A Mason's Work

Brian
00:01

I wanna talk briefly about the idea of journaling and the concept of journaling. For some of you that may not have heard of it before, journaling is the act of sitting down, usually with a, you know, a set, you know, loose leaf paper or, you know, ring bound or whatever, spiral bound, sitting down with a piece of paper and documenting your thoughts and feelings about a given day. There's tons and tons of journaling techniques out there. All of them are great. They do a really important job of helping you externalize your thinking process and put it out on paper, which allows you to operate it on, operate it on, operate on it in ways that you couldn't normally do. So when you extrovert your thinking process, it becomes an object in the real world, which allows you to use all sorts of stuff to problem solve and figure out things.

Brian
00:58

So with journaling, you get a little bit of like a narrative flow. You get the kind of way that your thoughts will change from one to the next, keeps a continuity of that journaling experience, which is great until you want to make some meaningful connections with things that maybe are much harder to reach across. And so, for example, this is where the Masonic symbols really help. You wanna start putting disparate concepts or ideas together with your sort of stream of consciousness. Use the Masonic tools, use the Masonic symbols to help you do that. There is a, a lot of ways to go about this. I, I have an opinion about some ideas that might work. Well. One of those is to take, either use the Masonic symbols deck that we've produced at a Mason's work or work with, you know, just three by five cards and write down the Masonic symbols that you will need to use to help you get around some of your thinking process.

Brian
02:05

So what tools do you need? What symbols do you need? Get as many as you can. More perspectives are better than less. Fewer perspectives don't lead to as many insights. So when you have a lot of, you know, concepts to choose from, as you sort of cognitively walk around problems or situations, you're gonna get a lot further and you're gonna be able to see a lot more clearly into, into the situation you're trying to, to deal with. So, use journaling as that, that narrative conversation. Use some extroverted symbols in conjunction with a journaling process, extroverted sort of perspectives or concepts. And, and in that way you get a much more comprehensive solution to, or a much more comprehensive look at some of the challenges you might be facing. Things

Brian
02:59

Like, you know, the, the standard internal stuff, things like your interpersonal relationships. Journal those out first. You know, grab your, grab your symbols cards. Use them to try and figure out maybe there's a root cause, maybe there's some, some opportunities for improvement. And then from there, try journaling again. Circle back and document what you've learned. The one thing that journaling can do that, that a symbols deck can't for sure, is keep history. So as you journal, you're gonna be able to keep a story going and you're gonna be able to look back on your story and track where you've been. And that's really helpful as well. So these aren't, these aren't one tool is better than the other. They're functionally for different purposes. Please use both. You're gonna get a whole lot further.

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