Neuroscience of Coaching – Episode 21
Journaling for Rapid Self-Reflection and Business Growth (Kim Ades)
Kim Ades: I think sometimes people are a little bit intimidated, but they don’t realize that they’re writing all the time. They’re writing emails, they’re writing texts. They’re always already writing. You know, when we were little and we were going to school, one of the first things we learned to do is read and write. And so it’s a really, actually fundamental exercise. But people feel like it’s a big job. They ask themselves, or they ask me all the time, am I doing it right? It’s a journal. You can’t do it wrong.
Dr. Irena O’Brien: Hi, I’m Dr. Irena O’Brien, and you’re listening to Neuroscience of Coaching. I’m a cognitive neuroscientist with almost 30 years of study and practice in psychology and neuroscience. And as the founder of the Neuroscience School, I teach coaches and other wellness professionals real world, evidence-based strategies to use in their own practices.
In each episode, I invite a seasoned coach to discuss a topic that affects our field, and together, we provide you with science-based tools to help your clients reach their goals by working with their brains to create results that last. Do you want to achieve faster results in your coaching practice? I’m guessing your answer is yes, because almost all of us do. And one of the best ways to reach your goals faster is through journaling.
If you’ve been following this show for a while, you’ll remember that I talked about journaling in a previous episode with Kay Adams and Deborah Ross. That discussion focused on journaling as it relates to manifesting, and I encourage you to check it out. Even if you’re not interested in manifesting, it’ll give you more context behind today’s conversation. So journaling for the purposes of our episode today primarily involves two main neurological areas. First is the default mode network. This part of the brain is what we engage when we’re introspective, daydreaming and reminiscing. You can see how it plays into journaling.
Unfortunately, it’s also a large source of our constant mind chatter, which is too often negative. So we need to be careful not to let our introspection and mind wandering take a negative turn. Second is the salience network, which our brain uses to determine and prioritize goals. Obviously, you can’t get what you want more quickly if you don’t know what you want in the first place.
In short, the salience network serves as a filter for the vast amount of data our brains process each day through our senses, experiences, and thoughts. Achieving faster results is greatly tied to focus, and focus is greatly tied to your salience network. So that’s the fundamental neuroscience behind today’s episode. But of course, there’s much more to get into, so let’s bring my guest into the conversation.
Kim Ades is a serial entrepreneur who, after a decade running an assessment firm, sold her company and went into coaching. She soon discovered the prevailing coaching model was flawed, intuitively realizing that driven leaders need to understand the link between their thoughts and outcomes rather than simply being, quote unquote, held accountable. This led her to become known as a strong advocate for journal-based coaching over the past 20 years. As such, she’s the founder and CEO of The Journal That Talks Back, a coaching platform, and Journal Engine, an online journaling platform. She also runs her own executive coaching company, Frame of Mind Coaching.
But Kim, I’m so glad you took the time to join me today.
Kim: I’m so happy to be here and I’m so happy to learn from you actually. I was listening very carefully about the neuroscience of journaling, and that was really interesting for me.
Dr. Irena: You’re so welcome. And before we get into our topic today, tell us a little more about your journey and how that led to your focus and advocacy for journal-based coaching.
Kim: So, I’ve always been a journaler, ever since I was a child. You know, I was the kid who had a wild crush on a boy, and I would journal about it and talk about how, you know, he wasn’t noticing me. And I was kind of in love, silently or all by myself. So I was always a journaler ever since I was a kid, particularly when I had difficult times. And as you mentioned, I ran an assessment company. And one of the things that we discovered when we were assessing individuals to help companies identify who would be a top performer was that if a person had a higher degree of emotional resilience, they would be much more likely to succeed than others.
And so that played a really important role in determining where I am now and what I’m doing and how I’m doing it. I ran that company for ten years and ended up selling my shares of the company. But the really important piece of that was that I ran my company with my ex-husband. And when our marriage fell apart, it was really difficult for us to run the company together continuously. So I ended up selling off my shares and I was really having a tough time. And what did I do? I journaled. And why did I journal is because my emotions were all over the place.
