Episode #49: Journaling
In this episode, Karen F. Geiger, author of Storied Life Journal: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living shares how journaling helps you design a life with more stories. Karen will cover the benefits of journaling as a regular practice and demystify the difficulty of journaling with helpful techniques and prompts to help you connect to the page and tell your own story.
Episode Recap:
Kelly Callahan-Poe and Karen Geiger, the author of Storied Life Journal: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living, discuss the power of journaling in fostering self-awareness and personal growth.
Research supports journaling’s impact on stress reduction, cognitive function, and creativity, with studies showing a 77% increase in self-discovery and a 65% decrease in stress.
Journaling benefits include self-awareness and discovery, improved self-image, reduced stress, and greater awareness of one’s goals and emotions.
Journaling can be a simple habit, such as writing to-do lists, or snippets of thoughts and feelings, and can be done at any time of day to help settle the mind and body. Karen emphasizes the importance of writing down plans and priorities to avoid ruminating at night and encourages focusing on Gratitude and Glitter to reframe negative days and find positives.
Karen encourages listeners to try journaling for 5-10 minutes a day to experience a shift in their lives. She suggests a stream-of-consciousness journaling habit, starting with prompts or quotes from the Storied Life Journal to overcome fear of not doing it correctly. Karen emphasizes progress over perfection, encouraging participants to let pen go and connect words without editing.
The episode covers journaling tips for new college graduates on the job hunt and for women looking to get back into the working world after raising children.
Episode Transcript:
Kelly Callahan-Poe
Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms Podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe and today’s episode is called Journaling with Special Guest Karen Geiger. Karen is certified through the Therapeutic Writing Institute. She’s a certified and licensed speech-language pathologist and award-winning writer. When she’s not at the pickleball court, you can find her teaching at the Erie Cancer Wellness Center for individuals dealing with cancer and grief. She also she also teaches online journaling workshops. Welcome, Karen!
Karen Geiger
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you and talk to your audience.
Kelly
Well, I was really excited to get a copy of your book. So, I want to ask you all sorts of questions. What inspired you to write the Storied Life Journal: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living?
Karen
Well, thank you for purchasing the book. I have always been a journaler. Ever since I was little, I was I was that girl that had the floral diary with the little lock in the key. I know we all did. It was purple. I remember it so distinctly. I don’t still have it. But now I have these beautiful linen-backed journals that I’ve been keeping up for years. And I really wanted to create a journal that was specific to my needs.
I never really had any inclination to do this until luckily enough, my very good friend started the Erie Cancer Wellness Center. And she knew that I was a writer, I have some published things on Grown & Flown and Better After 50. And I won an essay at Penn Writers for nonfiction. And so, she had said to me, I want you to spearhead the journaling program. And I thought, okay, great. Thank you so much. I’m honored. I had no clue where to start. So I really feel like the best things I do are rooted in education and knowledge. So, I searched online, and I found the Therapeutic Writing Institute. I do have the book. I’ve marked my books up. So, this is the journal, it’s a journal to the self program is that Therapeutic Writing Institute. And so, I did go through that certification, which is very involved, very detailed, and it’s excellent. So,I felt like I could give the participants at Erie Cancer Wellness Center, my very best. The program is on a volunteer basis, everything is free for them. So. I really wanted to make this something that they left the class feeling like they learned something either about journaling or about themselves. And then what I’ve done is I’ve taken the Journal to the Self, and I’ve kind of mixed it with my speech-language pathology, background, my cognitive training, you know, for cognitive therapy for head injuries and strokes and all of those things, that knowledge plus my writing knowledge. And that’s kind of where Storied Life originated. I took everything that I knew from all the different areas of my of my life, things that I’ve done and completed and participated in. And I put it into that book, hoping that maybe somebody who picks it up will discover how great journaling can be in their life. It’s so easy. It is so so easy to start the habit.
Kelly
I definitely want to talk about how you’ve organized the book. But there are some very interesting prompts in here, but taking a step back in terms of the research you have done in the past about journaling, and benefits and impacts of journaling. Can we talk about that?
