[0:00] Music.
[0:13] I'm excited today to bring you some thoughts about a topic that might be one of my most highly requested topics in a while. And the topic is morning pages. If you follow me on Instagram, and I actually mentioned this in my emails too, but I was going to say, if you watch my stories, you probably see me talking a lot and sharing about my morning pages. And this is an exercise that I've learned from the book, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, I want to make sure to give her clarity. This is not my own invention. This is not my own idea. This is straight out of her book, The Artist's Way. And I'm loving this practice so much. I want to share with you some of my thoughts and takeaways from the experience, but mainly I'm going to read straight from the book to help translate the process of the morning pages to you so that you can begin implementing it. And obviously the purpose of this podcast is not to take away from the sales of the book. So go buy the book too, read the book, enjoy it and love it. But I am going to pull out just the principle of the morning pages. She has lots of beautiful principles that she teaches that have been extremely impactful to me just in the last few months. So the first thing that I want to say is that this principle of the morning pages comes from this book about, that's called The Artist's Way, right? And I'm afraid that some of you might be like, oh, well, that's not for me because I'm not an artist.
[1:32] And that's, I guess, the first thing that I really want to push you on is to consider a new way to think about creating your Instagram content, a new way to think about writing emails, a new way to think about writing podcast episodes or any content that you're publishing anywhere. I want you to, from today and forever forward, consider that effort an artistic effort. And I hope that you've had experiences before in the past where you have felt that, where you felt like.
[2:02] Oh man, like as silly as it sounds, creating this reel feels like inspiring or writing the text in this caption feels like I am like transmuting a little piece of my heart out into the world or this piece of content or meme or whatever it is. Email that I'm sending feels like it is dripping with me, with my personality, with my thoughts, with my emotions, with things that are really important to me. And so I really want you to think about no matter what type of content you are creating, if you are a business owner and you are engaged in the work of marketing your business, I hereby dub thee an artist. And I know it might sound weird or feel a little bit weird, but we're going to massage this today because I think this goes back to my ultimate thesis for my entire business experience, which is that this work of doing marketing that we.
[2:58] Spend so much time and effort at needs to be more than just marketing for the sake of making sales. I am so passionate about marketing with a purpose for yourself,
[3:10] marketing with a purpose for your audience beyond just making sales. So let's get into it. Let's talk about some morning pages. So I started this experience, I guess, at the beginning of August, just a few months ago. I actually went back through. So basically, well, I'll read. Let me read first what the morning pages are straight from her book, and then I'll share more about what I've been doing and my experience. Okay, so this is straight from Julia Cameron. What are morning pages? Put simply, morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream of consciousness. Like, oh, it's another morning. I have nothing to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I do the laundry yesterday, blah, blah, blah.
[3:53] They might also more ingloriously be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions. There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art or even writing. She says, I stress that point to reassure non-writers working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be simply the act of moving the hand across the page and writing down whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too pretty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included. The morning pages are not supposed to sound smart, although sometimes they might. Most times they won't, and nobody will ever know except you. Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you, and you shouldn't even read them to yourself for the first eight weeks or so. Just write three pages, stick them into an envelope, or write three pages in a spiral notebook and don't leaf back through. Just write three pages, and then write three more pages the next day. She goes on to say, make this a rule.
[4:51] Always remember that your censor's negative opinions are not the truth. The morning pages are the primary tool of creative recovery. As blocked artists, we tend to criticize ourselves mercilessly. Even if we look like functioning artists in the world, we feel like we never do enough and what we do isn't right. We are victims of our own internalized perfectionist, a nasty internal and eternal critic, the censor, who resides in our left brain and keeps up a constant stream of subversive remarks that are often disguised as the truth. The censor says wonderful things like, you call that writing? What a joke. You can't even punctuate. If you haven't done it by now, you never will. You can't even spell what makes you think you can be creative and on and on. Make this a rule. Always remember that your censor's negative opinions are not the truth.
[5:42] This takes practice. By spilling out of bed and straight onto the page every morning, you learn to evade the censor. Because there's no wrong way to write the morning pages, the censor's opinion doesn't count. Let your censor rattle on, and it will. Just keep your hand moving across the page. Write down the censor's thoughts if you want to. Note how it loves to aim for your creative jugular. Make no mistake, the censor is out to get you. It's a cunning foe. Every time you get smarter, so does it. So you write one good play, the censor tells you that's all there is. So you drew your first sketch. The censor says, well, it's not Picasso. She continues, morning pages will teach you that your mood doesn't really matter.
[6:23] Morning pages are non-negotiable. Some of the best creative work gets done on the days when you feel that everything you've done is just plain junk. The morning pages will teach you to stop judging and just let yourself write. So what if you're tired, crappy, distracted, or stressed. Your artist is a child and it needs to be fed. Morning pages feed your artist child. So write your morning pages. Three pages of whatever crosses your mind. That's all there is to it. If you can't think of anything to write, then write, I can't think of anything to write and do this until you have filled three pages. Do anything until you have filled three pages.
[7:00] The morning pages teach logic brain to stand aside and let artist brain play. Okay, let me just read this one last line. Again, this is straight from her book, but she says, it may be useful for you to think of the morning pages as meditation.
[7:16] I actually want to go one step further because I have found these morning pages to be, it actually feels more like a prayer to me. So let me back up just a little bit and explain my slight modifications to this practice. So first, I have not been writing longhand. It makes my hand tired.
[7:37] I have instead just been typing right into a Google Doc, which I, you know, we're going really hard on the truth that there's no right or wrong way to do this. So I've been typing my morning pages into a Google Doc. I started at the beginning of August and I have 70 pages in a Google Doc right now. Which don't do the math on that, because that means I have not been writing three pages per day, but that's okay.
[8:01] So it was actually kind of fun to scroll back through, even though, again, and she says not to go back and read your morning pages. And I didn't, but I wanted to go back through just for the purposes of this episode to highlight some interesting things that have come to the surface as I've been really prioritizing this work. So basically, like I said, this is not something that I'm doing every single day, although I aspire to do that, but I am doing it lot. I'm doing it most days, I would say. I am not writing three pages exactly, but I am writing a lot. I don't actually keep track of how much I write because I think some days I might write actually more than three pages. But the purpose for my morning pages has basically become a conglomeration of things like this, a place to dump out the doubts in my mind and My brain, I'll speak for myself, goes to self-doubt really quickly if I've let it, or at least it has in the past. And I am constantly actively working on retraining my brain to default to faith and to default to trust and to default to my worth and worthiness. Because if I don't, then my brain will start to throw up all kinds of self-doubt about why I'm not qualified, why I'm not good enough, why I don't have enough experience and all the great things that our doubt brain likes to offer up.
[9:19] I've also used my morning pages as a place that, well, it's become a place where I collect thoughts that I've learned, things that I've learned from my launches, from offers, from programs. There are ideas all throughout my morning pages that have turned into actual offers that you all now know about. So some examples, actually the very first writing from my morning pages back at the beginning of August was about the launch crew, which is now a thing and I now have two cohorts of it. So it's fun to see where quite literally the idea for this program was born and planted inside of my morning pages. You also watch me host an in-person event in August. The idea for that came through in my morning pages as well. I have ideas for other little like mini workbooks and templates and graphics that I've created all throughout my morning pages. Some days the things that I'm writing turn into podcast episodes or outlines. Sometimes it turns into free workshops or outlines. very often it turns into emails and Instagram content. And so I just want to share with you that, like she says, there isn't a right or wrong way to do this, but I have found that this effort has moved my business forward more quickly than probably anything else that I've done. And I've always journaled a lot. I have another separate Google doc that I've been keeping for like probably years that has like 300 pages. That's basically my morning pages, but without the same intention.
