I didn't start because I was a diary person. I'd read a few books that kept saying the same thing: the successful managers and founders, they write every day. That was the whole trigger. No big inner experience, more of a hunch. If they do it, I thought, then maybe there's a reason, and I wanted to know what it was.
So I bought a reMarkable 2. And then I started writing every day. That was how I got into journaling, long before I had a word for it.
how I started journaling
In the beginning it was very functional. My questions were all about optimization. How do I get more productive? What's going on inside me right now? What am I grateful for? How can I improve? I sat there with the pen and worked away at myself like I was a project with a roadmap.
And it was fun. That matters to me to say, because I'd have expected a daily thing like that to turn into an obligation at some point and then fade out. With me it was the other way around. It stayed, all the way to today. I think that's the real reason the experiment turned into a habit. Not the discipline, but the fact that I liked coming back to it.
the goals that didn't hold
In that first phase I had very high goals. I set my sights on things that were genuinely big. Some of it, in the end, didn't carry the way I'd hoped. When I think today about why, I find a few different explanations. Maybe a plan just wasn't ripe yet. Maybe there weren't enough people who wanted it. Some things were already getting going, just not on the scale I'd pictured. Looking back, in a few places I thought too small, or picked too narrow a niche.
But it didn't disappoint me. And I'm not putting a gloss on it. Those high goals weren't a mistake. It was precisely because they drove me that I noticed at all how much fulfillment matters to me. The work on myself, too. The drive brought me to a point where I could look deeper. Without that level of expectation I probably never would have landed there.
What changed over time were the questions. Through writing it slowly became clear to me that productivity isn't the most important thing. For me that wasn't a thesis from some book, it was something that stood out more plainly on the paper from one day to the next. Presence counts for more, and the work on yourself counts for more. I didn't decide it. I read it, in what I'd written myself. It had been there all along, I'd just skimmed past it.
What helped me with that was a simple tool I took from Ali Abdaal's Productivity Lab: the Balanced Week. I planned my week so the work sat in the calendar as tasks, but just as firmly the open space I needed. Not to do less, but to work on the actual goal with a clear head and then, through the free time I'd planned, to balance out again. It's also a shift in perspective: with a bit of distance I see things differently. Whenever I'd pushed it too far into pure output, that was exactly what brought me back to myself. It has stayed one of the most important things for me to this day, because it keeps reminding me what I actually need right now. Society measures performance, and we do the same to ourselves. Everything is supposed to be measurable. But does measurable also mean happy?
the way through the body
Alongside that, a whole physical thread was running. I tried out a lot and soaked a lot up. At the start I mostly got into cold plunging for the physical performance, to get better and to endure more. But cold plunging is much more than that. Stepping into ice-cold water every day is a shock, and that does something to you. Each time you step out of your comfort zone on purpose, you confront yourself, and that's exactly where you grow. It's about letting go, about feeling your body, about listening to the inner voice. At its core it's very close to writing. There too I expose myself every day to something I'd rather avoid, and through that I get closer to myself. The cold plunging has stayed with me to this day, I do it every day.
The breathwork came in during that early, performance-driven time. At the start it was mostly about training my mental awareness, so that too was a form of optimization. What really turned it around was a Wim Hof retreat in Lapland, Finland. Looking back, that wasn't a detour, it was an important step toward where I stand today. Through the breath and through the nature up there I came into real contact with myself for the first time. And after every round of breathing we wrote down what had come up in us. That's where the breath and the writing touched for the first time, long before I made anything of it.
The retreat grew into more: I later trained as a breath coach. Conscious breathing brings me even closer to the feeling of my body, and the more clearly I sense that, the more clearly I see what's going on inside me.
Here too the real insight came through writing. At some point I realized I don't have to perform at the top at all. It isn't about peak output, it's about a feeling for my body that fits me and does justice to who I am. And about sensing with intuition what I'm capable of and where the path leads.
That path didn't run in a straight line. There were good phases and hard ones, in productivity as much as in this coming back to myself. Sometimes I was deep in the doing, sometimes far from myself. And every time I found my way back through a small break, through sport, nature, the forest or the sauna, I had a different view afterward of what I was doing. They were honest self-experiments with ups and downs, not a clean upward curve.
what journaling actually does
That insight set a few things in motion. Through the more honest feeling for my body and through the questions in the journal, I arrived at intuition. The breathwork that had started as brain training turned, over time, into something deeper. Today I hold an Alignment Day and work with people one on one on finding their own intuition.
If I'm to explain how the writing actually works on me, it's like this. For me, journaling is less a technique than self-reflection: a quick mirror of my inner state. When I start to write, after a few lines I notice how stressed I am. Or how much I'm with myself right now. It's less about plans and more about feelings, about arriving with myself. When I mirror back, in writing, what's inside me, I recognize much faster what state I'm actually in. Sometimes I read a sentence of mine and instantly know more about my day than I knew about myself all morning.
And it shows me where I'm blocked. Some things that are there and want to be let go only become conscious to me through writing in the first place. Before that they sit somewhere in the background and press, without my being able to name them. On the paper they take a form, and that lets me touch them.
What then became conscious through writing, I can often go at and even resolve more easily with the breathwork. That's how I did it in my own self-experiments. First see on paper what's there, then work on it with the breath. One lays it bare, with the other I can let go. Over the years I've worked a lot on myself this way and resolved a lot of inner blocks. Not in one big act of liberation, but piece by piece.
a long process, not a switch
When I look back today, one thing stands out above all. This has been a long process, nothing from one day to the next. Growth, for me, meant letting go of old things so a new identity has room. That doesn't happen on command. It takes time, and it sometimes hurts, because you're giving up something that was familiar to you for a long while. The writing helps me with exactly that. It shows me what I'm holding on to, and that makes it easier to open my hand.
Inkward came out of that, by the way. While building it, this mirror often set off strong emotions in me, because it reaches so deep. Suddenly my own words were standing in front of me, handed back, and I felt how much lies in there. It's a difference whether you write something and turn the page, or whether it's calmly handed back to you. It doesn't interpret, it gives me my own words back, and that's exactly what sets something in motion in me.
Today writing is also a kind of manifestation for me. It's my way of fixing myself in place. Where I stand right now, what state I'm in, how my identity is shifting at the moment, what limits I see in this moment. And by now it also means, for me, rediscovering what's been buried. Things in me that seemed lost or forgotten, and that suddenly surface again on the paper, as if they'd only been waiting for me to write them down.
By now I believe that most of what we're looking for already lies within us. Not as a method someone teaches you, but as something we've known all along and just write over in everyday life. The writing doesn't teach me anything new. It lays bare what's already there, and gives me my own words back. The solution never came from outside. It was already on the paper, I just had to read it.
In the end it's basically only that. And that's exactly why it carries so far.
