Shauna Niequist, Using Your Pen to Stay Present

Jessica Honegger [00:00:03] Hey, there. Welcome to going scared. I'm Jessica Honegger, founder of the world changing brand Noonday Collection, and I'm so glad to have you here for today's conversation. Our going Scared Community gathers here every week for direct and honest conversations that help you live a life of courage by leaving comfort and going scared. All right, we are now into our third part of the new series Know Thyself, which is your step by step guide to discover how to get to know yourself. Short 30 minute conversations that are going to give you the tools and tricks of the trade on how you can change in order to show up better for your family, for your community, for your work, for your loved ones. OK, today's tool that we are talking about is journaling. Do you have a journaling practice? I have had an on again, off again practice of journaling throughout the years, but so much of self awareness really has to do with self-reflection, and written reflections are a powerful way to simply get a window into your soul. So I thought there was no better person to talk with about journaling than Shauna Niequist. You just wrote a guided journal and who has had a very regular practice of journaling over the years, and she gave just some really practical tips and guides today that I really hope that you are going to be able to implement into your life. Shauna Niequist is the New York Times best selling author of Cold Tangerines, Bittersweet, Bread and Wine, Savor, Present Over Perfect, and it's the Present Over Perfect guided journal that she just came out with. So love, Shauna. She's a friend. We share some food tips even on today's episode. I can't wait for you to give it a listen. Shauna, it is so good to hear your voice.

Shauna Niequist [00:02:03] I am so happy to talk with you. It's been way too long.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:06] It's been too long. I was joking with Shauna that we haven't spoken in a long time, but whenever I'm in some place where I'm like, I think Shauna's been here before, she'll know exactly what to do and what to eat. And I text her, and you never have failed me yet.

Shauna Niequist [00:02:23] That is my favorite thing to do. Those are my favorite kind of texts to get any time. I love it.

Jessica Honegger [00:02:28] Yeah, I think I've done it in Santa Barbara, Michigan, New York. Where else are some of your specialties? Tell me some of your because those would be your very much Shauna places, but are there any others that I'm missing here?

Shauna Niequist [00:02:41] Well, we used to live in Chicago, OK?

Jessica Honegger [00:02:44] There's a well, I've texted you from there as well.

Shauna Niequist [00:02:46] So OK. Yeah. But yeah, West Grand Rapids. Yeah, West Michigan, Grand Rapids, South Haven, Saugatuck and then definitely Santa Barbara. Obviously, we live in New York now and I'm just crazy about it and could recommend restaurants all day long. Austin is one of my favorite food towns, Austin and Houston, both. I love to eat there. I love that. Yeah, I always eat well when I'm in Texas.

Jessica Honegger [00:03:11] Yes, we do that. We do that. We eat well here. We eat so many things. Well, it's a very fine. And I, especially Austin, has such an eclectic variety of foodies. But thanks for joining us today. So I really wanted Shauna to come on the show today. First of all, she did just launch a journal called Present Over Perfect, which is a guided journal that is based off of one of her previous books, with the same title Present Over Perfect. And what I just will. First of all, it's beautiful because everything you do is beautiful, so thank you for making it for you. It's important to have a pretty journal.

Shauna Niequist [00:03:44] It is. It is important. Yeah, you want to. You want to gravitate toward it. You want to want to hold it.

Jessica Honegger [00:03:49] I say that although my composition notebook, it's like I like, ran out. You know, I ran out it got to an end of a journal. And so I just like went through my husband's office and found an old composition notebook journal that my kids never used for school. So it's not very pretty right now. But Present Over Perfect, what I love about it is that it's guided, and I often find the blank page extremely intimidating. And I think that's what's so great about this journal is it really helps. I think you've called it a training wheels for journaling, but I wanted to start with you just sharing when I think, you know, this podcast series is all about self-awareness. And when I think of actually your work Present Over Perfect, it really does take us on a journey of becoming aware of certain mindsets and certain behaviors that weren't working for you, that were actually causing some breakdowns. And those breakdowns led to some breakthroughs and choosing to get off the hamster wheel and press in and lean into a journey of self-awareness and becoming more present. So I first would just love to hear a little bit about that for you. Why does awareness matter?