[10:46] And I've just found that, first of all, after I do my warning pages and I dump out my brain, whatever comes to the surface, I just let it come. Sometimes, like she said, sometimes it is like very clear, specific themes or ideas for me to use for something specific, like a podcast episode or an email. But sometimes it's not. And sometimes it's just my brain dump. sometimes it's just me putting random thoughts onto a piece of paper.
[11:12] There's a lot of ideas that actually came out as I was scrolling back through that, you know, ideas that I had that I like highlighted or made bold or put stars by that I never ended up doing anything with either. And so this has just been very helpful to help get, I love how she calls it, the sensor. The sensor in my brain, it has helped me turn down the volume and It's helped me not let it get in my way. And I want to offer this because I see this a lot with my clients, that this is happening in your content, whether you may have realized it or not. That very often when you feel a little bit creatively blocked about what content to create, there are probably a number of reasons for that. But I think one of probably the biggest reasons that goes unidentified is that you're actually just experiencing a creative block, which basically just means that your brain is trying to censor itself. Your brain is trying to avoid saying something dumb. Your brain is trying to avoid something coming out and being, you know, imperfect or not polished completely. And that's what the work of the morning pages is supposed to help with or serve to because it helps you get stuff out without any expectation of what the stuff that comes out is going to do or be. I've also been adding in an extra additional intentional layer into my morning pages where I start with a prayer.
[12:31] And it's just a simple prayer, just inviting, mostly inviting my brain to reflect and be in tune with God and to be close to God. And when I start writing on my pages, I just assume and or have made the assumption that everything that comes out is as if it's an answer to that prayer that I offer when I first start. So these are just a couple of funny examples that are coming to my mind. Something that i have been really enjoying to do and honestly that i've done for years it's not supposed to be like a hack or a strategy but i guess it kind of is something that i've done for a long long time back when like with my first businesses that i started is if there's ever a day when i feel a little bit confused or unsure about what to do today about what to say i go to prayer i go to god and ask because he knows he knows exactly what he wants me to say or he knows at least what he wants me to hear or what he wants someone in his audience to hear that he could possibly deliver to them through me.
[13:33] So I say these prayers all the time and very often the prayer sounds like, hey, what's the one thing that you need me to do today? Because if you're like me, you probably have a long to-do list. You probably have lots of tasks that need to be checked off and small and large things that need to be done or complete. And you probably have clients that you're serving and you probably have children in your family and a spouse who you also love to serve too. And so that list can get really long. And for me, like sitting down in front of a really long to-do list in the morning, sometimes it feels good if there's like a bunch of small things on it that I can just like knock out while my kids are asleep before they wake up. That feels good. But any time besides that, looking at that to-do list when
[14:16] I don't have time set aside to work on it makes me feel agitated and anxious and irritated. And so one way that I found to sort of combat that is by asking through prayer, what's the one thing? That I can focus on, that I can do today, that's not going to take me that much time. Or if it does, that I can trust that God will also help me find the availability to do it. So some funny examples. Just last week, my call schedule has started to get really busy, which is amazing and is, I believe, a symptom of me working on a lot of things, like trying to increase my visibility, like trying to call in high-level clients.
[14:52] Like creating bigger programs and bigger offers. And so people are starting to reach out to me and ask for my help, which I love and is so fun. But it's also caused me to skip eating lunch, which, you know, whatever. But it does become a problem later in the evening when it's four o'clock and I haven't eaten anything. And then the nanny leaves and my work time is complete and I am hangry, grouchy, tired, exhausted mom. That is not what I want. But I want to leave my workdays, clock out, quote unquote, at the end of my workday feeling expanded and energized and excited. And that doesn't mean that I'm not working hard, really hard when my nanny's here. I do a lot. But I want the work that I do to invigorate me and to feel good and to feel expansive and exciting. And I also want to have time to nourish my body the way that it needs to be nourished, which for me is eating lunch. And so literally just a couple weeks ago I was saying a prayer and at the end of my morning my morning pages session the question that I'll frequently ask is what's the one thing that you need me to do today or that you want me to do today and that day I actually screenshotted it because I thought it was funny but the instant answer that came to my mind was I need you to eat lunch today.
