Inner Peace

Titles and highlights

November 18, 2025

Time has a funny way of getting on, doesn’t it?

Often I’ll meet Monday with the best of intentions only to find it’s suddenly Monday again and I can’t quite remember what I actually did during the week that past.

Here’s two strategies I use to prevent time slipping through my fingers and actively perceive the weeks as they pass:

1)Title your week.

Any self respecting Google doc has a title so your week deserves one too. Think of what you want your week to be about. Is it major progress on a project? Spending quality time with your family? Having an adventure with your colleagues? Giving your week a title sets it up to be different from any other week. What we want to avoid is each week blurring into the next. You probably remember how you spent that glorious week around Christmas last year- without you knowing, it was titled “Do nothing but swim and eat for a week”- yup, that’s memorable! Name every week to tell yourself why it’s special.

2) Highlight the moments

To continue with the stationary/ office theme, I like to think back and highlight moments in the week that was. What cracked me up? What surprised me? When did someone go beyond the call of duty? When did I live into my desired identity? Highlight all these things, they happened during that week! And when you highlight them, not only does it feel good, but it also helps to idividualise the days and weeks. That’s the goal!

Letting your weeks go by as an anonymous procession is letting your life go by without you seeing it.

Title it. Highlight things.

Don’t miss a moment.

The scientist’s reframe

November 10, 2025

Scientists, engineers and architects know about this.

They know that to get anywhere we must experiment. And experimenting means that most of the time we aren’t getting the desired outcome.

So why is it so hard for us to come to grips with?

How can we make like a scientist with the endeavors of our lives?

How can we take joy in the process of figuring it out and discovering unexpected things along the way?

They do it. We can too.

Distorting time

November 9, 2025

We are all Marty McFLy. Yup, we’re masters of time distortion.

Recently I had a morning-long battle with myself to go for a walk. I was editing and writing and as each ‘pomodoro’ 25 minutes went by I said to myself:

“I’ll walk on the next break”

And of course I never did. I had distorted the time in my head. You can usually catch it in the language:

“That’ll take forever” I thought. Of course I don’t really mean that but the imprecision in my language is what helps me to distort it.

After a few hours my brain began bulging and fuzzing and I knew the walk was no longer a nice to have- it was needed.

So up I get and out I go- air pods in and happily strolling along the road to my favourite power pole. I check no one is looking, then turn around to head back (why do I always find it so embarrassing to do a 180 in public?)

I get back to my desk feeling refreshed and thinking why didn’t I do that hours ago?!

Here’s the crazy part- the from desktop, around pole, to desktop took me nine minutes.

NINE MINUTES!!

In that time it felt like I had visited another dimension, I saw my power pole for goodness sake! It felt like an eternity (there I go again) and the time away completely reset my brain’s ability to keep logging deep work hour.

But it only took me nine minutes.

Note to self, stop arguing with yourself- just go on the walk.

It’s always a good idea.

Email batching- thanks Tim!

November 4, 2025

Some say 6, 7; I say 12 and 4!

This idea is from Tim Ferriss. I read this over 10 years ago and I keep coming back to it over and over again.

Tim’s advice is simple- we get more time by eliminating things. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean we miss out on things, it just means we are smarter about what we get rid of and when. So it becomes possible to have your cake and eat it.

Like most, I sometimes feel like I’m a professional email responder. My email inbox is a GREAT place to go if I want to feel ‘productive’.

The problem with that is we are being reactive to the needs and the to do lists of other people. I open my inbox and suddenly an hour and a half would disappear.

My day becomes a continuous stream of processing the request that leak in from people whenever they feel like sending me an email. Over time, this removes my energy and ability to do what’s important and non-urgent to me.

Tim suggests instead we batch our emails, let them accumulate and check them only twice a day.

So I check my email at 12pm and 4pm. That’s it.

The amazing thing is, when I go to my inbox with the singular focus of processing what’s there- it takes all of 15 minutes. Its because I’m a lot clearer on my own priorities and can cut through them quickly. I’m also not kidding myself thinking I will split focus between what I’m doing and the emails as they come in- I am focussed solely on the inbox during these chunks.