Shauna Niequist [00:05:09] You know, if you think about it, one of the things that they talk about, like in our physical bodies pain is a signal that our body needs something right like it and it protects us. So like if if you put your hand on a hot stove, the pain will remain, will will tell you like, Hey, move your hand so you don't, so you don't burn yourself any worse than you already have. [00:05:28]And I think without self-awareness, we're hurting ourselves all the time, without even really even realizing it, that the kind of when I look back at some of the worst choices I made, it was because I had stopped listening to that voice inside me, to my own desires, to my own pain level, and I decided that there were all these things I just should do, and those voices came from outside myself as opposed to from within. And so I got really off track in my life when I lost a sense of my own voice and started listening too much to the voices outside of me. [36.7s] So self awareness is like an inner compass, right? But in order for it to work, you have to look at it. And I didn't for a long time. And journaling is one of the easiest low entry level ways to do that, to practice self-awareness. It's literally just who am I and what am I thinking and what do I want and what hurts and what's working and what's not? It's one of the easiest tools that we can use in our lives to get to know what's happening inside of us.

Jessica Honegger [00:06:32] So you wrote Present Over Perfect a few years ago, and it's been wildly successful and you know, it was a bit prophetic even. I mean, I think so many books have followed since then about tuning in to a slower pace and choosing to get off the hamster wheel of life. I'm curious how your journey since writing that book influenced the prompts and the many essays that you wrote for this journal.

Shauna Niequist [00:07:01] Well, you know, so there were, you know, many people who read prison over perfect and it really connected with them, but then they reached out to me and the question they asked was like, Oh, like, I like this, but like, how? How do I do this in my own life? [00:07:15]And so I tried to write, to be honest, I tried to write a follow up book that told people how, and I just couldn't do it like it wasn't working. It wasn't coming together. And it's because I realized this has to be a journey that comes from each person's individual story and life. I can't tell someone the how I can tell them the why and why it's important and the warning signs and how it looked in my life. But this had to be an intensely personal journey for each person the same way it was for me. [32.6s] The last thing I want to do is tell people like, these are the 10 steps, then you end up with my life. Nobody wants that. They want their own life. They want a life that flows out of their loves and desires and dreams and most deeply held values. And so we realized in this like flash, I was on the phone with my editor and she we were like, Oh, we're going about this all wrong. The nature of Present Over Perfect is you have to be able to choose your own steps. This has to be a journey that you where the reader is the author of the journey, as opposed to me telling them how to do it. And so we, like, scrapped all the work and started over. And throughout the whole process of making the journal, the biggest thing we did was take away words and add blank space like I like. The word count dropped every edit because we felt like you have to look through this and it has to make you like, exhale on a deep level. It can't be like, Oh my gosh, Shauna has so many tips and tricks for how to do this. It has to be like Shauna is going to sit with me while I slow down my life and start to pay attention to what's happening inside my own self. So it really changed along the way. We felt like the spirit of Present Over Perfect had to dictate what this journal was going to be.

Jessica Honegger [00:09:00] I love Dan Siegel, who is a neurobiologist we've had on this show, and he says that the number one thing you can do for your kids and I think also fill in the blank your people in your life is to make sense of your own story. What does that mean to you when you hear that?

Shauna Niequist [00:09:16] Oh yeah, I totally think that's true. I love that. And I think, you know, one of this point, one of the ways, [00:09:23]one of the reasons that I take care of myself in any way, whether it's understanding my own story or learning to rest well or learning to practice my vocation in ways that are meaningful for you, for me. On one hand, I'm doing it so that I can be the best possible parent so that I can be like a good person to live with in my house, you know? But also so that I can show them these are the things that we do in order to be the best possible versions of ourselves. So when I, for example, write in my journal, part of it is so that I can be the best mom I can be, so I can be a person who practices self-awareness so that I understand my motivations, so I understand what's missing in my life. But also, I want to show my kids like, you don't just wake up one day with like a healthy, happy whole life. You kind of have to work for it. You have to pay attention. You have to practice healthy patterns. And I love our kids are old enough now where we kind of get to model that to them. [53.6s] That feels exciting to me.

