[Music] hi welcome to this episode of inside strategic coach today Dan and I are going to talk about the importance of writing things down and in particular handwriting now Dan one of the reasons why I was really excited to talk about this today is I remember that on our team doing in a video shoot Corey one of our team members asked you a really great question and it was Dan why do you have people write things down and your answer surprised me so could you answer that question again and then we can take it from there yeah it actually has to do with your thoughts Shannon that when the thoughts are inside of us we're kind of in the middle of them they're not clear in our brain and just by the act of saying and we have various exercises in strategic oach and where you say well I'd like you to State what your goal is here okay and this is what's going to be true at the end of 90 days and and I'd like you to come over here and you'll do the first one in a box and then you'll come over and in another box you'll write down well what's the biggest obstacle that would keep me from getting to that goal and you write them down in that process which takes maybe a half a minute or a minute you've taken something that first of all is quite emotional but it's really quite unclear and you've had to make a choice of how to say what the goal is in quite a few words you know could be five or six words and then you've had to say the obstacle and suddenly you've taken something that's inside and subjective and youve put it outside of yourself and now it's objective and you have a distance a personal distance between you and these thoughts and they're not they're not inside your head anymore they're on a sheet of paper and all of a sudden a different kind of thinking goes into play because you have a clearcut result with with a deadline measurable result and then over here you have something that can be looked at analyzed and you can overcome it but you're not as emotionally involved with it as you were before all of a sudden your brain now freed up from having to deal with it inside now can look at it outside and as a result of that you're thinking is much clearer it's more creative and it leads directly to action so I think that's the thing and you know the success of life is how much of our thinking can go into successful action I mean if you want to know what a successful life is it's a person who can continually take thoughts and put them outside of themselves and then take successful action and actually achieve the results and do that over and over and over again over an entire lifetime I mean that's a really successful life I love that definition I don't think I've ever heard that before so Dan it's that whole idea of taking something subjective and making it objective and getting that emotional distance from our thoughts which I think is so interesting and that's really what kind of startled me because I thought it was a great question that Corey asked but your answer was even more surprising and it's true because then you can see it and you can handle it differently whereas before it was s of an emotional dilemma now you can bring to bear a lot of other parts of your mind into turning it into successful action the other thing is in your brain it's connected to dozens or hundreds of other thoughts but on paper especially and I have a real preference for boxes if you put a box around it you're cutting it off from all other associations and you're just able to look at the actual goal and the actual obstacle you're not being bothered by other thoughts you've kind of separated them from they were just part of a big soup and now you've taken it out and they're just really really clear and alone so you've actually isolated them and it's the isolation which allows for concentration so you can actually concentrate and you can give just the relationship between the goal and the obstacle you can give it your full attention and all your creative abilities your previous successful experiences come to the Forefront well I've handled something like this before you know and then you think well how did I handle it well I did this and this and this and all of a sudden you get access to your experience which you don't if it's just floating around in your brain I'm glad you said the term access to your experience because that's really what we have people write down at coach is it's different ways of people accessing and gleaning new value from their past experience their future goals and then we turn that into conversation and then action and it's that writing down process that helps people get so much clear because all of us have a lot going on in our minds it really is a soup in there but I like that description of really taking it down into a discreet isolated thing in a box and the other thing about boxes I find is that they're not ginormous there's only a few words you have to write down it's not intimidating it's not scary it's your own thoughts anyway so that process is a very creative one I would say the other aspect about that is that the physical writing with your hand whichever hand is your writing hand has a totally different impact on your thinking then if you're typing I spent the first probably 50 years of my life writing everything so I've got a really well developed brain as a result of and I'm a good typist I'm a trained typist so I'm a touch typist and I can type really easily but there's some things I have to tell you Shannon when I can't crack them I'll just get a sheet of paper out and I'll break the thoughts down as a series of boxes or circles and I'll connect them and then I'll write other thoughts mind mapping you know that Gary clayin who's one of our coaches a great teacher of Mind mapping but it's that separation to get perspective you need separation from what it is that you're looking at and you could go away from it and you could come back and you haven't forgotten the thought because it's written down the other thing is and I'm not an expert at this but I had a neurologist a very very successful neurologist who was in the program for about five six years your and he says you