125: This 15 Minute Exercise Builds Resilience & Self Compassion. Self-Awareness Practice.

Your week leaves marks, even when you pretend it didn’t. I’m Coach Sam, and I’m sharing a simple weekly journaling practice I call “Highlights and Heartbreaks” to help you get emotionally honest, feel less numb, and stop letting life blur by on autopilot.

We start with one blank, double-sided sheet of paper. On one side, you list heartbreaks from the last seven days without overthinking or overexplaining. On the other, you list highlights, even if they feel small. That two-list “weekly inventory” builds self-awareness and mindfulness fast because it shows you the full picture, not just the hard parts or the highlight reel.

Then we go deeper where it matters: you circle any heartbreak that still stings. Those “stingers” are the moments that keep looping in your body and mind, draining your energy and raising your stress. I walk you through breathing, letting the emotion move, and writing yourself a short love note that validates what happened and offers you a path forward, whether that’s a boundary, a hard conversation, or a clean release. Finally, you expand on one to three highlights with gratitude and self-recognition, so your brain learns to notice what’s working and co-create more of it.

If you want a practical mental health tool that takes about 15 minutes a week and strengthens resilience, self-compassion, and emotional regulation, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s been carrying too much, and leave a review so more people can find the practice.

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Transcript

Why Journaling Wakes You Up

Samantha Pruitt 0:08

Hello, beautiful humans. Coach Sam here today doing a solo episode. I'm calling this Highlights and Heartbreaks. I want to share with you a weekly inventory, also known as journaling practice, to wake you up to your life, process experiences, and move forward with compassion, wisdom, and power. Why should we do this? Well, people journal to improve mental health, reduce stress, and to boost productivity. Journaling is for releasing emotions, organizing thoughts, and tracking personal growth in writing. Journals serve as a private, safe space to process emotions, enhance self-awareness, and set or track goals. Journals act as a memory aid and a creative outlet to build self-awareness and self-confidence. Awareness, mindfulness, or what I like to be using the term, or what I call it, is basically being awake. Being awake is an antidote for being asleep. Being awake is the opposite of being numb or simply going through the motions day after day, week after week, as your life slips away from you. Nobody wants to be asleep. But often it is a survival mechanism, a coping mechanism that is used when things get really stressful or feel like they're just out of your control. There are endless ways to take back emotional control and agency over your own existence. We talk about them on the show all the time. Journaling is simply one of them. It's a great place to start for anybody who's looking to reconnect with themselves and start rebuilding the life they deserve. How to do this weekly highlights and heartbreaks journaling exercise. Here we go. Once a week, carve out quiet time alone with just a blank double-sided piece of paper and a pen. So this is a once-a-week

The Two-Sided Weekly Inventory

Samantha Pruitt 2:34

activity. You carve out quiet time by yourself with a double-sided piece of paper and a pen. Then, without judgment or hesitation, just go through each day of the last week and ask yourself some questions. On side one, were there any heartbreaks this week? Page one, side one. The question is, did I experience any heartbreaks this week? On page two, the flip side, the question is, were there any highlights this week? Page two is, did I experience any highlights this week? So on one side it's the heartbreaks this last week, on the other side, it's the highlights this week. What you're going to do is start with the heartbreaks. I want you to write things down and then move on. Gently just comb your mind and answer simply without much detail or pressure to spill it all out or provide a lot of details. Once you've covered the week and answered both questions, hopefully you'll have at least one thing listed in each category on each side. Then you'll be done taking inventory. And after that, we'll go through it and read through it and process it. So let's start with page one. Okay, so page one is the heartbreaks. Remember the prompt. Were there any heartbreaks this week? Did I experience any heartbreaks this week? Once you've spilled those out without overthinking it, without a lot of detail, you've got the heartbreaks written down. I want you to do the other side, the highlights. Again, you're writing those down on the other side, just putting them down, plain and simple. Not a lot of emotion or detail, just making a list. When you're done with both sides, you're going to turn it back over to the heartbreaks. Now, reading through the heartbreaks, you're going to circle any heartbreak that still stings. Where there is still emotion, unsaid words, unfelt pain, a holding tight in your body.