Jessica Honegger [00:10:18] Tell me what your practice of journaling has been over the years because I'm not going to lie. You're a writer. I mean, you are a legit writer. I remember when I read your, I think bread and wine was my first book of yours that I read, and I just remember feeling held by your words. And a lot of people write books. I write books, but I don't consider myself. I mean, I know, I mean, I am a writer. It's even hard for me to say. But I you write, you write for fun like you write, whether you're going to have a book go out there or not. And you know, that's that's as unique as my dad would say that's a special breed of cattle in Texas language. So what do you say to the person that doesn't feel like a poetic writer person?

Shauna Niequist [00:11:04] Totally. Well, I would say if anyone peeked at my journal number one, I would die. Number two, it's a mess. Like, please, yes, I am, by profession, a writer. But the writing anything you've read has been edited by like a zillion people right like, I don't write like that in my journal. My journal is just an absolute dumpster of like my feelings, my grocery list, things I want to get rid of from our cabinets that I keep forgetting to throw out, letters I should have sent, people I haven't texted back, things I'm worried about, prescriptions I need to get refilled. I mean, it's just like a total. It's crazy. And that's how it should be. [00:11:54]And one of the, you know, when you talk about neurobiology, one of the things that we're doing when we're journaling is we're taking all of the thoughts and feelings and ideas and worries and anxieties that are racing around our bodies and our brains, and we're giving them somewhere else to be. And you sort of like defang them at that point, you take away some of your power, and some of it is because the actual physical act of writing forces your brain and your body to interact together, which is a healthier way for us to process emotion than when it's just circling around in our minds. And so it's an actual healing act. It's a physically restorative act. And so the point is not that it's beautiful. The point is that your fingers are moving [43.2s] and like,

Jessica Honegger [00:12:39] I like that, they're making me feel better.

Shauna Niequist [00:12:41] Absolutely. And the other thing I would say is not everybody has to be a writer and journaling is doesn't have to be your primary thing that you love. It's just one tool in your toolbox. For me, it's the tool I go to most often. But for someone else, it might be a tool they only reach for after their most go to tools aren't working. You know what I mean?

Jessica Honegger [00:13:06] Yeah, totally. So I don't journal that I have a consistent journal, but maybe it's once a week. Maybe it's every other week and same. It's like all sorts of things and am totally. But you really do this.

Shauna Niequist [00:13:19] I do. But some of it is. This is how I process the world. I've been writing on Post-its and on the back of receipts and on, you know, any piece of paper I can find all my life. It's how I know what I think or feel about anything. And I also would say, going back to what you were saying a moment ago about not being a writer, I mean, obviously, you are a writer. But one of my favorite quotes is from Anne Lamott, and she says something like being published doesn't make you a writer or not having a creative writing degree doesn't make you a writer or not. You're a writer if you walk through the world with an index card and a pen in your back pocket, that's it. If you walk through the world as a noticer, if what you see and think and feel and observe, eventually you put a pen and paper even if it's a pen and an index card from your back pocket that makes you a writer.

Jessica Honegger [00:14:09] I love that. I don't know why. I'm suddenly feeling like I'm wanting you to talk me into this. I'm curious, like I thought I was a journaler, but now I'm talking to you and I'm like, Oh gosh, I'm not. Not anywhere near what Anne Lamott just said. And I feel like I could actually experience a lot more benefit as I feel like I could hone this tool a lot more. So I'm just curious to hear about how you have honed this tool in your life over the years. And is there a nonproductive journaling?

