Neuroscience of Coaching – Episode 12
The Power of Reflective Journals (Kay Adams & Deborah Ross)
Kay: For most people, five minutes is plenty of time to rage on the page and feel a little bit of release. Then we can step back from it, look at the reflection piece of it, say, wow. I didn’t realize I was still carrying that charge. I wonder what I can do about it now.
Dr. Irena O’Brien: Hi, I’m Doctor 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 practical, evidence-based strategies to use in their own practices. In each episode, I invite a seasoned coach to discuss a topic that clients struggle with, 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.
We spoke in a recent episode about neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change and adapt due to experience. We’re continuing that conversation today as we talk about manifesting the life you want. Manifesting starts with defining and embedding your intention in your subconscious. We’ve talked about that in previous episodes. From a neurological standpoint, manifesting primarily makes use of four of the large circuits in the default mode network, the central executive network, the salience network, and the attention network.
These four primary brain areas, along with the two branches of the vagus nerve, allow us to give our focused attention to our intentions and make our intentions important enough to the brain to embed them in our subconscious and use its power to manifest them. It is both simple and complex, as stress, negativity, bias, and negative beliefs all conspire to create a life that we would not choose if we realize we have the power to choose. But the fact is, we do have the power to discern the difference between our negative conditioning and our inner awareness, and thus discover that our reactions, our experiences, are conditioned, not hardwired. You need to understand this if you want to manifest the life you want.
The default mode network is responsible for brain activity when a person is focused inward, including during wakeful rest, daydreaming, mind wandering, and reminiscing. It lets us retrieve and integrate long term memories and enables us to tell ourselves our own story. But it’s also responsible for the constant chatter in our minds, most of which is usually negative. As we’ll talk about with our guests when we’re journaling, focusing our attention inward, exploring our thoughts, emotions, and sensations, we’re engaging the default mode network.
The salience network, is the system the brain uses to determine what is important. This is the first step in creating the life we want. Like a colander, it filters the barrage of internal and external stimuli we encounter at any given moment. In the filtering process, it uses what’s in our subconscious to identify what is relevant and then guides behavior accordingly. This activates the central executive network and quiets the default mode network, which allows us to focus without distractions or self-consciousness. Our subconscious contains our beliefs, what we value, and what we do without thinking, such as driving a car.
On the conscious level, manifesting is a process of clear and focused thinking. However, that accounts for less than 20% of the mind. The subconscious and unconscious make up the remaining 80% to 90%. And this is why we sometimes find ourselves in situations we don’t understand. If we want to change our lives, we have to retrain the subconscious. One way to do this is to repeatedly couple images of your vision with strong positive emotions in the body, whether imagined or recalled. The release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin get the brain’s attention and trains the subconscious to seek out similar experiences in reality and pursue them.
That’s the process in a nutshell. But there are many places this process can be derailed. For instance, do you know what you really want? Or are you trying to manifest someone else’s dream? How can you manage stress? And what about those intrusive negative thoughts that never let you focus? These are just three of the many ways that journaling can help you manifest your life.
So let’s bring my guests into this conversation. Kay Adams is a best-selling author, speaker, psychotherapist, visionary, and founder of the Center for Journal Therapy. Her first book, Journal to the Self, is a classic bestseller that helped define the field of personal writing as a tool for healing, growth, and change. In 2008, Kay founded the Therapeutic Writing School to prepare and certify journal therapists and facilitators. Ten years later, she founded a second online school, Journalversity, offering evergreen and facilitated courses from leading experts in the expressive writing field. She’s the author of 13 other books, as well as the co-author of your Brain on Ink, which she wrote with our other guest today, Deborah Ross.
Deborah is a certified journal therapist and licensed professional counselor. She retired from private practice psychotherapy to focus on teaching journaling in meditation programs and healthcare settings, including those that serve cancer patients and brain injury patients. She’s a core faculty member at the Therapeutic Writing Institute. Deborah is fascinated by the intersection of the modern findings in neuroscience and the ancient arts of contemplative practice and writing.
So thank you so much for being with us today, Kay and Deborah, I’m so happy that you’re both here.
Kay: Thank you, Irena. It’s a pleasure to be here. This is Kay.
Deborah: Thank you. This is Deborah.
Irena: So before we start talking about the facets of manifesting the life you want, will you tell us a little more about your work and how you came to be doing it, how you two met? Kay, why don’t you start us off?
