You should never underestimate the power of keeping a written journal. There are many ways in which a journal can help you to better succeed in life.
You can use it to help yourself associate your feelings with your thoughts and your thoughts with your feelings and this is what is most important in order to succeed in life.
Your journal can help you to find out what motivates you in life, develop new skills, learn new strategies for dealing with life in general, write down ideas and plan them through and find out more about the person you are by asking questions of yourself and writing down answers to those questions.
A journal is an essential tool when it comes to learning about yourself and if you want to be a success in life, and knowing about yourself is a must.
While you may think, you know yourself, very few of actually do. By keeping a journal, you may begin to realize all the little things you do not truly know or understand about yourself.
Develop Your Intuition
Your own intuition is your greatest asset and if more people developed an ear to listening to what we are actually saying inside then more of us would know the way to go and how to successfully achieve what it is we want out of life, simply by following our own inner guidance.
Your own personal journal can be a great way of developing your intuition and listening to yourself and what lies within you, record all the little things that you might let pass you by, such as flashes of inspiration, premonitions or hunches about something, basically anything that your intuition is telling you.
Keeping a journal is essential because inspiration can strike at any time, some of the greatest inventors and thinkers kept journals including one of the most prolific inventors in history, Thomas Edison.
One of the most helpful things a journal does is give us the ability to look back on records and refer to them.
For example if you encountered a problem and overcame it in the past and a similar problem crops up then you can reflect back and apply the same solution or adapt it for a more positive outcome.
Your journal can remind you of past achievements and this goes a long way to building self-confidence and helping you succeed in life when things get tough and can help comfort you.
Learn From The Past
A technique which is very popular and one which keeping a journal can help you accomplish is the “best-better” technique.
This technique can be applied to any situation that crops up in life and simply relies on you looking back on the situation and finding what you liked about it or what you experienced from it and then deciding how you could do better next time or how you could have better experienced from it.
The key to recovering from past mistakes and succeeding in the future is to learn from your mistakes but remember to focus on your strong points rather than your weak ones.
If you concentrate more on your weak points rather than your strong ones then very often this leads to you unconsciously reinforcing them which then lead to low self-esteem and of course having a low self-esteem isn’t positive.
It is only by building on your strengths can you increase your self-esteem and your self-esteem is the crucial factor to understanding your weaknesses and correcting them and therefore building a positive outlook on life which greatly increases your chances of success.
By noting down your experiences in your journal you are able to look back on them and gain a clearer understanding of yourself and how you feel which ultimately determines how you think and how you think determines how successful you are in life.
Benefits Of Journal Writing
The benefits of journal writing are fairly well established due to the long history of journal writing. From Anne Frank to Di Vinci, journal writing has proven itself.
When considering the benefits of journal writing, it is important to set a few parameters. First, there is no age limit to using journals. There are distinct benefits for children of all ages, but journal writing is equally valuable to adults.
The reason for this is journal writing is an act of personal reflection. Whether it is a teenager reflecting on the social nightmare of high school or an overworked parent taking twenty minutes a night to write is irrelevant.
The point is, all age groups benefit from stepping back from their life for a few moments and reflecting on things.
Whether you recognize it or not, journal writing provides you with an anchor in your daily life. In the journal, you are free to write what you want without restrictions, to truly address the issues in your life without fear of criticism.
Put another way, one of the benefits of journal writing is it acts as a self-help psychiatrist, but for MUCH cheaper!
As you write in your journal over time, you’ll also start to ascertain a second benefit to doing so. This benefit is one of self-criticism.
Inevitably, you’ll read through past entries and review your life. Doing so will lead you to self-reflection as well as thoughts on how you might act differently should certain situations rise again.
Of equal importance, journal writing has health benefits. Before you click away from this article, consider a time in your life when you were extremely frustrated. Hopefully, you spoke to a friend to “get things off your chest.” Didn’t you feel a lot better afterwards?
Getting things off your chest helps relieve stress, one of the biggest killers in our modern society. Journal writing acts in much the same way since you are able to write your thoughts without fear of criticism.
There are other benefits to journal writing, but all boil down to one simple fact. Writing in a journal allows you to express yourself without being judged. With the lack of privacy in our modern, digital world, that is hardly a small benefit.
Benefits Of A Good Training Journal
Most of us have trained at one part in our lives. Chances are if you’ve ever taken your training seriously you’ve used a training journal or a training log.
The main difference between training journals and training logs, is what you document in them after each workout or day, etc. Training journals are just that. They are more of a journal rather than a log.
They will normally include things like mental health and how you felt during the day or your workout. They can reach a bit into some statistical information but this is normally saved for a training log.
Training logs are generally created of off some kind of a template. For example, every day you fill out a form that has the same fields. Things like current weight, daily workout, diet information, are all things that can be put in a Training Log on a day to day basis.
Both journaling and logging are important to keep an effective history of your past. For convenience sake it’s nice to have two combined together in some way. This way it’s always easy to remember to do both.
Benefits Of Recording Your Training
The number one benefit of recoding your training is to have a detailed history to look back on. This can be very useful in times of planning.
For example, to figure out what has worked for you and what hasn’t. It’s very useful for figuring out reasons for injuries or for times of burnout.
Have you ever sat down and tried to plan out training with nothing to work with? If you have something to look back upon a detailed account of what you’ve done over the past few weeks it’s easy to plan ahead, and to effectively increase your workout intensity, and so on to improve for the future.
A detailed journal is also really nice to have just for personal use, and to be able to look back on past months and years, to remember different accounts.
Gratitude Journal
Keeping a gratitude journal can be a key part of living a happy and prosperous life.
How so? Acknowledging all the things, events, and people we appreciate will quickly get us out of the “whining” mode and right into “happy” mode, increasing our vibration. And with that, we’ll begin to draw more of the things we’re already happy about.
Ever notice how your days go from bad to worse as you grumble and resent all the things in your life that make you miserable – or that you THINK make you miserable.
We won’t get into justifications here. It’s clear enough that if you think enough about them, that’s where you’ll stay, and that’s what you’ll keep getting.
So what if somebody else had a hand in it? Do you really want to give them the satisfaction of successfully making you miserable too?
You can turn things around. Express appreciation. In writing. For the unlikeliest things. The only condition: you must find a way, anyway, to actually feel some appreciation.
But it doesn’t just have to be challenges. Sometimes the simple things, the things that we normally take for granted, work just as well as objects of our appreciation.
Did you have a good meal today? Or yesterday? Are there people in your life who would miss you if you were gone? People you would miss? Express gratitude.
Can you see? Hear? Walk? Talk? Express gratitude. Is today a beautiful day? Did the sun appear when it was supposed to? Express gratitude.
Do you own or have access to something, anything, you enjoy? A book, a CD, a piece of clothing or jewelry (no fancy metals and minerals required)? Express gratitude.
Chances are there are many things that deserve to be written into your gratitude journal. And why write them down?
There’s something about the writing process that makes things so much more real. You’ve probably read all about the power of written-down goals.
Well, gratitude, especially as a path towards greater prosperity and abundance, works the same way.
Then watch what happens. Your vibrations will go up. You’ll feel happier. Things start working better. Maybe some new signs of prosperity come very quickly, maybe they’ll take a while.
Either way, you can be assured that as long as you keep grumbling, you’ll keep swatting any incoming signs of prosperity away like flies. So stop grumbling and welcome all the good that’ll be flowing into your life.