Shauna Niequist [00:14:42] [00:14:42]You know, I would never say that what I write in my journal, like magically turns into an essay, but I would say that writing is writing and you get better as a writer by writing more. [11.0s] And so the other thing I would say is I there are these couple not tricks, but practices that I use in my writing life that I realize now are way more about just my actual life. They improve my actual life, so much. So I always try to do before I go to bed at night, I try to write three glimpses and when I see a glimpse, I mean, like, let's say, two to five sentences or just a list, but it's three different moments from my day, and I write it in the most sense-heavy way possible. So if it's about a conversation with one of my children, I sometimes write the words in the conversation. But I mostly write like how his hair was falling into his eyes or what he was doing with his fingers, or how his voice sounded to me, or what kind of sneakers he was wearing. Or if it's a meal I write, you know, certainly the flavors, but also what music was playing in the restaurant and what kind of the table felt like under my fingers and that kind of stuff. Because so first I started doing it as a writer because you can go back and write about an experience you've had. But if you don't have those sense details down, you forget them and you can never backfill them in a way that feels authentic, right? Like you can always tell when someone's like, I believe it was midday and his eyes were sad, you're like, That's not how it went. So you have to have those. So I started doing it in order to do good writing. You want to remember that it smelled a little bit like rosemary and that there is, you know, violin music playing in the background, or that the chairs were screeching on the tile floor or whatever. [00:16:30]You have to have those memories and you have to get them down in order to do good writing. But here's the thing. It doesn't just make me a better writer. It makes me a better human in the world. I think it makes me a better Christian. It makes me more grateful. It makes me more connected to my senses in this city and other people, I find that I live in a more like, I'm leaning forward in my life. [26.3s] Like, I'm like, all my senses are ready to be dazzled, do you know what I mean? And so I started doing that as a writer, but it ended up being a really enriching kind of act for my whole self.

Jessica Honegger [00:17:09] My therapist, Curt Thompson, who's also been on the show, he says, you know, we become what we pay attention to. And so it feels like what you're saying is it helps you to pay attention.

Shauna Niequist [00:17:20] Absolutely, yes.

Jessica Honegger [00:17:22] What happens if you begin to pay attention to things that aren't helpful if you're in depression, anxiety and you're writing? I mean, you said that there's something that happens when it's pen to paper and it's getting out of your brain. But is there a way to kind of use journaling as a tool to cope with anxiety depression?

Shauna Niequist [00:17:46] Oh, absolutely. I would say, you know, the last couple of years of my life have been really difficult in a lot of different ways, and I have written hundreds of thousands of words and you know, like 50000 of them are going to be in a book that's going to come out next year. But most of it was like, I needed this grief and this sadness and this rage. I needed them out of my body. And so they came out my fingers onto the page. I just wrote through everything, and it was really freeing to get to to get those things out of my heart and out of my mind and out of my body onto a page that I could kind of push away from me a little bit and say, OK, thank goodness you're not rattling around inside me anymore. Another thing that it does is it in some instances, it shows you that these are just feelings and that no feeling is final and that you're going to get through it. Also, there are sometimes when you're journaling and it helps you realize how deep into the darkness you really are. And it forces you to ask for help. I had both experiences in the last couple of years. And one of the things I do, and this is something I love about journaling. It helps you see the patterns sometimes more clearly than you would another way. So I'll go through every several months and I'll read everything that I've written in my journal. And it's really clarifying because you start to see over and over again. Like, Man, I worried about this a lot. Or Wow, this really brought me a lot of joy or wow, that relationship really cost me a lot more than I thought it did. I was carrying it very heavily. [00:19:26]And so I think a lot of times journaling can be a way of discovering patterns about ourselves that we don't always see in real time and also certainly seeing how serious things are. [9.8s] You know, I had to kind of bump up my therapy routine and reach out in a couple different ways and practice a new kind of therapy. And I realized how much I needed that extra help because it was something coming up in my journal over and over and over. So it was a signal back to me that I needed some more help and support.