And what I wanted to do more than anything was to handle my marriage with as much grace and peace as I could possibly muster. Some days that was really hard, but my journal helped me to deposit my thoughts and helped me remember and helped me, I guess you could say, point me in the direction of what I wanted. And so my journal was central to my healing, was central to my dealing with my emotions, dealing with my feelings of sadness, of failure, all of those things.
And so, as soon as I sold my company, I was recruited by a coaching company in Toronto and they hired me to be their VP of marketing. And I got to observe how they coach and instinctively I felt like they were doing it wrong, like they were missing a very, very important component, which was, most leaders know what to do, some of them aren’t doing it and the question is why? What’s stopping them from doing it? It’s not that they don’t necessarily have a plan, it’s not that they aren’t aware of what it takes. It’s that something else is playing a role in interfering with their ability to do what they know they need to do.
And that’s when I started my own coaching company because I was really interested in identifying those barriers and that’s why I started to use journaling in the process, because I thought if I could get inside their heads and understand the conversation, they were having with themselves, maybe I could get somewhere. So that’s the background.
Dr. Irena: Wow. So what is it about the journaling process that is especially helpful in achieving faster results?
Kim: So there’s so much. So when I started coaching leaders, what I did was I decided that I would give them a journaling prompt once a week and they would journal every single day. And every time they journal, I would be on the other end of the journal reading and responding to that journal. So how would I be reading and responding? I would dig deeper, I would ask questions, I would challenge them, I would encourage them, I would support them, I would understand their perspectives, their values, their beliefs, all of that stuff.
So how does it accelerate performance? How does it accelerate anything? First of all, when an individual is journaling on a daily basis, they’re doing the work. Second of all, they are, you know, you use two terms, I got the one salience network, they’re using their salience network. What was the other one? You said a different network.
Dr. Irena: Yeah, the default mode network.
Kim: The default mode network to reflect and to dream and to think. And so journaling is activating all of that stuff. But what’s happening from a coaching perspective is that I’m able to access all kinds of interesting data from my clients. And that data enables me to get a picture of who this person is, how they’re wired, how their beliefs influence what they do and what they don’t do. And it helps me to pick up their patterns, patterns of behavior, patterns of beliefs, just their patterns in general, and how some of those patterns prevent them from reaching their goals.
Some of those patterns, while they may be protective patterns, aren’t actually helping them get to where they want to go. So when you are reading a client’s journal, it’s like walking in a room. The light is on and you can see where everything is. When you don’t have a journal, it’s like you’re walking into a dark room with a blindfold on and you’re feeling around and trying to find the lights. It’s such a stark contrast. But there’s more, because my premise is this, is that a client moves forward if and only if they trust their coach. If they don’t trust their coach, they don’t move forward.
And so the question is, how do you establish trust quickly? Well, frequency of contact is very important. If the coach is on the other side of the journal, reading and responding on a daily basis, then the relationship gets built strongly and quickly. The other piece of it is that they go deeper, faster, because of the breadth of content that they’re covering in a short period of time. So all of that accelerates the process in coaching.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. So change happens in the default mode network, right? Because change happens through self-reflection. So you must have clients who come in and are not able to reflect. So what do you do about those clients?
Kim: Well, what we do is we ask them to tell their stories. So we just simply ask what happened? You know, you got into a conflict with this person at work. Tell me what happened. And so in their telling of their story. And then when we ask them questions after that, we trigger self-reflection and we ask the questions that have them kind of look inwardly and say, hey, was my action actually aligned with the desired outcome I was seeking? So we trigger self-reflection even though it may not be easy and natural for everybody to do so.
Dr. Irena: The journaling enables you to really ask more targeted questions. So I can see how the coaching would proceed quicker, right, than not journaling. So do you have any statistics on how fast journaling helps?
Kim: I’ve been coaching for 20 years, and I know that in a ten-week period, people move like a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time. And very often, I will say that many, many people have come to me saying, I’ve been in therapy for 20 years, and I haven’t moved as far in 20 years as I have in these ten weeks. So what we see is great traction in a short period of time.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Because ten weeks is fast.
Kim: It’s very fast.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. So as I said in my opening, that the default mode network generates a lot of negative self-talk. And so when it comes to journaling, what can we do about that negative self-talk?