Karen
Absolutely. So again, I really like to route myself in knowledge, I’m not just going to go and wing it. So, I was even surprised the impact that journaling can have both mentally and physically. We all know journaling is a part of being mindful and it can decrease your stress and it can decrease your anxiety. It’s really almost a buzzword for 2024. I feel like maybe it’s just because of the algorithms that I see all the journals out there. But it not only decreases your stress and anxiety, it can actually improve your liver function, improve your lung function, and it can decrease stress hormone, decrease your cortisol levels. And these are all in various studies. So. we’re actually going to read a little bit so I get my percentages, correct. There was a 77% increase in self-discovery, 78% increase in integration and retention of information. So that, to me, especially journaling isn’t just for the older population, it’s really beneficial for all ages, like those kids in college, those kids right out of college, journaling can really help. There’s a 42% increase in the likelihood of achieving a goal. And that was both for just general life goals. And for sports-related goals, there’s a 65% decrease in stress, 55% increase in creativity, 59% increase in memory. So it really is kind of this mind, heart body. Just mixture of all good things. Especially when you add gratitude, there’s an increase in dopamine and serotonin. So, maybe we don’t have to be checking our phones every five seconds, because we’ve already had that dopamine hit for the day.
Kelly
Well, it’s funny, because I already knew about the memory aspect of it, because I came up before the internet existed, right? So, we had to actually write down notes. So, I didn’t have computers in school to write notes. So, I have to handwrite things down. And I remember where things are on the page. And it helps me to write things down to memorize, and I try to explain this to my kids because they’re typing notes. And I don’t think you have the same effect when you’re typing something versus when you’re handwriting them.
Karen
No you don’t, there are different connections, it’s different synapses connecting when you actually have that fine motor skill to the brain, there is an actual study, and I don’t know the percentage on this of the increase, there is an increase in retention, when you are actually handwriting. I do the same thing with my kids and trust me, they’re not going to listen. But there is I feel like that’s too it’s really a shame that there’s such a disconnect between the fine motor skill of handwriting, and the retention of material, typing isn’t the same. Now, that being said, if for some reason you are journaling, for you it needs to be a typewritten activity, or even a voice-recorded activity. That’s better than nothing. I do prefer pen to paper.
Kelly
Old school for me as well. I think there’s something personal about it as well. In the beginning of your journal, you kind of go through some of the benefits of journaling. And obviously, you’ve given stats in quotes, but can you kind of outline what you see is the key benefits of journaling, and why it’s important?
Karen
I really think that journaling is an opportunity for everybody to become a little more aware of who they are and where they’re going. I mean, that’s kind of the bottom line, it is an opportunity for greater self-discovery. It can improve your self-image. And actually one of the quotes that I absolutely love, the woman’s name is Karen Mullins, she says that “you’re never going to outperform your self-image”. And that’s so important, because if we don’t know who we are, how do we know what we want and where we’re going. And, the class that I just taught today, we did a roadmap, because the ladies were saying something about, they don’t know what to do next. And I said, Well if you pull up maps on your phone, you have a destination in mind. So, let’s find your destination. And let’s find your map to this, you know, when they chose joy, so we wrote a map to joy. So, journaling is really for everyone. It can be a simple habit. That’s five minutes and all you’re saying are maybe some gratitude and even a to do list you know, don’t forego that to do list as that’s not journaling it can be because that is you know, that’s an opportunity to write down what you’re doing. It’s a log of what happened during the day. The benefits are like I said, their mind and body. And I think we all need that five minutes even to just settle in with ourselves get grounded anchor into the day, and you know, see where we’re at.
Kelly
Do you recommend journaling in the morning or in the evening or it depends on your how your own body and mind focuses?
Karen
So I I personally journal in the morning it is, in fact, when I don’t, I miss it, I feel like I’m a little off kilter. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m writing page after page. As long as I just kind of get the snippets of gratitude, what I have to do, and maybe a sentence or two about maybe how I’m feeling maybe what’s going on, it doesn’t not every day is the same for sure. I prefer morning. If journaling for somebody is I’m at a stoplight heading to work. And that’s when you get to jot something down. That’s okay. I think the biggest thing to really impress upon everybody is don’t make it too precious. It doesn’t, you know, it does not have to be a beautiful, leather-bound notebook with a special pen and your cup of chai tea. And that corner of the of the room that is like Instagram where you can be sitting in bed in your pajamas. I’d have to have coffee first. But you know, it can be anywhere at any time. The book does. It’s right here. So, in the book, the way I have it set up is in my head, it was the morning through the left-hand side of the page, which is the ancient quote, and then the prompt. And then if you prefer to write that whole, you know, the page and a half, that’s great. And then that next page is for next day Planning and Priorities, and then Gratitude and Glitter.
