I changed this ONE thing and my productivity & creativity went through the roof

Welcome back to another episode of The Mind School Podcast! 

I’m so excited to share today’s episode with you because it’s all about a little change that’s had a BIG impact on my creativity and productivity. During my time here in Bali, I rediscovered the power of handwriting—and it’s been a total game-changer!

In this episode, I’ll talk about how simply putting pen to paper has helped me tap into a deeper level of focus and creativity that I wasn’t accessing through typing. I know it might sound basic, but sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest difference.

It’s a simple switch that’s made a huge difference for me, and I’m excited to share it with you!

What You'll Learn:

🖊️ How handwriting can significantly boost your creativity and productivity.
🖊️ How our fast-paced, tech-driven world might be stifling our creativity.
🖊️ The importance of slowing down to process thoughts and ideas fully.
🖊️ Why combining old-school handwriting with modern technology could be the key to unlocking your full potential.

If you give this handwriting hack a try, I’d love to hear how it goes for you! Tag me in your posts or send me a message @breannamay —let’s talk about how this old-school method is helping you tap into your creativity.

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Transcript

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Music. Welcome to the mind school, the classroom for your mind and soul, where we design our lives from the inside out. Here you will find a human first approach to life, business and relationships, to create freedom, growth and constant evolution through mindset, emotional intelligence, leadership and connection to self. I'm your host, Brianna may educator, CEO mindset and business mentor, and my mission is to teach the things we were never taught at school so that no dream is left on the pillow and no purpose left unfulfilled. Here, you can expect a lot of laughs and thought provoking conversations as we squeeze every drop of juice from this beautiful, precious, crazy thing called life. Welcome back to another episode of the mind school podcast. This is going to be a really quick, I feel this is going to be a short and sharp and snappy one for you today, and I had to share it because I so I was in Bali, and, well, I actually still am in Bali, but by the time this episode is put out onto YouTube and put out into the podcast world, I'm no longer in Bali, but I have been here for two weeks now, and I have rediscovered, and I'm not going to say discovered, but rediscovered this beautiful, simple, easy hack that has actually made me and I really thought about it, but I was like, wow, my productivity and my creativity has gone through the freaking roof, and it's just by making this tiny, tiny change. And this change is it's gonna sound so silly as I go to say it. Just listen, stay with me, guys, because this sounds so simple, but it's always the simple things that are the most profound. I have started picking up a pencil or a pen and this, and I've just been writing in a journal and on paper instead of typing, and I mean everything, like my business plans, my course structures, my goals, my absolutely everything, I have been handwriting. And this is going to sound so weird, because it's like, what, what is, what is happening here? How is that cool story? Brianna, so you're writing with a pencil now, but actually what this does is so wild for your brain, and I want to share with you what it actually does when you switch from typing, which so many of us do now, how often do you sit down to create a program or create a course or make a plan or do your diary entry? I don't know if you actually do a diary entry on your computer, but so often now we have switched from handwriting to typing, and it does not have the same impact. It doesn't have the same impact on our thought processes. It doesn't have the same impact on the way we process our feelings. It doesn't have the same impact on our subconscious programming, and therefore, it's actually not as powerful for us accessing our creativity. It's also not as powerful for us to manifest. So there was a morning where I literally just thought, God, I saw someone. So I was by the pool, and I saw someone with a journal. And I don't know, there's lots of people. I was staying in Changu. And for those who don't come to Bali often, Changu is kind of the hipster spot in Bali. And I was staying in this I was actually staying at a gym. So Paul and I were at a gym, and everywhere at this place is it's people personally developing. Essentially, it's a utopia. For me. It's like ice baths and saunas and journaling and meditation circles and working out and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. It's like everyone's just there to be healthy and to, you know, reflect. And so I was by the pool, and I was just observing. 90% of people were on their phones. 90% were just scrolling and I don't know what they were doing, but they're on their phones. And this is pretty common, right? Like when you are on the train, if you commute to work, or when you are in a waiting room if you have an appointment or you're going to get your hair done, and you look around. You look around everywhere, cafes. It actually makes me pretty sad. Sometimes you look around and you're like, everybody is on technology, whether it's an iPad or a phone, everybody is learning and processing and thinking in this really fast processing way, and it doesn't fucking work for so many reasons. And this was actually a gripe of mine when I was a teacher, because I saw that there's this real shift. And look, obviously there's pros and cons. There's a real shift in the school system to get kids on iPads really young. And so kids were like, on their iPads, reading a book on their iPad, and typing assignments and all of these things. And then there's a disconnect. How. How stupid is this just on a side tangent. But then you get to year 11 and 12, and all your big exams are handwritten. Make it make sense. Like just make it make make sense. That doesn't make sense. The kids aren't even they literally have a sore hand from writing for two hours because they haven't practiced. So that made me mad. But anyway, that just was stupid. But NAPLAN and all of the standardized testing and everything in schools now it's all on a computer, and the more I understand mindset, the more I understand creativity, the more I understand flow state, the more I understand subconscious reprogramming, the more I understand the law of attraction, and the more I understand energy and manifestation, the more I'm like, Oh, we've got to stop with this fast paced typing. We've got to stop with the way we're processing, which is multiple tabs and typing really fast and backspacing if it didn't make sense, and deleting things and getting Google to think for us and all of that is making I honestly believe, and I say this with love. It's making us dumber. It's making us really, really challenged by accessing our creativity. It's making us all think we have ADHD. It's making everybody think that they need to go somewhere else to find inspirational creativity or to access their own answers. It makes us think we need Google rather than just sitting with thinking. And it's making us I'm just concerned. I'm concerned. And like I said, I was by the pool, and 90% of