Shannon Malseed
Mental Performance Training for Athletes

The Art ofJournalling

Shannon Malseed  ·  Mental Performance Coach
Start Here

You don't have a journalling problem.
You have a "which one" problem.

Almost every athlete I work with has tried journalling at some point. I get told the same story nearly every time. "I've tried it, and it kind of helped, but I stopped doing it." Or "I was really inconsistent with it." Or "I don't really know how I'm supposed to journal properly."

My first journal entry is from when I was about eight years old. I'm 31 now, so that's a couple of decades of writing things down, and in that time journalling has carried me through the periods where I was really struggling mentally, and through the periods where I wanted to level up my mental game.

Here's what all of it taught me. Journalling on its own, without knowing where to direct it, is a pointless tool. When you know when to use it, how to use it, and why it works, it becomes one of the most powerful things you have for getting yourself out of a mental rut, or for reaching into your true potential.

What follows are six types of journalling that work for different periods and different moments of your life. By the end of this guide you'll know exactly when to pick up the pen, and how to use the page to the best of your ability, wherever you happen to be at the time.

Shannon Malseed

Hi, I'm Shannon, ex pro cyclist turned Mental Performance Coach. I once needed someone to teach me how to believe in myself, beyond the results. Nobody did. So that's exactly what I do for athletes like you.

I've coached 100+ high performers, including Olympians, national champions and WorldTour pros. This is the journalling work I give them, and the work I've done on myself for years.

Three rules before you start

1
Write unfiltered. Pure stream of consciousness. Nobody is ever going to read this unless you let them. Not your coach, not your partner, not your future self. The more honest you can be about what you're actually thinking, feeling and believing, the more every session is going to give you back.
2
End with forward momentum. However messy it starts, the arc of a session ends with one sentence of clarity. What I need, or who I'm choosing to be when I get up from this page. This is what separates journalling from rumination and wallowing, and it's the part most people leave out. You get to be your own mental coach on that page.
3
Use it when you need it, and when you don't. Most people only reach for it in the dark times, when they need to vent and offload. It works best when it's consistent, including on the days you don't feel like you need it at all. Every sentence you write is shaping your inner world, your subconscious, your neural pathways and your belief systems to align with the athlete you know you can be.
The practice

Six types of journalling

They do completely different jobs. Reaching for the wrong one at the wrong moment is why it hasn't worked for you before.

1
The Brain Dump
To get it out of your head so you can sleep, train, or race.
2
Processing
For the thing you're still carrying weeks later.
3
The Debrief
After the event. Facts and lessons, not a verdict on you.
4
Coach on the Page
Talking it out with yourself until you find the real answer.
5
Champion Self
Writing as the athlete you're becoming, not about her.
6
Self-Compassion
For the day after the worst day.
1
Type One

The Brain Dump

Get it out of your head.

No structure. No solving. No sense-making. You are emptying a bag onto the floor, that's it.

Everything that's rattling around goes down. The session tomorrow, the thing you forgot to reply to, the number that scared you, the argument, the email, the bike that needs a service. Your head is a terrible storage container and a great processor, and most athletes have it doing the wrong job.

Five minutes. Bullet points are fine. Handwriting on the back of a receipt is fine.

Why this works

In a sleep lab, people who spent five minutes writing tomorrow's to-do list fell asleep around nine minutes faster than people who wrote about what they'd already done. The more specific the list, the faster they dropped off. Your brain will keep rehearsing an open loop until it trusts the loop is held somewhere.

Use it when Your head won't switch off at night. The morning of a race, before the nerves have a story attached. Before a session you're dreading. Any time you can feel everything but can't name any of it.
Prompts
  • Everything in my head right now, in no order.
  • What's weighing on me…
  • Tomorrow, specifically. What, when, where.
  • What am I carrying that isn't mine to carry?
  • "I don't know where to start." That's a start ;)
The trap

Trying to fix any of it. The moment you start solving, you're doing a different exercise, and the dump stops working because you'll only write down the problems you already know how to answer. Empty it first. The answers get their own session.

2
Type Two

Processing

For the thing you're still carrying.

This one is for the heavy stuff. The crash you haven't really dealt with. The selection you didn't get. The race you bombed. The season that ended in a way you never got to grieve.

Fifteen to twenty minutes, on the same event, three or four days in a row, then stop. Not forever, in a block. You are not writing to feel better on the day. Some of these sessions will feel worse on the day. You're writing to turn something that lives in your body as pure sensation into something with words and edges and a shape.

And every single entry ends with the same line: what does this mean about what I need now?

Why this works

Writing about hard experiences has been studied for forty years across hundreds of trials. The effects are real, but they're not magic, and they hang almost entirely on one thing: whether you move from what happened to what it meant. Naming a feeling in words takes heat out of it. Circling it in sensation does not.