Kelly
That is my favorite. The Gratitude and Glitter.
Karen
Oh, good. Talk about that. Well, the next day Planning and Priorities was really almost kind of a selfish endeavor for me, because I realized that I was really ruminating a lot night means I would lay there and think, Okay, I have to do this and this and this. And, you know, what’s everybody doing? And what did they I mean, I would go to I mean, it’s probably a mom thing, what is, you know, what does my oldest have to do? What is, you know, my youngest have to do. And so that was really me not jotting things down in a notebook. Okay, this is the plan for tomorrow. This is what has to get done. So that I know, I won’t forget number one, because you know, a lot of those things, you wake up and think, oh my gosh, don’t forget to do this. So, then I could write it down. And it’s already, it’s already out of my head. I don’t have to think about it anymore. So hopefully it doesn’t keep me up.
The Gratitude and the Glitter I think is really important. Because some days, you might go to bed and think this was not a good day. This was bad. An awful day. And so that gives the writer an opportunity to be like, Okay, what’s one thing and again, that’s don’t make it. Don’t make it huge. Don’t make it grandiose. And I solved this huge problem in my world now. I had a great cup of coffee. That is like almost always my number one. I worked out I took a walk. Dinner was good. It doesn’t it doesn’t have to be big.
Kelly
But what’s the difference between Gratitude and Glitter?
Karen
So for the Glitter, the Glitter would be something maybe a little bit more fun. So, like if I had a great if I played great at pickleball that would be a Glitter. You know if I went undefeated, that would be the Glitter. You know, so those are your wins. Those are the things that you think good for me for doing that. That was that was pretty cool. I think that you know, it’s that start of the forehead since you’re the same generation.
Karen
Give yourself a gold star give yourself some Glitter. We don’t we make things special enough in my opinion. And this is an opportunity to make everything anything the big and the little things a little bit special. And celebrate.
Kelly
And the other point that you talk a lot about living in the analog world, we’re in a digital world all day long. So just to kind of move yourself away from that you need to stay away from the blue lights that are not good for you. And to start. That’s also part of the calming down process and moving into kind of the next phase of the evening and settling.
Karen
You know, just grounding yourself in something that isn’t bombarding all of your senses. You know, we are getting, we’re getting overloaded with this digital world, I think sometimes. And I think it was in the new book, The Anxious Generation where he determined that teenagers have like five hours of screen time, plus four hours of screen time because of school, that’s nine hours. And adults are not far behind. You know, it’s all it’s a distraction. And it does take it’s an interesting fact that it takes 21 minutes to return to a task after you have been distracted. So, with every notification, every time the phone buzzes, somebody texts you whatever it is, if you are at work, or you’re trying to study, it takes 21 minutes to get your brain back into study mode, or work mode, whatever it might be. So just kind of shutting that part off for a little bit. And getting back to pen and paper. It sounds so old school. But there are, there are so many benefits that I think if you just give it a chance, like I said, I feel like if you have out of those nine hours that you’re on the phone, if you have five minutes, which I think most people do, if you have five minutes to get off of your phone, get on to paper, you might notice a shift.