Circling Stingers And Writing Love Notes

Samantha Pruitt 5:07

You'll notice they all have varying degrees of impact. Some you will have already totally moved on from, and they are already easily behind you, released with compassion. Others that you circle still have active emotion, emotional pull, and negative vibrations. That's the sting. You're circling the stingers. Once you have the stingers circled, I want to tell you about these stingers. You're going to think about them for about five minutes. A stinger is a type of heartbreak that needs more space to breathe, or else it will get stored and recirculate in your body and mind like venom, like a sting would. As you focus your deep inhalation and exhalation, allowing the emotional stings to move through and out of your body, I want you to write yourself a simple love note expressing tenderness towards your heart and what happened. What was the sting? Let me give you some examples. So I've picked one of the stingers, I've got it circled, and now I'm going back and I'm going to give some thought to it and process it. You're going to write yourself a simple love letter about this sting. I'll give you an example. Heartache number one. Example one, someone's actions have hurt me. Here's an example. Dear Sister Sam, Monday, when your coworker, boss, friend, son, husband, you fill in the blank, spoke to you harshly and criticized you about XYZ, fill in the blank. I know it made you feel really bad. So somebody's actions hurt me. I'm acknowledging what happened. I continue writing the love letter. Sister Sam, I want you to know that their judgment is not truth. I want you to understand that there is never one perfect or right way to do anything. I want you to feel unconditional love for me as well as the freedom to do things your way. You can decide whether to have a conversation with them and be honest about how they made you feel and ask them for change that you want to see moving forward. Or you can also decide to simply release their words back towards them because their words don't belong to you and let them roll right off of you. Either way, I respect, trust, and love you. All right. So that's me writing a love letter about that. Remember, when you're writing these love letters to yourself, you can use any types of words, nicknames, or messages that feel natural to you. It should not be forced or artificial. Write it, read it, and then feel it. Release this energy so you can make space for healing. Let me give you another example of a heartache. In this instance, the heartache was a life event that occurred this last week that hurt my heart. It wasn't anything anyone did to me, it was just life. Here's how I wrote that. My beloved sister Sam, this week, when you heard the tragic news about your teacher, Pam's passing away, I know it was shocking. And instantly you felt your heart crack open with sadness. As it does for you, when somebody you care about dies, that crack in your heart feels like it can swallow you whole. So I know you fight back the dark-consuming pain and you look for a way to quickly provide a salve and a bandage upon the break. I want you to know that you are safe. I want you to know that your teacher Pam is at peace. I want you to know that she has moved on to her next assignment and will continue to bring unconditional love and joy to our world still. I want you to feel her spirit and wisdom in the room every single time you gather with your Sangha community. You are in this year to live course for a reason, and your teacher, Pam, has gifted you yet another beautiful lesson. Sister Sam, you are brave and you are loved beyond measure. Those are examples of me addressing two heartbreaks this last week. You're going to do something similar. Write them down, read them and feel them. Allow the emotions and the energy to move through you and out so there is space for healing. Once you have done the heartbreaks, and hopefully there aren't too many. Some weeks there are, some weeks there may be none. Don't judge it. Just process them and write yourself a love letter about each of those heartbreaks. Once you're done with the heartbreaks, you're going to move on to the other side. Now it's the highlights. Hopefully, you made a highlight list on the other side that's more than one or two. But again, no judgment. Some weeks there might not be much of a highlight list at all.

Highlights Reflection And Gratitude

Samantha Pruitt 10:58

Other weeks there could be dozens. Read through your list of highlights. Pick one or two or three to focus on. Just write a simple paragraph about what transpired. So pick one or two or three highlights, and you're going to write for each of those a simple paragraph. In that paragraph, express how it made you feel, what transpired, gratitude for others, recognition of your own hard work, or really anything that comes up for you around this highlight. Feel free to brag here. Feel free to really pour out love upon yourself and others. Here's an example of a highlight this last week for me. This last week, I helped my grandson apply for school. That was one of my highlights. In reflection, here's what I wrote. I feel grateful for this opportunity to help my grandson develop into a happy and healthy adult. I'm so proud of his commitment to personal growth. I'm excited to help him explore other opportunities and find joy for himself. So that's just an example of me summarizing a highlight, allowing myself to express what transpired and also how I feel about it. Highlights. Now that you've become aware of highlights and awake to them, you'll start looking for them. Moving forward, you'll be attracting them actually into your space. Be on full-time duty to co-create highlights. For some reason, we turn away from them or we don't really shine enough light when things are going right in our life, when circumstances or experiences or events happen that are positive. Instead, we focus and tend to focus on negative experiences. We want to break out of that pattern. Okay, so journaling exercises. How these journal, I still hope, let me just say that these two journaling exercises are helpful for you. How they impact you will be up to you. Remember to do them both and not just one. You need to balance out negative and positive emotions throughout the week. Some weeks you're going to have more things on your list, and other weeks you're going to have less. It's all normal. Don't judge it. Mostly what I wish for you is the opportunity to carve out this time, this space to process your experiences and your emotions each week. That's really what it is. Like I said before, I call it taking inventory. The simple truth for us to

Balance, No Judgment, And Closing

Samantha Pruitt 14:06

be with ourselves and our own thoughts and emotions wide awake each week is a necessity. I hope you send me a message about your experience. Feel free to reach out with any questions. Always remember here at the Everyday Awesome Project that how your life feels is more important than how it looks. And that includes what your journal looks like. Okay, my beautiful human.