How Can Journalling for 10–15 Minutes a Day Help You?
Even though I have always loved to write, I never actually kept a diary growing up. But when I was setting up my own business, one of the things a coach I worked with encouraged me to do was to write every day in a business journal. It wasn’t a complicated practice, just 10–15 minutes of self- reflection in a notebook which allowed me to mull over the day’s events and focus forward on to the next.
I really enjoyed the practice and over time it’s sort of morphed into a quasi-business come personal reflection tool for me.
And now I really notice when I don’t do it.
Last month I hold my hands up and say that I was so busy that I didn’t write in my journal for 3 weeks. Thinking about that yesterday, when I finally sat down with pen in hand, it made me realise that that 10 to 15 minutes really does keep me on track in lots of ways.
It definitely helps me stay focussed on my goals; I keep my most important goals in the front of my journal book and so the focus is automatically there as I always read through them before I start to write.
Some days I stick to the 10–15 minutes and am pretty business like about it, other days I let my mind wander and I can be writing for over an hour. It’s quite therapeutic, just allowing your mind to go where-ever it wants to. I have solved problems this way, worked out my next steps, forgiven other people, moved forward and forgiven myself all within the safe pages of my journal.
I also did a bit of a de-cluttering yesterday as well. Every so often I shred my old journals, but I always make a point of quickly reading through them for any gems of wisdom (not usually many!). It’s really interesting how quickly you can forget what you’ve achieved, so that’s another way that journalling helps you by capturing all the good stuff.
It also made me realise that I am still making the same mistakes in some areas of my life and I need to take more notice of my gut instincts much, much earlier. So it also helps with you being able to track patterns of behaviour and you can really learn about yourself from it.
There’s also something about accountability to myself when I write stuff down. It’s like a magic trick. If it’s written in black and white I’m more likely to see it through.
I do think that’s why I found myself going off track these last few weeks so much. It’s definitely a great tool for self-motivation and self-discipline.
It’s also good for improving your emotional resilience. It’s similar in some ways to thinking things over about stressful situations. But the self-reflection on the page just seems to have a bit more structure to it.
Having somewhere to dump your problems just helps you deal with the flow of life’s ups and downs. In that ten to fifteen minutes you can focus on whatever you need.
I’m on my 365 day journey, #365small changes, what difference are you going to make in your life?
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