I’ve been doing a lot of journaling lately. It’s a great way to get to know yourself, and to get clarity on what you want out of life. It can also help you sort out your feelings about the way things are going in your life, and figure out what you want to do about them.

You can even have different journals that serve different purposes in your life. For example, you could have a food journal if you’re trying to lose weight. You could also have a gratitude journal, where you write down things you are grateful for every day. You could use a journal for planning your business, or dealing with your relationships. Or you could have just one where you write your life — your goals and dreams, successes and failures and how you feel about each one.

Whatever information you decide to record in your journal, it will help you get to know yourself. Here are four ways journaling can help you:

1. Journaling gives you a safe place to process the events in your life.

When you are in the midst of an event, good or bad, it’s hard to process the feelings and emotions you have in the moment. Recording it in your journal gives you time to reflect and to describe not only the event itself, but any feelings you have about what took place. You may find that when you are writing you remember more details that you didn’t catch while they were happening, and this can give you more insight into your actions and reactions.
This works almost like visualization in writing. You see the event unfolding again in your words instead of in pictures.

2. Journaling gives you the time and space to understand your feelings.

During the processing of events, you can be as clinical and dispassionate as you want to. It’s as if you are recording the actions of someone outside yourself, from the viewpoint of an objective bystander.

Taking your journaling one step further, your writing can allow you the time and space you need to figure you how you feel about what happened. Reflecting on how you feel about events in your life is a great way to get to know yourself.

So often in life we are required to keep our feelings and emotions to ourselves. If we stuff them down too deep it can lead to self-destructive behaviors such as drug abuse and overeating. A journal gives you a place to let everything out and be completely honest with yourself about how you feel.

3. Journaling helps you find your why.

As you get to know yourself through your journal pages, you will start to find more clarity on what your life’s purpose and passions are. Writing your life gives you the opportunity to explore different events and scenarios and to find out what feels right to you.

The more you write, the more you will find yourself understand why you feel the way you do about certain things, and why you take the actions you do to deal with certain situations.

Journaling gives you a deeper understanding of why you do what you do, and what you should be doing with your life.

4. Journaling gives you a way to track your progress over time.

One of the things I noticed in my journal the other day was that I haven’t really moved very far from where I was a few years ago. I have grown in small ways, but not enough (at least to my mind) to make a big difference. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t been recording my progress over time.

Going back and reading over old journal entries gives you the chance to see patterns in your life. You will notice how you deal with certain situations, either positively or negatively, and can work to change the reactions that you don’t like.

Reading your old entries can also highlight the progress you have made, the goals you have achieved, and the ones that need changing in order to fit you as you are now.

Create a Ritual For Journaling

Getting to know yourself through the pages of your journal can be a daunting experience if you’ve never done it before. It means being honest and open with yourself. You can say anything you want in your journal knowing that it is a safe outlet that is yours and yours alone. This is your time to spend with yourself, and you might find it easier to write if you create a ritual around your journaling time.

My favorite time to journal is in the early morning when no one else is up yet. I get up and put the coffee on, and then settle in to write before I even think of doing anything else.

Journaling is best done when you have time where you can be alone and undisturbed. Turn off the computer, the cell phone, and anything else that might distract you from your thoughts.

Set the mood for self-reflection with candles, incense, or even some relaxing music.

Make yourself a cup of herbal tea, take out your special pen and your journal and prepare to write.

Above all, remember that this is your time to get to know yourself. There is no right or wrong way to do it. Whatever feels right to you in the moment is what you should do.

Do you journal? I’d love to hear your thoughts on journaling and creating rituals for it. Please leave your comments below:

(Photo Credit: Stock Xchng/Ynsle)

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1. Taking Care of Yourself: Keeping a Record of Your Journey

Starting a journal is a big part of taking care of yourself. There’s a reason that almost every personal development book and program out there tells you to write in a journal — it works. When you use a journal regularly, you are keeping a record of your journey. You will be able to see the continuity between past, present and future as well as have a record of all your successes (and your failures too).