Kay: All right. Thank you so much. I really appreciated the introductory comments because that’s so in alignment with what Deborah and I have been doing, she, for longer than I, but together we’ve been teaching for about ten years now. So I started the Therapeutic Writing Institute, as you mentioned, in 2008. And it is a deep dive school to prepare people who are facilitators or therapists or coaches who want to use expressive and therapeutic writing in their own worlds, their own careers, to have a balanced and in-depth approach to the many powers of therapeutic writing.
And I especially loved the three items that propose, do you know what you want as a core question in using writing for positive brain change? How do you manage stress, and what would you like to be doing differently and managing intrusive negative thoughts? These are all things that the journal can be so helpful in creating. And as we go deeper into the conversation, we’ll be talking about some specific strategies that really do enhance the individual’s capacity to fully engage with the neuroplasticity practice of repeated actions in a direction that feels positive and purposeful and how that can actually become sort of easy.
So, Deborah, I’ll turn it over to you.
Deborah: Thank you. So in my training as a psychotherapist, oftentimes in graduate school, we were told, you know, have your clients journal about that. And I often found that a very mixed practice, and yet I believed that there was something very important about it. And then Kay was coming through town to do a one-day practice for therapists on how to bring journaling in. And I went with one of my colleagues and she said to me, so what do you think of the training? And I said, I have to get trained.
And so that began my, it was almost three years, I guess, training with Kay at the center. As it happened about the same time, Dan Siegel, the psychiatrist who is founder and co-director of the Mindsight Institute, was offering his first online comprehensive training. And that was also three years. And I had been introduced to that in a program that he and Jack Kornfield did for therapists that’s where I first heard about it. So I had overlap with my training with Dan and my training with Kay. And when it came time for me to do my Capstone project, I said to Kay, so what do you think of Your Brain on Ink? So the rest is history, as they say.
Kay: We actually met, for the very first time in person, when we were invited to teach at an expressive therapy summit in New York City, a two-day workshop on this methodology. And we planned it on the phone and met for the very first time over bagels and coffee in New York, in Manhattan, a half an hour before we started teaching two full days. And it was absolutely, you know, the odds were against it being a pretty awesome experience, but turns out we teach very well together, and it was a wonderful audience that soaked up everything we had to say. So that’s kind of how we got our mutual start together.
Irena: Yeah. I thought your title was amazing. Your Brain on Ink. I love the title. And I thought, there is a lot here. There’s something here. And at the same time, Dr. James Doty came out with his book Mind Magic. And so the neuroscience that I presented today comes from James Doty’s, James Doty’s book and how he teaches a manifestation. I think there’s just such a synergy. And I can see how journaling could be a very useful tool in helping you create that life.
Kay: Absolutely. Absolutely. Deborah’s position is that writing in a particular way, which she details in her method and we detail in the book, is a form, can be a form of self-directed neuroplasticity. And the mission and vision of the Center for Journal Therapy is to make the healing, art and science of journal writing accessible to all who desire self-directed change. And maybe you can say a little bit more about how you see self-directed neuroplasticity through writing. Can you say a little bit more about how you came up with that concept?
Deborah: Well, the term itself is not original with me, but it really resonated for me in terms of keeping a journal. And if you take an evidence-based system, which is affordable, available and accessible, and then you teach people just enough, very user-friendly manual for your brain. I mean, it’s an owner’s manual. We don’t get that when we come into this world. But I think it’s something that’s very powerful, then people can have much more agency about how they are living their lives, more awareness about what their values are, what their goals are, are their actions in alignment, where do things need to be tweaked and how is the journal the bridge between what we’re conceptualizing, what we’re feeling, the way that we want to be living, and actually manifesting that.
The notion of setting an intention and then bringing attention to what you’re doing and then taking action and what’s not, not in the book itself as a fourth step, but is in the book as part of journal therapy, is the notion of a reflection. After you write, what are you noticing? What are you aware of? Where is my prefrontal cortex witnessing all of this? Because I would say that most folk, when they write, they assume if they rage on the page or they spill something out and close the book, they’ve gotten it out of their head or their body onto the page, and they’re good to go. And that’s just step one.
And so when I think about self-directed neuroplasticity, I very much think about that reflective step that says, what am I noticing here from that kind, compassionate, witnessing place? This is not the inner editors. We’ve got plenty of those, plenty of strategies for how to deal with them. But what am I noticing here? And is this in alignment with what I want to be doing and where I want to be going?
