In this episode, Lynz Floren, author of the Growth Journal, is joined by Brianna Jovahn and Aubrey Allen from the Growth Network Podcasts team to explore the concepts and exercises in the Growth Journal. The team delves into the importance of personal growth, sharing their perspectives and experiences. They discuss various tools for growth, including journaling, therapy, coaching, and more. The episode provides insights into the content of the Growth Journal and sets the stage for future podcast episodes.

Powerful Highlight Quotes:

1. "Growth means going through something to be stretched." - Brianna Javon (Timestamp: 00:00:36)
2. "Even in a forest fire, new plant life grows healthier than before." - Aubrey Allen (Timestamp: 00:01:57)
3. "Adversity fortifies us; the challenges we face contribute to our growth." - Lynz Floren (Timestamp: 00:02:19)

New FREE Exercise:

Explore the 2024 Mind Map Exercise described in the episode for a deeper reflection on different areas of your life.

Buy the Growth Journal Today!

The Growth Journal is not just a book; it's a comprehensive guide for individuals seeking personal and professional transformation. Dive into interactive exercises, thought-provoking prompts, and inspirational content. Elevate your growth journey with the Growth Journal, available now on Amazon.

Credits and Follow-up Links:

Producers:

• Lynz Floren - LinkedIn - Instagram - TikTok - Spotify
• Brianna Jovahn - Website - LinkedIn - Instagram
• Aubrey Allen - Website - LinkedIn - Instagram

Connect with Us:

• [Visit the Growth Network Podcasts Website]
• [Follow us on Instagram]
• [Coming Soon - Join the Growth Journal Community on Facebook]
• [Sign Up for Our Newsletter]

Subscribe to the Growth Journal Podcast:

• on [Apple Podcasts]
• on [Spotify]

Bookmark the Growth Journal Podcast Web Page

Mentioned in this episode:

Purchase the Growth Journal Today!

Meet the Growth Journal, your essential tool for personal and professional growth. Immerse in exercises and prompts to guide self-reflection, uncover strengths, and set goals. Explore values, passions, and ambitions with free extras and a companion podcast. Order now and unlock your potential. Invest in the Growth Journal for a purposeful life.

Growth Journal on Amazon

Lynz:

Lynz:

All right. Welcome to the Growth Journal Podcast. My name

is Lynz Florin and I am here with Aubrey Allen and Brianna Javon from my

team at Growth Network Podcasts. we're talking today about the Growth

Journal for anyone who has purchased it or who wants t

o know more about it.

We're kind of just going to talk through some of the exercises, some of the ideas

behind it, so maybe you can get a bit more out of it. I'll start with you, Brianna.

does growth mean to you? Or what is the importance of growth to you

in your

life?

Brianna:

when I think about growth, in my life I think you have to

go through something in order for you to be stretched. Um, if that's life, when I,

when I say that, I'm thinking about life lessons. a lot of times when people are

hit with something out of the ordinary or something that has been shifted,

they're not sure how to navigate it because they're so used to doing the

same thing over and over and over and over and again, pretty much

in a routine. So I think that's

where the growth aspect comes in. is when you do

hit your head on that door or when your mom told you not to touch the stove

when you touch the stove. And now, you know, it's hot. So now, you know,

you're not going to touch the stove anymore. So I think w

ith those life lessons,

that's the growth and maturity and the wisdom that you get.

Brianna:

And I don't think it always pertains to age. Sometimes it

does pertain to age, but a lot of times it pertains to experiences as well.

Lynz:

N

ice. Aubrey, what about you? What does growth, mean to

you? Or how does it play a role in your life?

Aubrey:

Yeah, I completely agree with Brianna that it depends on,

like, the circumstances that you're in and the people that you're surrounded w

ith.

I'm reminded of, like, when a forest fire happens, new plant life grows healthier

than it was before. And even it is a forest fire that you're going through, like,

you just gotta remember that there's new life

Lynz:

Yeah, that's great. I m

ean, I think

adversity Right.

the things we're challenged by fortify us in some way. So, cool. Well, I just

wanted to sort of check in on that and then kind of share the pieces of the

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

growth journal with you all. I work with you both every week

and, uh, but I've

been kind of working on this on my own.

Lynz:

So it's fun to show it to you and, to see what you think of it

and what, you know, what your thoughts might be about it. I tried to include

links to outside resources so that the bo

ok is cool, but you can kind of take it

further. And so I started realizing that I had extra PDFs and extra materials.

Lynz:

And so now people can kind of get to that folder, you know,

from here. you know, the fun part about this, it's a great r

esource, but also it's a

way for people who resonate with it to find us. Maybe they want to sign up for

our newsletter. Maybe they want to hire us.

