Fast Company’s Daria Burke: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient

An Interview With Heidi Sander

Gratitude journaling allows us to be present, more mindful and experience more joy in our daily lives.

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 Daria Burke.

Daria Burke is a visionary leader and storyteller at the intersection of fashion and technology with the ability to capitalize on changing consumer demographics and behavior, digitize brands and lead purpose-driven, diverse and inclusive teams. Daria is the the former Chief Marketing Officer of JustFab, responsible for global brand awareness and positioning, overseeing all marketing functions across channels and geographies. As such, Daria led JustFab’s customer acquisition, retention and eCommerce site merchandising, responsible for driving global membership growth and revenue for the brand. Burke joined JustFab in 2019 following years spent building iconic fashion and beauty brands through innovative marketing initiatives. Previously, Daria led beauty, fashion and retail advertising partnerships at Facebook, where she served as a trusted advisor to CEOs and CMOs, partnering with client leadership teams to ignite new growth and evolve from a traditional distribution and media heritage to digital-led, omnichannel organizations. She successfully drove partner adoption in emerging technologies such as native checkout, augmented reality and artificial intelligence-driven customer messaging. Prior to joining Facebook, Burke served as Head of Beauty Strategy, Growth and Innovation at CVS, leading beauty and personal care category growth initiatives and serving as an architect of the BeautyIRL concept. Burke was one of the 10 founding team members of Rent the Runway, where she contributed to the brand’s rapid growth. Earlier in her career, she served in a series of marketing roles of increasing responsibilities at some of the world’s leading luxury beauty brands: Estée Lauder, Lancôme and Yves Saint Laurent Beauté. Daria was honored as a 2020 Woman to Watch by AdAge, and her creativity and impact have been recognized by Women’s Wear Daily, the CFDA, Vogue and Forbes. Daria holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Business Administration from the New York University Stern School of Business. For more information, please visit: https://www.dariaburke.com/.

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?

I grew up in 1980s Detroit, a city plagued by its past: poverty, violent crime, and a devastating heroin-turned-crack-cocaine epidemic were the result of the auto industry’s move abroad and a near-bankruptcy in 1981. I also grew up desperately poor and was raised under extremely challenging home conditions. My parents, neither of whom attended college or trade school — married when they were quite young and separated when I was just 2 years old and my younger sister hadn’t yet had her first birthday. So this combination of environmental threats — acute and sustained — gave me a lot to process in real-time as a young child and for many years as an adult. It also illuminated my innate resilience. Education was always a priority and because I excelled in school, I channeled all of my energy into doing well, learning as much as I could and attending a great university. I realize now how inclined I was towards meeting the world on my own terms, and to having the belief that my life was circumstantial, not predetermined.

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 have been journaling for decades (I kept a diary for years as a child), but my current consistent practice is about seven years old. There actually wasn’t a specific situation that prompted my current practice. I think I just found myself often having thoughts or feelings come to me at different points and wanting a place to capture them. Before I really got into meditation five years ago, I would set my intentions for the day. It was the first thing I did in the morning, and I found greater clarity and a sense of well-being. And my early meditation practice was usually guided so I’d do more prompted journaling. I’ve always been a goal-setter, but I used to type it out on my computer. Around the same time I committed to my meditation practice, I began vision writing — a form of visualization that could be seen as goal-focused, but I write (by hand) in the past tense as if it has already happened.

How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?

I think of spirituality or spiritual wellness as encompassing consciousness, psychological growth, creativity, and emotional maturity and alignment. With that in mind, journaling is absolutely a spiritual practice and one of my rituals for healing as it enables the discovery of new spaces and shifts within myself. Through journaling I can document and process any thoughts or feelings that may arise. It is one of the ways that I can observe and release — without resentment — attachments to ways of thinking that may not be in service of the best version of myself. I can identify the thoughts, acknowledge where they’re coming from (fear, shame, ego) and put them in context, especially in stream of consciousness writing. I’ve often uncovered something that I was probably grappling with on a subconscious level but was able to see it on the page in a way that had the effect of “that’s what I’ve been feeling!” Suddenly, I’ve given voice to this “thing” that I couldn’t quite get my head around and there’s a validation in that.

If I’m noticing any patterns in the kinds of things coming up in my morning pages, it may become something that I choose to work through with my therapist. But at a minimum, I’ve at least gotten it out of my head and am no longer holding on to it in the same way, which frees my mind up tremendously before I meditate. So, I do my morning pages then meditate for at least 15 minutes. This practice has been so powerful in helping me shift from projection to presence, which absolutely results in a calmer state of being that feels less stressed about things outside of my control, more grounded to face the things I can, and more mindful and aligned overall. (Sounds like a modern serenity prayer, doesn’t it?)

Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?

Absolutely! In my experience, allowing myself to be alone with and bear witness to my most genuine thoughts and emotions was a meaningful first step towards self-compassion. I am a recovering perfectionist and can be hard on myself. When I started journaling as part of my shadow work, I was able to get clear on the ways in which I was playing small in my life, where I felt shame, and how my upbringing influenced the way I was showing up. There was a lot of editing and tailoring myself in many ways.