Irena: So what comes up for me is that with the reflective practice is that you’re helping people create self-awareness. Yes. Because without self-awareness, there is no change. Yes.
Deborah: Yes.
Irena: Because without self-awareness, there is no change.
Deborah: Yes. Right, right.
Irena: Yeah. I mean, I tell my students that all the time because I teach neuroscience to coaches. And I said, your biggest job, your main job, is to help your clients create self-awareness.
Kay: And with that self-awareness, I think, as a natural consequence is insight and understanding. And that is where the reflection rite, I am convinced, is superlative in its capacity to harvest insight almost immediately. I mean, this isn’t something we necessarily grow into. It’s not an evolution. It’s kind of an immediate right there in black and white, and your own handwriting or pixels is right there. So at the end of the write to read back and then ask a reflective question, such as, as I read this, I notice or I’m aware of, or I’m surprised by, or I had no idea that.
These are all ways. I mean, any of those will work or whatever else is appropriate, but it’s a way of synthesizing and integrating in the moment something that can be continued across time. And even just a read back of a collection of reflection rights will demonstrate a pattern of awareness, progress, movement on the road toward manifestation. And manifestation is one of the things that I teach that is very close to my heart. I studied with a guy named Robert Fritz in the eighties. And his methodology of manifestation is pretty simple, but it’s also very complex and deep.
So it wasn’t until I started working with Deborah that I realized that what he has essentially been teaching all this time is a form of self-directed neuroplasticity, where I know what I want. That is my intention. I place attention on it, and then I take action. And the intention, attention, action process is one that we detail in Your Brain on Ink. And that Deborah can say more about from the neuro perspective.
Irena: Yeah, I would like to hear more about the neuroscience perspective of journal writing. Deborah, do you have any neuroscience to add to what I presented?
Deborah: The one piece that I would add is something that I’ve been a little bit more focused on recently is with Dan Siegel, and he’s got a really good YouTube video about the hand model of the brain. And, you know, he talks about the skull brain, which is, of course, what most of us think about the skull brain and the nervous system. But he also talks about the heart brain, the gut brain, and the relational brain, all of the wiring that happens in the context of relationship.
And so one way that I think about when setting intention and then paying attention and action is, is there a particular one of those four brains recognizing they’re all integrated? I mean, this is nomenclature. These are words that are separated. But, you know, this is an integrative process. So is there one particular brain that really is needing attention here? Is this my gut brain that I’ve been ignoring? Is this my heart brain that I’ve been ignoring?
Connection is such a vital part of our lives and is an integral part of our work, usually. So do I need to be paying more attention to the relational brain as I am thinking about what it is that I want to manifest? So that’s one way of that I think of now as sorting where I want to focus my attention. But my understanding is that the intention, attention, action really comes a lot from the habit world and the research that has occurred in how people create habits, change habits. And for me and my journal metaphor is the bridge these different manifestations of our brains is one way that we can access the material, especially the embodied piece.
I mean, the quote that I heard so often in the meditation world comes from James Joyce – Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. I was raised that way. Many people were. So what does it mean to come home to your body and understand how that’s showing up in my journal, I was gripping the pen. I felt the ease, my breathing shifted, and how can we use those cues and clues to inform what we want to be doing and where we want to be going?
Irena: And also, you can’t separate out the body from the brain, just as you said. And so your physical health also influences your brain health. So if you’re eating a poor diet, you’re not exercising, you’re not sleeping properly, it’s going to affect your brain. So your book is a workbook with more than 65 unique writing prompts. So can you give us a few examples and tell us what you’re trying to elicit with those prompts?
Kay: Sure. I’m thinking specifically, first thing that jumps to my mind, my methodology is sourced in having lots of different ways to write, which I call techniques that offer interest, variety, different experiences. They appeal to different cognitive systems, emotional processing systems. And one of them that is kind of all-purpose crowd pleaser, if you will, is called the captured moment. And it can be a sensory based rite, usually fairly brief, seven minutes or so, and focused on sensory input of any moment of any day that you might want to preserve. Like insect in amber that stays alive in captivity or whatever. The captured moment can be written about sad experiences or challenging experiences as well. But my focus is in the context of a very positive experience.
And that’s because one of the key elements in journal therapy is bringing balance to the journal through not only catharting and bemoaning difficult situations, which is where a lot of people start. It’s like I turn to my journal when I’m really stressed or anxious or sad or confused, which is great. But it’s also useful to balance that with some moments of magic and some moments of awe or connection or togetherness or love, intimacy. So the captured moment is a balancing point in the journal.
