Clarity Is a Skill: How To Practice
Four remarkable questions to quickly help unlock clarity.
Not that long ago, I was eight months pregnant and living on stitched-together patches of sleep. In front of me: planning for new motherhood, dealing with pregnancy (ouch!), all while working in startup land. I struggled to find time to write. Sometimes I wrote at 3AM in the morning if the baby kicked me awake or gave me one of those yelp-inducing punches to the bladder (this is known as “lightning crotch”—yes, seriously it’s a thing).1 Other times, I wrote late at night to get myself to go to sleep. And, more often than not, it came out as scribbled notes in my iPhone with autocorrect changing half of what I was trying to say.
For most of my life, writing things down was a way for me to understand things better. But as I became more and more sleep-deprived, as my body changed, I found it harder and harder to write. The massive adventure ahead of me of pregnancy, giving birth, becoming a mother—it was daunting. It was no small fact that my identity, life, and known world would be subject to massive upheaval. I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I felt lost and insecure.
Pregnancy: I wanted to understand it. I wanted to catalog it. I wanted to explain it, tell the stories of pregnancy. Yet all I could write were the worst clichés, and then wincing, knowing that that wasn’t it. How could I go through something so deeply human and yet struggle for words to explain it?
I decided to use my friend’s Clarity Card process2 as a structured way to journal towards the end of my pregnancy. The method is simple and beautiful, and I ended up in tears just by having this as a guide. Below, I’ll walk you through the four-step process he outlines — and how I used it to chart out ideas, insights, and clear perspectives on being pregnant. Plus, I’ll include some of my original notes from when I wrote this out when I was eight months pregnant. It helped me.
A 4-Step Guided Framework for Journaling and Gaining Clarity
Much like Julia Cameron writes about in The Artist’s Way, just getting pen on paper and making a list can be an extraordinary way to dive into your mind. The mind, I’ve learned, is an incredible tool that can be cued with phrases and questions. All you have to do is let your mind respond to the questions you put forth.3
Here’s how I did it:
