1. Every night before bed, grab your capture notebook, find a quiet place, put on some music to get you in a calm yet creative mood, get a red pen, close your eyes, replay the key events of your day, then jot down talking points that you can dictate about in your audio journal. Naturally, jot down ideas throughout the day, but right before bed is the perfect time to find the colorful moments that slipped through the cracks.

2. Write your word of the day for the entire month in the back of your capture notebook. Each day, write the word of the day in red in your capture notebook. When you do your dictation, use the word of the day in a sentence at some point in your entry and relate it to an event of the day.

3. Whenever you ask quality questions in your notebook, write them in red so you can talk about them in your audio journal. Quality questions are immensely powerful. They get to the heart of things quickly. I receive supervision for my job as music therapist. Every two months my past supervisor - a very experienced and talented music therapist himself - helps me work through how to up my game. The first time we spoke, I was asking him a million questions and there was stress at work and my mentor interrupted me with a key question that stopped everything: Do you like the job? It was clear we weren’t moving on until I answered that crucial question. That’s what a great mentor can do: hold space for you in transformational moments.

4. Any ideas related to new roles, sub-roles, mini-mission statement revisions, new goals, or project work should be written in red in your capture notebook and discussed in your audio journal.

5. Give a title to the day - something creative. It could be an unusual phrase someone used during the day or a zany image.