If you think of your journal as a friend, then it is like having an unconditional friend who is always there, ready to listen. It doesn’t talk back, share your secrets or try to impose its agenda on you. Your journal is a place where you can share your dreams and goals, celebrate your successes and analyze your failures. You can write what makes you happy, and what makes you mad.

Journaling is one of the best ways I know to get clarity when something is bugging me or when I’m feeling unsure of what direction I should go in. When I write, it’s like giving my mind free rein to solve problems in the best way it knows how.

No doubt you’ve heard the saying “Get out of your own way” — well, that’s exactly what journaling lets you do. When you get things out of your head and on to a page (or a computer screen, although I find that doesn’t work nearly as well) it gives you a different perspective and lets you see things a lot more clearly than when you try to process them through thought alone. If we stick to the analogy of the journey, then writing out your problems and solutions to them turns your journal into a map of sorts… It gives you a much clearer sense of direction than if you tried to rely on your memory to get you where you needed to go.

Another thing that journaling does for you is really lets you get to know yourself. When you write out your goals and dreams, you discover what you are passionate about. You begin to see patterns — what excites you, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, anxious or angry. When you “dump” your feelings onto the page the patterns become much more clear and you get a very real sense of who you are and where you are at that moment in your life. These entries often become the signposts of our life, confirming we are on the right path, or just as often leading us down a completely new road.

Personally I’ve kept journals for years. I think my mother gave me my first diary when I was about ten years old, and I’ve kept some form of a journal ever since. That being said, not everyone is as enamored of the idea of writing in a journal. Part of the problem stems from the thinking that they don’t have anything to write about.

If you’re not sure whether journaling is for you, start with a gratitude journal. You don’t have to worry about what to write about every day because all you do is write down three to five things you are grateful for each day. It’s a great way to start and you’ll notice that gradually you begin to write more and more about your thoughts and feelings around what you are grateful for each day. Paying attention to, and acknowledging all the good things in your life is another important part of taking care of yourself, so combining the two makes sense.

Photo Credit: © Paul Simcock | Dreamstime.com

Related posts:

1. Taking Care of Yourself: Ten Tips For Taking Care of Your Body Mind and Spirit
2. Taking Care of Yourself: What Are You Waiting For?
3. Taking Care of Yourself: 5 Baby Steps to Putting Yourself First

So… it’s been awhile… again. I have to admit, for the longest time I never really knew what to do with this site. It has been a constant reminder of lost focus, if I ever really had any true focus to begin with.

As Tiffany Dow pointed out on her blog yesterday, for a long time now I’ve been a flitterer. Jumping from one thing to the next, and whether you call it shiny object syndrome or just plain old Adult ADD, I have it in spades. Or had it…

I’ve been reading a lot of self help and personal growth books lately. The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they tell you to a) find out what you’re passionate about, and b) focus.

One of my favorite questions has always been, “If money wasn’t an issue and you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do?”

I’ve never known how to answer that question because I’m so eclectic and even a little eccentric. My interests vary far and wide and into places that only my family and close friends know about because I’m not very open. I’m all about creating the life I want, and I do it without really thinking about what other people see when they see me but it’s hard to put all of that on a blog because everyone says you have to focus on one thing, brand yourself, become a “go to” person and frankly… while I understand that … it drives me nuts. Because I’m not just one thing … it’s a combination of all those things that makes me who and what I am.

If life is about creating yourself, then no one but you should have the final say in how that creation looks. (Unless, of course, your creation is on the highly illegal or immoral side.)

One thing I do know for sure is that in my creation, the times when I feel the best about myself and my life are the times when I have been posting on this blog. Whether words or pictures, creating the blog post has become an art form for me (and I suspect for many others as well).
So it should be that the opposite is true also — if I write and post, I will feel even better.