Kelly
You have some steps to get people in the right frame of mind to start journaling and we’ve talked about some of them in terms of priority planning and gratitude and slitter Can you give us some of the other the other steps
Karen
I do think that here is a stream of consciousness journaling habit that you can do, which is pretty much just opening up a blank page and writing whatever comes to mind. I do feel that the blank page can be very daunting for people. And it brings up a little bit of fear that they’re not doing it correctly. So especially in the book, I do start with with springboards. So, they’re just easy prompts quotes, and especially in Storied Life Journal, you can either work off of the quote itself, or you can riff off the prompt. And if neither of those speak to you, that’s okay. It doesn’t matter to me. You can write whatever you want, you can write a list of all the stuff you have to do that day. You know, these are just kind of guides. I think that you know, it’s that whole progress over perfection. You know, we’re working on pragmatics and prose, it doesn’t have to be pretty. My biggest rule, I only have few rules in my classes. Obviously, with what is said in class stays in class, it’s kind of like Vegas. But the second rule is, that there are no rules except don’t edit. We’re not here to critique ourselves and determine if what we wrote is good or not, there’s no value given to what you’ve written on the paper. It just is. It’s done, and it’s there. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that if you let the pen go, even if it doesn’t make any sense, if you let your brain just go wherever it wants to go, and you’re connecting words that maybe aren’t even sentences, sometimes, and that would be more a little more stream of consciousness. Sometimes, you end up in a place, that’s really cool. And that’s where a lot of ideas are born.
Kelly
Just great for people in my industry in advertising and marketing. And we’re going to talk about that in a couple of minutes. But you also talked about creating in quarters, what does that mean?
Karen
That’s, I do think that it’s important to kind of give yourself a goal. I’m very goal-oriented. I think that that is partly because of being you know, a speech-language pathologist. And when I worked with patients, we had long-term goals, short-term goals, you know, met unmet continue. And if you ever worked in any kind of therapeutic realm, do you know what that is? So, I do think that it’s important to work with, where you want to go.
But I do think it’s important to give yourself a little bit of a time limit. Give yourself when it comes to like writing a fiction because I am doing a book coach and training with another accelerator. You know, some of the best books have a timeframe. So, it’s not like, that ticking clock. It’s not like, oh, I have years to do this. Now. If you have a goal that you want to achieve, and you know what it is, and you know how to get there, block it out, put out the steps, you know, just like we did in the class today, write out the map, and then give yourself if it’s one-quarter great if it’s if you need to extend it to two quarters, but at least then you give yourself that ticking clock of I need to get this done gives it a little bit of an urgency. I think that I think that it just kind of gives you a timeframe to work with them.
Kelly
And you also include a goal planner as well as kind of a habit tracker in there to help guide you as well. So, what are some examples in some of your classes that you might give as a goal that someone might have in a certain quarter?
Karen
I think when one of the things that we do more in my online workshops is we do determine joy is kind of a big word for everybody and I usually allow the class to determine the word that speaks to them most. You know, obviously, I have a curriculum but I really go by the participants and their language. Language is so important which we can talk about in a second but I so what I usually do is if for some reason, we are trying to find more joy there, there are techniques, specific techniques and tools to evaluate your most authentic self and are you being your most authentic self, which would equate to being joyful, right? Because when you are, when you have that mind, heart coherence, you’re kind of in the flow, you’re being in your zone of genius or zone of flow, or however you want to say it. And then we determine, well, how are you going to get there? What is your scaffolding? What are your pillars that are holding you up to bring you joy. And if finding joy is something that is your goal, then I will write in my journal, four times a week for 10 minutes a day. And that’s a goal. So actually in pickleball is in this one. I actually wrote two pickleball journals as well, Dinks and Drives. And I think it’s actually in the Dink one where there’s a cognitive goal, an athletic goal. And then another kind of goal, we’re not always striving and never arriving, you want the goals to be attainable, you want them to be measurable, and you want them to be true to you. Not true to somebody else, you don’t want to do what somebody else is doing, you want to do what’s true to you.
Kelly
So there’s personal, there’s professional and personal could be mind body spirit, and you could organize it however you wanted, right? And professional can be whatever you want your professional goals to be. I want to record 50 podcasts in the next three months type thing and all the steps that I need to do to get there. You talk a little bit about different quotes that you love, that that inspire you, can you give us a couple of the quotes that are that are most inspiring to you, I can tell you my favorite quote.