I remembering Deborah, the woman who wrote a captured moment when you were pairing writing with a scent. She was writing about a summer she spent in college at a camp where she was a camp counselor or something. And she just did this beautiful recollection of the outdoor shower, and it just had buckets of water that you had to load into the shower and you had to take it really fast. But it was great to do it out in the woods. And this memory came back to her because of a particular shampoo that she was connecting with the scents.
Deborah: With scent being the most primitive of our senses, I mean, it goes to the limbic system and is the only one that goes there first. It’s so evocative. You can cue with sent as a way to anchor. And then if you wire that association. And I always talk to people about neurons that fire together, wire together. And so if your journal has been wired as rage on the page, you have to be intentional. You have about doing something else with it. And the negativity bias is going to prime you to pick up a journal to rage on the page.
So here are just two principles. Neurons that fire together, wire together, and the negativity bias. Velcro and Teflon. And we can then have agency with how we steer that. And scent is actually a vehicle for doing that. And people have used all sorts of things, whether it’s culinary, whether it’s a candle, whether it’s tea, coffee, chocolate, old bay seasoning. And that just. It deepens and enriches the writing. And again, gives you another entry point.
Kay: This student had grabbed a bottle of Pert shampoo, and that was what she had used. So just a sniff of Pert shampoo transported her back to a moment that she then was able to, from the distance and perspective of 20 plus years later, she could look back on it and say, that was the summer that I really grew in my confidence, that I could handle any sort of situation that came up, and that has stayed with me all this time. And I didn’t make that connection until I was doing this writing process, remembering how much I learned that summer, and then reflected back on what the meaning of that was and realized that I had integrated it and literally changed my whole perspective on my world because of this sniff of Pert shampoo.
Irena: I’m glad you added that, Kay, because that was my question, was, how can ascent help you create change? And you just explained that how it helped her. So, one thing that I haven’t touched on is stress and how stress can impact the process of manifestation and change.
Deborah: One of the journaling techniques that’s lower on the journal ladder in terms of structure, pacing, and containment is the list. And Dan Siegel was the one who coined the phrase name it to tame it. So when people are feeling that sense of overwhelm, I mean, I always invite them to discover the list. And if I have to, I will cue how to do this on the page, because I don’t want somebody’s list entries to take an entire line. Now you’re dropping into story, so it needs to be brief, but can you name it to tame it? Or in the journal therapy, where we call it a cluster, but I know it’s also known as a mind map is an invitation to put stress in the middle of a cluster, and then you allow it to come out onto the page in that web.
So now you’ve got it on the page. Now everything’s safely parked. You can, if you choose, address an element of that cluster or mind map. And one of the advantages of that is you see relationships between things. Again, that neurons that fire wire. So here we go. The upper left corner of my cluster. Oh, boy. That needs a lot of attention. And I can bring my focus there, knowing that everything else is safely in the parking lot. And then, of course, doing the reflection right about what you’re noticing as you’re writing about these kinds of things.
And the stressors are unique to us. I mean, we have all of the societal challenges, the global challenges. We have all of that, and then we have whatever our own unique situations and circumstances are, it’s all on the page. And sometimes, depending on what’s going on, I will invite people to have a dedicated journal for something.
Kay: Piggybacking on the clustering example, my very first job out of graduate school with my counseling degree, newly minted, was as the evening shift group counselor for an inpatient psych unit, adult unit. And what the patients loved the most was clustering the day. So I would invite them to write the day, today’s date, in the center of the page and circle it, and then just spin thoughts off of other thoughts about what was your doctor’s appointment? Did you have any visitors? What was the food like? The average psychiatric patient who’s hospitalized has significant stress.
So this was their opportunity to just dump it all out. And somebody would have. Yeah. My brother came to see me. He brought my dog. That was my best thing. I always invited. Best thing. Worst thing. What was the best thing that happened to you today? What was the worst thing? And put those somewhere in your cluster. So, you know, his brother came to visit, and he brought the dog, and the dog was the best thing. And then he wanted his money back for the money that he loaned me, and I don’t have it, so that’s the worst thing. And I had a doctor’s appointment, and my doctor’s a jerk, and my brother’s a jerk, and everybody’s a jerk.