Use it when Something is still with you days or weeks later. You keep replaying it. It shows up in your body before training. You've told the story out loud three times and none of them landed.
Prompts
  • What actually happened, and what I've been telling myself about it.
  • How do I truly feel in this moment? Let it come out unhinged, no editing.
  • Where is this sitting in my body? Breathe into it, and let it move.
  • What am I holding onto that wants to be let go of?
  • Can I have compassion, love and understanding for myself in this moment?
  • Always last: what does this mean about what I need now?
The trap

Venting on a loop. Writing the same rant for twenty sessions with no landing point doesn't release it, it rehearses it. That's not processing, that's practising the thought.

The tell is the question you're asking. "What's wrong with me?" and "Why does this always happen to me?" are brooding questions, they spiral and they never resolve. Swap them for "What is this?" and "What do I need?" Same subject, completely different direction of travel.

3
Type Three

The Debrief

Facts and lessons. Not a verdict on you.

Every athlete debriefs. Most of you do it in the car on the way home, at high emotion, with no structure, and what comes out isn't a debrief at all. It's a character assessment.

So we make it a form. Same five questions, every time, good day or bad day. The structure is not admin, the structure is the protection. It's what stops a bad result becoming a bad identity.

Do it within a day or two, while the detail is still sharp, but not in the first hour. Feel it first (that's type two), then debrief.

Why this works

Structured reflection beats free-form reflection for athletes, consistently. It builds the self-awareness and self-regulation that separate the athletes who compound their experience from the ones who just accumulate it, and it drops rumination instead of feeding it.

Use it when Within 24 to 48 hours of any race, comp, trial or benchmark session. Yes, including the ones that went well. Especially those.
The five questions
  1. What actually happened? Facts only. Times, splits, positions, what the body did. No adjectives, no story.
  2. What did I do well? Name three. You don't get to skip this one, and "nothing" isn't an answer.
  3. What was in my control, and what wasn't? Two columns. Be brutally honest about which is which.
  4. One thing I'd do differently. One. Not a list of twelve, that's just self-attack with bullet points.
  5. What this does NOT mean about me. Write it out in full. "This does not mean I'm not good enough. This does not mean I don't belong here."
The trap

Debriefing while you're still bleeding. If you fill this in from disappointment, question four turns into a hit list and question five gets skipped entirely. Feel first, then analyse. In that order, never the other way round.

4
Type Four

Coach on the Page

Talk it out with yourself.

This is the one nobody teaches, and it's the one that changes the most.

You write a question. Then you answer it, in your own name, as the coach who believes in you completely. Not as the critic. Not as "I". The second you stop writing "I" and start writing your own name, you step outside the spiral and you can finally see the thing you're in.

It reads strange the first time. Do it anyway. You'll be shocked how much you already know the answer to, the moment you stop being the one drowning in it.

Why this works

Talking to yourself in the third person regulates emotion without using any extra effort from your brain's control system. It's essentially free, which matters most when you're maxed out and have nothing spare. People also reason more wisely about their own problems in third person than in first. Same brain, better advice.

Use it when You're stuck in a loop. You need to make a decision and keep going round in circles. The same fear keeps showing up and you're sick of it. Or you can feel there's something underneath, but you can't get to it.
The format
"[Your name], what's actually going on here?"

Then answer as the coach. Kind, direct, honest, on your side. Keep the conversation going for as long as it wants to go, question and answer, back and forth.

"[Your name], what would you tell an athlete you love who said that to you?"

The advice you'd give in a heartbeat to someone else is almost always the advice you're refusing to take.

Go deeper

The Delayering Ladder

When you've got twenty quiet minutes and you want the root, not the symptom. Ask these in order, on the page, and keep climbing down until the answer stops being about sport. That's how you know you've hit it.

  1. What am I feeling in my body right now?
  2. If these feelings had a voice, what would they want to say?
  3. And if that came true, what would be the worst part?
  4. And if that were true, what would that mean about me?
  5. In whose eyes?This is the one that cracks it open. Don't rush past it.
  6. One more layer… what would that say about who I am as a person?
  7. When was the first time I can remember feeling exactly this?Use your own words from the rung above, word for word. Let the memory come. It usually will.

Fear of failure is the most common answer there is, and it's almost never the real one. Keep going.

The trap

Letting it become an interrogation. If the voice answering you starts sounding like a prosecutor, you've swapped the coach for the critic. Stop, and go straight to type six. You cannot get to the truth from inside self-attack.

5
Type Five

Champion Self

Write as her, not about her.

Present tense. Already true. Not "I want to", not "I hope to", and absolutely not "I'm trying to".