Jessica Honegger [00:19:54] It's so powerful and it does require presence and practice. I hate using the word discipline. I love that you're in any or do you still identify as enneagram? Seven wing six. OK. Yes. So that's what I think about you all the time, because I am like that too and I experience you. People think of sevens as like, Wow, crazy and blah blah blah, you know, but you I mean, I think through healing are just so go so inward and so deep and have healthy boundaries. And in all of these things that I've learned so much from you by watching you, you did just mention this word rage. Has that been a new emotion for you from the last couple of years, or is that did you feel pretty in touch with anger?

Shauna Niequist [00:20:42] That's so interesting that you ask that. I would say, No, I it is a brand new rage. Just the last couple of years, I've always been a person who feels things deeply. But I would not say anger has been a part of that until just the last couple of years, and I think it's a lot of different things driving it. I think some of it is midlife. I think some of it is menopause or perimenopause, and I think some of it is some really hard things that happen in the last couple of years. But I think also some of the what's happening in the pandemic has, I think, forced us to grapple with how little control we have over our lives. And for a lot of us, that's brought out a lot of anger so that it is it's kind of a new one for me and one I'm learning to not just push away, but learning to kind of befriend a little bit like, OK, vortex of rage. You're weird, but you're here. What do I do with you? How do I manage this new thing? Does that make sense?

Jessica Honegger [00:21:39] Yes, it does. And I am. We're going to have an after after the show chat, guys.

Shauna Niequist [00:21:45] OK? Yes. Yes.

Jessica Honegger [00:21:46] Well, just rage is that's new to me. Anger, you know? And so that's it made me think about the whole enneagram seven six. I mean, we constantly want to escape uncomfortable emotions, and we love to live in the realm of happy and I mean, you go through anything hard in life and realize that grief is just part of life, that is, man, that's just this, that's the journey of sobriety for a seven, right? Mm hmm. And so a lot of my journey the last couple of years has been learning to embrace grief and accept grief and befriend grief. But rage and anger is a bit of a new emotion for me that has emerged and it it's I just thought, Hmm, I wonder if it's an enneagram seven thing where we just keep a lot of these more uncomfortable emotions at bay.

Shauna Niequist [00:22:35] Well, I mean, I think that's definitely true. Here is also something. I just spoke with Ian Crohn recently, and he told me something about the enneagram that I had never heard before. You know, people approach the wings all different ways. But he says, and I had never heard this, but it's making a lot of sense to me that he it seems to him that right around midlife, many people start to live more out of the opposite wing than they did in the first half of life. Hmm. Meaning that you and I would be moving into that eight wing as opposed to the six wing. So a lot of anger there. Maybe that's it. So I don't know. But when he said that it really resounded with me and I need to think about it more and I need it, you know, but I need to journal about it more. But I think it's worth thinking about.

Jessica Honegger [00:23:26] Yeah, this is so interesting because I said those exact words. I said, Oh my gosh, I feel like suddenly I'm this eight, and I called my my eight girlfriend, who journals very explicit things to God told me about these explicit things over the years, and I, I was always non-judgmental and just like, OK, that's like, I'm in this with you. But I didn't identify with it. I didn't really. I just never responded, like, I wasn't one to like, get mad at God or, I don't know, just even rage. I mean, I rage in the privacy of my own car. But you know, I rage some pretty crazy things like and I may tell my husband about it later. I'm like, I kind of raged and about this and but it's really not your fault. And I don't I don't know what just happened, but I don't know it. Maybe I'm in any enneagram eight. How are you getting to, you know, you use those words of like, OK, you're here. We also on this podcast series have talked about inner family systems, which is all about identifying these different parts of us and befriending us. What has helped you as you have come into this new range of emotions, you said you've done a new type of therapy.

