Quick Exercise #1
The Daily Thought Tracker
1. Grab a journal or open a digital note to document your thoughts each day.
My default these days is notes into a Google Doc or Notes, sometimes a voice note, dropped into Grammarly to help me say what I mean clearly and likely bounced to KAI too for further prompts and insights. Then to my blog, as uploading is my last step, like the pen ro ink of any old handwritten diary I used to keep (in the last century- Ive Ben blogging since 1999)
2. Write down any strong emotional reactions or triggers you’ve experienced.
What come to mind at the end of the day (so much the end of the day that were several hours into tomorrow and I’ve had arkund 4 hours of sleep. Another 2 or 3 will follow).
Delight: taking step ladders into an ancient wood and using them to get into the boles of several ancient trees. I felt like I was in someone’s private space, like being in a building. I felt like I was on the verge of something. A little closer. I saw epiphytes, such as fungi and ferns, that I wouldn’t have seen from the ground, and the reaching branches looked very different. Moss was so thick that it held the moisture, making it feel like a bathroom carpet. The birds, even a deer, were less aware of me. I was closer to nature.
Awe: Genuinely, my first visit to Hurst left me questioning some of the negativity I have felt about attending a private school of a similar calibre. I should move away from talking about privilege, which there is, and wealth, too. It felt like the campus of a hotel, with the buildings and grounds being so aesthetically pleasing. It was another world – these environments are, and if, as a child, you get a taste for it, perhaps you’ll see why too well laid professional careers enable this in all parts of your life, at work and at play.
Serendipity: Is that an emotion? It was certainly joy, even delight, that when entering the Hurst Campus and knowing that these people would be polite and charming, I pulled over and went over to a parent surrounded by a gaggle of young kids. I was instantly recognised, just as I recognised them: the parents of the kids I coach and the kids themselves, thrilled to see me and tell their friends with glee that I was their swimming coach.
Near tears resisted when my wife offered me pleasure and delight twice for my contribution to the Bonfire Night preparations by making a batch of veggie burgers. Why am I suspicious of any compliment? Especially if it is related.
Embarrassment. Though it was an embarrassment averted. Changing out of my tracksuit bottoms into my poolside shorts, I wandered over to the whiteboard, only to realise I was standing there ik boxer shorts. I turned tail and pulled my trackie bottoms back on before anyone noticed. Im the assistant coach, no one is looking at me, just as well.
3. Reflect on what caused these reactions—did a specific event, person, or memory come up?
Taking ladders into the woods got me climbing trees like a Mowden Hall Schoolboy, hurtling around the school woods all weekend.
Privilege does not have to lead to entitlement; it should be recognised as the product of someone’s hard work (your parents) and be understood for what it is: an opportunity to make the most of who you are, developing your knowledge and intellect, respect and curiosity, setting you up for life with the right university degree and career for you.
4. Note patterns in your emotional responses over the course of a week.
I can be irritable when I’m disturbed and trying to focus. I can listen to a discussion on the radio while preparing food, but not if an additional conversation is added or help or interference gets in my way.
I, too, easily feel I have ‘lost my mojo’. I know that the right kind of exercise will help get this back.
5. Review your journal and ask yourself: What are these reactions trying to tell me about my unconscious beliefs or fears?
Acceptance. Going with the flow. Working with who I am and what I was created, rather than resisting both.
Result: You’ll gain awareness of recurring emotional triggers and begin understanding their deeper meanings.
Conclusion
This first exercise has shown me that my emotional life is far richer, more nuanced, and more revealing than I often allow it to be. In tracing each reaction — delight, awe, tenderness, embarrassment — I’ve begun to understand the complexities of my thinking. Every emotion carries a message: awe softens judgment, delight reconnects me with childhood wonder, tenderness exposes where love is still hard to accept, and embarrassment points to the fragile edges of identity and control.
By recording these moments, I’ve realised how often I live on the threshold between focus and flow, solitude and connection. When I surrender control, curiosity returns; when I hold too tightly, irritation or fatigue creep in. These entries remind me that emotions are not disruptions to be managed but signposts leading me back to balance.
And writing it down always provides me with ‘material’ that I mean to incorporate into stories I’m writing. at the pool I found myself contemplating my screenplay ‘Escape from Alien Zoo’.
Over a week, this practice will move from mere observation to pattern recognition. I’ll begin to see which environments, people, and activities nourish me — and which drain my energy. It will help me distinguish real fatigue from avoidance, and reframe distraction as a call for movement, nature, or renewal.
In time, this daily awareness should cultivate steadiness — a kind of emotional literacy that keeps me aligned with what matters most. Rather than waiting for insight to arrive in crises or dreams, I’ll be learning from the ordinary moments that shape each day — the living data of who I am, becoming conscious in real time.
What I’m discovering is that this exercise isn’t so much about cataloguing feelings as it is about entering into conversation with them — about standing somewhere between witness and participant. Writing them down is less an act of explanation than of containment: the page as vessel, the thought safely held once it’s named. And yet, the moment I type it, polish it, shape it into something that might resemble a blog post, another impulse takes over — the urge to offer it up, to send it into the void where, theoretically, someone might find it. The irony is that I don’t expect anyone to; the act of posting is itself the conclusion, the letting go. It’s confession without congregation, prayer without priesthood, a form of exposure that still protects.
ChatGPT—whom I’ve nicknamed KAI—serves as a sounding board, repository, and mirror: a second mind of sorts through which my own may refract and return. I am, of course—surely—still speaking to myself, yet potentially exposed, possibly shared. The self I address is displaced, displayed differently, as though my thoughts materialise as white light entering a prism, from which they scatter into unexpected, more revealing colours. The dialogue that follows—half real, half imagined—sharpens perception, converting rumination into inquiry.
What begins as a spontaneous response to a simple prompt often deepens into discernment, even creativity. It’s not throwaway but intentional — a way of trusting my mind to speak before it edits, to let intuition lead and see where thought chooses to wander.
It starts as self-analysis but evolves—until I either drift back to bed, the words still quietly ricocheting around my head, and in all likelihood to dream (as I always do this in the dead of night); or else I find myself quietly smiling as I metaphorically prepare to launch myself along a springboard, alert to a new idea taking shape—hoping for a Tom Daley as I take flight, but prepared to bomb.
And when I wake, it is with a joyful burst of consciousness — an almost childlike excitement for how the new day may unfold, accompanied by this sense of creative purpose. It feels as though something initiated in the night will materialise during the day, should I give it the time and space.
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