Louise Carnachan: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient
An Interview With Heidi Sander
Journaling is a gift to yourself — and you’re worth taking time for it. There may be material you wish to share, but the main purpose is expressing yourself for yourself. I highly recommend using whatever format feels right — drawing, writing, phrases, poems, ramblings. It doesn’t have to make sense, be important, insightful or deep. Like your dreams, your journal is yours alone.
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 Louise Carnachan.
Louise Carnachan, author of Work Jerks: How to Cope with Difficult Bosses and Colleagues (June 2022), is an interpersonal work relationship expert with over forty years of experience offering practical help to untangle problematic work dynamics. She’s been an inveterate journaler for decades. Her workplace advice blogs can be found at www.louisecarnachan.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 during the Mad Men era in southern California, the only child of parents who separated when I was eight and divorced when I was nine. Happily, I made friends easily and liked school. I went to Scripps College but once I had my BA in Psychology, the job I’d anticipated evaporated. Taking the advice of a friend of a friend, I headed to Seattle with the goal of obtaining state residency before enrolling in the Master of Social Work program at the University of Washington. Luckily, I got into grad school the first time around since plan B was to continue waitressing in a train-themed restaurant and apply to school again the next year.
I lived in Seattle and environs for 43 years. I never became the therapist I trained for. Instead, I went to work coaching and teaching communication and leadership skills. I worked for others for the first nine years of my career, had my own consulting business for 23 years, then went to work for an internationally acclaimed cancer research center for almost eight years. Recently, I moved to a community outside of Portland, Oregon, to be near chosen family. Now I’m semi-retired but still do some leadership coaching and I write. My first book, Work Jerks: How to Cope with Difficult Bosses and Colleagues, will be published in June.
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.
My best friend from college introduced me to journaling over 40 years ago. Because she was an English major, writing was second nature to her. I distinctly remember a time at the Oregon coast when she and I were journaling and drinking coffee. That scene represented the life I wanted to live — at the beach and writing!
During those first years, my entries were mostly about my emotional life and relationships. I was an on-again, off-again journaler for a while, then “morning pages” became all the rage thanks to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I ended up using morning pages the same way I’d used a journal. But I became a consistent writer. I’ve had brief periods of time where I exchanged my journal for lengthy emails to friends (oh, my poor friends!), otherwise I’ve pretty much kept at it for decades. As I’ve aged and matured, the content has morphed from emotional exploration to spiritual questions to intentions and gratitudes.
During the COVID era, I think there’s importance in keeping a record of facts as well as personal experience. I’ve encouraged clients and friends to do this and recommended they encourage their children to do so as well. Future generations will want to know what it was like during this time. Depending upon age, what’s been lost or gained is so different. Kids’ experience is unique in terms of school and socializing. Write or draw the unvarnished truth — don’t pretty it up. Wouldn’t you love to have a firsthand account of how one of your ancestors coped when life changed so dramatically? I’m guessing our descendants will want to know what we worried about, how parents raised kids and went to jobs, whether there were financial challenges, who they lost, and what brought joy when so much had changed. I know I’d want to read a real-time record over a historian’s view.
How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?
I’m one of those people who feel deeply, and that was especially true when I was younger. My family and the men I dated thought I was overly emotional because I’m expressive — and not everyone wants to hear it! Writing down difficult emotions has helped me to understand their origin and, over time, release them. If I’m extremely upset and need to cope, I’ll grab whatever’s close by to write down words or phrases. I’ll use scraps of paper, backs of napkins — anything will do. Keeping the record isn’t important, getting the feelings out and on the page is.
The past decade or more has led me to write about the larger spiritual questions. Switching roles with my parents and my dad’s passing, losing friends prematurely, my own heath challenges and mortality, thinking about what I want to leave behind — all of this has led to the evolution of my journal content. Sometimes it’s a reading or lesson from a spiritual leader that prompts me.
Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?
I have boxes of old journals and dozens of files on my computer. I used to re-read journals at the end of a year. It was probably around the fifth year that I realized much of what I wrote was repetitive. I found I had patterns in my goals, emotions and disappointments. At first, I was frustrated with myself that I wasn’t making more progress, but I finally realized that is life. A therapist I worked with pointed out that we may deal with the same issue repeatedly but each time it’s at a deeper level. We do grow and change. This has led me to be more compassionate about my own patterns and foibles. I stopped re-reading my journals a long time ago, although I still have them. Maybe I’ll read them again, maybe I won’t. I guess releasing them now feel like losing parts of my life.
I have a separate gratitude journal by my bed for recording that which fills me up, makes me smile or feels good. There’s scientific evidence that listing at least three things for which you are grateful each day can help with mild to moderate depression just as well as medication. I began keeping a gratitude journal about a decade ago when I went through a particularly rough patch with health and work. Once life normalized, I dropped it. But then I’d pick it up again when I needed a boost. Since COVID started, it’s been my part of my bedtime routine. With so much bad news, I decided to consciously focus on positives each day. I often have a couple of pages’ worth, never just three items. I’ve filled up quite a few journal books since March 2020 — isn’t that great?