people were on technology of some sort, and then I saw this lady, and she was just some baking in the sun, but she was handwriting in a journal, and I couldn't help but think she just looked more calm. She just had this energy of like, groundedness. And I was watching her, thinking, Oh, that looks nice. Like that looks so nice. And I think back to being a child. And I don't know if anyone else can resonate with this. I was a kid who was always writing. I was writing poems, and I had dear diaries, and I remember having this diary that had like a lock, and it had this, like little key lock, and they were like my beautiful I just loved writing handwriting, and it was a real time of accessing imagination and creativity and accessing time with myself. And I was looking at this girl, and I was like, this is really interesting. And I noticed a lot of my planning. And you know, even in my day to day of running a company, if I'm writing an offer or I'm creating a plan for a client or I'm creating a plan for a course or for a lesson or a curriculum, I will admit, I've definitely gotten more accustomed to just doing it in my clickup, which is, you know, the program that I use in the business, and I just write everything in there. And I thought, I'm gonna just, I'm gonna do something, and I just want to see what happens. And for the next few days, I didn't touch my computer at all. I went out to the pool with literally a journal and a pen, and I sat with content ideas planning masterclasses that I'm running for the mind school, ladies or whatever it was, I would just handwrite. And what was the craziest thing was that I got so much more focus, so much more clarity, so much more creativity. Because what happens is you have to sit with your frustration of, I can't figure this out. You have to sit with, oh no, that wasn't quite it, and cross it out. And you have to follow a brain process. You have to almost follow your own processing on a page to get to a deeper answer, to get to another idea. But on the computer, you don't you backspace, or you get a little bit frustrated, and you open a different tab and go see what someone else is doing, or you pick up your phone, or whatever. You get distracted so easily. And you outsource your creativity, you outsource your imagination, you outsource your thinking, you outsource your creative and critical thinking. And then you start to believe that you just can't focus. Then you start to believe that you're not smart. Then you start to believe you don't have ideas. Then you start to believe I don't have any ideas. I don't know what to write. But actually, I think that the medium and the context these days perpetuates our lack of creativity and thought. And so anyway, like I said, I've just been really sitting with handwriting, and often I will, I'll be like, Oh, I'm frustrated. And so I'll cross something out, and then I'll do like, it turns into a mind map. And it's almost like, I think of, you know, when I was a teacher, you would award points a lot of the time. You would award marks to students who showed their process. Remember at school it was like, show your work in maths, even you could get marks by showing your process and don't we'd always say, like, Don't cross things out, leave your draft. Your draft is the magic. As an English teacher, I used to watch a student come to life in their essays, because I'd say, draft one, and then draft two, and then draft three. And because they were handwriting, and they were leaving their beautiful, disorganized, messy thoughts on a page, they were able to sit with it, and then to think a bit longer, and then to stay and then to create a little mind map. And then that idea would spring into another idea, and this idea would actually come into another. Dear, and you see the magic happen on a page, but that is because writing gives us time. Handwriting gives us time without distraction and on a more subconscious programming lens, it also allows our mind time to process, and when we have time to process, I don't mean just process our feelings, but to process our thinking. And so then our thoughts become higher quality. And so I really feel that we're doing ourselves a disservice by doing the fast thing. We're doing the fast thing, but it's actually not the fast thing. It's slowing us down, and it's making us scattered, and like I said, it's making us outsource our brilliance, whereas, I think if we slow down and we sat with a pen and we went back to old fashioned handwriting, then the technology that we've been given to further enhance our creativity, to further enhance our mind and our thoughts and our Critical Thinking, that's when that becomes a real fucking weapon. That's when our technology becomes something that we can really use. But I think we've done it the wrong way around, and this is getting a little bit philosophical now, but if I think about the way the world's going and AI and everything can be outsourced by AI now these days, but the creativity, the imagination, your own critical thought and your own special, unique lens that you see the world through and that you get your ideas from, that can't be outsourced. So really, let's I feel like what we need to do is flip it. We need to do the slow things on the hand with the hand. We need to write with our hands and our notepad and our journals, and we need to stay with our thoughts. We need to access all of those beautiful things that our mind is capable of, that we probably have forgotten, and even just doing it for half an hour, an hour a day, then we go to the supercomputers, then we can go and get AI to enhance us, rather than the other way around. And so that was meant to be a really quick rapid fire, but there was so many ways that that just brought so many extra layers to this conversation. And I really, really like it changed my productivity. It changed my creativity. It made me so much more aligned with my ideas and my content and all of that in my business and personally and outside of my business, by simply spending some time handwriting. That's the hack. That is the hack that is the takeaway. Let's flip it. Let's move to handwriting. Go back to writing on a journal, and then go to your laptop, then go to your phone, I promise you, your creativity, your inspiration, your critical thinking, all of that will just be 10x in fact, I would love to hear from you once you've done this. Please let me know once you've gone back to the old school, let's bring back the old school so that we can be enhanced by the new school. And let these two things work together. But let me know if this impacts your creativity. Let me know if this impacts your productivity. It really did for me, so I had to share. Let me know how you go share this. Tag me. Get in my DMs. Subscribe if you are on YouTube. Thank you for being here. I will be back next week. Thank you for tuning in to the mind school podcast. It is a massive intention of mine to continue to grow this show, because the more the show grows, the better the guests get, and I know that is going to be so powerful for you listening. So if I could ask this massive favor, it would mean the world if you could please leave a review, hit the Follow button, or leave a rating on Spotify, so that we can continue to grow this show and bring you the juiciest, most thought provoking and expansive conversations through incredible guests. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week. You.