I think it’s very fitting that I’m re-starting this blog as part of my very first 10k Writer’s Day. Because if there’s one thing I am sure about in my life, it’s that I was meant to be a writer.

All my life I’ve written — stories, essays, poetry, journals, songs. About the only thing I haven’t tried to write at least once is a play or a screenplay. But when it comes to writing a personal blog, it’s hard to put myself out there.

So here I am again, starting over at fifty — definitely not what I thought I’d be doing at this point in my life but I’m excited about the possibilities. And at least now I know the answer to the question.

So if you asked me again,”If money wasn’t an issue and you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do?”

I would answer you, emphatically and enthusiastically, “I would write!”

And so the journey begins. Where will I go? Who will I meet? What stories will I tell? Only the wind knows for sure, but it’s going to be an exciting ride. And I will write about it all.

Let the journey begin!

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1. I Did Write!

It’s that time of year again…. time for me to step beyond the boundaries of “must research and write only the facts” and pretend that I actually have an imagination, and that I know what to do with it. :) Yes, it’s day one of National Novel Writing Month, and I am determined to write my 50,000 words of semi-coherent characters and conversation over the next 30 days. Who knows… at the end of it I may even have something that doesn’t beg to be deleted on December 1st.

I’m not sure why I do this to myself every year. I’m not a fiction writer, and I know it. Stick the word “challenge” in front of me, and I’m there even if I have no hope in hell of ever completing it. But I do, and I love it. It’s something I do just for me, that gives me pleasure (along with the fits of temper when things don’t flow just right) and stretches my creativity way beyond the comfort zone I’m used to.

And so the insanity begins again… balancing the need to write fiction and non-fiction together on the same day, every day. The goal is 2000 words of fiction and 8000 of non-fiction, ie. work (just so no one thinks I’m slackin’ off on the job here). Have I mentioned lately that I’m the queen of unreasonable goals? :)

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1. And on Day 2
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There’s a lot to be said for recycling beyond the environmental and decluttering benefits. You can learn a lot about yourself too in what you’ve collected over the years.

Last week started out great and I had big plans to get a ton of writing done, and a handful of websites updated. And then things started happening that I needed to pay attention to. Looking back now, it seems that all of it was headed toward one goal … to teach me a lesson about myself.

The first thing that got me taking notice was that my son’s computer finally quit on him. It wasn’t unexpected, but the timing couldn’t have been worse for him since he couldn’t afford to replace it right away. So rather than leave him without, I decided to clean off my laptop and give that to him. Going through all my files, seeing what I’d written over the past few years, and especially what I’d bought in terms of ebooks and courses was a real eye-opener.

Self-realization #1 – I am officially a digital packrat … There’s stuff here that I forgot I’d bought, never read, and a lot that I bought with the intention of using it and never took action. My mind has been going a mile a minute lately with ideas for articles and blog posts, ebooks and videos and all kinds of other good stuff I can create.

While I was burning all the files off the laptop onto DVDs for storage, I decided to start going through some stored boxes of paper files and see what could be taken to the recycling centre. And this is where self-realization #2 really got my attention.

It’s no secret that I have self-confidence issues. But every once in awhile I get the tar kicked out of me by the Universe, and I’m reminded that this wasn’t always the case and that I do have talents and abilities that are worth sharing.

In the bottom of one box I came across some tear out copies of book reviews that I’d had published when I was an undergrad. I started reading and was struck by the realization that I’m a pretty decent writer when I want to be.

In another box, I found an envelope full of old check stubs and bank statements from when I first started this internet marketing gig way back in 1998. They were a good reminder that I was a pretty decent affiliate marketer and newsletter publisher at one time as well. I’d totally forgotten about those days in the wake of the lean years. I’d let my lack of self confidence convince me that I didn’t have anything to offer that could compete with the “gurus”.