I’ve encouraged my clients and readers to adopt this practice, particularly now. It really does help, given how much we’re assaulted by negative news.
What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?
I’m in awe of poets like you, Heidi — how you choose words so precisely and with such care. For me, it’s free-writing spilled all over the page. I wish I had the talent for poems or doodling, but I don’t.
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’ve mentioned some of the ways in which writing in my journal has given me emotional release and a place to ponder big questions. Given your deep understanding of grief and journaling, it won’t surprise you that journaling was a lifeline during my father’s passing. I was staying in a hotel near his retirement community in northern California. One of my best friends, a chosen sister, joined me a couple of days into that week. I wasn’t able to sleep much so when I awakened early, I’d sit at the desk to write about what was happening and what I was feeling. I remember writing about the hospice nurse who gave me permission to create the memories I wanted to retain from that time. She was a real blessing. As sad as it was to lose the man who had been a giant in my life, I appreciated the privilege of being with him and witnessing the gradual release of physical life. To say I saw the circle of life sounds terribly superficial, but it was an incredible gift to be with my father. Having a way to express the impact in writing was a saving grace.
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?
Some of what I write in my journal has generated ideas for blog posts, sort of along the lines of your journal writing that prompted poems. However, I’ve been so unvarnished in naming names, spewing vitriol if I had it, and describing passions when they ran amok, that I can’t imagine sharing my journals with anyone. I made a mutual pact with the friend who introduced me to journaling that when I pass on, all my volumes are to be destroyed unread and files deleted from my computer. I have the instructions written in my will with directions on where to find them. I will do the same for her if she goes first.
That said, the journals from COVID years could be of value in the future. It’s possible I’ll end up editing some and leave them where they can be found. As I’ve said, I believe a record of this time will be important to our descendants and to future scholars. Just think, there will be people who receive doctorates on the pandemic years and will make it their life’s work, so let’s give them source material!
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. Releasing negative emotions through writing is a great way to calm yourself — and it’s a lot less disruptive than screaming. There’s something about the kinesthetic act of typing or writing by hand that helps to connect the brain, heart and body in a way that thinking, speaking or yelling don’t.
2. Writing about gratitude gives perspective when looking back over a day. The added bonus is that once you make it a regular practice, your mind seeks and remembers moments during the day in which you experienced joy or gratefulness. If you give yourself an assignment to find things for which you are grateful, your brain will comply. In the morning, I also write about what’s going well. It’s uplifting to start the day feeling positive.
3. Resilience is not just living through troubling times and coming out the other side, it’s recognizing that you did so. You can acknowledge and reinforce your resilience by writing down what you’ve accomplished, what you notice about your strengths, when and how they show up, and how you were able to overcome previous difficulties, which bolsters your confidence that you can overcome difficulty in the future. Many of us were told by our families not to toot our own horns because it makes us appear arrogant. I say, go ahead and blow that horn and be shamelessly self-congratulatory. No one is going to read your journal unless you share it.
4. I love using my journal to write daily intentions. It’s a mindfulness practice to prime my brain for a good day. I write intentions for how I want to show up in the world, things I want to do, my physical well-being, how I want to feel emotionally. If I’m driving that day, I always include one about being safe and having ease of travel. That thought is triggered when I approach a changing traffic signal before I try to speed through.
5. Journaling is a gift to yourself — and you’re worth taking time for it. There may be material you wish to share, but the main purpose is expressing yourself for yourself. I highly recommend using whatever format feels right — drawing, writing, phrases, poems, ramblings. It doesn’t have to make sense, be important, insightful or deep. Like your dreams, your journal is yours alone.
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, that’s very kind and generous.
I know I have become more peaceful as a result of catching the voice in my head that’s negative or punitive and either questioning it or dismissing it. This is old, habitual muck that isn’t useful and only makes me cranky or sad. The key is to tune into mind-chatter, which is often background noise. When I catch it, I’ll tell myself, “Oh, there you are again,” then find distraction with a better feeling thought or an observation of something material in front of me. If I’m perseverating on a useless rant, I’ll give my brain the exercise of looking for the color red in my environment. Any distraction works to get out of a thought rut.
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 talk with a woman astronaut who has served on the International Space Station! It’d be really fun to speak with either Christina Koch or Jessica Meir who conducted the first all-female spacewalk or with Kayla Barron who is currently on the ISS. I dreamed of having their profession when I was young. I’d love to hear about their career path, what it’s like to be on the ISS, what their goals are from here — the moon or even Mars?
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I write an online blog about stress, resilience, leadership and communication at work which can be found on my website. I’m on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-carnachan, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/lacarnachan.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfillment and success with your writing!
Thank you for including me in your series, Heidi. Best wishes to you in 2022.
