266. Put Handles On Your Poems: The Inner Work Upgrade Nobody Talks About
266. Put Handles On Your Poems: The Inner Work Upgrade Nobody Talks About
Why Journaling Isn’t Working: Truths Don’t Execute, Mechanisms Do
You understand your patterns.
You know what activates you. You can identify your red flags, trace your coping mechanisms back to their origins, and write an emotionally devastating journal entry about exactly why you did the thing you swore you weren’t going to do again.
You are genuinely doing the inner work.
So when does all of that awareness begin changing how you actually live?
When does it stop being something you understand after the moment of self-sabotage and start becoming a new response inside the moment?
When does insight become embodiment?
If you’ve ever reviewed an old journal and realized you’re still writing about the same lesson six months later, you’re not failing at personal growth. But you may be missing the mechanism that allows your awareness to become action.
Because truths don’t execute.
Mechanisms do.
Awareness Is Powerful, but It Isn’t Integration
Journaling has been one of the most transformative practices in my life.
It’s also the habit I’ve built the most consistency around. Over the last seven years, journaling and intentional reflection have helped me understand myself, repair old patterns, navigate difficult seasons, and make major changes.
But I’ve also experienced periods where my inner work didn’t seem to travel beyond the pages of my journal.
I would have an important realization, write about it extensively, and feel like I had uncovered something profound. Then, six months later, I would discover myself struggling with a slightly different version of the same problem.
This became especially obvious when I reviewed the top lessons from the first six months of my year.
I had written down 18 different lessons, but many of them were repeating the same essential truths using different language.
That repetition was information.
It showed me that I had created awareness around these patterns, but I hadn’t fully integrated what I had learned.
One of the frameworks I use is:
Awareness → Authorship → Action
Awareness is recognizing the lesson or pattern.
Authorship is deciding what the lesson means, how it applies to your life, and what you want to do with it.
Action is implementing that lesson in a way that changes your behaviour.
Many reflective practices stop at awareness. Sometimes we move into authorship and write about what we want to do differently. But without a mechanism that brings the lesson into our everyday lives, it may never become consistent, embodied change.
Truths Don’t Execute, Mechanisms Do
When I brought my 18 lessons to an AI assistant and asked it to help me turn them into an actual strategy, it identified that I didn’t really have 18 separate lessons.
I had approximately four recurring truths.
Those truths were going to remain beautiful pieces of wisdom unless I attached each one to a mechanism.
A mechanism might be:
A specific time of day
A recurring trigger
A ritual or routine
A decision script
A timer
A short checklist
A change to your environment
A rule you follow when a predictable situation occurs
A journal entry can help you understand that you need more rest. A mechanism determines when you will rest, what will remind you, and what the practice will look like.
A reflection might reveal that checking your inbox first thing in the morning makes you feel reactive and scattered. A mechanism keeps you out of your inbox until your morning practices are complete.
Insight tells you what matters.
Mechanisms help you live like it matters.
Or, in the words of my inner Firestarter:
“A truth without a trigger is a poem. Beautiful. Useless in a knife fight. We’re keeping the poems, but I’m putting handles on them.”
Put handles on your poems.
Give your wisdom something you can grab when you actually need it.
Case Study One: Escaping Fire Brain
One of the most important truths I uncovered was that many of my struggles with emotional eating weren’t really beginning with food.
They were beginning with the amount of time I spent in what I call detrimental Fire Brain.
Fire Brain is the part of me that wants to work, produce, solve, build, push, and accomplish. It’s powerful and necessary. But when I stay there for too long without intentionally returning to Ocean Brain, it becomes much harder to hear what my body needs.
Ocean Brain is slower, more receptive, embodied, spacious, and present.
My journal entries had already shown me the pattern:
I would work for several uninterrupted hours, become mentally and physically depleted, and eventually want something that offered immediate escape.
I knew overworking was contributing to emotional eating. I knew I needed stronger boundaries. I knew the eating itself was often the symptom rather than the root cause.
But knowing that didn’t automatically change anything.
I needed mechanisms.
The first mechanism was simple: setting timers during my deep-work blocks.
Without timers, I can become so absorbed in my work that two or three hours disappear. Then I emerge from the vortex wondering why my brain is demanding Pizza Hut and a small personal rebellion.
The second mechanism was changing one of my daily rituals.
My spiritual ritual had previously been a morning Kundalini practice. But I had already become extremely consistent with it. It was no longer creating the identity upgrade I wanted from the ritual.
More importantly, the ritual was happening before I entered Fire Brain.
I needed support when I was trying to leave Fire Brain.
So I moved my restorative practice to the part of the day when I needed it most. After my first few deep-work blocks, usually sometime between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., I now practise yin yoga or yoga nidra.
That reset helps me return to my body before moving into the rest of my day.