Seeing the evidence that yes, I did know what I was doing at least once in my life gave me the motivation I needed to pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again. (I think there’s a song about that somewhere!) I’ve been agonizing over how I was going to make my writing habit pay for itself, and it seems that I’ve been worried for nothing. I did it once before, and I can certainly do it again… only better this time. :)

And to do that, I’ve decided to set myself a goal of writing 5000 words a day. Between journalling, blogging, and all the article and report-writing that I do on a daily basis I figure I must be pretty close to that now. I just haven’t had the confidence to post a lot of what I write because I’ve always worried about whether people will like it or not. I still haven’t figured out where and how much I’ll post every day, but I’ll definitely post the word count here at the end of the day.

There’s one more bonus that came out of giving my laptop away…. I now have an electronics-free writing space where I can scribble to my heart’s content.

All in all, despite the stress of the situation, it’s been a good week. :)

Photo Credit: Septober

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The theme for Thursday’s Photo Challenge is “writing” — something I have done entirely too little of lately. :) But that’s about to change. I started writing out my plan for 2010 last night, and to be able to achieve all the goals I’ve set, I’m pretty much gonna have to write my little fingers off for the next year or win the lottery. And since I don’t play the lottery, I’ll give ya one guess what it’s gonna be. :)

So this is my writing area… It’s pretty bland looking right now, but I’m hoping to convince my son to put a fresh coat of paint on it over his Christmas break.

But as far as the writing goes today, you can see by the blank page just how much I’ve got done so far this morning. :)

I guess that’s a pretty good hint that I should probably go and get some work done!

Have an awesome day!

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So, the idea behind the Monday outlook post was to set myself up for a more productive week. Now that the week is over, I can report my results to you…

I failed.
Miserably.
Brutal would be an understatement.

Out of the eight challenges I set for myself, I met two and a half:

1. There is new content on the Thoughts of Christmas blog. (challenge #3)
2. I went wandering down one of the river paths and took some new photos. (challenge #8)
3. There is new content on The Acorn Stash blog, and on this blog. (challenge #6 – considered only half done because there are still more blogs that need new content.)

It’s an improvement over last week since I only completed two challenges last week. But it’s still brutal.

Am I embarrassed? You betcha. But more than that, I’m seriously ticked off at myself. Mostly because I have no excuse other than that I was totally, utterly, and completely unmotivated to write. And so I didn’t.

It’s not even like I can say I had a ton of other stuff to do because I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even step foot outside the house all week until I went out Friday morning to take pictures and get groceries.

If I’m really honest with myself, I think I have to say that I’ve lost my passion for internet marketing, at least the way I’ve been doing it for the past several years. The whole keyword and market research thing has left me thinking that there has to be something more. I think for awhile I’d much rather write on the topics that interest me and make me happy, and hope that they interest you and make you happy too. I realize that I won’t be able to please everyone, and quite frankly, I’m okay with that.

And now on a more positive note…

I had no problems being motivated to train this week. With some great results, I might add! After just one week of weight training and cleaner eating, I managed a 4 percent reduction in body fat. So the week wasn’t a complete loss. :)

And I do plan to do better on both the challenge and content creation fronts this week. I’ll post my plans for the week as soon as I have them figured out, so stay tuned.

And have a wonderful week!

Here’s a summary of this week’s content:

Some Thoughts of Christmas Traditions
Christmas Shopping Survival Tips

New Wallpapers For You

Monday Morning Outlook
Order and Chaos Side by Side

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I read a lot of fiction … probably more than is good for me at times. :) And in each novel I read I usually find at least one passage that makes me think, gives me an aha! moment, or otherwise fits one more little piece of the puzzle that is me into its proper place.

But never, unless it was totally and absolutely required for coursework (and none of that since high school) have I ever attempted to write fiction. Until now.

For whatever reason has possessed me (or maybe left me would be more apt), I’ve just signed up to do NaNoWriMo for this year.

Yep, me who has never written so much as a short story in the last 30 years is going to attempt to write a novel in a month! Definitely outside my comfort zone, I’d say.

Do I have any idea what I’m gonna write? Nope. Not a clue.