know it's really really interesting that so much of the way that our brain works is really geared to how our hands work because the great distinction of human beings versus other creatures is that we have these hands with an opposable thumb that's the great breakthrough is the opposable thumb so we can hold things between our thumb and a finger and we can do very very fine work and he said that this has had a major major Major Impact and continues to have major impact on the development of our brains that what we can get our hands on like we have phrases in the English language like I can't really solve this till I get my hands on it you know and this is a handson Solutions so we use this thing hands and there's I think a direct connection that's developed over Millennia and Millennia of the fact is that we're better thinkers when we can use our hands and and what the neurologist told me he says there's an unusually large amount of your brain he was giving me percentage and it was in an area of about 30% or more of your brain that is actually directly connected to your dominant hand so if you're right-handed or left-handed and he says that so much of what you're able to do is sort of the teamwork between the brain in your head and he says actually a brain in your hand and he says so for the longest time people thought our brains were just in our head but he says now we're beginning to understand that it's throughout the nervous system and our organs and we actually have memories I know Ken Arland who's a longtime great strategic coach client who is a musician a very good musician and he has one of the most successful business of a musical company in Chicago and he said that he could take his saxophone that's his main instrument and he said that if I didn't have to sleep he says I think I could probably play for 24 or 25 hours of everything that I've learned in my lifetime sa after sa I wouldn't repeat a son and he says it's all in my hands he said I wouldn't have to look at music or anything he said I don't have to be thinking about it but the music memory is actually in my hands there are some phone numbers I can only dial by using my hands I don't actually remember the number but my hands do so I think all of us have that experience there's another connection that I've heard about and HH our cartoonist is the one who found this that your hand is connected to the broka part of your brain which is where language resides and so when we're writing things down where we really are clarifying our thinking and by using those words we're strengthening our thinking I always think sometimes we have these random thoughts and they're not fully formed when you actually write them down they have to get distinct and made into words and defined as oppos to something that's just general one other aspect in the Strategic coach Workshop we always recommend that people write in the forms that we provide a lot of them will scan it some of them not all of them will scan it into their computer and they'll actually do typing and what I've noticed is a huge difference in their participation in the workshop that the active writing doesn't make them separate from the other people in the room but the AC of typing actually Cuts them off from the other people in the room room and I tell them I said well if this is the only way that you can get your thinking out go right ahead and do it I said I'm not going to allow a whole room of people typing because I noticed they just sort of disappear from participation in the workshop so generally I'm kind of loose about it I mean if it gets out of hand I'll I'll have a discussion about it and I said you know as long as you can read your own writing this is the only thing matter and I said you're only doing this for thinking purposes you're having a conversation with your yourself you can't have a conversation with yourself where the thoughts are in your head you have to get the thoughts outside of you so you can have a conversation with yourself and that's really a lot of what strategic coach is about we allow you by asking certain questions and providing you with boxes to write in we're allowing you to have probably the best conversation that you have with anybody except it's with yourself M that also isn't where it stops we think about something wew write it down but then we have a conversation about it and the thing I love about this learning cycle that we use is that not only is the person I'm talking to hearing what I'm saying but so am I that process that was really articulated by writing it down gets strengthened by conversing and talking about it and adding emotion and details and color to what was simply on a box on a piece of paper the other thing Shannon and this has just been occurring to me over about the last 10 years is that handwriting is disappearing because a lot of schools don't even teach cursive anymore when I was a child we learned Printing and we spent the first part of learning the alphabet we learned how to print and that was the first grade and then the second grade we learned cursive two totally different kinds of writing and I suspect they use a different part of the brain so I really feel I have an advantage being in my' 70s that I spent so many years writing things on paper the other thing about it is because handwriting is fading out when you get something that's handwritten you actually really look at it in a way that you don't if it's typed or if it's printed one of our great great marketing experts Brian CTS from the New York area he was saying that there's no more powerful piece of marketing in the world than a handwritten note that's sent through the mail he says one is because nobody uses the mail anymore so if you send something in the mail you don't have any competition but the other thing is if it comes handwritten then people just immediately look at you know they take it out and they read the note and everything they keep it and they keep it it's very interesting your daughter sat in on one of our workshops you're 13 years old and she wrote me a note after the workshop lovely note and I was just cleaning out my bag last night