Effective Journaling
I recently asked for feedback on topics you’d like to see covered in blogs. Effective journaling was one of the suggestions and I decided to tackle it right away because of the ROI. Journaling is the highest value activity you can do that’s not actually playing or competing given the benefit it provides in the time you spend.
Journaling serves multiple purposes. Most importantly, it gives you a chance to look at your performance with some objectivity, the way a coach would. I’ve discussed this concept before, that most of you are without a dedicated coach observing your every move, and so you need to be an effective coach for yourself.
While you are trading or playing, you don’t want to be too self-reflective, beyond making real-time adjustments (or knowing when to quit), since it distracts from delivering your best performance. When your job is to perform and compete, that needs to be your sole focus. Afterwards, however, it’s vital to stop and reflect on the quality of the performance as it directly affects future performance.
Journaling gives you what a good coach would provide: The feedback needed to improve. Journaling helps you understand what you did well, where you improved, what you did poorly, what you can learn, and how you can do better the next time you play or trade. If a coach was watching you the whole time, this is what they would comment on afterward. While you can try to do this reflection in your head, it’s inefficient. The mind has a limited ability to manage and wade through large amounts of information and retain it into the future. Journaling can help you do it for yourself.
Journaling also helps you clear out the clutter in your mind, get organized, and make sense of what happened. It’s an opportunity to release emotions in a productive way and learn from each experience, so you can recover quickly and avoid accumulated emotion. This allows you to move on with your life and come back to trading, poker or golf with a clear mind, ready to perform at a high level, or at least improve upon previous efforts.
Journaling is not a complicated exercise, but it is one that is easily undervalued. Many of you have tried it at times but the habit doesn’t stick – you go through waves where you do it regularly, only to fall off during periods when you’re doing quite well, evidence of some subtle overconfidence weakening your process. You’ve also stopped journaling when your performance has been so bad you don’t want to review it and make yourself feel worse.
Some of you fall out of the habit simply because you’re not convinced of the value. It’s a fair question to ask, but not one that you’re consciously addressing, so it just slips out of your mind. Always remember that as competitors you’re involved in an ongoing experiment to figure out how to be the best trader, poker player, and golfer you can be. You try things and see what works. Not doing something can be a way to actually find out its value. What I hear frequently, even from clients, is “I slipped up recently with my journal even though I know it’s something that’s been quite valuable.” Sometimes you need extra proof that journaling is, in fact, a tool that helps you to avoid steps backwards, recover faster from a tough day, avoid getting swept up in a big win, and develop new insights into your game and mentality.
If you have gone through cycles like this before, or if qualitative journaling is something that’s new to you, remember that like any other habit it’s going to take time to build and master. The establishment of the habit can be challenging at times, but the idea is to eventually reach the point where it’s so ingrained as part of your daily routine that you can’t not do it.
Many have made the mistake of thinking they have made it a permanent part of their routine only to slip up when traveling, returning after an illness, or dealing with personal distractions. Don’t lament losing momentum, see how quickly you can recover the habit.
To get started, I suggest committing to a two to four week period of time where you’ll journal 3 – 5 minutes each time. This is a reasonable starting point to begin judging for yourself the benefits that it can have. And when you recognize the benefits, make note of them in a separate section of your journal to reinforce the value.
As far as the format of your journal, do whatever works. Maybe you like to have a dedicated notebook and write with a pen. Maybe you want to type it out, or use voice to text. There is a benefit to journaling even if you never look at it again. So do whatever works for you.
For myself I have found that when I’m writing about something I don’t have a firm grasp on yet and I’m just beginning to understand it, I can’t type. Writing by hand helps me explore the ideas and allows my mind to go in different directions.
Once I know the direction, however, I switch to typing because it is a much faster way to get my thoughts out. There is also benefit in talking things through. When I’m brainstorming an idea, I do much better with someone else than alone. If you aren’t sure what works best for you, try these different avenues. For traders, if you think a sparring partner to discuss topics with would be helpful, The Mental Game of Trading LIVE offers an opportunity to link up with like-minded traders to collaborate with so you are not alone in the process.