Karen
I think probably one of my most favorites is by Dr. Wayne Dyer, which is “if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. And I think that that goes for everything. And everyone, quite honestly, I mean, I think if you just flip how you’re perceiving something, and that’s where that’s where journaling can really help because journaling can really improve those executive level function skills, you know, that frontal lobe, prefrontal lobe frontal lobe of memory, problem solving, prioritizing, categorizing, attention to task, it is that task initiation. So, getting yourself started. And I think that that really helps you when you can analyze something that you’ve written down from a different perspective, that changes that timeframe from act and react, you know, you there’s a, there’s a stimulus, and are you going to act react? What’s that process? And I think when you give yourself that couple minutes to write it on paper and really look at it, your first reaction might not be your second, third, fourth. So I love that quote, another one, which I, I tell my boys all the time is by Henry Ford, “it’s whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right”. And that comes to the power of language, to me as a writer, speech-language pathologist, language to me is beautiful. It’s how we talk to each other, and how we talk to ourselves, is so important to who we are, where we’re going our self-image, our self-discovery? You know, I think so many people would never speak to their friends, the way they talk to themselves.
Kelly
Of course. Well, let’s take this one step further, a little bit, because there’s different target audiences that we’re trying to reach with this podcast. Let’s start with the entry-level. People who are just getting started and I talked to a lot of them, especially recently in terms of I’m trying to get a job I’m graduating from college, how do I get myself in the right frame of mind? How do I position myself to get a job and figure out what I want to do. There was one quote that I really love that I felt kind of really resonated to get started on, on this is which is “the difference between how people see you and how you see yourself is very different.” And I love that quote, because if you literally sat down and wrote how you see yourself and then asked, not just your friends but people they don’t even know very well it is it can be very different about what the perception is versus the reality. And I think that’s really important because we don’t give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. So, to me kind of reframing ourselves in a different in a different light and working on the elements that make us us, and the confidence part of things that is what gives you life is really what you want to be projecting into a new job. But I’d love to hear the type of advice that you would give on what young, young generational kids would journal about? And why would it matter to them?
Karen
That is such a great question. And I think it actually goes back to that the prompt that I had said. Well, we do actually what I do teach in the in the workshop is kind of finding that magic of you that authentic self. And it’s hard, my kids are at that age ending college first jobs. And they know who they are, and they know what they like, but they’re just kind of figuring out who they are from student to worker to going into the workplace. And I think it’s really important to understand, you can start understanding who you are, and asking the question, Who am I? You can do that every day? And your answer will be different. That’s true, because it depends on it depends on how you’re feeling and what’s been happening. And you know, how you slept or whatever, who am I? Write it down. And those words a lot of times I have the classes start that prompt, I have the answer it with every sentence has to begin with “I am”. And that really solidifies who you think you are maybe at the core. It’s interesting, I was in a writing class once and the teacher looked started off with write it down. Who are you? Oh, gosh. I found that so difficult. And it was interesting, because I have incorporated that into my workshops. And it’s interesting to see how people spin that if they go super negative with I am not tall, I am not this, or is it a little bit deeper where it’s like, so I remember my response, because we read them because it was a writing workshop. And I remember marveling at how beautiful these other people had written theirs. And mine was I am not that Karen of the memes. Like, that was kind of like, that’s nice. That isn’t you know. And so, it’s interesting to know, if you’re starting out, you’re heading into college, or heading out of college into the workforce. set, set some great goals, you know, and don’t go too far, don’t do the whole, you know, 10 years, I want to be here in 10 years, I want to be at the end of this corner, and try to have it be things that you can control. You can’t necessarily control getting a job, you can do your very best. But that’s that final decision isn’t up to you. But you can present yourself as someone who is confident, secure, calm, motivated. You know, writing down, that’s where that that language comes in, get a thesaurus, and write down some great words, and think that’s the word I want to do that. I want to be abundantly confident. And then what does that look like to you? Hopefully these kids know how to do snowflake method, you know, abundantly confident, put that on the middle of the page, and then get all of your lines coming from that and what does it look like to you? How you dress – a suit and tie a dress? You know, is it a dress isn’t very professional? Is it? You know, like a Friday casual you know, go? Is it go into every detail be detail-oriented? Is that what it is? You know, abundantly confident? Is that how you hold yourself? Your back is straight? Is it somebody who’s physically fit? Is it somebody who is organized in brings their lunch to work?