Kim: Well, the good thing is that as a coach, when a person journals and they do have negative self-talk, I am able to extract it faster. I’m able to see it, find it, capture it and show it to them. And when someone’s journaling and suddenly the words are on the page, what’s really exciting about that is that it’s separate from the person I’m coaching. Right? It’s all of a sudden outside of their brains and on paper or on a computer for our purposes.
And so we could go back and say, hey, here is the negative self-talk. Here’s the negative belief you have about yourself. First of all, is it even true? And does it line up with your goal? Does it enable you to get to where you want to go? And then we can explore, where did this belief come from? And do you need to hold onto it so tightly, or can we let go of it a little bit and create some room for a slightly different belief to replace it? Slightly different, slightly better, slightly more useful belief to replace that negative self-talk?
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Putting your negative self-talk down on paper is really informative. Right? Because normally it just goes round and round your head. You don’t pay that much attention to it, but when you see it written down, you can see how crazy it is.
Kim: Yeah. I had a very funny experience just yesterday with a client who was journaling, and she said, I know what you’re going to say, Kim, those are just your silly beliefs. And I didn’t say a word, and I would never say silly. But what I discovered was that the client was having me in her head and I wasn’t even there.
Dr. Irena: So, in effect, you’re kind of saying that your clients are coaching themselves.
Kim: I’m saying that they learn very quickly through this process, and I think that for something to stick, they have to learn it. Right? It has to get absorbed somehow. And so when they’re journaling and they see in their own writing, oh, man, I’m going down that rabbit hole again. And that’s not useful for me. They say, okay, but, okay, I see it. I see what I’m doing. And now the question is, how do I get out of this hole? How do I change? And that’s a completely different conversation from, I don’t even realize I’m in a hole.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. So what do you see as the hardest thing about getting people to embrace journal-based coaching?
Kim: I think sometimes people are a little bit intimidated, but they don’t realize that they’re writing all the time. They’re writing emails, they’re writing texts. They’re always already writing. You know, when we were little and we were going to school, one of the first things we learned to do is read and write. And so it’s actually fundamental exercise, but people feel like it’s a big job. They ask themselves, or they ask me all the time, am I doing it right? A journal, you can’t do it wrong.
And so I think the first thing is a feeling of, wow, it’s intimidating to just write things down and to do that on a daily basis. The second thing is, I think sometimes they want to make sure they look good in front of their coach. Right. And the good part about it is the coaches are very, very skilled at working around that, pass that through, that, breaking that up, because we can very easily see when that’s happening. And what we do is we focus on the storyline instead of how a person looks in front of us. The storyline is always revealing.
Dr. Irena: So your clients have to be really committed. Right? Because it’s an immersive and intensive process, unlike other coaching.
Kim: Yes.
Dr. Irena: Where you just see your client once a week or once every two weeks. Right? And this is a daily thing.
Kim: It’s a daily thing. And the coach is right there with them every single day, rowing right beside them. It’s a very intimate experience. It’s very intense, and it’s really designed to move someone far in a short period of time. And the people who sign up for it are people who are really ready for that change, who say, okay, I don’t need this to drag on for a year, I’m ready for that. Like that really quick change, shift, transformation.
Dr. Irena: So, as an expert on this topic, how has your journaling evolved over the years and what have you found personally challenging about it, if anything?
Kim: Well, I still journal pretty much every day. And what I am clear about is that my journal is designed to help take me to a better emotional state. Right. So my journal is there to help me, like, unload whatever it is that’s going on for me, but also to guide me to a better place. And so I use my journal in that way. I use my journal to say, okay, what do I want? Where am I going? I’m in this crappy place, but I don’t want to stay in this crappy place. What is it going to take for me to get to this new, better place? And sometimes that’s tactical. I need to take action, and sometimes I need to think differently, and sometimes I need to remember all the amazing stuff in my life.
And sometimes I just need to, like, okay, I am overwhelmed. I’m tired. I need to cancel some things from my calendar this week. Right? So my journal helps me get to a better place. It helps me gain clarity. And so has my practice changed over the years? Yeah. I mean, I don’t have any crushes anymore on boys. Right? I’m married. It’s all good. And so I think the content has changed. I really often contemplate, you know, like, what do I want my life to look like? How do I want to get old? What do I want to make sure I include in my lifetime in this period that I’m here? What are the projects I want to work on?
