Debbie Pace Of Debbie Global: How Journaling Helped Me Be More Calm, Mindful And Resilient
An Interview With Heidi Sander
Journaling also positively impacts your emotional state by helping you identify and connect with deep and surface-level fears, problems and concerns so you can recognize the triggers and learn ways to better control them.
Journaling is a powerful tool to gain clarity and insight especially during challenging times of loss and uncertainty. Writing can cultivate a deeper connection with yourself and provide an outlet for calmness, resilience and mindfulness. When my mom passed on, I found writing to be cathartic. When I read through my journal years later, there were thoughts that I developed into poems, and others that simply provided a deeper insight into myself. In this series I’m speaking with people who use journaling to become more mindful and resilient.
As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Debbie Pace, CEO of Debbie Pace Global.
Debbie is a former Navy journalist, author of Journal to Freedom, host of The Show Up! Show podcast and a national-award winning broadcaster-turned visibility and mindset expert, who helps entrepreneurs overcome fear and self-doubt to show up and powerfully share their soul-based message with the world.
Through her coaching and healing programs with journaling as a foundation, Debbie draws from her experience surviving a painful divorce, a business bankruptcy, and having no home for her and her two young children, to remarrying her husband and completely turning her life around. She pulls from her life experience to help others break through blockages keeping them from leading fulfilling lives, stepping into their power and purpose, and articulating their message in a way that naturally and effortlessly attracts their desired community.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! We really appreciate the courage it takes to publicly share your story of healing. Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your childhood backstory?
I’m pretty transparent with my story of growing up with a violent father the first five years of my life, before he passed away in a car accident. I didn’t understand growing up that I was born a highly sensitive person (HSP = heightened sensitivity to pretty much EVERYTHING), so the trauma of that violence impacted my emotional and physical health pretty deeply and was woven into a lot of my fear-based decisions as a teenager and young adult.
My mom remarried and we had a blended family that came with its own set of challenges, and I always felt like an outsider that didn’t fit in — whether it was in my own family or out in society. I was a chameleon in life with lots of acquaintances and no really close friends.
So, I tried to escape the parts of myself I didn’t like, and I joined the U.S. Navy as a journalist in 1991– to find the thing I thought existed outside myself that would fix everything. It turns out, though… you can’t outrun yourself. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the next decade of my life I moved from one broadcasting, journalism and marketing job to another, overachieving, winning awards, and still… trying to outrun myself.
Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about journaling. Have you been writing in your journal for a long time or was there a challenging situation that prompted you to start journal writing? If you feel comfortable sharing the situation with us, it could help other readers.
I’ve journaled off and on since I was about 12 years old, though I really fell in love with journaling when I was divorced and trying to reconcile my marriage. It was one of the darkest times of my life, because I was also going through a business bankruptcy while supporting two young children. I felt completely alone and like a failure in every area of my life. I even questioned my own existence.
After one conversation with an unlikely friend, I began to believe my life could be different. That conversation sparked something in me that ended up turning my life completely around. I made a choice in that moment to believe in what was possible, and I became a huge fan of manifesting through journaling.
How did journaling help you heal, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?
At one point while trying to reconcile my marriage, I watched a video that talked about your miracle being closer than you think, and I began writing that in my journal.
Over time, I gained momentum, and I began including all the things I wanted for my future, for the marriage, for my family, and for how I wanted to feel in my life. When I had moments of doubt, I went back to my journal and wrote it all out. Even when I didn’t believe it could happen for me, I wrote it out and it seemed to be much more possible.
That was the fuel that began my emotional healing and kept me on the path to eventually fix my marriage and bring my family back together.
Did journaling help you find more self-compassion and gratitude? Can you share a story about that?
Journaling has been the single most important tool in helping me find grace, compassion and gratitude for myself. As an entrepreneur, when I fully jumped into my role as a coach in 2016, I had a lot of failed launches — lots of life and business lessons that I took personally.
My self-image and self-respect were at an all-time low.
I believed all the marketing messages and thought there was something wrong with me because I just didn’t get to my first six-figure month in 30 days… or 60… or even 365.