The unexpected thing was I found it hard to wait! I had become so used to the magical task-giving inbox that I almost needed it.

“Oh! I wonder what emails I have!”

It became a discipline of it’s own not to check it outside of my allocated times.

I had become addicted to having an instant task someone gives me with a finite end!

When I feel productivity waining, I can pretty much guarantee it’s because this habit has slipped.

When I want to reconnect again to powerful focus on what actually moves the needle on the work that really matters to me, I go back to 12 and 4.

When in doubt, 12pm and 4pm.

Rehearsals build certainty

November 2, 2025

An actor in rehearsal is building the future.

You’ve heard of vision boards, right? Don’t lie I know you have one!

They seem kind of embarrassing when others see yours, but they are powerful visualisation tools. When I first heard of them I thought it was all a bit mystical, but the older I get the more I understand how important it is to see something before it exists.

To build a house you draw up the plans for it.

To take a road trip, you use a map to see and plan the journey.

I knew all this in theory, but I recently realised that the actor’s rehearsal process is also a visualisation exercise.

To get a desired outcome, we have to have a sense of certainty of what it will be like when you do it.

The first day of school is daunting because we can’t picture in our heads what it will actually be like- who will I sit next to? What do the classes look like? What will happen? (Sometimes we imagine it worse than it will be). We don’t have a store of images and experiences ahead of the first day of school, we can’t visualise it, therefore it’s a difficult experience before and possibly during.

The 513th day of school on the other hand, is a lot less daunting- or at the very least we know exactly what to expect.

An actor in rehearsal is laying the foundations and ruts of certainty.

“I will go here, I will do this and then this and then this. The audience will be there, the lights will be there and then I go backstage and have 7 minutes to get changed, have a drink and get the rubber chicken.”

Without this methodical and gradual process, actors don’t have the certainty they can perform at their peak come curtain.

When I think forward to 3 months from now when we’re remounting a show I tour in the US, I get zero nerves because I have laid hundreds of ruts of certainty. I can visualise exactly what it will be like.

So a fun game I’m playing is to create that level of internal certainty for things I don’t yet have in my life.

I think this is what the vision boards are all about. If we can make our desired realities as clear, as vivid and as real as our actual realities, we’re a heck of a lot more likely to get them.

Don’t try and be good.

October 19, 2025

Looking back on my experience of drama school, it seems a lot of the initial training was about getting us to focus on the right things.

There’s this thing people say about actor training where they “break you down and build you back up”.

I’ve never really liked this saying- it seems kind of negative or unnecessarily fear inducing. From my years of training it’s more about discovering patterns and building new ones.

And that’s just the learning process. But I guess people like making things sound dramatic and scary when it comes to acting.

It’s confronting, sure, but so is meeting your edge in any arena.

One of the main focuses I needed to undo in my training was this thing of trying to be liked. Of monitoring in an audience or in a director- am I doing the right thing? Do you like this?!

It makes sense, of course; my only frame of reference for learning was the school system that was all about being ‘right’. But of course acting isn’t about being ‘right’ it’s about being true.

Even that is a tricky metric- true according to who? Looking elsewhere for how truthful your work is is just another way of outsourcing your certainty.

Instead, as actors we must become experts of placing our focus. One way of doing this is to give your character an objective:

To make this person stay

To make them leave

To make them understand me

You get the idea. This is how we pursue truth; to what extent did you fight for your objective?

I love this way of thinking because if I’m feeling nervous I can ask myself, what is my objective?

And more often then not in those nerve wracking situations my objective has accidentally become “to make these people think I’m clever or funny.”

You lose when this becomes the objective, you really do. And this is what can happen if you’re not clear on your objective as an actor.

Trying to be clever or funny or attractive will always set you up for failure. Those things MIGHT come as a result of what you do in pursuit of an objective (emphasis on might, haha).

So in life, I think we should practice the same thing; give ourselves objectives that get us out of our own way. Objectives we can fight for, use our full selves to pursue them.