That was an honest and raw experience, but I found the exercise of journaling about it all to be a powerful way of summoning a gentleness to inform my growth rather than judgment. Carl Jung famously said, “There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent.” When you block out the dark, you also block out the light. And there is no spiritual path without the kind of growth that leaves a few scars. It’s incredible to look back over time at old journal entries and reflect on how I have evolved. Even that reflection is a way of honoring and thanking these past versions of myself for getting me this far.

What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?

I should start by saying that I have had three different journals and do several types of journaling! I use each one for different reasons and have yet to find one that is laid out in a way that works for everything, but I’m condensing to two.

The first is for my morning pages, a concept that was inspired by Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. My morning pages (which are often more than three pages) are streams of consciousness brain dumps of whatever immediately comes to me when I first awake. I don’t edit it. I don’t ignore it. I don’t judge it. The content is truly varied and can sometimes start with a quick capture of anything I remember from a dream or an intention I want to declare heading into my day and I let it flow from there, no matter how seemingly random or disconnected the ideas feel in the moment. Writing one word on the page can literally trigger an entirely different thought and I just let it come out as it enters my mind. It provides such a release and is an incredible way of making space for a broader range of myself that may not be otherwise expressed on a daily basis or in the context of “regular” life. Sometimes, it’s barely coherent. You’re not meant to go back and read it, although I do from time to time. But I use that time and space to honor whatever needs to be “said.”

The second was purely a gratitude journal, which I use at night. Right before my evening meditation, I like to end my day capturing at least five things for which I’m grateful. And these are often the smallest things like “I’m grateful for my call with this person today” or “I’m grateful for my ability to see the bright side in a particular situation.” The more we practice gratitude for internal factors actually helps build mental resilience.

The third journal may sound like a bit of a catch-all, but it’s use is intentional. It’s where I do prompted intuitive journaling, my vision writing, and it’s where I capture synchronous events that I may observe over time or note things that come up during meditation that I want to pay attention to. It’s like my soul workbook!

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?

I think many people are afraid that they won’t survive their emotions if they allow themselves to feel them in the first place. I just heard about a study in which 60% of the men and 30% of the women who participated in the study elected to give themselves an electric shock rather than being alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes. That is heartbreaking! But writing, particularly about traumatic experiences, has been proven to be extremely powerful. Of course, it doesn’t have to be about trauma, although studies have shown that 50% of women will experience some traumatic event in their lifetime. To heal from that event — whatever it is — often means that we have to say goodbye to that old version of yourself or to wanting the outcome to be different or to limiting beliefs that keep you in the trauma loop. Journaling — along with other modalities — showed me that to make space for both the grief and the gratitude is the hallmark of healing, because it means that you’ve confronted the thing that threatened your inner peace and accepted that it happened, while being grateful for having survived it and for the opportunity to choose to become something more.

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?

Wow! That’s impressive. I don’t have plans for specific journal content, although I am developing a podcast that will hopefully expand what it means to live well and on purpose. I imagine the conversations I’ll have there will be fertile ground for exploring some of the big questions I tackle in my journal. And because I have three journals, I have absolutely been thinking about developing a new kind of journal that allows for several kinds of journaling, is more deeply rooted in neuroscience, and that outlines my personal process of self-mastery that I call Interior Design.

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”?

• Expressive writing about your thoughts and feelings related to traumatic or stressful experiences can be healing.
• Gratitude journaling allows us to be present, more mindful and experience more joy in our daily lives.
• From enhancing your memory to improving your focus, writing stimulates the brain in ways typing does not.
• The release that comes from writing can be as cathartic as crying or as restorative as meditation.
• Writing can lead to great insights and self-discovery.

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?

Thank you! I would love to inspire the movement for people to cultivate a mindset to move beyond their perceived limitations and seemingly fixed parts of themselves to find their inner truth, their intrinsic talents and to do more than they ever believed possible. I think so much self-compassion would be found in this work and it’s only through self-compassion that we can have empathy and compassion for others.

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. :-)

I would love to have a long lunch with Oprah Winfrey. I literally grew up with Oprah; I honestly cannot remember a time in my life she wasn’t a part of my consciousness. Her presence has been expansive and magnifying for me personally, but her vision and intention have led her to create a legacy that will be felt for generations. She is a business genius who has made a transformative impact on the culture many times over. Oprah introduced the idea and the promise that we can all live our best lives at a time when that language did not exist nor did the concept feel accessible to everyone. She has invited us all on the journey to uncover our highest selves, and I would love to bask in her wisdom.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

They can find me on dariaburke.com, where they can also sign up to be notified when my podcast launches. My writing on the intersections of impact and innovation can be found on FastCompany.com, and I share many musings on these topics (and more!) on Instagram @DariaBurke.

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfilment and success with your writing!