But then we would do a little meditation about this day is over. You have lived through it. You can have it back tomorrow if you want it, because it’s captured for you. You don’t have to take it to bed with you. They reported, and the night nurses confirmed that they were able to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer without the hall wandering, without asking for more sleep medication. They had better sleep and more restful sleep when they had closure with the day.
And another technique that I use a lot for stress management myself, and I invite clients and others to do it as well, is just this very, very simple technique. But I call the five-minute sprint, which is just exactly like it sounds. You write for five minutes and you write fast. When you know you only have five minutes, the bottom-line kind of rises up to meet you and you can get a lot more done in five minutes than you might have if you’ve been wandering around. I personally can whine for a long time before I get around to writing anything useful.
So the five-minute sprint is a contained, structured, paced way to vent. And for most people, five minutes is plenty of time to rage on the page and feel a little bit of release. Then we can step back from it, look at the reflection piece of it, say, wow, I didn’t realize I was still carrying that charge. I wonder what I can do about it now and then. And then that leads into the investigation into the query into the, as James Doty might say, the mind magic of let’s pretend that I knew the answer to this question. What would I be doing? Yeah, what would a successful person do.
Deborah: That then invites perhaps another write with an entirely different technique. You can find your stressor and then you can turn it into a character. And writing about your stressor as if it’s a character. One way that I also will add to that is I will invite people to think about, so what quality might you want to bring in as an ally now and do a character sketch of that? So, for example, if I felt that I needed bring more curiosity to my situation, I could do a character sketch of curiosity. And the last time I did one, I noticed my curiosity only likes tasting menus in restaurants. If she can’t get a tasting menu, she ain’t going.
So you start to develop this relationship with these different qualities that you can then bring in, depending on your circumstances, and you can have fun with this. Journaling is, yes, it’s serious and it’s playful and it’s creative. And you can invite all sorts of qualities to the page that we don’t usually associate with this sort of bearing hobby. I got to process this. And people will often say, I’m working on this, I’m working on this. I love my work and I will use that phrase. But you can invite people to say, I want to play with this, I want to explore this. And what dimensions now show up as a result of changing what the invitation looks like.
Irena: So if a listener wants to get started, journaling what do they need?
Kay: They need a notebook and a pen, or else a pencil if they prefer, or else a digital device. The supplies are not the main thing. It’s perfectly fine to write on a keyboard or a device. No significant difference in outcome. A wonderful quality to bring is curiosity, as Deborah was talking about, and willingness to tell the truth as you know it in this moment, without rationalizing too much.
And one thing that is, I think, really important to emphasize to new beginners is to protect your own privacy, that this is a document that is yours and yours alone. You have a right to your own thoughts and feelings. You don’t have to explain them to anybody else. And if you need to lock it in your bottom desk drawer, then take care of yourself. Deb, what do you think people need to get started?
Deborah: I mean, I agree with everything that you said. In addition, what I would add is to pay attention to any associations that you have with whatever you’re selecting. So if your habits are around getting a notebook and school, for example, is your association with notebooks, and school was a good place for you. By all means, use a notebook. However, if school was a place where you felt very challenged and kind of couldn’t wait to get out, then maybe a notebook is really not the best vehicle for you.
And just to pay attention to whatever your associations are and your habits. Lined, unlined. I noticed, for example, that sometimes people who are in the middle of something really chaotic prefer lined paper because it is giving them some bumper guards. And part of the measure of them working through or exploring through something is when they actually might want to switch to online paper. Also, if you are using a pen and paper, it needs to be a really good match. You don’t want to be fighting the process of physically writing. And then in that reflection writing, if you are physically writing, I think it’s very important to pay attention to letting your Freudian slip, that kind of thing. You know, where does your handwriting change?
Kay: And I would just piggyback on that, that when you’re talking about lined or unlined paper, there’s wide lines and narrow lines, college ruled and wide ruled. And people have a preference. They may not even know that they have a preference. Wide lined people who write on narrow lined paper feel anxious and like, compressed and squeezed and narrow lined people who write on wide lined paper often feel a little anxious because there’s too much space. I don’t know how to fill the space. So it matters. And it’s a simple choice, and people can make whatever choice they want, but they do it with intention and with attention to what they actually want.
Irena: That’s interesting about the wide lined and the narrow line paper. I prefer wide lined, now that you mention it. And so may I add one more thing? Is that don’t just rant.
Kay: Yeah. Don’t just. Yeah.
Irena: Yeah. Because then you’re re traumatizing yourself.
Kay: Yeah. It can lead to that. Catharsis is a wonderful thing, but it also needs balance with joy and what’s going well.