Journaling As Cool-Down
Journaling immediately after you play or trade is about preparing for tomorrow. Mental clarity is one the most important factors for doing your best. Trading, poker, and golf are intense activities. Your mind absorbs a lot of information in each session/game, and if you rely on the brain’s natural digestion of all of this data, it might impair your sleep and your ability to recover, which means you’ll show up the following day a little bit cloudy. At its most basic level, the post-session journaling is designed to process information more efficiently.
On days where intense emotion is triggered, or at least enough that it affects your performance, the risk is that emotion will carry over to the following day. You need to get the emotion out and the best time to do it is soon after you’re done.
I know you don’t want to. You want to move on and not focus on it anymore. But you can’t. The mistakes and losses rattle around in your mind and limit your ability to truly move on. Journaling can help get those issues out of your mind, so you can rest and reset. Plus, you gain an opportunity to discover something transformative that could improve your reactions in the future.
In general, you want to capture the learning/lessons/mistakes from a strategic/technical/mental standpoint. If you take notes throughout the day, you can build on them or review them like a daily report. Doing something is better than nothing. At a minimum, do a brain dump, writing out everything in your mind, what happened, what the emotion was, what the trigger was, any other key details of the hand/trade/situation that can easily get lost. Details can disappear from memory and they can be the key to solving the problem and minimizing the chance it’s going to happen again.
Some people have a difficult time with a blank sheet of paper. Here are three basic questions you can use in reflecting afterward:
What did you do well in general and/or improve on the things you’ve been working on?What mistakes did you make?How can you improve on them and/or be better next time?It’s a simple, straightforward way to get started.
On days when your emotions are particularly intense, you can also complete a Mental Hand History. Clients find that structure helps them to get the emotion out and analyze the problem more deeply while the emotion is quite raw. This can be hard, but you’ll get an opportunity to uncover hidden insights that can be very revealing and create a breakthrough.
Journaling in Your Warm-up
Journaling can also be used in your warm-up to create a bubble around poker, trading or golf, where the only thing that matters is performance. That doesn’t mean performance is the most important thing in your life, it just means at that time, you want to have deep focus where nothing else is distracting you from the activity.
When you have external concerns that are very real, whether it is illness, financial struggles, moving, a laundry list of tasks to complete, or strife in a relationship, all of those emotions and tasks swirl around in your mind, impairing your judgement and ability to be focused and present.
To create your bubble, write for up to 15 minutes, one hour before you start to play/trade. This gives you an opportunity to get some of the emotion out and/or make a list of tasks, with the intent of being able to put them away for now. Once you’re done, draw an imaginary line in your mind where all of the concerns you’ve noted down are behind you, and you can pick them back up once you’re done.
In a way, this gives you a short break, or vacation of sorts, from those tasks and concerns. There’s nothing to do about them now. You’ve logged them and now you can focus on the job at hand.
This kind of journaling is capped at 15 minutes because you don’t want to go too deep and tap a whole well of emotion just before you perform. You want a little release without getting too deep. That said, the additional 45 minutes left in your warm-up time does give you an opportunity to add anything still rattling around in your mind.
You could also re-read your journal from the previous days during your warm-up, but you don’t need to. Sometimes it can be overwhelming to have to review it.
There is, however, additional benefit available when you review the journal in the future because it can be a great way to reference how you were thinking/performing in the past. Your mind has a limited capacity to recall data and manage it, but a journal helps to offset those limitations. And if you are struggling with similar issues from before, reviewing a journal can give a different perspective and help you dig out the important information.
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Thank you again to everyone who responded to the survey with feedback about what you want to hear more about in future blogs. I’m a big believer in journaling and hope these tips will help you start to form the habit or pick the habit back up if you have fallen off the wagon.
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