Dr. Irena: So one of the things that I touched on is about when you journal, it’s almost like coaching yourself. And so that’s not to minimize the value of a coach. It’s just that when you start thinking and organizing your thoughts, right, that you can often get yourself out of a mess. Let’s say that you’re in, and it’s just because of the journaling. So that’s what makes journaling so powerful in coaching.
Kim: Absolutely. And the other thing is, there are two pieces to it. Okay, I think let’s call it three pieces. Thing one is journal. Thing two is ask yourself really important questions as you’re journaling and use your journal to answer those questions. So the questions you’re asking yourself are really critical. That’s why journaling prompts are helpful, and we can talk about that in a minute. But then the third thing is, go back and read your journal and just start to pay attention to the amount of times you’re complaining about the same thing or how long you’ve been struggling with the same issue.
Or pay attention to your language and just start to look at your patterns. And a lot of people just journal and never look back at their journals. But reading back your journals is extremely helpful for just helping you see how you show up in the world and what your tendencies are and what you keep struggling with. And it’s really informative.
Dr. Irena: Your patterns follow you.
Kim: Your patterns follow. Boy, do they ever.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of the prompts that you use?
Kim: So I always use. And by the way, if anyone’s looking for great prompts, we have some on our website, frameofmindcoaching.com, go there. There are ten amazing prompts that you can use in your journaling practice for whoever’s journaling. The first prompt is always monitor your mood. So every day, just tell me what your mood is like and why it’s that way. In other words, what happened in your life today that created the mood you’re in? What’s your mood like?
And what I’m trying to understand is a baseline, like what are you like on a day-to-day basis? How do you operate in the world? What makes you feel a certain way? How are you engaging with others? How do your conversations impact you? How do your wins impact you, your losses, your struggles, et cetera. So I’m just trying to get a baseline, and that just gives me a starting point to understand what the person’s life is right now. So monitor your mood.
The other really cool journaling prompt that I use, and I use it at around week eight, is a very unique question. I position it like this. I say, I want you to select a person. Doesn’t matter who. Could be someone that you know, could be someone who passed away, someone famous, someone that you had a fight with in the past, someone in your imagination, doesn’t matter. Select a person to have a conversation with. And the only criteria is that it must be an ideal conversation.
And so literally, it’s a conversation, you know, like a script in a play. Just go back and forth in this conversation, and I cannot tell you how insightful that journaling prompt is. It’s wild. And I’ll give you an example. Years ago, I was coaching someone who was a VP of sales for a technology company. And in her ideal conversation, she decided that what she wanted to do is become secretary of state. So her conversation was between herself and the government, and it was an interview. So they brought her in for the interview. She was journaling this, and they said, we looked at your resume. You looked like a great, ideal candidate. It, but tell us in your own words what qualifies you for this position?
And she wrote paragraphs and paragraphs like pages of her qualifications. She explained that she came from Japan and that her family came to the United States and started a company and contributed to the US economy. She talked about how her education was in economics, and then she wrote a ten-point plan about all the initiatives she would undertake in her role as secretary of state. And they were really impressed. They said, wow, you’re an incredible candidate. And, you know, right now, you’re our top runner.
And as soon as we’ve interviewed all the candidates, we’ll get back to you. And at the bottom of her journal, she wrote me a note. She said, how’s that for dreaming big? And it occurred to me, actually, Irena, what do you think? Is that dreaming big?
Dr. Irena: It is dreaming big.
Kim: It’s dreaming big. Except I gave her a blank canvas to create anything she wanted. And what she created was a situation where she had to prove her value. And at the end of all that proof, they still didn’t give her the job. She had to wait for them to interview all the other candidates. And what we discovered was that the reason she played it out that way is because she felt it was more polite. It was not aggressive. It was more appropriate. She didn’t want to seem, you know, full of herself to just assume that they would give her the role.