So, I journaled every single day — sometimes more than once — and I focused on gratitude for who I was. I focused on any small or large wins I had each day. And, I focused on gratitude for what would show up in my life in the future. It was so powerful, because it took me out of the pain of my current situation and helped elevate how I felt in the moment. It helped me believe in something again when there was no current physical evidence, and it kept me from walking away from entrepreneurship completely when I wasn’t seeing the success I desired.
What kind of content goes into your journal? For example, do you free-write, write poems, doodle?
I’m very specific about my journaling, because I believe in the power of language and intention in creating our present and our future. I usually ask myself an empowering question to begin journaling, and then write out how I really feel first. I go into the shadows to pull out what’s hiding emotionally, and then I rewrite it into a positive outcome for the future. Other times, I focus on “I AM” statements to step into my own power quickly. This is the same method I use in all my journaling programs, because I’ve found time after time that it helps unlock desired results faster.
How did you gain a different perspective on life and your emotions while writing in your journal? Can you please share a story about what you mean?
Journaling really helped me connect with the wounded little Debbie who was walking around in life scared and still clinging to safety, and who just wanted to be loved. For example, during one of my journaling sessions, I did a time warp exercise, where I went back and reconnected with my younger self. In that session, I reconnected with the bouncy, blonde-haired little girl who was full of hope, life and wonder. It unlocked some of the best parts of me that were hidden so deeply, because I had forgotten how to fully live and feel joy. That little blonde girl energy is now with me everywhere I go.
In my own journal writing, I ended up creating poems from some of the ideas and one of them won an award. Do you have plans with your journal content?
Absolutely! I constantly push myself to go further and deeper in my journaling practice, so I can bring even more to the coaching programs and sessions I offer. I use my journaling content to create programs to help others unlock the hidden, powerful parts of themselves so they can show up and share their message with the world. Also, from the inner child journaling I mentioned above, I created an inner child healing meditation. I feel our ability to turn our deep journaling work into something valuable for others is nearly unlimited — if we’re willing to take the chance.
Fantastic. Here is our main question. In my journaling program, I have found that journaling can help people to become more calm, mindful and resilient. Based on your experience and research, can you please share with our readers “five ways that journaling can help you to be more calm, mindful and resilient”?
- One way journaling helps you become more calm, mindful and resilient, is that it enables you to pull out of the current personal perspective and write about your situation as a higher-level observer. This gets you out of the victim loop and enables you to see the situation from a more unbiased perspective, which ultimately helps you access more resources than you would have had in the negative perspective.
- Journaling causes you to slow down your body’s responses, which helps calm down the sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight or freeze), and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest) responsible for reducing heart rate, stress and anxiety, among other things.
- Resiliency can become stronger with journaling by focusing your writing on what you’re passionate about and reconnecting with your purpose by writing out intentions, goals and positive action steps. This helps keep you connected to the ultimate outcome and keeps you moving forward when roadblocks appear.
- When journaling — especially if it includes gratitude — you’re training your mind and body to see and feel the end result in the current moment — whether it has manifested in your life yet or not. This helps you become more mindful during some of life’s more challenging situations, because you can see outside the current situation to another result and pull a different feeling and response into the now.
- Journaling also positively impacts your emotional state by helping you identify and connect with deep and surface-level fears, problems and concerns so you can recognize the triggers and learn ways to better control them.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of peace to the greatest amount of people, what would that be?
What an amazing question! The movement I would inspire would help everyone in the world understand that even undesirable behavior is rooted in love and protection of the self, so they would then communicate from love and understanding in a way that empowers and builds up others, versus criticizing and shutting them down.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)
I’ve had this vision for years that Oprah Winfrey comes to my house, and we talk about forwarding the movement of communicating from love. I would love for us to share thoughts and ideas on how to bring this movement out more quickly into the world in tangible, actionable steps.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find the Journal to Freedom and The Show Up Show online, as well as stories sharing my journey and coaching work, my sound healing album, and more at https://lnk.bio/debbiepaceglobal.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued fulfilment and success with your writing!
Thank you so much! I wish you continued creativity and expansion in your journaling and writing as well.
