Author Michelle Douglas: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient
An Interview With Heidi Sander
Inner Voice. Learning to recognize your inner voice can help you to be more mindful in the moment, even when you are not journaling.
Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calmness, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others that simply provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with people who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.
As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Michelle Douglas.
Michelle Douglas is a writer and mentor with a passion for helping individuals and brands uncover their reason for being and share their story. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Don’t Wear Shoes You Can’t Walk In: A Field Guide for Your Twenties. An avid journaler, Michelle shares the life advice she has gleaned from her 10+ year journaling practice with today’s twentysomethings on Instagram @fieldguidefortwenties.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?
Of course. I believe how we grow up influences what we see and look for in life. I am the daughter of a carpenter and a piano teacher and thus my childhood was filled with wood, music, and an early understanding of what it means to create. This influenced my favorite colors, my standards for quality and my appreciation for timeless works. I was born in Jacksonville, Florida and lived in the same house my entire life, I come from a very humble home that was overflowing with love and filled with confident people. My parents were both self-employed, which afforded us the ability to be together often. Where my parents may have lacked in financial resources at times, they made up for in artistic resources and for always being around to help build the self-confidence and self-worth of their children. I am very close with my older brother, who is also a creative, a talented brand identity designer. I’ve often joked that as a writer, I might be the least creative person in my family. I spent my entire childhood and early life in Florida. After graduating from the University of Florida, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia to begin my career in advertising and marketing and to begin living and learning on my own. I met my now husband in Atlanta, made a move a little farther north to Annapolis, Maryland and have called this home for seven years. As I think about what I’m doing now, it seems I took after my parents. I have been running my own business now for four years and spend my days working at home, writing for future books and for brands and blessed to spend a lot of time with my husband and young daughter.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.
I’ve been writing in my journal for 12 years, I started when I moved to a new city for my first job. I was experiencing so much “new”. In a new city, at a new job, trying to meet new people, buying my first bed and first couch. I was also learning so much about work, dating, navigating new and old friendships and I kept finding that I wished I had a guide, someone who had been where I was. And so, I decided to create that, to be that person for someone else in the future and I started writing down one thing I learned every day and I committed to the practice for that year and for many years to come. Sometimes it was just a simple line or memory from the day, but most often it was a lesson that I filtered out of events that happened. My answer to the question “why did that moment happen in my life?” or “what did I learn today?” I started doing this in November of 2010 and it has proved to be one of the greatest things I’ve ever done for myself, I still end each day this way, writing down one thing almost every night before I go to sleep.
How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?
Journaling healed me in the moment in that I found comfort, peace and predictability in the routine of writing something down every night. It grounded me in who I was and helped me pay close attention to my inner voice. And it healed me in the seasons that followed because it helped me to discover and explore the strengths and weaknesses of my life, but even more importantly, the cycles. As my practice continued over the years, I started to see patterns or cycles, such as the same thoughts of doubt that would come up at certain times of year, reminders to myself of the temporary nature of current challenges or simply anticipating when a particular flower might begin to bloom because it always made me so happy that I would note its first appearance of the year in my journal.
Reflecting on each day as it happens and actually learning from it changes the way you view and approach the next day and every day after that.
Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?
Yes, to both. But specifically, an overwhelming amount of gratitude.
It takes practice to learn to be grateful in the moment, but having a catalog of life experience to look back on can make it easier. As I look back in old journals and read through events and learnings, both good and bad, big and small, I’ve discovered the importance of each moment and to be grateful for whatever comes my way. I’m convinced that things actually taste and feel better when we express gratitude for them. Not only does the fruit taste sweeter or the view become even more unforgettable, but by taking the time to express gratitude, we take the time to pay closer attention to the person, place or thing at hand. This time of gratitude has helped to reveal even more lessons for me.
What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?
-I free-write and I very quickly developed a standard entry format. I date each entry so that I can go back to previous years on the same date and see how I was feeling or what I was going through. An example of the format is below, the date followed by an entry.
1/4 — I contributed to Authority Magazine today about journaling. A dream come true to be considered an “authority” on journaling, I suppose if you do something for 12 years you can begin to consider yourself an expert.
How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?
My journal helps to remind me of the truth whenever I let doubt or another voice try to direct my path or make me feel inadequate in some way. A specific story that comes to mind is a journal entry that I refer to as “My List of Truths”. It started on the topic of quitting, which is personal to me because while I don’t think I’m a quitter, I often think that I’ve left things too soon; a job I enjoyed, a city I loved, or a mentor relationship that I could have done a better job nurturing. I have this not-so-kind voice in my head that tells me I stopped short and then wonders what might have been. So, I made a list of all the big lies I tell myself, I wrote down the lie and then the truth. This list holds five big lies that I tell myself and then two truths for each lie, those truths share what I found by leaving the cities, the jobs or the people that I thought I’d left behind. And having it written down is a powerful tool, because I can’t forget it.
In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?
I’m so glad you asked this question, because I do. I have been sitting on my journal content for years, thinking it was simply for a future child when it occurred to me that this could be really helpful to others now. I’ve written a book titled, Don’t Wear Shoes You Can’t Walk In: A Field Guide for Your Twenties and it is publishing on April 5, 2022 with She Writes Press. It is part advice book, part journal and allows the reader to learn from my life, but even more so, teaches them how to enhance their own life by being aware of and open to the lessons happening all around them. I believe if you recognize the lessons you are learning and record them, you will grow because of them.
Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?
1. Routine. The routine of regular journaling can bring peace and predictability to your life.
2. Inner Voice. Learning to recognize your inner voice can help you to be more mindful in the moment, even when you are not journaling.
3. Cycles. Journaling reminds you of what you’ve already overcome and can help to remind you of the cycles of your life.
4. Gratitude. Journaling has made me grateful for the people and experiences in my life, which calms me.
5. Sleep. Journaling can help you sleep. Writing down something I’ve learned or experienced every day helps me to get my thoughts down on paper and sleep better at night which does wonders for many aspects of my mental health.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?
A movement that would bring the greatest amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, would be Knowing Yourself. Too often people are trying to dress like someone they saw on Instagram, achieve what someone else did on LinkedIn or trying to altogether be like someone else they’ve read about. I want people to journal, to take notes on their life and study it, to get to know their voice and then know when to trust it. To know how to be their own encourager and encourage themselves to live out their unique truths.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)
Sara Blakely, I’m always so impressed by the way she supports women and uses her resources and success to support others. I feel kindred to her in the way that she is driven, loves her people and wants to give back to other organizations. Also, I find the story of how Spanx started to be so inspiring and I’d love to pick her brain for gutsy ways to promote my new book. Not to mention, she just seems like a funny and fun to be around person.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’d be so grateful to get to know more of your readers. They can find me on Instagram @fieldguidefortwenties where I share lessons I’ve learned and also at fieldguidefortwenties.com where they can read my blog and learn more about me and my forthcoming book, Don’t Wear Shoes You Can’t Walk In.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!
