The habit of noticing

“Journaling is like whispering to one’s self and listening at the same time.” - Mina Murray

March 14th was my birthday.

And one of the ways I celebrated was going on an artists (shopping) date with a friend.

We grabbed oat chai lattes and hit one of my favorite art stores, Flax, in San Francisco. (The one at Fort Mason)

Can you guess what my birthday present to myself was?

C‘mon, it’s a safe bet if you say…

I bought a new journal and some fabulous pens!

⚡️BOOM⚡️ Good guess. The older I get, the more important it becomes to play creatively. And this year I’ve doubled down on using my writing practice for reflection and self-expression.

So back to my latest burgundy, leather, birthday journal and colored pens.

It’s called my Portable Writer’s Studio.

I was introduced to this concept by one of my mentors Sonia Simone.

(BTW: the next time she runs a Remarkable Writing Workshop I highly recommend you check it out. )

The basic idea is that you have different sections to capture different ideas. You train yourself to pay attention to details around you. And let it be messy and playful, rather than pristine and organized.

Embrace the art of helping you inner child show up! (So cliché but true all the same.)

Here are a few helpful and playful tools:

⚜️Colored pens & pencils

⚜️Washi tape: decorative masking tape crafters use - check that out here
(Introduced my friend Jill to this on my birthday - NEVER heard of it; poor thing. 😲)

⚜️Stickers

⚜️Spill some coffee or tea on it (my personal favorite to free things up)

The sections are places to note your observations about what's happening around you. And a central area to keep all your ideas.

Sonia’s method uses three main sections:

Idea Garden
5 Things I Noticed
5 Phrases I Overheard

I’m taking a few months to practice jotting things down each day. Everything from snippets of conversations I overhear to big or small things I notice. All purely for the purpose of paying closer attention to what’s happening around me.

Over the years, I’ve expanded her sections and added a few of my own. I change them around every time I get a new notebook. Mine fall into two categories; my internal and external world.

I’ll use these sections in my latest notebook:

Power Hunches: insights or intuitions that come up at random times
Deeper Questions to journal on

Sound Bites: I miss listening to conversations in cafes, those little sound bites of conversation you can use later and weave into a piece, so now I pay attention on Zoom calls or picking up a to-go order.
Soul Sessions: ideas for prompts and these emails

Idea Garden: writing or project ideas

You can take about 15-20 minutes writing down ideas that come to you. Scribbling things you notice and words and phrases you overhear. They can be mundane and boring or funny and classic.

It's about creating the habit of listening and paying attention to what's around you and using that as material. You can also use your internal world to notice the random (or deeper) things you're thinking about. I intend to spend more time asking myself deeper questions about this next chapter of my life.

I want to pay closer attention to what’s changing around me now that the world is opening back up again.

Then, when I’m looking for writing prompts or ideas for new material it’s all there.

More importantly it creates a habit of noticing new things and making different connections from the world around you.

Over time you’ll automatically start picking up on details, but it takes training and small steps every day to build the new habits.

You have to make the time to build the habit.

So that’s what I’m committing to for the next three months. Playing in my portable writing studio daily - even if it’s journaling about one question for five minutes.

And then I’ll share some of those pieces with you here.

Now I want to know about you.

What are the things you think about in your journals? I’d love to hear…