Welcome, I'm your host, Greg McEwen, and I'm here with you on this journey to learn how to become 1% wiser every day.

Have you ever felt like there were just too many tabs open in your mind?

Today I've invited Alison Jones, the author of Exploratory Writing, Everyday

Magic for Life and Work. By the end of this episode, you will have the simplest of tools

that can produce extraordinary results. You'll discover an idea so simple, you'll get it immediately, and yet you've probably never done it before in your life.

It will help you to be able to turn the chaos in your mind into clarity and even creativity.

Let's begin.

Thank you. creativity. Let's begin. If you want to learn faster, understand more deeply and increase your influence, teach the ideas in this podcast episode to someone else within the next 24 to 48 hours.

Alison Jones, welcome to the podcast.

Hello, Greg. It's good to be here.

Tell me, how did you discover exploratory writing, or rather, how did it discover you?

Yeah, the jury's out on which way it happened, actually.

So I guess there's two answers to that.

One is that professionally I was aware of free writing and had used it in the past. And it's obviously a really powerful tool that many writers use. But the more personal answer is that it just occurred to me at three o'clock in the morning when I was having an entrepreneurial meltdown. I think I'm probably not the first and the last to have that. And that overwhelming, what have I done?

How will we keep the house?

You know, all the things that go through your head at 3 in the early stages of setting up a business.

You're having a panic attack.

I was having an anxiety attack, a panic attack.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's very physical.

Of course, three in the morning.

It's what it always happens, isn't it? And it urges you out of bed. You can't just lie there. You physically, I had to move. I had to do something. Didn't know what to do, really. Obviously, you thought waking my husband would be a bad idea. He wouldn't perhaps appreciate that. There was a scruffy pad of paper and a pencil, and I just started to write. And it really was, I say in the book, it was a sort of a, it was a howl on paper. It's really inarticulate. But then I started to describe the sensation I was feeling,

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