to folks. That's one of my favorite books to recommend.

  [00:33:10] She has an analogy where when you get divorced, it's like two parents are traveling on the road that's south of Seattle, which is I 5. And when, when the road, when the highway comes up to Seattle, it actually hits two lakes and it splits. And so I 5 goes on the west side and 405 goes on the east side.

  [00:33:33] And so she describes it as like, that's where the parents go, right? And then there's two bridges across the the lakes. And that's where, you know, we're bringing our kids back and forth. They're going between the two roads, but we still got these two roads. And then eventually north. of the lakes, the roads come back together.

  [00:33:51] And that is always her hope and dream and my hope and dream that, that there's a way that it's [00:34:00] not necessarily going to be the same as it was way back when. It's not necessarily that you're going to be BFFs with your ex, but Will you be able to come together in these kind of important times and support each other and support the kids in a way that you feel really proud of and feels really good to you?

  [00:34:21] Like, that's the hope and dream. And I just really appreciate your generosity and sharing, sharing your story with us.

  [00:34:29] Yeah, no, thank you for allowing me to share that. And I, I think for me, the word allow is really important here. I felt like I allowed myself to show up vulnerably in this experience because she could have said, go away.

  [00:34:47] I don't want you here. I'm sick. I don't need you. Yeah. I'm so grateful that she allowed me to be there because I could not have showed up for her if she did not let me. I'm grateful [00:35:00] my ex husband allowed me to show up because he could have said, no, just bring the kids. I've got this. But to just give myself a whole lot of grace because life is hard and divorce is hard and humaning is hard and all of the things are hard.

  [00:35:16] So giving myself a whole lot of grace, which is where journaling comes in for me is, you know, those times when I'm beating myself up because I said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing or what I did wasn't enough. This is where I can reassure myself that, you know, I did my best and my best today might not have looked like my best was yesterday.

  [00:35:36] But it's okay. I'm just going to take care of myself a little bit better. I'll get a little more sleep. I'll move my body. I will, you know, eat foods that actually make me feel good so that I can show up in a better place. And I always say that I show up in my journal for myself every day because

  [00:35:57] even though every day of journaling does not provide [00:36:00] me with those aha moments, and not every day even necessarily is productive or feels good. Some days I just write about what I had for breakfast, just to keep myself in the practice. But by showing up every day, I'm showing the universe, this is where I am when you feel like you're ready to give me the answers I've been seeking.

  [00:36:20] Oh, that's juicy. I love that. I would love for you to tell folks about the free resource that you have on your website if folks want some support in getting started with journaling.

  [00:36:32] Yeah, so the best place to find me right now is on LinkedIn. I'm doing a big website overhaul, so I pulled it down.

  [00:36:39] So on LinkedIn, you can find me at Amanda Stern Journaling, and I have a free seven days of journal prompts delivered to you with all kinds of encouragement and support. It is seven days of my. favorite journal prompts. So if you are looking to start a journaling practice, shake [00:37:00] up your journaling practice, revive a journaling practice, this is a really great tool.

  [00:37:05] Again free on my LinkedIn featured section and it's delivered straight to your inbox. So you can do it over the course of seven days. You can do it over the course of the rest of your life if that's what you So

  [00:37:18] choose. Fabulous. So I will make sure to link to it in our show notes. So you all can find it and, and check it out.

  [00:37:26] I'm wondering, Amanda, to close, if you think of some folks that are going through their divorce right now, and want to give them a word of encouragement, or a tip, if you will. I wonder what you might share with them.

  [00:37:44] . I will give you the, the advice that somebody shared with me.

  [00:37:49] Cause when I was getting divorced, I needed to hear people tell me everything is going to be okay. And I would have people on standby. And when I would give them the nod, they would say, Amanda, everything's [00:38:00] going to be okay. And one day a Friend of mine at work said to me, he's like, I'm going to do you one better.

  [00:38:05] Not only is everything going to be okay, but you are okay right now. Even if you don't feel it, one day you will. And I firmly believe it's true. And I've shared that with all of my friends who have gone through a divorce, through any kind of hard time. I remind myself every time I have a hard day that everything is going to be okay.

  [00:38:28] And I am okay now, even if I don't feel like it yet, because I will.

  [00:38:34] Thank you. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing all your knowledge and your personal stories. I really, really appreciate you taking the time to talk to my wonderful audience here. Yes, it's been a delight, Meg.

  [00:38:49] Thank you so much for having me. All right, y'all. That's what we have for this week, and we will see you next time. Take care.

Break out your mechanical pencils & unicorn journals! 🦄

It's time to see how journaling can be your secret weapon to navigate the emotional rollercoaster of divorce and co-parenting.

This isn't about perfect grammar or perfect prose that you'd be proud to show your kids in 10 years. This is about clearing your brain so there's space for what you value most.

Our guest this week, journaling pro Amanda Stern, shares an a-la-carte menu for journaling and gives pointers on where to start.

She also tells how her journaling practice transformed her relationship with her mother-in-outlaw (ex mother-in-law) at a crucial time.

Plus, we'll talk about how journaling can help you get better sleep—because who couldn't use a little extra shut-eye during stressful times?

So grab your favorite pen, a cozy spot, and let's learn how to let the page hold worries & stress so that you don't have to. Onward to more ease! 

Here's a link to Amanda's 7 Days of Journaling Challenge! 

Chat with Amanda on LinkedIn.