The truth was that spending too long in Fire Brain left me vulnerable to escape-driven choices.
The mechanism was a timer followed by an intentional Ocean Brain practice.
Case Study Two: Protecting the Beginning of the Day
Another repeating lesson involved my tendency to launch into business tasks before completing my morning practices.
Sometimes I would tell myself I was only going to check one email or respond to one vendor.
That ten-minute detour could quickly become 60 or 90 minutes of messages, feedback, decisions, and tiny administrative fires.
Eventually, the entire morning would feel hijacked.
I might still complete my workout and practices later, but they required significantly more effort. I felt less centred, less focused, and more likely to make choices that left me tired, foggy, or moody the following day.
Again, I already knew the truth.
Starting my morning with email, vendor communication, and business administration did not help me get ahead. It made me less grounded and effective throughout the rest of the day.
But truths don’t execute.
So I created a five-step morning checklist:
Stay out of your email. Work can wait.
Enter Ocean Brain first.
Journal with presence.
Practise Kundalini.
Move your body.
The checklist is intentionally short.
It doesn’t contain every possible thing I could do to create a perfect morning. It contains the mission-critical behaviours that protect the quality of my day.
Simple checklists aren’t evidence that you’re incapable of remembering what matters. They are tools for shaping your environment and reducing the number of decisions you need to make while you are tired, distracted, activated, or tempted by an old pattern.
You are not too advanced for a checklist.
Sometimes the most sophisticated thing you can do is build a structure simple enough to use consistently.
How to Turn a Journal Insight Into a Mechanism
Choose one insight you’ve written about more than once.
Then ask yourself:
What is the actual truth?
Try to reduce the lesson to one clear sentence.
For example:
I make worse decisions when I work without breaks.
Checking email first thing makes me reactive.
I need connection before I need food.
I abandon my evening routine when I haven’t decided when work ends.
I feel calmer when I move my body before difficult conversations.
When do I need this truth most?
Identify the moment when the old pattern usually begins.
Is it after three hours of work?
When you walk into the kitchen after dinner?
When you receive a difficult message?
When you pick up your phone in the morning?
When you feel the urge to cancel something important?
What mechanism could meet me there?
Choose something concrete and repeatable.
You might:
Set an alarm
Write a decision script
Put a visual reminder somewhere specific
Create a five-item checklist
Schedule a restorative practice
Change the location of a tempting object
Attach a new action to an existing habit
Decide what you will do when a predictable trigger appears
The goal is not to build an elaborate personal-development obstacle course.
The goal is to make the desired response easier to access at the exact moment you need it.
Your Embodied Activation
Return to one journal entry, monthly review, coaching reflection, or lesson from the past year.
Choose one truth that hasn’t fully translated into your behaviour yet.
Then put a handle on it.
Attach it to a trigger, ritual, routine, checklist, timer, environmental cue, or decision script.
Don’t just write that you need more rest.
Decide when the rest happens.
Don’t just recognize that your mornings need protection.
Create the rule that protects them.
Don’t just admire the poem.
Give yourself something you can grab in the knife fight.
And as a bonus activation, try a yoga nidra practice. Especially if you’re a high-performing, deeply creative woman who knows how to activate Fire Brain but occasionally forgets where she parked the ocean.
Your nervous system may send you a handwritten thank-you card.
Links Mentioned
Transcript
Welcome back to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. Today's episode is going to be a powerful one for creating change. What I'm sharing has been wildly transformative in my own life. So I wanted this to live here for my journaling girlies and the growth-oriented baddies who are absolutely obsessed with understanding themselves better and doing the inner work.
But maybe there's also been some frustration, some impatience. You're consistent with these introspective practices. You understand your patterns and your red flags. You know what activates you, and you're genuinely doing the work.
Maybe sometimes you ask yourself, "Okay, so when is all of this journaling and inner work going to change something?" And not just change it in the aftermath when you're journaling about the moment of self-sabotage or the time you went back to old habits, but when is it going to change how you be? When is it gonna translate into new responses, upgraded patterns, and the self-leadership you know you're capable of?
This episode is for you if you're ready to make your inner work start working outside the journal and off the yoga mat. I'm sharing the number one reason why journaling and inner work doesn't work. As always, we'll end with an embodied activation so you know exactly what to do next. In a while, I'm gonna share five words I want you to remember every time you notice a mismatch between awareness of your patterns and the embodied shifts of those patterns.
I still remember these five words almost daily at this point. Quick celebration before we start. The podcast just got a glow up. New cover art that I'm obsessed with, new trailer, new intro, all the things. I also finally marked the show as explicit instead of trying to remember which episodes had naughty words.
This does not mean I'm turning this into the Eminem show, but I also had to finally acknowledge that I'm ready to let go of the old version of me who sometimes still performed saintliness in case old clients from my personal training job were listening and got scandalized. Now everyone can self-select, and no one is shocked when my inner fire starter drops an F-bomb.