Will I even get close to finishing? Who knows. I hope so.

But regardless of whether or not I’m successful — and I’m certainly going to do everything I can to ensure my success — I’m pretty sure that I’ll be able to put a few more pieces of my puzzle back together by the time the month is over.

For now I’m going to dig out my battered copy of Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path and start getting myself ready the challenge. :)

Have a great day!

If you’re doing NaNoWriMo this year, leave me a note in the comments.

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I came across an interesting post from Brian Kim this morning. He was talking about setting expectations, and since I’m always being accused of setting unreasonable ones, I just had to stop and read it.

A couple of things in the article really got my attention. First, he divides the responses to setting expectations into three types. I’m definitely a “type B” — the person who sets really high expectations for themselves, then crashes and burns when the reality sets in that they’ll never be met.

The second thing that really got me thinking was this line: “You take one action and EXPECT NOTHING.”

That’s such an outlandish way of thinking for someone like me, who in addition to setting unreasonable expectations also feels the need to micromanage the whole plan down to the tiniest of details. Can you say self-sabotaging control freak with a super-sized case of overwhelm? That would be me. :)

The more I think about it, the more I definitely like the idea of taking one action and seeing what comes of it. Especially when I’m trying to tell myself that I can write an extreme amount of content in a short amount of time. (At the risk of truly embarrassing myself, you can see the last, most unreasonable of my goals lists on The Introverted Marketer’s blog.)

And while I can admit now that it was a nice idea to think I could accomplish all of that, the truth of the matter is I had no real idea when I made that list whether I’d even get a quarter of it done in the three months I gave myself.

What Kim says makes sense to me now (a classic case of hindsight being 20/20):

“…you shouldn’t expect anything IN THE BEGINNING, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NOTHING to base those expectations on.”

He’s right. I can say with complete emotional detachment now that my content writing experiment was an unqualified failure. I had no systems in place, no real concrete plan of action other than to get up and write my little fingers off every day.

Now that I’ve pretty much squandered three months on an impossible task — so impossible, in fact, that I haven’t written hardly anything in those three months — it’s time to try something different.

The first thing I have decided on is that I will not set any content goals whatsoever for the next few weeks until I see what I can reasonably accomplish in a day. Instead of saying I’m going to write 100 articles in a month, this time I’m saying that I will devote 4 hours a day to content creation, and see how much I can complete in those 4 hours. If I do this for the next two weeks I will have a better idea, when crafting my plan for the next three months, of what I can reasonable hope to get done.

The bonus of doing it this way is that at least by focusing for the next two weeks on seeing what I can without expectations, I will have made a bit of a dent in that huge list despite myself.

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… or at least let my fingers do the talkin’ without talkin’ to the brain first. :)

Wondering what I’m yammering about?

I’ve been working at getting more productive, and creating more quality content than a post or article every few days. My writing lacks consistency and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s my own dang fault.

So yesterday on twitter, someone said to post your goal for the week. And feeling totally exhausted and feeling guilty for it, my fingers (with no input from the brain, I swear!) typed in real quick … My goal this week is to write 50 original pieces of content.

When I actually thought about it after, I realized it’s not that bad. That’s only 10 posts and articles a day for the next 5 days. Which means I could, theoretically, take Sunday off. And it’s totally doable … except that I’ve only been able to manage one a day (and sometimes not even that) for the past couple of weeks. The huge list I posted for the next three months is in serious jeopardy of not getting done unless I can pick up speed here.

If I had thought before I wrote, I would’ve said I would commit to getting done one article a day. But where’s the fun in that? One a day is the very least I should be doing, and so that’s no stretch at all. I love to challenge myself and setting the bar really high is the only way I know how to do that.

Will I make it? Who knows, but I’m certainly going to work my butt off at it. I opened my mouth, and I’m not backing down now :)

(And yes … this counts as 1 of 50, and the official start of my writing week! )

What do you think? Did I bite off more than I can chew this week?

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