Lynz:

Who knows? So the book starts with people talking about

where they want to grow. How they w

ant to grow. So, kind of setting an

intention, for what they're doing. and I wanted to ask you guys, have you all

done much journaling? Is this something that

is a part of your life at

all, as a resource, um, or a way to work on things?

5]

Brianna:

Absolutely. I know for Christmas, a good friend of mine

knows how much I journal and made me an entire prayer board with six aspects

of my life. Relationship, love, self reflection, business, family, and I forgot the

other one. But yeah, journa

ling is very huge for me.

Aubrey:

I actually don't do much journaling as I would like to. I'm

more of like a inspirational collage type of person, so Pinterest is a really big

thing for me. yeah, I find it, kind of work more on vibes and visual

type things.

Lynz:

Nice. Yeah, well, and as we'll get into here, there's so many

different tools to grow, and journaling, you know, writing is sort of just one of

them. but, One of the things I do a couple throughout the book, this is the first

reflection. And, basically there's just a few points where it's like touch points on

being like, Oh, hey,

I have to look at myself right now and check in

about a certain thing.

Lynz:

whole book is a series of reflections in a way, rig

ht? But this

is sort of the, How do you feel about reflecting about yourself? But it kind of

primes the pump to get started. And then the first, major exercise in the book,

identified these different tools for personal growth. And, you know, one of them

is

, journaling, writing. and this is where the episodes of the podcast are kind of

going to come from. We're going to talk about these different tools with our

guests. And, starts with Identifying your relationship to each one of these tools.

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

And write, like

, maybe one of them is like, oh, I didn't even know boundaries

were a thing. Maybe I should learn more about that. or, You know, hey, I used

to love reading, but I haven't done it in a long time, and it's something I want to

do more of, and so, the coming

pages will kind of give you questions about

these specific things, and, is there any one of these topics here that is sort of

like, stands out

as something that you, are wanting to do more of?

Lynz:

these days.

Brianna:

I guess for me it would have to be gratitude. I don't feel

like I've given myself enough grace and celebrate those small and big

accomplishments because I'm so hard on myself. So, the gratitude part is huge.

Because, you know, if you've done this before,

like a reminder in a sense, of

what you've gone through in the past, then you're like, okay, I can get through

this little bitty thing.

Brianna:

So, just doing more celebrations.

Lynz:

That's

Aubrey:

Yeah, I think the three

that stand out to me is, Therapy,

Self Awareness, and Acceptance. I think those three kind of go hand in hand.

just kind of being more aware of myself is something that I would love to work

on.

Lynz:

Yeah, it's like a mix of, um, not only of be

ing aware of

yourself but also getting out of your own head, right? There's

Lynz:

like this, uh, kind of both those things at once. so yeah, each

of these we get like a full page with a couple questions, to kind of dig, in

and really

all of these things are meant to be just A cue to kind of dig

inside.

Lynz:

You could end up writing about something completely

different on these pages. As long, as long as you're writing and getting

something out, I think it's, valuable. but,

you know, identifying what areas of

my life do I want to learn more? Maybe you haven't thought about that

specifically, And, what's my experience with therapy? Do I prepare for therapy?

I wrote this question because I always go into my therapy sessions wit

h my

therapist, like, really unpre I'm just like, whatever comes out, that's what we're

talking about. But then I was talking to a friend, and she was like, Okay, well I

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

have this whole agenda every time I go into my thera We gotta talk about this,

we gott

a talk about this.

Lynz:

And I was like, I didn't realize to think about it that way. So, a

lot of these questions just came from my own experiences and me talking to

other people. coaching, you know, some people don't want to be coached.

They'r

e like very happy with thinking they know what's up and they don't want

to be told what to do, you know.

Brianna:

I do have a question with that, Lynz.

Brianna:

When it comes to coaching, is that a

personal

business or bot

h when you receive for coaching? Those coaching sessions?

Lynz:

it's a tool, I think you can point at place you want. And you

can sort of get general coaching from somebody, you know, but, I know, people

often hire a business coach because they

can justify the cost if it means they're

going to make more money, you know. but I think Having someone in your life

that's sort of helping you to see your life as a system that supports you.

Lynz:

a coach can help with any piece of that. I've h

ired a coach for

like a transition period to be like, I need to help get through this period of time

when I started the Growth Network Podcasts, I, like, okay, I'm not working for

somebody else now. I need to get into a new headspace.

Lynz:

Um,

but we talked about the rest of my life too. You know, it

wasn't, um, nothing was off limits, you know.

Brianna:

gotcha.

