Writing in your journal every single day will change your life.
Writing in your journal every day is the difference between being transformed and being confused.
Writing in your journal every day is the difference between being proactive and seizing life in your own hands, or being a mere observer to life’s possibilities.
Writing in your journal every day is the difference between starting your day collected and strategic instead of frenzied and rushed.
Writing in your journal is the fastest way to completely control your mind.
In The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg teaches the principle of a “keystone” habit, or a habit that automatically takes care of many other things.
Journaling is such a keystone habit.
In this article, I’ll give you 5 questions to journal about that can will cause huge pivots for you.
First, let’s learn why you need them.

Why Journaling?

In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Josh Waitzkin talked about how important it is to visualize, understand, connect with, strategize for, optimize, and understand your future self.
He shares that his ultimate mentor is himself 20 years in the future.
This isn’t new.
Josh isn’t the only one who teaches this.
I’m not the only one who teaches this.
Napoleon Hill even talked about this concept in Think and Grow Rich nearly 100 years ago.
The principle is simple: think about your future self as often as you can, and it will bring your body and mind in alignment to act towards that future.
Your journal is the tool through which you do this.
Journaling is how you persuade yourself of your own desires (more on that later).
Dan Sullivan wrote every day in his journal for 25 years exactly what he wanted. He persuaded himself to believe that he could have it.
Now, he’s the #1 entrepreneurial coach in the world.
He wanted to coach entrepreneurs, and he got it.
Scott Adams, founder of the Dilbert cartoon series, wrote affirmations for years in his journal saying, “I’m going to be a syndicated cartoonist.”
He was persuading his subconscious to accept what he wanted, and he got it.
You can use your journal to persuade yourself.
You can use your journal to commit yourself to doing what you want to do.
You can use your journal to desire and have the future you want.
You can journal about anything, but these 5 questions are how you “set the stage” before writing anything else, so you can have optimal results.

Question 1

“Where am I right now?”
Answer this in bullet points describing your situation.
What time of year it is. Who the people you’re trying to build better relationships with. What your workout routine looks like. What you ate that day. What your current income is. What your current challenges and problems are. What your current day-to-day schedule looks like.

Question 2

“What are my wins from the last 90 days?”
Be bold and unashamed about this.
In our book The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and I teach that you always want to be measuring yourself against your former self, because that allows you to recognize the progress you’re making.
What the 5–10 biggest wins of things personally and professionally that you’ve accomplished recently?
If you really take the time to do this, you’re going to appreciate and recognize far more from the last 90 days than you usually give yourself credit for.
Writing your wins allows you to appreciate your past and use your past as a springboard for a bigger and better future, whereas most people don’t take the time to appreciate all that they’re accomplishing.

Question 3

“What are the wins I want for the next 90 days?”
Three to five bullets.
What are you trying to accomplish?
What would you like to see happen in your world?
Be specific, strategic, and bold. Anything goes.

Question 4

“Where do you want to be one year from now?”
It’s a year from today. You’re waking up one year older.
That person is contingent upon how you present self interacts with and understands them.
What do you want to be doing?
Make a list.

Question 5

“Where do you want to be in three years from now?”
Dream big here. Nothing is impossible.

When Should You Ask These 5 Questions?

Dr. Robert Cialdini researched that to be per-suaded, you first have to be pre-suaded. This is the core concept behind his book Pre-suasion.
Pre-suasion means the mindset you have in the first place determines whether or not you’re going to be able to be persuaded.
Your journal is a pre-suasion tool. Use it during your morning and night.
When you’re sleeping, your mind isn’t resting. It’s doing amazing processing. It’s mapping new connections, ideas, memories, and places.
What do you want your mind to work on during the night?
Write those things down.
As Thomas Edison said, “never go to bed without a request to your subconscious.”
You also want to journal in the morning. The first thing you do in the morning really has an impact on the direction your day goes.
Rather than looking at his phone and scattering his brain with emails, text messages, and social media, Josh Waitzkin writes in the morning.
He goes to a quiet place and he writes.
He outputs.
He empties out all of the things that his subconscious mind were processing during the day.
When you first wake up, write your goals.
Write the problems you’re trying to solve.
Write what you’re trying to accomplish.

Where Should You Post These 5 Questions?

Record all 5 of these questions in the front page of your journal.
It’s powerful and it’s accountable.
They’ll become a trigger and a prompt every time you open your journal.
You can see where you’re at.
You can see your wins from the last 90 days.
You can see what you’re trying to accomplish, in both the long and short-term.
Every time you open your journal, you can look at your questions for 10–20 seconds and be reminded of your future.
This gives you tremendous confidence.
You write from the perspective of faith and confidence that you’re going to actually accomplish what you want.

Humble Yourself

As I shared here, I rarely re-read my journals. They’re for creation, not consumption.
There is one area I love to read, however.
I love going back to a journal from 3–5 years in the past and seeing what my wins were from that time period.
I love seeing what I was trying to accomplish and what my goals were.
It’s fun to see that.
It’s humbling.
It sometimes brings you to tears.
It builds your gratitude.
It transforms you.
I remember an experience at the beginning of one year, I looked at all of my journals from the previous year and read my 12-month goals.
It was amazing.
All of them had happened except for one.
At the time, I thought I was going sell a million copies of Personality Isn’t Permanent, and, at least back then, I did not accomplish that. My strategy at the time was not effective.
But all the rest of the goals came to pass.
My wife and I have been blessed with 6 and now 7 amazing children.
I wrote down that we would have kids before we got them.
There’s a great quote from Stephen R. Covey that “Mental creation always precedes physical creation.”
If you’ve looked at these 5 questions BEFORE journaling anything else, you’re going to ultimately pull a lot more powerful nuggets from your subconscious while you’re journaling.
You’re going to be able to write from a more elevated state.
You’ll have better ideas brought to your mind while you’re journaling, which is ultimately going to allow you to have more inspiration, more flow, and more excitement.

Conclusion

1. Where are you right now?
2. What were your wins from the last 90 days?
3. What are the wins you want to have in the next 90 days?
4. Where do you want to be 1 year from now?
5. Where do you want to be 3 years from now?

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