TLDR: Modern society has almost completely culled out opportunities for reflection and introspection. Without these mindful practices, we cannot become we want to be in our relationships, our jobs, or our personal lives. Journaling is one of the most powerful ways to reflect, and GoldMind seeks to provide a new way to journal and organize insights that helps people use technology to become the best version of themselves.
Busy modern culture and technology have created a slippery slope for being less intentional about our lives. We have become quite good at overloading our schedules, and we fill free moments with digital distractions. This type of life doesn’t leave much room for reflecting on how our lives are going and if we actually like who we’re becoming based on all the the choices that are shaping us.
A reactive, unintentional lifestyle can lead to problems in every area of our lives. Our relationships—including the one we have with ourselves—can suffer when we are not putting intentional thought and effort into making them amazing. Studies show that social media and binge watching have been linked to mental health issues. Constantly checking notifications and feeds can cause issues with our ability to focus.
Your mind has so much potential to come up with meaningful ideas that lead to meaningful decisions and a meaningful life. But if you don’t give yourself the chance and the space to come up with those ideas, you suffocate that ability and end up feeling stuck and miserable.
The Mindfulness Movement
The growing mindfulness movement is society’s response to the modern trend of busyness and distraction. As people see the consequences of distraction addiction and busy schedules, more people are discovering the importance of having a strong awareness of, and relationship with themselves. An observant, compassionate stance towards ourselves and our thoughts is a core element of mindfulness.
Journaling is a powerful but underutilized mindfulness practice. It has been shown to build self-awareness and increase the quality and depth of your thinking. Unlike meditation (currently the most popular mindfulness tool), journaling captures what’s going on in your head concretely. It unlocks your ability to make new discoveries about yourself that help you develop more control over your life. Among its many other benefits, journaling is a force multiplier for reflecting on your life and learning from it. However many people hesitate to pick up journaling. There’s a stigma towards journaling (it isn’t masculine…). It can be hard to know what to write about.
Enter GoldMind: A Mindfulness Writing Tool
GoldMind is a new web (and soon to be mobile) app that promotes guided, focused journaling. It was created with several goals in mind:
- Help you rewire your mind to do your best thinking.
- Empower you in bringing more awareness and intention to how you treat the things that matter most to you.
- Change the way you see and use technology so that it becomes a tool to help you grow and live a meaningful life.
You don’t have to be a good writer to benefit from GoldMind! You simply need to build the habit of writing what you’re thinking and allow yourself to be vulnerable with and curious about your own thoughts.
Rewire Your Mind
Your entire experience in life starts with your thoughts. Without realizing it, you can create thought patterns that become unhealthy and result in repetitive emotions that can cloud your judgment. For example, do you treat yourself kindly in your thoughts? Do you tend to focus on the good in others or on unmet expectations you have for them?
Getting your thoughts in front of you is a powerful way to identify and break cycles of unproductive thinking. GoldMind will help you to address cyclical thinking with prompts and questions that reroute your mind to better ways of thinking. Done regularly, you can change the direction your mind naturally goes in various situations. While it isn’t a ‘cure all’, journaling has been shown to be beneficial in helping people deal with depression, anxiety, stress, trauma, as well as increasing general happiness and appreciation for what you have.
Get Intentional About Your Priorities
If you are like most people, you will find that sometimes your actions don’t line up with your priorities. You might not be seeking to understand the points of view of the people you care about. Or you end up going days, weeks, and months without spending time on the things that are truly important to you.
The mind requires stillness and quiet to reflect on what is going on both in our heads and in our lives. This solitary time helps us identify the subtle but important problems in our lives and come up with solutions. Journaling about the important things in your life is an effective way to become more intentional about them.
GoldMind will help you to target and spend more time thinking about the things you care most about. It was designed to help you capture all of the thoughts and new ideas you have or find during your day about any topic. This makes GoldMind about more than journaling.
GoldMind also helps you organize everything you write so you can be confident that when you go back to a topic, you can find everything you’ve ever written about it. Over time, you can build a powerful repository of your own ideas, as well as those you have come across, that you can go back to and continue to build on and gain value from. Exciting future features for GoldMind will make it easy to capture and organize new ideas quickly on any device, as well as ensure that you won’t just forget about something after you’ve written it down.
Technology That Empowers You
Is technology actually making you happier or better in the long term? How is it actually helping you from day to day? The idea for GoldMind has evolved substantially over time, but the core mission has not changed one bit. GoldMind’s mission is to help people recognize their potential and use technology to empower them to reach it.
GoldMind will turn your laptop into a repository for your deepest reflections on your most important priorities. It will (soon) make your phone a tool for quickly capturing important thoughts that you have throughout the day and priming you with the ideas that inspire you.
GoldMind will help you have a more mindful approach towards the rest of your life by helping you capture, organize, and build on what you experience with your devices so that you can grow from the things you feel, think, watch, read, and listen to. By using GoldMind to write regularly, you will also grow in your capacity for creativity and problem solving which will have cascading effects on the rest of your life.