Lynz:

Showing up, this is another one of those that are like, you can

kind of go through a whole section of your life without realizing that

how you show up for other people and how they show up for you is something

to think about. if you've ever had

somebody not show up for you, it sort of

might be something you've been aware of for a while.

Lynz:

who do I show up for? Who shows up for me? I think are

great questions to answer. How can I show up better for myself? Oh, where

we're looking a

t tools now we're looking at our life.

Lynz:

What kind of, what's the life we want? Look at your future

Self In the mirror is the sort of writing exercise here, and that leads to. This My

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

Future Self Mind Map exercise. And this kind of reminds me of what you were

talking about, Brianna, where, someo

ne gave you the prayer board about these

different categories.

Lynz:

so you can kind of think about those different areas. This is 12

categories of our lives. You know, from what do we do with our alone time to

So, Community, Friends, Family, Re

lationships, Hobbies and

Passions, Work, Career, Finance, Our Contribution to the World, How it's Our

Relationship to Personal Growth Itself, and then Our Health, and then Leisure.

So we can make sure we have some fun. so which of these areas is

an area that

you would want to envision a future self shift in?

Brianna:

Contribution to the world for me. I'm always about the

vision and the purpose of my life. And so, I have to let go of it always being

about me all the time. but also how I

have these tools and these talents, not to

just keep them to myself, but to also share it with others and to make an impact.

So I think for me, in the past, I always thought about that.

Brianna:

Somehow in between, I veered from it. So I kind o

f want

to get back into, you know, doing community work, um, supporting others,

providing resources, etc.

Lynz:

Nice.

Aubrey:

Yeah, I think, the personal growth, stands out to me so

that I can work on contribution more. can

't Give away if your cup is

empty, so, just working on understanding myself better, and then I can more

effectively help others that way.

Lynz:

Awesome. yeah, I think mine is, it's either contribution or

community, and I think because they're in

tertwined, that there's something

about giving back and it being a communal thing, is definitely mine as well.

And so yeah, each of these pages, there's a statement. About topic, there's a

quote, there's two questions, and then people get a chance to write

a statement

of intent, or an affirmation, you could also call it. But basically, want to be

around this topic? I want to make better use of my alone time, I want to play

more music in my alone time, things like that. So, each of them has that same

setup h

ere. And what I think is really cool is that at

the very end,

you're encouraged to rewrite your statements of intent, on one page, and take a

picture of it. if you're never feeling lacking in one of these areas, you can just

read one of these st

atements to yourself. And then we have one more reflection,

and, this is sort of reflecting on those statements of intent. and what kind of

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

goals you want to set for yourself, when you're done with the journal. And now

my favorite part. This one's funny be

cause I had to make a meditation and

publish it to the podcast before I could create the link to the playlist that I could

put in the QR code to publish the book.

Lynz:

So it's like I had to kind of go through these things. But

basically we're g

oing to have meditations that come out periodically in the

podcast. And there's a subset playlist that is accessible through this QR code so

you can just check out the meditations if you want that kind of support. and then

just sort of an explanation of wh

at, what's important about meditation, what it is,

how do you make

it into a practice. my take on meditation, people

might have different views of what it is, that it's getting your mind quiet or, you

know, whatever. And, For me, it's just about

taking the space to connect with

myself on some level. You know, there's a, there's an inside piece of me that if

I'm flipping out or if I'm, worried about things or I'm in my own head, there's a

part of me inside that just wants a moment. and sometimes y

ou can do an hour

and you can get something out of it, but I never feel like my mind gets quiet.

Lynz:

I just connect my mind to my insides, you know, however that

is. So I think it can be useful for anybody. it's funny when I was a kid, you

cou

ld not talk about meditation as a kid when I was a teenager, the nineties, no,

talking about meditation made you very weird. You were very, very weird if

you were talking about meditation, and now it's like a common, a much more

commonplace thing, and

[00:

12:58]

Brianna:

They're including it in school

curriculums, too.

As far as meditation and yoga, I was like, oh, wow.

Lynz:

hmm. it turns out like keeping your mind in a good space

helps

Brianna:

Mm hmm.

Lynz:

W

ild. And so the next page, there's this very simple body scan

meditation. we'll eventually do an episode, a guided body meditation that's more

in depth, but this one sort of, you can do it yourself in five steps, kind of a self

paced thing. and, last is gr

atitude. Brianna, you mentioned it earlier that,

Gratitude is super important and, honestly, it's a hard muscle to wire to be

regular.

Lynz:

You have to kind of really work at it. It's a practice. So we put

these gratitude snapshots so, you can

just write the date and write something

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

you're grateful for in the book here and to kind of memorialize it, and we

included a few extra pages of that. And, in the extras document, we just have,

An 8.