Now, let's get into why your journaling isn't working. This episode comes from someone who is a self-anointed journaling queen. It is the habit I've built the most consistency in. And it's created a lot of deep transformation, especially over the last seven years. And I've also had times where journaling and inner reflection doesn't translate into change.
Instead, sometimes I'll review my own reflections six months down the line and discover I'm still struggling with some of the same things. This happened to me in early July when I reflected on my top lessons from the first six months of the year. One of my favorite practices is doing a monthly review where I reflect on the top three lessons from the month.
Something interesting happened when I did this reflection in July. I realized that many lessons repeated themselves with different wording. And if I'm still coming back to s- some version of the same lessons, it's a red flag that these lessons are not being integrated. And one of the practices I live by and talk about is this idea of awareness to authorship to action.
The lesson itself is the awareness. Authorship is what you decide it means and what to do with it. Then action is doing something to implement the lesson. With a lot of journal practices or forms of inner work, people sometimes stop at awareness. Or maybe they do a little bit of authorship work where they think about how it applies to them and what it means in their own lives.
But it still doesn't translate into consistent, embodied change. Now, if you notice this pattern in your own life, this doesn't mean you jump to a s- shame spiral or beat yourself up. You're doing this awareness to action audit because you love yourself, and you wanna create change that's going to bring more joy, ease, presence, and power into your everyday life.
Love-powered growth, not shame-based perfectionism. Once you have this awareness, the repeating lessons, the cycles of knowing you want to change but the change not happening, you get to choose what to do with it. Here's what I did that was deeply effective. I plugged all 18 lessons from my first six months into a conversation with AI with this prompt: "I imagine there's a way to take these 18 lessons and other takeaways and turn it into an actual strategy and plan of attack instead of, 'Oh, yeah, I learned these things but don't execute on them half the time.'"
Then I let Fable cook. For those who aren't into the AI stuff, this is Anthropic's most powerful model to date and one of the more pleasant ones to chat with. But if you hate AI, you can bring these types of reflections to mentors, therapists, coaches, smart friends. It doesn't have to be done with AI. I personally love the pattern recognition these models have, and these processes have helped me enormously.
But there are other ways. This brings us to the five words that I want you to remember if you remember nothing else from the episode, and this came from Fable. Truths don't execute, mechanisms do Awareness can be the first step of change, but it's not what creates change. Authorship-driven action does.
When I brought my lessons to Fable, its diagnosis was that I had 18 lessons, but only about four truths. Those were the things to focus on, and they were forever going to stay lessons unless I found a way to attach a mechanism to them. This looks like attaching a lesson to a specific time of day, trigger, or a specific decision script.
If your best lessons or pieces of helpful awareness only live as wisdom inside a planner, and you only look at them once every six months, it's probably not going to change much in your daily life. There needs to be some way to bring that wisdom into the body, into your routines, into your rituals, so that it creates this lasting change.
This is the number one reason journaling and inner work don't work, because they often stay between the pages of a book instead of moving into upgraded behaviors and actions. These insights need to translate into your routines. This is how you create change. As you can imagine, my fire starter archetype was absolutely thrilled about this concept. Here's his words: "Red line.
A truth without a trigger is a poem. Beautiful. Useless in a knife fight. We're keeping the poems, but I'm putting handles on them." Haven blinked at him. "Handles on poems?" Rex shrugged. "Yes, so she can grab one when fire brain starts driving." The five words I originally had for you were truth don't execute, mechanisms do.
But if you want something more poetic, put handles on your poems. I'm gonna share two case studies from my own life so you can see what this looks like in practice. Your embodied activation will be to think of a lesson you've learned this year, maybe more than one if you're anything like me, or maybe you revisit a journal entry with a lot of insight, and you create a specific mechanism for that insight The biggest truth from my first six months of the year had to do with my tendency to spend too long in fire brain without returning to ocean brain.
I'm gonna do a deeper episode on this in the coming weeks because understanding this is one of the biggest keys to reducing binge and emotional eating for high-performing women. So this came from two lessons. One was from March, where I wrote, "Binge eating and overeating isn't the problem. The real problem is being in detrimental fire brain for too long."
So even now with your business stuff and struggling with food because you're prone to overworking, it's not the eating that's the problem. Solving the eating with SOSs and willpower is focusing on the symptom, not the root cause. It's not having haven as an architect. It's not having proper ocean brain returns, and it's about not setting timers, et cetera.
The other one was from April, and for this one I wrote, "Escape does not equal pleasure, and you've built enough presence that settling for escape doesn't cut it." And this goes to show that progress is not linear. Your level of presence isn't as high as it was in April. You're very much in the so much to do, so many steps, what's next?
