A Morning Practice That Can Potentially Improve Your Focus from The Artist’s Way
“Ooga booga wumba chuck Palahniuk woodchuck fluck puck muck amok.” ― Excerpt from author’s morning pages
If you’re wondering what the gibberish in the quotation is, it’s from the Morning Pages practice as taught in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. A popular practice since 1992, it’s been regularly referenced and featured in media and promoted religiously by its practitioners. How to do the practice can be found here and in other videos that are widely available for free. While we are focused on the Morning Pages practice discussion here, we also encourage you to consider purchasing the book if you’re interested in doing a deep dive into the work by Julia Cameron.
The simplest way to summarize what benefits of your Morning Pages practice does for you is that it brings focus and clarity. To the social entrepreneur, especially for young professionals, or even older and more experienced people who may have anxieties, fears, frustrations, and worries about day-to-day operations, having focus and clarity can help you recognize more patterns, be more inspired, which in turn helps discover solutions to problems that you might not otherwise have seen without stepping back for a moment.
Yes, Morning Pages are not merely for creative professionals, but a universally-accessible practice that anyone and everyone should at least try for a few weeks as a means of draining the junk in their heads. Most of what stops us if we take a step back are the voices that tell us “I can’t” or “This is too stupid” or “Not good enough”, and those voices masquerade as being reasonable, practical, and logical. Reality check: nope, they’re just one of many voices in your head, and sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, yet we have to agree that the people who ignored those voices and listened to the other voices that said, “Go, go, go!” are the ones who built technologies we could only dream of from science fiction, and also launched business ideas that impacted anything from a rural village in Uganda with microfinance to a wide scale global support project like Angels for Angels, which believes in financing ideas worth supporting and giving opportunities to people who wouldn’t otherwise have them without a little love, advice, and funding.
Taking time for yourself to be petty, honest, and unfiltered without any consequences allows you to make sure that those voices are heard, instead of repeating themselves to you 24/7. Seeing them on paper, you don’t build them up in your head, you see them for what they are: noise. There may be some wisdom or insight, there may be foolishness, but most importantly, it’s not you. In turn, you find associations from the stream of thoughts that flows, which is what leads to pattern recognition that helps with problem-solving and not panicking.
Oftentimes, we create a kind of mythical idea of a perfect social entrepreneur, and when we don’t feel we’ve met that ideal or it doesn’t match our dreams, we create this noise in our minds. By using the practice of Morning Pages, we can separate the distracting thoughts from the ones that encourage us to pursue our goals and live out our ideals, and as an extra benefit, we not only inspire ourselves, we inspire those around us. When we in turn inspire those around us, we create a better environment that encourages others who aren’t (yet) able to take the initiative to help themselves or experiment as you would with Morning Pages or other exercises, practices, or guidance to be better. In other words, by being a better version of you as we’ve written about many times, you inspire others to be better, and when others are better, it’s a net gain for everyone.
A popular saying in Eastern Philosophy is that we must watch our thoughts, for they become our words, and then in turn, watch our words, which become our actions, and finally, watch our actions, because they define our character. So by slaying the unhelpful thoughts or giving them a home in your private journal with Morning Pages, yes, you could potentially be a better person by acting and speaking better without the fear speaking through you–because it’s right there in ink and paper that nobody will ever read instead of out in the world.