Continuing this series, where I share one page and transcription of a handwritten journal entry.

Emotional Touchpoints

Ups

Downs

and places between

Emotions are

beacons and

sources of fuel

To take notice

and bring us places.

Brief reaction to transcribing this page.

If observations 1-19 are poems, ballads, rock, and metal tunes then 20 and 21 are brief thrash or punk tunes. They're songs that show up in a playlist or mix tape that vanish as soon as you notice you're feeling it.

Ever create a journal study? It's a kind of research where you ask the same set of questions over the course of a specific situation or journey. You get facts of timing, activity, sequence. But also you get a report of what people are experiencing. What are they feeling.

If you recruit a variety of people of different backgrounds that lead them to that journey, you'll get different impressions and contexts to learn from how people feel along the way to accomplish a thing.

Journal studies are only one kind of emotional touchpoint.

One that comes to mind I have mixed feelings about. Life events as basis for applied business research. So many businesses are setup around life events like birth, going to school, dating, life partnerships. Life events are a place we connect with emotional touchpoints. Learning and researching in such a space I feel is a time to be as patient, open, respectful as possible since we can represent such a power imbalance doing this learning for a wealthy entity involving a group that is not at all on such a power footing.

Another way I see emotional touch points is in my own creative work and journaling. What am I working on and how has it been with ups and downs?

• What's working well?
• What's not working?
• What am I grateful for?

These are useful questions when I check in and take time to meet with myself to reflect and plan. They're also solid questions to journal with to unpack what I'm feeling. Journaling lets me have conversations with recent past me and a few years ago past me. I get to connect with what I was feeling a while back mixed in a context of big and small events.

Why care about the past? Because it can help make sense of

• what you're going through now
• seeing past you in a new light
• considering what you're building toward

Journaling and making use of journals helps us connect with and hopefully accept the quirky learning messy clever willful beings we are.