[16:09] And so I looked through my call calendar and I didn't have time or lunch built into my calendar. Actually, I think I had a 15 minute break. So as soon as that answer to that prayer came through, I looked at my calendar. I saw that 15 minute break and I was like, okay, that's going to be my 15 minute time that I am officially blocking out to make lunch. I'm not going to get and scroll on my phone. I'm not going to check my email. I'm not going to reply to client boxers. That's going to be my 15 minute lunch making time. And then I had a call after that that was a group call. And so I was like, I can just hurry and eat during the call. So just a funny example, but it's coming to my mind so strongly of how sometimes the things that God wants us to do might be unexpected. It might be possible that they don't even really seem to make sense or they don't seem to be moving our business forward in any certain way, which might be what you would expect for God to say. I'm thinking of another time early in my business, you know, when I had new babies at home, I had a two-year-old and a brand new baby and no child care support yet. And Nate was working from like 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. And then had a long commute home and, you know, got home long after it was dark. And I was feeling it. I was feeling the burn a little bit. And I really wanted to work on my business, but I didn't have the support at that time that I needed to be able to spend the time that I wanted. And so that's when I started implementing this practice of saying one simple prayer to ask God for the one thing.
[17:33] And I can't even remember. I know the answer to the prayer on this one specific day was to send an email to this one specific person. I can't remember who it was or what it was about. And I remember thinking a little bit like, that's it? How is that supposed to help anything? But I just did it with faith. And I remember thinking afterwards, like I said, I wish I could remember the specific circumstances of the email because maybe it was more significant than I'm remembering. But I do remember afterwards feeling like, you know what, even if nothing else gets done today, I feel confident that what I did was enough. And I'm choosing to accept that one email as enough because that's the one thing God wanted me to do today. And so things like this happen all the time and I really want to emphasize here that what I've really found for the last, what has it been, like two months, two and a half-ish, that I've been really intentionally working on this effort.
[18:31] This to me feels a lot like a principle you may have heard me talk about before that I learned from one of my mentors, which is slow down to speed up. It sounds so counterintuitive. It sounds so unexpected and almost unbelievable that Kaylin spending more time, you know, 30 minutes, maybe an hour in front of her Google Doc every day, that could possibly be the thing that helps her increase her sales. It doesn't make sense on paper. But what has made sense is seeing my own clarity come through as a result of this exercise and going throughout my day with that same rounded, confident clarity that what I'm doing is enough and that I've done the one thing that I needed to do today and everything else can fall to the wayside if it needs to.
[19:19] I've seen really powerful, amazing ideas come through that I also have an intention that when God tells me to do that one thing today, I do it today. So I act quickly. And there's a lot of actions that I've taken and offers that I've made and moves that I've made really quickly in the last couple of months that have turned into something even better and a lot of moves I've made that turn into nothing. And so I just want you to see this beautiful truth, which is that when you start to prioritize your silent, private, thoughtful, meditation, prayerful time, whatever that looks like, that your business just might move forward more quickly than it ever has,
[20:06] even though it sounds like it shouldn't make sense. But it has been the actual truth for me. And I can see on paper actual ideas that have come through that have made me thousands of dollars in the last couple of months, which is pretty cool and pretty crazy.
[20:19] So the last thing that I want to leave you with is just a handful of questions that I like to build into my morning pages. And I want to be careful to not make this like, here's this routine or here's this formula to follow that works every time because I think the magic of the morning pages is not having a routine. I think the magic is letting whatever needs to come out, come out. And I think the magic is letting you practice putting words on a page. I want to even be careful to say that I think that you should use your morning pages as a way to create content because that kind of defeats the purpose. I think that sometimes pieces or words or stories or phrases will come through that you can definitely use in your content, but I don't want you to sit down to your morning pages with a specific goal of what content you're going to write in mind because I want it to feel like whatever God wants it to be is what it will be that day. But I do want to leave you with a few questions that I really like to put a pin in my morning pages session so that when I put my laptop away at the end of this session, whether it's a workday for me and I go straight into, you know, getting ready for client calls or greenhouse calls or podcast recordings or whatever.
[21:27] That I have like synthesized when I need to. And same for the days that I have when I don't work. Because there are days when I'll do my morning pages in the morning and I put my laptop away and I'm in mom mode for the rest of the day. So here are some of my favorite questions. And I've already mentioned several of these, but number one, what's the one thing that I need to do today? And asking for the answer to that question to come from God instead of from your own brain. Because your brain's going to be like, oh, you need to fold the laundry and load the dishwasher and make sure to pick up the kids from school and make sure to pick up the thing from the store for the Halloween, whatever. But I want you to really seek for the answer to that question to come from God. I also think this will be a very useful exercise if you struggle to hear what God's trying to tell you, this will help because whatever comes out on the page is going to be the thing that he's trying to tell you. And you can just trust that and have faith in that.
[22:16] Other questions that I really love, what decisions am I making today? For me, a lot of times I have lots of decisions to make. What do I want to sell? When do I want to sell it? Who do I want to sell it to? How do I want the messaging to be? What's my launch strategy going to be? There's lots of decisions that I have to make on a daily basis. And so I like to synthesize everything by writing out with very direct clarity, what decisions am I making today? Where I'm just going to decide and then I'm not going to come back and keep reflecting and ruminating on this. I'm just going to decide and move forward from here.
[22:49] What am I grateful for? I love building that question, especially on days where I feel a little bit activated or nervous or tense, or it feels like there might be something that I need to do or should do or have to do. When I come back to, what am I grateful for? It can feel really grounding and peaceful to make sure that I reflect on what I'm grateful for. Next couple of questions. What do I need to release? Very often for me, this usually looks like I need to release some kind of an expectation on myself or on someone else. Very often this looks like releasing some kind of a belief that I have something to prove to someone or releasing some kind of a belief that someone's doing something better than I'm doing or that I'm doing something that's not good enough. Those are frequently the things that I need to release.
[23:37] Stress is something I often need to release worry doubt fear and I really like consciously writing out like I am releasing this thing and then I do like a little deep breath and then when I put my laptop away it's like okay I feel clear I know what I need to do today I hope you love this episode morning pages has become like I said I don't really want to call it a secret hack because it's not it's actually really simple and very basic and many of you are probably already doing something like this but I I really think some of the power of it for me has been approaching my morning pages with a very specific intention of using my morning page, Google Doc, as a place where I come to empty my brain, to fill it back up with what God needs it to be filled with. And then I can put my laptop away and go throughout my day with clarity.
[24:27] With decisiveness, with help from heaven and support. I can't think of a better way to go throughout your day. I would love to hear from you if you have been trying morning pages or if you want to try and have questions about it Send me a dm on instagram and let's chat about it I would also love if you would leave a five-star review on this podcast because the more people leave reviews The more people can find this amazing content and it would mean the world to me So if you would I would really appreciate it And I hope you have so much fun testing out and playing with your morning pages And like I said go get the book the artist's way because this is just one of many amazing helpful principles that she teaches to help you clear through creative blocks so that you can move forward faster and with more clarity. Have an amazing week, you guys. I'll see you next time.
[25:15] Hey, I hope you loved this week's episode. If you did, I know you would love to be a member of my community, The Greenhouse. It's where I teach you how to build an amazing, fruitful life while you build an amazing, fruitful business. It is a movement for women who want to unsubscribe from the traditional success path that says that life has to be a struggle and instead learn how good making more money can get, how fun marketing can be, and how much joy and presence you're capable of feeling as a woman and as a mother. Find out more and join at katlynpriest.com slash greenhouse and I'll see you there.
[25:54] Music.