Books

The Dear Diary Process

I never thought I would write a book. To be fair, for most of my life I didn’t particularly like reading them.

I grew up surrounded by a family who always seemed to have their head in a book, while I was usually somewhere else. I was thinking, creating, watching people, noticing what they did and becoming curious about why they did it. I learned by observing, absorbing and pulling things apart in my own head until they made sense to me. Looking back now, I realise that probably explains a lot about the way I eventually came to understand people and the human mind.

It also makes becoming the published author in the family slightly amusing.

I didn’t set out to write The Dear Diary Process either. It began on 17 March 2010 during a conversation with a professional golfer. Somewhere in that conversation he mentioned that he wrote in his diary every night, and almost immediately my mind went somewhere else. I began thinking about what he was writing, what his mind was doing with that information and what might happen if we changed the way he used those few minutes before sleep.

So I created something.

At that point it wasn’t a book and it certainly wasn’t a grand plan. It was simply an idea that made sense to me, created from years of watching, listening and understanding how people think, combined with what I knew about behaviour, emotion, neural pathways, sleep and performance. We applied it and what happened next changed his life, although neither of us could have known that the conversation would eventually change mine as well.

Later, somebody asked me to write a blog about the process. So I wrote one. That became more writing, which became more explanation, more understanding and more of the thinking that sat underneath what initially looked like a very simple five minute exercise. Eventually somebody read what I had created and said, “That’s a really good book. You should get it published.”

And somehow the kid who never wanted to read the books became the published author in the family.

What I love about that story now is that the book was never the objective. The process came first. The results came next. The book simply became a way of sharing what I had discovered.

How to Change Your Thoughts for Awesome Results

The Dear Diary Process showed me just how powerful change can become when we stop making it complicated and give people something they can actually apply. Five years later, in 2015, another moment of frustration took me in a different direction. This time I was reading someone else’s book and found myself becoming increasingly frustrated by how much personal development information tells us what we need to do, while very little of it explains how to actually do it.

We are told to think positively, believe in ourselves, become more confident, set goals, visualise success, stop overthinking and change our mindset. The information sounds great and most of us already know a lot of it. The problem is that knowing what you need to do and being able to make your mind do it are 2 very different things. I knew that personally because I had spent parts of my own life knowing exactly what needed to change while still experiencing the frustration of being unable to create that change consistently.

That led me to a question that has stayed at the centre of my work ever since. If people already know what they need to do, why can it still be so difficult to do it?

How to Change Your Thoughts for Awesome Results grew from that question. I wanted to take what I had learned about the human mind, behaviour and performance and bring it back to the fundamentals, because before we can expect ourselves to change, it helps enormously to understand the mind we are asking to make that change.

One of the most important things to understand is that your mind isn’t primarily programmed for performance. Its number 1 priority is protection. It learns from what has happened before, creates patterns from those experiences and uses those patterns to predict what might happen next. That works incredibly well for keeping us alive, although it can become frustrating when consciously we are trying to move towards something new while our mind is working hard to keep us within what already feels familiar and safe.

Suddenly, struggling to change starts to look different. Instead of assuming you lack motivation, discipline, confidence or ability, you can begin becoming curious about what is actually happening underneath the resistance. Once you understand why your mind is responding the way it is, you have a much better opportunity to work with it rather than spending your life fighting against it.

The original eBook eventually became the foundation for something much larger… The How To Project. I wanted to take the fundamentals behind the book and give each of them the space they deserved, expanding them through video and conversation so that people could explore how their own mind works and, importantly, how they can begin applying that understanding to create change.

The How To Project now forms part of the Head Start ecosystem, where How to Change Your Thoughts for Awesome Results becomes more than something you simply read. It becomes an opportunity to understand yourself differently, explore the fundamentals that influence your thoughts and performance and begin discovering how to create the changes you may already know you want.

In many ways, that brings me back to the same place The Dear Diary Process began. I am not particularly interested in giving you another list of things you need to do. There are already plenty of people doing that. I am much more interested in answering the question that matters once you know what you want to change…

How do you actually do it?