But what we discovered is that in her sales position, she wasn’t asking for the sale, she wasn’t closing the deal, very much the same way as how she wrote out her ideal conversation. And when she realized that, we discussed her inhibition, her discomfort, her belief that it was more important to be polite than to ask for the sale. And literally, within a three-month period, she increased her sales. She did better in those three months than she did the whole previous year.
Dr. Irena: That’s an amazing story.
Kim: It’s crazy.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Especially, you had mentioned that she was from a Japanese heritage and her inhibition was cultural.
Kim: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Irena: And so she managed to change it.
Kim: That’s right. Well, she saw it like, hey, this is a pattern. This is holding me back. I’m not achieving the goals I want to be achieving. I could be doing better. And here’s something that’s really getting in my way, and I could still ask for the sale and be polite.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t journal, but I took a dream program last year, and so this was about healing from the past, from past trauma. And this person used dreams to see how you were progressing. And anyway, dreams have all kinds of meaning. But one of the things that I had to do was keep a list of how my mother had affected me. My list went on for pages and pages. So this wasn’t journaling, right, in your sense, but it went on for pages and pages. And I was shocked at all the little ways that this had negatively affected me. Yeah.
Kim: Yeah. And when you have consciousness about it, you start to decide whether or not you still want those things to affect you in the same ways. But if you don’t have consciousness about it, then they just affect you, and you just do your thing and don’t understand why you’re struggling and why you’re having a hard time getting to where you want to go. And the whole point of journaling is consciousness. When you are conscious, then and only then can you have control. You have decision making power over whether or not you want to keep this pattern going or not.
Dr. Irena: What you’re doing, in effect, is bringing it to the surface.
Kim: Exactly that. I often say we’re shining a light, but also, we’re holding a light. And what I mean by that is we hold a light and a hold a vision of the client’s capacity, their potential, what’s possible for them, and we do that for them when they can’t see for themselves what’s possible.
Dr. Irena: So in addition to your other example, can you share another client success story that illustrates what this process of journaling for faster results looks like?
Kim: Sure. So I was coaching someone, and my client said, I’d like you to coach a friend of mine, but here’s the thing. I want you to treat him with kid gloves. And I’m very direct. When I coach, I don’t wear gloves. And so his introduction was a little bit surprising to me. And I said, why would you position it like that? He said, well, he’s a very good friend of mine. He’s in his early thirties, and he has stage four cancer.
I said, okay. And I got on the phone with him. I wanted to talk to him, and I said to him, I have two questions for you. Question number one, how long do you have left to live? And it’s a tough question to ask somebody. He said, you know what? I really don’t know. I’ve been on all these experimental drugs. I think I’ve lived much longer than I was meant to live already. My guess is that I have about a two-year window.
I said, okay, what is it that you would like me to help you with? What are you looking to achieve as a result of coaching? He said, what I really, really want from you is I want your help in increasing my productivity. And I thought that was wild, because if I had two years left to live, I don’t think I would care too much about my productivity. And I said, why is that important to you? He said, well, here’s the story. I run a business, and I am the only child of a single mom, and I want to grow the business and sell the business and make sure that she’s in a good place when I sell it financially, and I want to feel at peace with that decision in my life and make sure she’s okay.
I said, okay, let me ask you a different question. What is it that you really, really want? He said, well, what I really, really want is I want more time, and I do want to grow my business, and I do want to sell it, and I do want to make sure my mom’s in a good place, but I want to do other things. I want to buy a house, and I want to be in a great relationship, and I want to run a marathon, and I want to travel to these great places.
And I said, well, let’s do that. Let’s do that. He started to journal, and he was this type a personality, and it’s a financial services firm where they do valuations and they do mergers and acquisitions. And so every single deal that came in the door, he got it. Every single deal that went out the door, he had to make sure all the I’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. I started to understand through his journal how many hours he was putting in to work. And I said, listen, you know, you’re working a lot. You’re tired. Your stress levels are high.
