Create your ultimate day (in advance): Morning Pages & mini visualisations
First things first, design your dream day and reprogram your mindset for clarity, creativity and confidence to subconsciously tackle the challenges ahead.
If you could design your ultimate day, what would it look like? Curating a detailed picture of your day can completely shift your mindset and its momentum. This tiny change in my morning routine has been the single most impactful addition to my daily habits in 2025, subtly shifting my personal and professional presence.
Morning Pages
Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has attracted a cult following, including among big-name celebrities. The book boldly proposes that every person has a creative source within them that can and should be nurtured as our God-given gift.
Enter Morning Pages. It’s one of the critical tools Cameron highlights. You may have heard of it, as decades on it’s still a much-loved personal development practice.
Morning Pages is the practice of writing three handwritten pages of your thoughts daily, first thing in the morning. They are just for you and not for anyone else to ever see. These are a free flow of consciousness. They might be positive, negative, colourful or bland. It’s not designed to be art or even writing. It’s meant to help you subconsciously unlock your creativity over time and, importantly, overcome The Censor - the logical brain. The survival brain is fighting to keep you supposedly “safe”, while trapping you in limiting ideas and beliefs.
I have personally found a digital version of Morning Pages, more sustainable. Choosing to write one digital page each day. There’s no need to buy new journals and you never run out of pages.
Mini Visualisations
As Neuro-linguistic Programming promotes, the mind can not differentiate between what is real and what is vividly imagined. So, detailed visualisation for desired outcomes becomes a form of mental rehearsal - it’s an idea practised by elite athletes, salespeople and more. Morning Pages has no set rules and is specially designed to flow with your thoughts instead of following rigid prompts. But, something that organically developed for me was describing my day ahead in detail. Write your day as you desire it. How will that meeting go? What time will you finish the big project? Set into motion the steps to achieve your ideal outcomes.
Rewriting Your Day (in Advance)
Describing the future in detail is much like scripting. Drawing influence from psychology, neuroscience and metaphysics, scripting is a writing technique where you create a story in advance. You write in the present or past tense, as though those goals have already fully manifested. You’re activating your subconscious, which remember, can’t distinguish between reality and imagined.
Ingrained Gratitude Practice
Gratitude has also naturally ingrained itself in my every entry, eliminating the need for separate gratitude journalling.
Shawn Anchor, in The Happiness Advantage, popularised the idea of the gratitude journal. He advocated for writing down three things that you’re grateful for daily. Anchor’s premise is that success doesn’t cause happiness, but rather begins with happiness. And it positively impacts your business outcomes, such as productivity. It rewires your brain for optimism.
This is aligned with the ‘Tetris Effect’. This is the idea that when you devote time and attention to something, you start to see that thing everywhere. Your brain develops new neural pathways to constantly look for patterns. By practising gratitude regularly, you learn to constantly scan your environment for the positives.
From Mindless to Curated Morning
When you combine Morning Pages with visualisation and gratitude, you’re not just writing, you’re reprogramming. You’re retraining your mind to seek solutions, opportunities and see the good that already exists around you. It’s a practice of self-leadership: creating your ideal day before it happens and show up as the person who already lives it. Over time, these small pages build big shifts in mindset, creativity, and confidence, turning the ordinary act of journalling into the art of intentional living.