Kelly
Energy to me, it’s a lot of its energy. I want young people to bring the energy to what we do. You know, and a fresh look, a fresh perspective.
Karen
And I think that the whole you know, “fake it till you make it” is I kind of love that for this generation because they haven’t, that’s what we did. Well that’s what I did. You know, I acted like I knew what the heck I was talking about because I had seen you know, a couple pages in my internships and all that, so when I had my first job, I walked in there thinking, I know what to do I know what to do, you know? Yeah, I’m just gonna figure it out. And again, problem-solving, you know, that that prefrontal lobe with your, with your journaling helps you to analyze problems in the moment, because you’ve done it on paper. It’s like building muscles, lifting weights. Journaling is like lifting weights, but for your brain for your cognitive function.
Karen
Storytelling is so is so important. Because when you attach an emotion, to something, it is remembered better. So when you tell a story, a story usually provokes an emotion. And that increases the chance of recall. And it also, you know, are you going to have, say, if you’re trying to sell something, are you going to have somebody want to buy it just because, or because it reminds them of a story that is similar to something in their life? So I guess, don’t be afraid. Maybe that’s really what we should be saying. Don’t be afraid. Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic has the most fabulous analogy of fear where she writes a letter to fear. And that I think, is one of the prompts in the journal. But she says, “ hey, fear, we’re going on a road trip”. And in a paraphrasing, in, “you’re allowed to come, and you can sit in the back, but you’re absolutely not allowed to drive.” And so I think, any age group, don’t allow the fear to drive.
Kelly
I love that. Well, that also applies to you know, bringing it up a couple notches on the ladder, let’s say you’re a woman coming back into the workforce after having raised your children and been out of the workforce for a certain number of years, you know, what sort of guidance would you give them or prompts to get started to put them in the right frame of mind?
Karen
I would say to them, I am right there. That is, that is 1,000% me. I stayed home raised my kids, dabbled a little bit, wouldn’t even call it a side hustle. Because it was just there. And I did it when I could, but I never took it to the point where I thought, Okay, this is, this is where it could go. And so for that midlife woman who’s like, Okay, I’m ready to get back. I would say, have faith in yourself. Find the faith on the page with remembering who you are. Because sometimes we get lost in all of the roles that we play. So find what lights you up and use the language. So I do this one prompt for the workshop. It is pillars. I look at it as if what’s holding you up? Figure out what the four things in your life are, that bring you the most joy that lights you up that you think this is 1,000% me and then move from there. You know, that whole imposter syndrome? It’s fear. That’s what it is. It’s fear of how am I going to look who’s gonna say something about me? What’s, you know, what are they gonna say behind my back? You know, and it’s, it’s scary. I’m not gonna lie. It’s scary. But I also think you have to have that group of friends that will say, say the best things about you when you’re not in the room. There are always going to be people who talk about you whether you do it or not. I guess that’s the thing. My dearest friends know that I won’t dance anywhere. It doesn’t matter if music’s on, odds are I am probably going to dance. And I remember saying to my husband, he doesn’t care, he loves it. And I remember saying to him whether I dance or not, if somebody wants to talk about me, they’re going to talk about me. So, I might as well dance because I looked up you.
Kelly
Oh, love it. That’s really great. And I’m gonna use the four pillars of what’s holding me up as one of my prompts to start with and what lights me up, not just holds me up, but lights me up and the path to joy because I think that’s something that I’ve definitely been ruminating on so I think that will really be helpful. Well, other than purchasing the book, The Storied Life Journal, how can people learn more about you and your workshops?
Karen
I’m really proud my website is finally officially professionally done and it’s so pretty. A big shout out to collab with Katie – she did a great job!
https://www.instagram.com/storiedlife_kfg
https://www.facebook.com/karen.f.geiger
I you are interested in any workshop, I am planning on a September right after Labor Day. And originally I was going to have a be a little bit more for midlife, but actually I think it doesn’t the prompts apply to everyone. So we’re going to call it Break Through to You because I do think that everyone needs a little bit of a crack in their shell and break through to who they really are.
Kelly Callahan
I love it. Thank you so much for your time. It was great fun.
