Journal your way to success

Your Journal an Effective Tool for Personal Development

A journal is an effective tool to use in your everyday life. It can be used as both a diary to record events in your life, and as a personal development tool. It is a great place to record events in your life and your reaction to those events, kind of like the cause and effect or the actions and reactions in your life. Your emotions are a very powerful memory tool. By writing about how you felt about an event, it helps you to recall the true experience of what happened at a later time.

Your journal will also help you work through some of the negative emotions that you may be feeling. The simple act of actually acknowledging how you feel and writing about it is the first step. Once you know how you feel, you can work at figuring out why, or what happened to make you feel that way. Sometimes, we cannot identify an exact event that caused the feeling, but journaling effectively allows us to at least figure out when the negative feelings started. Now you are ready to identify how you want to feel, and do what you need to do to create that positive feeling in your life.

In order to fully benefit from your journal it is necessary to go back over it and study your progress. If you experience a similar difficult situation or feeling, you can look back and read about how you worked through it before. Your journal then becomes a chart of your personal growth, which gives you cause for celebration. After all, what is the point of making mistakes if you are not going to learn from them?

If you are new to journaling you may find it awkward at first, and you might not know what to write about. The trick is to just write anything. You can even write about the fact that you don’t have anything to write about. Over time your thoughts and feelings will begin to flow freely onto the paper, just keep with it by making it part of your day to day routine. There are no rules or guidelines stating that your daily journaling has to be a certain length, or that it even has to make any sense. Remember, it is for your eyes only, so just write about whatever comes to mind.

Over time your journal can become a useful tool in your personal development. If you use it to record what has happened, and your feelings around the event, you will find that the emotion you put into it helps to keep your memories alive. You can work through your negative emotions much easier by recording them, and their cause. It is an incredible way to chart your personal progress, and learn from the journey. A life worth living is a life worth writing about.