Lynz:

5 by 11 PDF that you can print with mor

e of them. so people

can kind of do their own snapshots, kind of forever. And that's the

book!

I'm excited because I think the podcast can yes and The book

very, very well.

Lynz:

This episode probably benefits from having the book in f

ront

of you to go through the pages, but regularly, like you aren't gonna need to have

purchased the book in order to benefit from whatever we talk about in the

podcast. So,

Aubrey:

so what inspired you to start this project in the first place?

Lynz:

A friend of mine self published a book on Amazon, and I got

a little jealous. It was like, oh, I have things to share that I don't see out in the

world. You know, this person did it. Oh, that's really cool, but also I could do

that. And s

o I started to think about all the little tools I've done for myself. And

made my own mind map of these different categories. my first one was 2019.

So I've, been doing some versio

n of

this for about five years, which

is to say, what do I want for my alone time? I want to recharge. I want to

journal.

Lynz:

I want to play guitar. You know, I could just really, it, I just

printed this out and I wrote on it. So, I

n these documents is a version of this for

2024. Um, because I do think that Sometimes you just want to print something

out and you want to write all over it. Well, also the book. You're designed to be

able to write in the book.

Lynz:

And I real

ized that, like, I asked myself questions that I didn't

even put on this paper. And so, that's kind of what into this, like, alone time

community. Having quotes and having things, how do I make it more robust?

Being able to take things I'd done before and

just be like, Okay, how do I

expand upon this, you know, for someone else's benefit? And then, uh, of

course being able to kind of link it to a podcast, kind of threads the needle

around all the things, uh, nicely.

Aubrey:

what can people expect

from the podcast?

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

Lynz:

the podcast will pretty much pick a page or a

topic

from the book and talk to a guest about that concept. And so you kind of get a

chance to go deeper and you know, you'll see in the title, we're going coachin

g,

we're workshops, so it's picking pieces out of there and then getting , people we

respect, people we like, people we run into in our professional life and asking

them their opinion or their insights or their kind of takeaways about that topic.

]

Lynz:

And so over time we'll, cover each of the things in the book

from extended angles. and then also the meditation playlists. We're going to

continue to add meditations. And so it's a place you can tune to to kind of keep

the growth. train going and,

um, yeah. What was your question,

Brianna:

why was it important to incorporate the podcast with the

book?

Lynz:

Well, one, from a marketing perspective, just that it's more

than a book, that it has more to it,

than your ave

rage other one to

kind of stand out. but also just because That's the approach our business has to

things. It's like, okay, how do we make that into a podcast? and what was nice

was, it's also just a really great way to make us reach out to the people we

a

lready want to talk to. So it's an incentive to us to kind of keep our network

moving and shaking and grooving and like the give and take of the world would

give people a chance to come here and share their stuff. just seemed like it all

kind of worked tog

ether. Cool.

Brianna:

And I want to ask you, , Let's say, Scenario, you're at the

finish line, you've already launched the book, you've launched the podcast.

When you turn around and look at the journey, what is something that you can,

look forw

ard to as far as celebrating within this journey?

Lynz:

add celebration to the tools for personal growth in the next

edition.

Thank you. I just like got that hit. You're like, Oh, so

gratitude is important, but celebrating is a pretty way. Well, one, I think to me,

like, sharing it to the world will be a form of celebration because I can kind of

point to this thing I did and be

proud of it. but then there's also the, taking a

minute between this and the next thing to kind of take a breath. because my

impulse is to make 17 more journals. Now that I've done one, I want to go make

a million. And you're like, cool, cool. Why don't yo

u try and sell this one? and

so I think the way to celebrate it is to keep it in my focus, to not be like, move

on to the next thing, which I'm inclined to do. and I've already started notes for

how it's going to go. Grow and get better, you know, like jus

t even this

conversation, the celebrations. There's sort of some other things where I was

GJP102 Book Intro Episode Transcript.docx

like, Oh, I would, uh, it's locked. I'm not changing it, you know, like it's, it's

going public, but I know that in the, one of the best things is

that

thr

ough feedback from others, I'm going to think about ways to make it even

better.

Lynz:

And, for now I should just take notes on those and I don't

need to take much action. I could just spin my wheels forever. Well, cool. I'd

like to thank you gu

ys so much for coming on this journey with me exploring

the book. And I'm really excited to involve you all in the episodes and have you interview people. And I think it's going to be a fun show. And for listeners, you've checked out the book, you haven't

checked out the book, either way,

check out our show notes to get in touch with us and talk with us online about,

what you thought about this episode or the book or the podcast. And that is it.

So keep on growing. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.