Deborah: The trouble ranting protocols. I mean, ranting and, you know, getting it all on the page is really important and it’s step one of a multi-step process. And if you want to strengthen your neural circuitry, then rage on the page day after day about this issue, and you will absolutely strengthen that circuitry. It’s like going to the gym.
Kay: Yeah. You’re going to strengthen your rage muscle. Yeah. So balance. Balance and permission.
Deborah: Yeah.
Irena: So I have a related question. Most of our listeners are coaches, and I’m guessing that some of them are wondering how they can incorporate journal writing into their practice without becoming certified in journal therapy. So do you have a recommended first step?
Kay: So, yes, I think starting small, inviting the client in to the process and saying, I’ve been hearing some interesting things about using journal writing with clients and I’m wondering if you write a journal, if you might want to write a journal and if so, if we could explore that together. But another thing that coaches may very well want to know about is that writing the journal can be an absolutely wonderful place for self-supervision.
And that is a process of, instead of just writing up session notes, which we do, and we put them in a session note, safe place to then do a parallel process in a private right about was there some weird feeling I had and what was working in me that made me sort of get a little bit antsy when the client was talking about X. And I wasn’t able to fully concentrate on it and what was blocking them, or a captured moment of a moment when the client really kind of switched on and was integrating something or processing something or just how do I feel about this client? And there’s. It doesn’t have to be a deeply introspective thing. I have our general therapy colleague, Kate Thompson is the premier source on self-supervision in the journal, and I’ve got a little paper that was an interview with her and she talks about self-supervision.
So I can make that available as a resource for your listeners and also a paper on the journal ladder so that they can understand the relative structure, pacing and containment parts that play into it, along with the 14 techniques that are on the journal ladder and how they can be calibrated for different cognitive processing styles, different emotional processing styles. And when you know who your client is and what they are really wanting and how they approach life, then you’ll know kind of where to start with the journal ladder, with techniques that are going to be the most effective for that style. So I think I’d be happy to provide those.
Irena: That would be great. Yeah, that would be great. If you could share that.
Deborah: Dan Siegel defines mental health as the river of integration flowing between the banks of chaos and rigidity. And so I use that particular model also when I think about picking the journal technique. So if you think about the latter, if somebody has a really rigid stilt dance towards something, where can I pick a technique that might invite more fluidity? Likewise, if they’re all over the place, where on the ladder might I want to invite a technique that tightens things up for them so that they can have more of that sense of balance? So I add that lens to the process as well.
Irena: So, finally, is there anything else you’d like to say to our listeners?
Kay: I would say, particularly if you’re wanting to use this with clients, get curious about your own writing process. Have some inside out awareness of what might happen, what does happen. If you have a story that you can tell that isn’t too overly disclosive about, you know, I just wrote for five minutes, and I was amazed at what happened. Make it a practice, and it doesn’t have to be a huge practice. I mean, you don’t have to do this for six months before you can start using it. But a little experimentation in your own journal so that you can have a baseline of experience to share or to recognize in others and kind of help troubleshoot some of the soft spots.
Irena: That’s great. So thanks so much. What’s the best way for listeners to find out more about you and your work?
Kay: My website is — this is Kay. My website is journaltherapy.com.
Deborah: You can find me at deborahrosslpc.com. Deborah, D-E-B-O-R-A-H Ross, R-O-S-S. And you can also find me if you go to the Journal Therapy website.
Kay: Deb’s core faculty at the Therapeutic Writing Institute and teaches Your Brain on Ink in that venue as well.
Irena: Thank you so much, Kay and Deborah. This has been such a fascinating and rich conversation.
Deborah: Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.
Irena: So thank you all for listening. And remember that you do have the power to manifest a life you really want. As I’ve been saying all season, it’s never too late. The process of change is at once simple and complex, but it starts with really knowing yourself, who you are, what you really want, what trips you up, and then aligning with those desires. If you feel drawn to journaling, it’s easy to get started. Journaling is a powerful tool for self-discovery that you and your clients might find valuable.
I’m Doctor Irena O’Brien, and you’ve been listening to Neuroscience of Coaching. You can find out more about me neuroscienceschool.com. The 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 Cynthia Lamb. Danny Iny is our executive producer and post production was by Marvin Del Rosario. To make sure you don’t miss great episodes coming up on Neuroscience of Coaching, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player.
If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas out there to more people. Thanks, and we’ll see you next time.