night which happens periodically her note was there and I immediately took it out and I read it again and I put in the envelope I threw a lot of stuff away but I put the note back in because it was a personal note and it was a well-written note and I really appreciate it so time goes on and methods of learning change but there's a skill involved in writing things down which when nobody's doing it that skill will have been lost you know it's like in the old days they used to memorize things before printing it was not unusual that people over the course of their lifetime would have memorized the Bible or Shakespeare you know they could do Shakespeare for memory and you got to be sit in awe of what kind of brains they had to be able to memorize like that well there's no need for it today we have no need for that kind of memory because we have reminders all around us and knowledge will not be lost if you don't memorize something and that was the big thing about memorization is that knowledge could be lost if it wasn't in somebody's head who would pass it on to the next Generation yeah so cultures that have an oral history was really yeah Catherine neura just came from one in Colombia and they have no writing so massive amount of their learning is passing on stories passing on knowledge which has to be memorized from one generation to another so these people probably have really by our standards just colossal memories so you know something's probably been lost and new techniques coming along and something's gained so but if you can have both the Old and the new it's the double skill Dan you not only talk about what to write down but also what to never write down because it's not good for you or anybody else so I have a rule I never write anything negative about anything negative feelings but especially sending negative messages to other people first of all because your brain really doesn't differentiate whether you mean it or not if you're writing it down your brain thinks you mean it and the second thing is your brain takes it seriously and I have a firm belief that the brain doesn't pay attention to things you think about as much as what you write down because it's really fully engaged with the idea you've isolated it it's concentrating on the idea and if you write some negative thoughts to somebody else it has a huge impact on you and I have to say at the other end it has a huge impact on them the moment you send a negative message you've lost control over the message because you have no control now what that message is going to do when it arrives and when they get a negative message they feel just totally isolated from you they're cut off from you so this thing about writing things down it has a lot of power to it you know and there's a lot of Dimensions to it there's some power to it that I don't see with other ways of recording things mhm yeah certainly I know if I were to type something into my calendar I have to keep referring to it if I write it down in my weekly planner for example I remember it so it actually triggers my memory or on your wrist occasionally yes you do see on my hand on the palm of your hand yeah remember I don't know if you ever saw the movie momento no the man had no short-term memory so everything that happened he had to write and as their arms were covered with phone numbers and addresses and everything he had long-term memory but he had no short-term memory it was fascinating to see how he was able to go through a normal day without any short-term memory because he would have to write down where I'm going and then when he got there he'd have to remind himself why did I come here I forget who the actor was but it was a wonderful role and it really showed you the power for him of writing things down because he had no other chance of making sense of his daily reality except by writing things down so just to bottom line it Dan in terms of writing things down again I think my biggest take away from this is it really takes it from the subjective to the objective and that you can get some distance and then do really interesting things with it add your intellect add your experience connect things that weren't connected before and out of that as you talk about a successful life is really a serious of successful actions which are much more likely to happen if you actually write them down yeah very very much so there's famous stories about diarists people who every day they would write in a diary and I once did it for 25 years straight all but a few days over 25 years I wrote down what I wanted the next day you know it could be a sentence it could be a paragraph it could be a whole page but every night I did that and it took me from a very very negative place in my life to a very positive place in my life over a period of 25 years and I think the daily writing was hugely instrumental in really shaping my brain in a different way and constantly reinforcing certain things that I knew that worked and reinforcing lessons that I was having along the way negative ones which I never wanted to have again and positive ones I wanted more of I remember it had a huge huge impact that 25 years of doing that well that's a great exercise for people to leave with actually is to start writing down one two three things every night that you want in your life the next day next week and that'll be a great Habit to put in place writing down whatever means you're using to write down is great I find that handwriting seems to have some special power to it but it's all good because you're focusing your brain on this instead of a lot of other things the moment you write your brain takes it seriously it doesn't take thoughts you have seriously either as much or at all if you just let them float around in your head but the moment you write them down your brain says ooh this is serious he's taking time she's taking time to actually write it down think it through and then get it away from herself I better really really pay attention to what's happening here and I think that's the process that the brain goes through I totally greate thank you Dan thank you Shannon this was a great subject mhm