- Good morning, good life, welcome back to AmyTV where we come together to help you go after the life you want. I am a huge believer in having a mindfulness practice that helps you on a daily basis to maintain creativity, focus, and productivity. Now it took me a long time to hit my stride with this after trying a lot of different things, but what I found is that my most productive mindfulness moment is when I sit down on a daily basis to do a writing practice called Morning Pages. The reason why I love Morning Pages so much is that they are incredibly imperfect. It's not a writing assignment where you sit down and come up with your best ideas ever to put down on paper. Your job is to just write. You don't think about writing. You write what you're thinking. I have found in talking to a lot of people about Morning Pages that there is a bit of a misunderstanding of what the purpose of them is, and the perception of what Morning Pages are, and a lot of people think that they should be just as beautiful as their name would lead you to believe, but from my experience, I believe that the actual act of Morning Pages is the ugly part, and the result of maintaining the habit of Morning Pages is where the beauty appears. So let's break it down: what exactly are Morning Pages? This is a daily writing practice popularized by the author of "The Artist's Way", Julia Cameron. She calls Morning Pages "the bedrock tool of creative recovery." Put simply, Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing done first thing in the morning. Longhand means that your pages are written in your ordinary handwriting, and stream of consciousness is simply your thoughts and reactions in a continuous flow. Morning pages are not meant to be typed, they're not meant to be strategized, and they really do serve you the best when they're done as early in the day as possible, but that's it. As long as you fill those three pages, there are no other rules to doing this right. So why is this such a big deal? You're probably thinking, "What could be so amazing in my head "first thing in the morning "that I must get them out and onto paper?" But that's just the thing.

There's probably nothing mind-blowingly amazing going on in your mind when you first get up in the morning, at least not yet. You're just reacting to waking up and starting a day. Maybe you didn't sleep that well. Maybe you didn't sleep at all. Maybe you have a little bit of anxiety about problems in your life right now. Maybe you're just concerned about the unknown. All of these thoughts being generated by your mind are contributing to a lack of focus and productivity around the things you're passionate about, and around the things that you're creatively driven by. So we gotta get that first little bit of stuff outta the way. Here's how I do it. After I make my habitual glass of lemon water, I head to the space where I convene my morning routine, my dressing room. I keep my Morning Pages journal and other daily notebooks at a desk with pens, a salt rock lamp, and an oil diffuser. I put on soft, lyric-free music to set the mood. I sit down and open a new page in my journal designated for Morning Pages, and begin a new entry immediately after where I left off the day before. I start with the date, and then the time, and then I write. I write for three pages, sometimes complete sentences. Most of the time, totally illegibly. Whatever pops up in my mind, I start to write it, and as I think it, I continue to put those words down on paper. I don't judge what I'm thinking. I don't worry about what it's gonna look like. I just write whatever pops into my mind. My goal is to get those three pages filled up as soon as possible. The more I analyze my words, the longer it's gonna take, but the sooner I fill those three pages, the sooner that crap is out of my mind and into the real world, in a journal that I can close up and put away so that I can move on to the more creative work of my day.

No matter what challenges I might be facing in that moment or anxiety that could be popping up, I always feel 100 times better after doing Morning Pages. It gives me so much more space to think about the next video I wanna create, lesson I wanna teach, or blog post I'm gonna write. To put it to you another way, I think about Morning Pages the way Abraham Lincoln thought about his unsent angry letters. Lemme explain: whenever he felt the urge to yell at someone or put out negative energy, Lincoln would write something called a hot letter, where he would write all of his anger down as if he were going to deliver it to the person who needed a good talking-to. But once his frustrations were out of his mind and on paper, he was able to walk away from them, let his emotions cool down, and move on, and those hot letters were never sent and never signed. Have you ever sent a fiery text or tweet because somebody needed a little talking-to? Or have you ever told someone off before? If so, click the Like button. I know this is relatable. Here's another question: how many times have you been so frustrated with your mindset, your own mind, that you wish you could tell it off, and tell it to stop doing things that are driving you crazy? What if you could write it a hot letter, and ask for some of that space and clarity back? That's the opportunity that I see with Morning Pages. Your concerns and frustrations deserve the acknowledgement that they need, but they also then need a space to live, and that space in your mind is busy doin' better things, so we simply need to evict it from our brain on a regular basis and give it somewhere else to live. By having this practice every day and maintaining this mindfulness habit, you're acknowledging those feelings, but you're also moving on from them and using the positive energy that you have found beyond it so that you can do your more creative and productive, and focused work. So try picking a space, and a journal, and a moment in your morning when you can sit down and let 'er rip so that you can move on and do the more beautiful things that you wanna do in this life.

Question of the day: what mindset challenges have you been experiencing lately that have been keeping you from doing your best creative work? Leave that in the comments below. That's all for today, thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate it as always. Make sure you subscribe for good vibes, kiss the ones you love, and go after the life you want, cheers. I got this first scar pretty easily. So squeaky, so squeaky. Focus, creativity, and productivity. I'm getting a phone call. Hello? How exciting, thanks, Michael.