Shauna Niequist [00:24:37] So I I have a therapist who I just adore and I've been working with him, seeing him throughout, like since 2019 or something. And I'd had a therapist before that in Chicago that I'd loved as well. And but then he recommended at a certain point EMDR, which you mentioned earlier. And so I did a couple of sessions of that. It was very helpful. But I would say another thing that's really helpful for me is just kind of normalizing it, meaning talking about it with people like literally just doing it like this, like I would, you know, I went out to dinner with several girlfriends recently and kind of told them, like, Hey, one weird thing about New York is I don't have a car to scream in anymore. That's weird. We were like, I was like, guys, like, where do we scream in our apartment? And they laughed about it. They were like scream in a pillow. Also, scream on the sidewalk. It's New York. Everybody does it. [00:25:34]But it was it was a way of saying, like kind of tiptoeing into a conversation of like, Hey, I get really angry sometimes, and can we have a conversation about that? And it started as a joke, but they really met me there, and we ended up having a really great conversation about how hard the last couple of years have been, especially because we've been in these tiny little apartments and how hard it is to see our kids not getting to do like all the fun social stuff they we wish they could have done. And so therapy helps. [26.5s] And as some of the like I, some of the like midlife menopause that I think that's really a big part of it for me. So I'm going to like a million doctor's appointments right now trying to figure out that side of it, which has not been super easy in New York in a pandemic. But I'm on it. I'm trying to get done solutions, but just talking about it with people, I'm just asking everyone I know, especially like women who are like 10 years older than me. I'm like, Hey, I know we haven't known each other very long, but the other day I almost kicked my oven. Does that sound normal? And most of the women I talk to are like, Oh yeah, oh, you're 45, this is happening. Yeah. OK.

Jessica Honegger [00:26:40] OK. All right. All right. I want to get back to journaling because we need to wrap up here. And I noticed earlier you said you journal before you, go to bed. I mean, wow, my tank is just I'm exhausted by the time I am at night. So tell me about your actual practices. Like, what does this look like in your real life?

Shauna Niequist [00:26:59] Well, I would. Hey, I do most of my journaling in the morning after the kids leave for school, so that's like my biggest like, I start there. And then in the evening, I just do two things. I do those three glimpses and I have a little like gratitude practice. That's it, because I find the same thing. I don't want to like open up all the big stuff right before bed. I'll never sleep, right? I want to like, read a novel. And so the morning is for sort of that like big, ugly. What's happening? Pour it all out. Leave it all out on the page and learn from that process. And then the evening is just one of those three glimpses really sense based glimpses throughout the day. And then what am I grateful for? And just to kind of wind down the day,

Jessica Honegger [00:27:46] love that those sense-based glimpses. I just love that because I feel like that. It's, you know, it's kind of like the good things slip off of us, like Teflon, you know, in the bodily is like velcro. And it seems like when you can really imagine your senses, it activates more than just that left brain and helps you to almost kind of embody and remember those glimpses in a way that is going to be easier to recall in the future.

Shauna Niequist [00:28:18] Oh, absolutely. You. I mean, it's a little bit like the best parts of Instagram, right? The better. I think the best part of Instagram is if some if you see something or eat something or hear something or walk around a corner and it's beautiful, you get to show people like, Hey, this is how this. I had the great pleasure of getting to have this meal today. I got to I got to sit on this beautiful park bench or, you know, whatever. And these little glimpses are sort of a way of looking back through every day and saying, I'm going to assume that there are at least three moments worth remembering. And of course, there are. There are a hundred moments worth remembering. That's a really for me. It's a really life-giving, really kind of generative way of living. I love that

Jessica Honegger [00:29:04] Present Over Perfect, guided journal. It's out now. It's beautiful. Thank you so much, Shauna.

Shauna Niequist [00:29:09] Always great to talk with you. Thank you.

Jessica Honegger [00:29:15] Shauna really helped me to think about journaling differently, and even though I haven't actually written down the senses exercise that she talked about, I've done it in my head and it's been a very powerful for me. And now that this is actually live and launched, I am committing to all of you Going Scared listeners. I am going to actually write the thing down, guys, because writing things down is so powerful. I love going back and being able to just read my reflections from a certain season in life. It really is a way to open yourself up to this idea of becoming aware, aware of patterns where gratitude in a way of yourself. Today's music is by Ellie Holcomb and I'm Jessica Honegger. Until next time, let's take each other by the hand and keep going scared.