And in my brain, I thought, what my job is, is I need to help him lower his stress levels so his experimental drugs would be working for him. And I said, you know, we should talk about hiring people. And he responded in his journal, I can’t afford to hire people. And I said, you can’t afford not to hire people. Your life is at risk. You can’t keep up this pace. Like, we need to take a closer look. But he had a belief system that said, you know, if I hire people, I’m jeopardizing my income. I’m increasing my expenses. Things are going to go awry. It’s not going to work out for me. I need to do things on my own. The people around me are good, but they’re not good enough. And at the end of the day, I have to serve the client and on and on and on, right?
All these beliefs surfaced, and what we started to do was move around some of the elements in his business to find space to start hiring one, two people at a time. So it’s eight years later, he’s still alive, by the way, and he sold half of his business. So he got some level of income to put away for his mom. He bought a house, he ran a marathon, a triathlon, and he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He traveled. He took his mom on a great vacation. He got married, and maybe three months ago he had a baby, which is unbelievable.
Is he still dealing with stage four cancer? Yes, and in a way, it’s come back, but he’s still fighting and we’re still talking on a regular basis, and it’s just unbelievable.
Dr. Irena: Well, what a heartwarming story. So if someone has been having trouble getting into journaling, what would you offer as a quick way to get started?
Kim: Grab a piece of paper and a pen. And here are two questions that I would ask you to consider. Question number one, I like this. This is one of my favorite questions. What do you really, really want more than anything? And I usually have two really there for a reason, because I want you to think about what you really want instead of what somebody else really wants for you, what is expected of you, what you think you should want. You know, what your neighbors want, what your siblings and parents want, children want for you. What do you really, really want for yourself in your heart?
So question number one.Write that down and write down all the things you really, really want. Question number two, what’s stopping you from having what you really, really want?
Dr. Irena: Oh, those are great questions.
Kim: And write down all the reasons that you don’t have what you really, really want right now. And what I would suggest is, within those reasons, live a whole host of beliefs that are getting in your way.
Dr. Irena: Yeah. Yeah. So finally, is there anything else you’d like to say to our listeners?
Kim: Sometimes we struggle with things going on. What I’d like to propose is that much of the struggles we experience in the world are self-imposed. And using a journal to explore that has a great, great deal of power. Owning your struggles can change your game dramatically. And so my proposal for anybody is, if there’s something going on that you are struggling with, a good question to ask yourself is, what do I believe to be true about this problem, this person, this situation that’s causing me to feel bad? And that’s a good thing to explore. Whether you’re doing it in your head or in a journal, it’s really powerful.
Dr. Irena: That’s such a great way to wrap up the show today. What’s the best way for listeners to learn more about you and what you do?
Kim: Yeah, again, frameofmindcoaching.com. We have all of our programs there. We have those ten journaling prompts that you can download. We have podcasts, we have blogs. We have all the things that you could possibly be interested in. So please come and visit us. And if you’d like to set up some time with me, there’s even a little link there for you to do that. So frameofmindcoaching.com.
Dr. Irena: I’m so very grateful you would join me today, Kim. So what an interesting conversation. I learned so much about journaling, and I’m sure our audience did, too.
Kim: Thank you for having me on your program.
Dr. Irena: Thank you all for listening. And remember to check out my other episode on journaling with Kay Adams and Deborah Ross. We’ll have the link in the show notes. It’s not an exaggeration to say your journal is your most valuable tool for accelerating your business, and it’s also your most valuable tool for developing yourself into the person you need to be to reach your goals. Dedicating time and space for this process is a must for any coach who is serious about their business growth. Your journal is a point of ideation, creation, affirmation, and planning all in one.
Following what you learned today, you’ll find yourself gaining insights and breakthroughs at a faster pace than you have. And of course, your journal serves as a valuable retrospective to look back and see your own development over time in your writing. If you’re not already journaling, I hope you’ll take the first steps toward doing so today. And if you’re already journaling, I hope you’ve gained some valuable tips from this episode to achieve even faster results.
I’m Dr. Irena O’Brien, and you’ve been listening to Neuroscience of Coaching. You can find out more about me neuroscienceschool.com. Neuroscience of Coaching is a part of the Mirasee FM podcast Network, which also includes such shows as Just Between Coaches and To Lead Is Human. This episode was produced by Andrew Chapman. Danny Iny is our executive producer, and Marvin del Rosario is our audio editor.
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