The Power of Pen and Paper

Welcome to Coaching Conversations

We have created a NEW and Innovative line of books called Workplace Coaching Books. These books use QR codes with embedded audio and video lessons speaking directly to the reader. Each book comes with assessments and journal based coaching pages where they document what they've learned and what they've applied. In addition each book comes with the self analysis link that prompts them to share what they've learned and what they've put into action leading to greater learner application a

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Forgotten Art of Journaling
• 1:59 Three Major Benefits of Journaling
• 2:54 The Progress Principle Study Results
• 3:30 The Ashley Case Study
• 5:52 Embedding Journaling into Leadership Practice

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:37

When we develop ourselves and we develop other people. One of the forgotten arts, if you will, is journaling. I have become a huge journaling advocate, probably for the last 20 plus years. Often I will just go to a coffee shop and I'm not even a coffee drinker and I will literally just pull out a notebook and just write down ideas, observations, ideas for the companies, you know, messages I want to send to clients, whatever the case might be. And journaling does three major things, three major things that I think are really important. Number one it gets us to slow down and think and reflect. Number two it actually facilitates reflection. I don't think anyone can argue that when we reflect, we typically have better clarity, better thought process, better concise thoughts, better concise, clear communication versus just thinking right away in the moment. And then, third, one of the things that journaling does is it reminds us Just that. It reminds us of the good things and the things that we need to address. Often, when we're in the throw of things and we're running hard, we don't say to ourselves oh, I'm really stressed out, I got to slow down and journal, so schedule time for yourself to journal. Let me give you one of the best successes as it relates to journaling. You know, I read this book, the Progress Principle by Teresa Amable, and she talks about how journaling was a way of her capturing data and how she found out that progress was the most motivated thing for 76% of the people in her study. So 76% of the people in her study said I'm at my most motivated state when I'm progressing in my job. It was not reward, recognition or money. So here's the funny thing she got that data from journaling. She then found out that it actually lowered people's stress, and I might get this number wrong, but I think it was up to 23%. I have found the same thing. So one of the other things that journaling does is it helps us observe and capture things. When you combine observation with journaling, it is powerful. Let me give you the case study.

Speaker 1: 2:54

There was a young lady at our bank that I would say was shy and she was a teller, and one day I was waiting for our banker to come out and we do our business banking with them as well, even though they were a client and he said well, let's go back to my office. I said can we sit here for a few minutes? He said, sure, what's going on? I said watch. He said what I go watch. Everybody goes by the first two tellers and they go to Ashley on the end Every time. And he looked, a couple people came in, happened every single time, and he said wow, I've never noticed that before. I said you know, every time I come in she's got my accounts pulled up. She knows my kids' names. She's fantastic.

Speaker 1: 3:40

Now, if Ashley was listening to this and she might be she would tell you she's an introvert by trait. She is. And I asked her one day, sitting in her cubicle station, and I said what's your goal? What do you want? Now I'm going to share this. Not a great thing to share. But she said I really want to go into leadership.

Speaker 1: 4:00

I would never have assumed that. I would have assumed the opposite. And boy, that's the power of asking people questions. So when she was telling me and I said well, do you have an academy here or some type of thing that you can get into, she said we do. We have a leadership program. And I said well, I think that's awesome. I said I think you'll do great. So all of a sudden, you know, I told that to the bank president, or the person we were doing our banking with at the time and he said, wow, I would never have known she wanted to do that. Here's the moral of the story Nobody asked her.

Speaker 1: 4:33

She was so good as a teller. Well, that's one less thing I got to worry about. When you have high performing talent and you're not observing, you are missing out on an opportunity and sooner or later you might be missing that person. The next thing is when you take the time to just casually sit, give yourself a break as a leader and observe and journal other people, you will own it more. You have a repository of things you can now go inspire, motivate, coach, mentor, lead, manage whatever you want to call it. And that's the opportunity. We all too often are so busy with our heads down doing our jobs, we forget to look up and say who's doing a great job and then just simply make a note of it. Embed journaling into your leadership practice.