You write a day in the life of the version of you who is already there. What she does in the morning. How she warms up. What she says to herself on the start line. How she carries herself in the room. What she does after a bad session, and after a great one. You are not describing a fantasy, you are writing a set of instructions.

Then, and this part is not optional, you add the two things that make it real.

Why this works

Of all the written exercises that have been tested, writing your best possible future self moves optimism the most, across 29 studies and close to 3,000 people. But there's a catch worth knowing: vividly imagining the outcome and stopping there is linked with achieving less, not more. The vision is the fuel. The obstacle and the plan are the steering.

Use it when Daily, five minutes, away from the pressure. Also any time you catch yourself hedging out loud about what you actually want.
The three parts
  1. The day. Write a day in her life, present tense, in detail. What she does, how she feels, how she moves through it.
  2. The obstacle. The one internal thing most likely to get in her way. Not the weather, not your program, not other people. The internal one.
  3. The plan. "When [obstacle] happens, I will [specific action]." One sentence. This is the bit that turns the vision into a behaviour.
Write today's "when… I will…"
Stems to start with
  • I am the type of athlete who…
  • It's normal for me to…
  • Today I get to…
  • The version of me who wins this is already…

These are the same stems I use for spoken self-talk. If this section lands for you, the full method is in Talk to Yourself Like a Champion.

The trap

The hedge. "I'm trying to be elite." "I want to try to make the team." "I don't even know if it's possible." Read your page back and circle every hedge, then write the line again without it. If the sentence has a trapdoor in it, your nervous system put it there so you'd have somewhere to land, and you cannot become someone you keep leaving yourself an exit from.

Second trap: reaching so far your body calls it a lie. Aim one step ahead of where you are, not ten.

6
Type Six

Self-Compassion

For the day after the worst day.

Write to yourself the way you would write to your best teammate if they'd just had the day you had.

That's the entire exercise. Most athletes find it the hardest one on this page, which tells you everything about how you've been speaking to yourself for the last decade.

Nearly every athlete I meet believes the same thing: that the self-criticism is what keeps the standard high, and going soft on yourself is how you get slow. The evidence runs the other way, and so does my experience of coaching people who have tried it your way for fifteen years.

Why this works

Brief self-compassion writing after a failure cuts self-critical rumination and gets athletes back into it faster, and it doesn't lower the standard. You don't need the whip. You never did. It just got in first and took the credit for everything you achieved in spite of it.

Use it when The day after a bad race. After an injury. After the mistake you can't stop replaying. Before any debrief that you know you'd currently write in a cruel voice.
Prompts
  • Write the whole thing out as if it happened to a teammate you love. Then write your reply to them.
  • What would I say to the ten-year-old version of me who just had this day?
  • What is the kindest true thing I can say about this? True first, kind second, both required.
  • What did this cost me, and what do I need in order to recover from it?
  • What's still true about me that today did not touch?
Important

Compassion first, then the champion line. Never the other way round. If you jump straight to "I'm strong, I've got this", you're bulldozing something that still needs to be felt, and it will wait for you.

Make it a practice

Which one, when

Head won't switch off
Brain dump. Five minutes. Specific, not poetic. Tomorrow's list included.
Something still hurts, days later
Processing. 15 to 20 minutes, three days in a row, then stop. Same event each time. Always end pointing forward.
Within 48 hours of competing
The debrief. Five questions. Good days too. Question five never gets skipped.
Stuck, circling, need a decision
Coach on the page. Your own name, not "I". Take the ladder if you want the root.
Every day, quietly
Champion self. Five lines, present tense, no hedges. Plus one "when… I will…".
The day after the worst day
Self-compassion first. Then, and only then, the debrief.
Try this

Your first week

One type a day. Ten minutes.

Don't try to build a daily practice out of nowhere. Take them for a test drive first, one at a time, and find out which two are yours. Everybody has two that do most of the work.

Then keep the two, and let the others sit in the toolbox until the moment calls for them. You're not building a habit here. You're learning which tool your hand reaches for when it matters.

One last thing

The page keeps the receipts.

Especially on the days you can't feel it.

You will have weeks where the work feels pointless, where you can't tell if anything is shifting, where the same fear turns up wearing a different outfit. On those days the page is the only thing that can prove to you how far you've actually come, because your memory won't. Your memory edits in favour of the story you're already running.

The purpose of journalling was never to write nicely, or daily, or at all consistently. It's to get to know yourself on a deeper level than the voice in your head is currently letting you.

Ten minutes. Pick the type. Go.

Go deeper with me
Tell me how it goes

Do the first week, then send me the two that stuck. Email coaching@shannonmalseed.com or DM me on Instagram @shannonmalseed. I read every single one.