That’s playing big and that’s where the real magic is.

Don’t forget the victories

October 17, 2025

What was once a dream that is now part of your every day life?

We’re really good at forgetting good stuff.

It might be because of the insatiable human appetite for progress. Forgetting milestones probably serves us well in our pursuit of more and better.

But that’s a bit of an empty existence- success without fulfillment.

It might seem like a silly example but when I first started acting I remember how an audition would rule my entire day.

Well, to be perfectly honest I’d get the audition through and I’d question whether I could get anything else done that week…

If I was auditioning at 2pm on a Tuesday, nothing else existed until after that audition. Even then I probably took the rest of the day to gather myself and recover.

These days I can pack a full day around an audition and still have a great time.

This is progress- I’ve grown a LOT since the old days. I found myself lamenting that I wasn’t getting enough done recently and I suddenly remembered where I came from.

That I once couldn’t have imagined having the types of days I’m having now.

But of course now it’s just an ordinary day.

I think we’d do well to remember it wasn’t always like this. To give ourselves some credit and celebrate the things we forget to celebrate.

What is in your life now that was once a dream?

Match the energy to the task

October 6, 2025

Recently I gave up coffee.

I know; sad face.

The reason isn’t about coffee so much as the chapter I’m in right now. I’m a naturally excitable person and when you add a strong americano to that at about 10am- well, you get a LOT of positive energy from me.

Being caffeinated creates a certain type of energy in me. It’s great for big ideas, getting the pen going and filling an empty white board. Caffeinated energy plugs me into the visionary mindset; anything is possible, everything it fun and we can do it all.

That’s a great space to be- sometimes.

What I noticed was the chapter I’m in now actually calls for something else.

At the moment my days are solitary. I don’t need to project energy to a room full of 400 kids, or even teach to camera. At the moment my tasks are a cycle of writing, editing, walking or building pages for the website.

These tasks require attention to detail- something that the soaring visionary energy struggles with.

On coffee, I found myself easily caught up with ideas or tasks as they came up while I was trying to get on my quiet calm work.

So I removed it, in favour of an energy source that is more fitted to my rhythm and outputs right now.

So I’m challenging my own belief that all energy is created equal. Just as tasks vary greatly, so too should the energy source we bring to them.

You already know all you need for this moment.

October 4, 2025

Sometimes when I’m preparing for a presentation or to deliver some teaching, I get caught up in learning new things that relate to what I’ll be talking about.

Learning is great, and so is research- when we are delivering knowledge to others we should be as geared up as possible.

The problem comes in for me when the learning starts happening too close to the delivery.

I get all excited about some new stats or a specific study and want to include them in the talk. And the talk is tomorrow.

Not super useful.

Sure, we can teach from the book or refer to facts as we need but I find this disconnects me from the change I’m trying to make in the moment.

It also tells my brain a story that I’m ‘reaching’ for things, instead of deeply channelling truths I know.

It’s a bit like an actor learning all the lines and doing all the prep then ‘letting it all go’ when she steps on stage. We can’t experience that transformational flow while we’re trying to compute the fact that the play is set in Vienna in 1916… it doesn’t work.

You know what you know now and that is more than enough.

Our job isn’t to know more, it’s to deliver what we do know from our core.

You get to choose

September 2, 2025

I tried a new coffee place a few weeks ago and felt underwhelmed at the service. I felt awkward like I was being a nuisance asking for coffee.

As I walked home I began thinking about telling my mum about this when she inevitably would ask. I even started coming up with ways I’d tell the story:

Things like “It’s not that hard to be nice, right!?” and “I’m paying YOU money, surely it’s not hard to crack a smile”.

I began to feel satisfied at the little collection of complaints I had compiled. Suddenly I realised how pointless it was.

Sure, the service sucked but whats the point in letting that live on? I could see already how the conversation would go:

“How was the cafe?”

“Oh don’t get me started…”

Why? What a boring thing to perpetuate. I can let the bad cafe die, never go back and move on with my life.

You get to choose the story and you get to choose what parts to tell (and not tell)

JUSTIN ROGERS

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