Be sure to scroll to the bottom of this post for a PDF version and other notes.
If you’re new to Daily Prompts, you may want to start at the beginning of the series here.
Year______ Month_______Day______Consecutive Practice Days_____Missed Days______
Day 19
Gratitude: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Vision: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Why do I recommend getting so emotional about all of this?
Harry Lorayne, master of memory, wisely taught us that the brain remembers things that are emotionally charged. Again we can see mechanisms at play on a biological level here- emotions cause electrochemical responses that can assist in the brain’s plasticity. In plain English, this means that you are more likely to remember things that have an emotional impact. (There may be exceptions in cases of extreme trauma, but I’m talking about normal day-to-day emotional responses, not extreme outliers.)
It’s probably not true, but there’s a story of Socrates teaching a young student a lesson, then suddenly slapping him in the face. The slap in the face was to invoke a strong emotional response to ensure that the student would always remember that lesson. True or not, it certainly sounds effective. Hell, I even remember the story and I wasn’t the one being slapped!
The point is that you can use your emotional responses as a valuable tool. You can learn to invoke these emotional states in response to things that haven’t even happened yet. In fact, I’m willing to bet you’ve already done this many times. What do you think worry is? Worrying is an emotional response to something that hasn’t happened yet (and often never happens).
All I’m suggesting is that you turn that around and practice using positive emotional responses to train your brain. Not just turning worry into hope, but even further, turning desires into belief. You will act in alignment with your integrated beliefs, so you better take charge of what you believe.
One way to foster belief is through experiencing an emotional response. So write out how it feels to be the person you want to be. Write it in such a way that you are experiencing what it’s like to be that person. Practice trying to actually feel it as if it were already true.
It is.
These tools can set you up to become the person you want to be.
Affirmations: (the free PDF below features lined entries for your journal practice)
Daily: (The pdf version below contains three lined pages for your daily journal)
NOTE:
The above is an excerpt from the upcoming The Lyceum Course Journal. We will be releasing it here for free as a Daily Prompt blog post. If you would like a physical copy, we will link to it here once it is released.
Suggested Use:
I realize a daily journal prompt on a blog is a little weird. This is how I would suggest using it: Open your favorite note-taking software such as Evernote, copy and paste this post into it, and write your daily entries there.
OR
Download a PDF version of this post here. Feel free to print it out, or access it through a PDF editor where you can type in your daily entry.
Collaborate With Me!
This post series is a first draft of the future book. If you have suggestions, comments, or see errors, please reach out so that I can make the final product more valuable for you and the rest of the community. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
