Ongoingness Meets
Daisy Moore
Founder of journl. & Life Coach
Ongoingness Meets
Daisy Moore holds certifications as a Life Coach, a Post Graduate Diploma in Psychotherapy, and is an accredited Mindfulness Facilitator and Yoga Teacher. All of these threads coalesce to create her latest offering to the world—journl. the journal of all journals making it easier for people to access therapeutic tools.
In mid-2019, I attended one of Daisy's journaling classes at an Auckland studio. Initially, I was skeptical—"$30 for a journaling class? I already know how to journal!" However, curiosity got the better of me, and I went. To my surprise, in just 30 minutes and with only three journaling questions, I had a transformative experience. It was like turbo-charged journaling. How did that just happen?
The following week, I signed up for 12 weeks of life coaching with Daisy. This decision catalyzed significant self-growth and confidence. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of Daisy and her incredible gift of helping people help themselves.
I can see two main parts—the first is my childhood. My mum passed away when I was two, and I lived half the time with my dad and half the time with my aunt and uncle. I had a really unique experience growing up with two distinctly different lives. With my Dad, I could see a life I didn't want—a life of neglect, scarcity, and unhappiness. With my auntie’s family, I saw a life of connection and abundance, not always financial, but with time and fun.
The second part is my career. I started with a career in marketing. When we change careers, it can feel like a lot of time is wasted. But all of that is exactly what I need for what I do now. Absolutely everything I think has been beneficial, even the things that felt different and disjointed at the time. Looking back, I can clearly see that I've been preparing for this my whole life.
I studied marketing at uni basically because that's what my friends were doing. The careers’ counselor at school laid out the whole study plan and literally just followed without questioning it.
Straight out of uni I went into working in Marketing. Soon after, I realised I don’t want to market a business unless I'm aligned with it. I got a job in marketing at Fitness First thinking that this was the thing… but it still wasn't really. In 2015 I started studying life coaching on the side. Back then, “boundaries” and “holistic health” weren’t common terms like they are now. It didn’t necessarily make sense—who is going to be a life coach at age 23—but I was just doing it for me because I was interested.
At the time, Melissa Ambrossini ran Goddess Groups where I was living in Sydney. From memory, they cost $30, which was a stretch for me then. I asked her if I could work for her in exchange for attending the events for free, and she agreed. Along with my coaching studies, I became hooked on this new type of self-help content. So each week, I would write a blog post about what I was learning and what I was passionate about, sharing it in a private Facebook group just for friends because I was petrified of anyone else seeing it. Life coaching became my thing.
Later on the Life Coach industry started to boom, which was good and bad. Good because we need more people in this area. Bad because it's not a regulated industry which allows for a lack of integrity. That's when I decided to leave and train to be a psychotherapist.
Though therapy is amazing and if everyone could do it, that would be phenomenal but the reality is not everyone can. Here’s where I kept coming up against a wall. As psychotherapists, we’re offering a solution that is inaccessible to the people that need it most. I've been teaching journaling for years now, and that’s the solution I want to provide. Journaling is not a perfect solution but neither is therapy. However it is accessible and it’s a really great starting point.
I found this journal and I just started writing. Within a couple of pages, the physical feeling I’d had started to move. That was the first time I noticed, “wow, journaling is not just writing down notes about something. You can really use it to process what’s going on inside''.
In my 20s, I always had a journal but I mostly used it for writing down what I was learning if I was at a workshop or a course. When my mum passed away when I was young, I didn’t feel like I wasn’t ever able to express that grief. Crying and the like wasn’t really welcomed in my home. Years later, when we were living in London, I was reading Motherless Daughters and it unlocked something within me. It made me feel so validated in my experience but equally it was a lot to process. My partner, Josh, and my friends were at work, my family was on the other side of the world in a totally different timezone so one one was available to talk to. But I found this journal—an ugly red one that some construction company had given Josh and I just started writing. Within a couple of pages, the physical feeling I’d had started to move. That was the first time I noticed, “wow, journaling is not just writing down notes about something. You can really use it to process what’s going on inside''.