And it shows. That's what I wrote in April. Yes, I journal in second person sometimes. It's a thing I've done since my early young adult years. So I knew what the problem was, and this is the difference between addressing the symptom, binge eating, overeating, emotional eating, versus the root cause. Letting myself get into detrimental fire brain repeatedly.
But just knowing this wasn't going to create change. Here's what changed from June onwards. Having a mechanism. Honestly, multiple mechanisms. The first is timers. If I do not set timers, I will sit and work for two to three hours on end because I get so engrossed in what I'm doing, and then I wonder why all I want to do is order Pizza Hut.
So this is a big one. But then there was an upgrading to my daily rituals themselves. I have this four heart system. One ritual or heart for my mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health My red heart or spiritual heart used to be my morning Kundalini practice. Then I realized I've been doing Kundalini consistently in the mornings since February.
So A, it's not upgrading my identity anymore. Just like I wouldn't give myself a purple heart for journaling because I've become so consistent in that already, it was definitely time to change this ritual as well. And it was also time to create a new red heart for the time of day that would get me back into ocean brain when I needed it most.
So my new red heart is either yin yoga or yoga nidra after my first two to four deep work blocks for the day. Usually happens sometimes between 11:00 and 1:00 because I get up crazy early. And this has made all the difference. It's this beautiful reset before I go into the rest of the day. By the way, your bonus embodied activation is to go try a yoga nidra if you've never done one.
I love them so much. Ally Boothroyd on YouTube has hundreds, and they've all been amazing. Your nervous system is gonna thank me for this one afterwards. As you can see, I couldn't stay at overworking and not having boundaries is putting me into fire brain, and that's leading to overeating later. There needed to be a mechanism put in place when I needed it most.
So not first thing in the morning, but after my deep work blocks before going into the final part of my day. That's one example. The other example happened earlier this week when I was doing a repair ritual. I realized I'd gotten into this terrible habit of launching into business-related stuff before doing my journal entry, workout, and morning Kundalini practice.
Sometimes this would be a 10-minute detour. Other times it would take me into this black hole that expanded into 60 minutes, then 90 minutes, and now the entire day just feels off There was one day where I still did my strength workout after this happened, but I did it significantly later in the morning, which felt like it required three times as much effort and willpower.
Then it felt like there was far less willpower for aligned choices later on. Now, this was not the first time I've had to learn this lesson. This happened semi-regularly in July because I was in a season of coordinating a lot of different vendors who were working on cover design and book formatting and PDF design, and all these things that required my feedback and back-and-forth communication.
And after realizing, Kayla, my girl, you're repeating the same mistake morning after morning because truths don't execute, mechanisms do. The truth is, when I start my morning with inbox and vendor emails and admin stuff, I don't feel grounded, focused, and centered for the rest of the day. It doesn't get me ahead on my work.
It makes me less focused and less effective later on. And not only that, but it has a tendency of leading to less aligned choices later in the day, and those less aligned choices often lead to fatigue, brain fog, and moodiness the next day. So what's the mechanism? The one thing I could think of was creating a short daily checklist for myself in the morning before my day even starts.
Very short. So one, stay out of your email. Work can wait. Two, get into Ocean Brain first, and this doesn't have to take long, two to five minutes. Three, journal with presence. Four, kundalini. Five, movement. That checklist is the mechanism. And a little checklist like this can be powerful. This idea was inspired by something I read years ago in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, and they were sharing the work of Atul Gawande, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, who created the checklist manifesto.
This was a five-step checklist for doctors who were working with ICU patients. When Michigan ICUs used it over 18 months, the book says it nearly eliminated infections, saved an estimated 175 million, and it saved about 1,500 lives.
And if I remember correctly from the book, the doctors did not want to use it. They thought they were too good for a simple checklist. Meanwhile, that simple checklist created powerful results. After reading this, I think the moral of the story is that nobody is too good for simple mechanisms that help us live out our truth, whatever that is for us.
In Switch, they shared that checklists shape the environment and turn mission-critical behaviors into habits, reducing errors without assuming the people involved are careless or incompetent. They also pointed out that an effective sh- checklist should be short enough that people will actually use it. So around five items is most likely the sweet spot.
So I've given you the truth, the lesson, the awareness. I've shared the number one reason journaling and inner work isn't working, and that's because it's rarely attached to a ritual, routine, trigger, or practice. I've walked you through what it could look like to create a mechanism that creates change.
Now you have some embodied activations you're walking away with. First, turn a truth into a mechanism. Take a journal insight and turn it into a practice you do at the time you need it most. Or maybe you make yourself a simple checklist. And remember, using a checklist doesn't make you dumb or weak.
It's actually wildly smart and empowering to create a simple checklist to follow. And your bonus one was to try a yoga nidra practice, especially if you're anything like me and need some help getting out of fire brain from time to time. All right. That's it for me. Go put some handles on your poems