This is why the first journl. was born. It’s easy to say “you should journal about that”. But what do people actually do? When we think through a psychotherapy lens, we can see all the defences that we have which can stop us from getting the most out of journaling or stop us from even starting. We often have the need to do things ‘right’, to answer the question or prompt “correctly”.
journl. is a great starting point where we can access therapy tools, ideas and frameworks. It's a place where we can access healing at home. It's so important to reach out to other people for help when we need it. journl. is a place where we can come to ask ourselves, to tap into our own inner knowing.
I'd love to say it’s for everyone, but it's really for people who feel like they are destined for a big life and the current reality doesn't match that internal feeling. It's a starting place for people who want to change their external reality or anyone who wants to find more peace.
journl. is a starting place for people who want to change their external reality or anyone who wants to find more peace.
I'm most proud of the way I do journl. I’ve stayed true to who I am and the mission. There are ways to make money through being controversial to get a lot of attention but I haven’t done that. I’ve intentionally created a product that is safe, trauma won’t be re-triggered just to answer some fancy question. journl. has integrity. I’m really proud of the thought and care that’s gone into the whole process.
Why is going to a journaling class so valuable?
While we’re journaling at home by ourselves, we can experience resistance and think, “I'm not answering that”. But when we're in a safe container, we're more likely to try something a bit different. In a class we are also free of distractions.
When we come together to journal, we get the opportunity to learn from myself and the other people in the class. During discussion, we see the different tangents people have explored. The tangible experience of co-creation in the room is really special and it arms us with the confidence to go do it at home.
All three of those things can lead us to new and valuable insights.
Every class has the same structure. We always start with a breath-based exercise to ground us. We move through three to four journaling prompts and end the practice with the breath. In the middle, it's just magic.
I always have a plan for the class and what I think we're going to cover but there's a lot of co-creation that happens in the room. I also love that you can come, keep your head down and not say a word if you don’t want to. Or you can come ask, share and workshop together. There's space for it all. The energetic togetherness is really powerful.
The Goddess Sessions I used to help Melissa Ambrossini host. When I first got into this work in 2015/2016, no one was really doing it. I could drag a few of my girl friends along, but no one in my circle was really interested in what I was interested in. To come together with like-minded people was profound. It made me feel like I’m not doing this alone, I’m not weird for feeling this way. I felt part of something. I couldn't tell you what the events were about or what I learned, but I can remember the feeling of being in a space with like-minded people doing something positive.
Every single thing. Really. If we look at my upbringing, you could look at that and say, gosh, Daisy really got the short straw. And in many ways I did. But I feel like the luckiest person because I can understand people in a different way. That experience helps me profoundly every day. It's not about putting a bowtie on a turd, it’s not saying, “my mum died and aren’t I lucky?” But it’s saying that it offered me a very valuable experience that has made me into the person I am now.
Having to rebrand the business six weeks out from launch. Long story short, my IP lawyer said I only have the trademark for product and someone else had the trademark for education which would mean that I couldn’t teach journaling. I could have kept going with the brand and the idea. But I don't sell journals, I teach journaling. I had to pause the channels and redesign everything. It was devastating. Now I look back on that old brand and business and think, thank gosh.
Again, it’s not putting a bowtie on a turd. But it’s about how quickly can we find the line? How quickly can we get to the lesson. I've had so many tangible experiences like that, I'm getting quicker at finding the line and learning the lesson. What's the lesson? Keep going. There will be something.
Apart from everything… I’m currently really fascinated by the creative process.
How you start with just an idea in your head that magically grows into manifest form as you water it regularly. Equally as fascinating I find the emotions along the way—“This is amazing! This is terrible. This is going to be wonderful. Oh my gosh, this is crap.”—and how do I stay on the line of creativity as the final product emerges more clearly.
“It ran in my family until it ran into me.”
I come back to this quote everyday. I'm so inspired by the idea that all have a rich history and a reason for the way we are—our family, our society, the school we went to, things that happened in our life that make us who we are but we really do have the power to change if we want to.
I'm listening to this amazing podcast called Pop Culture Parenting with Doctor Billy Garvey. He talks about attachment which is built while we’re young, but it’s never too late to change. Research on things like neuroplasticity support our potential for change. I find that really empowering. Journaling creates space for us to be really curious and honest about our life, thought processes, patterns, behaviours to lead us towards changing our internal and external reality.
