Before I started journaling about 15 years ago, I thought of it as keeping a diary. My view of journaling was that it was a place for stream-of-conscious writing about the things and feelings you didn’t want anyone else to see.
And there is value in processing your emotions that way. But over the years, I’ve discovered that journaling can be so much more than that.
Especially if you design your journaling workflow intentionally to optimize for personal growth.
The trick is to find the balance between the things that help you now and the things that will help you in the future.
3 Pillars of Journaling for Personal Growth
There are lots of different workflows you can use when journaling for personal growth, but they all have a few things in common.
If you want your journaling habit to stand the test of time, it needs to have a couple of specific things in place.
I call these The 3 Pillars of Personal Journaling.
Like a three-legged stool, these pillars support an effective daily journaling habit. Remove one of the legs, and the stool can’t stand. Remove one of the pillars, and the system falls apart.
These are critical if you want your journaling habit to stick.
The first pillar of journaling for personal growth is gratitude. It’s hard to overstate the importance of gratitude. It’s easy to get obsessed with the things that aren’t working, but learning to find the silver lining can have a significant impact on our happiness and general well-being.
What’s fascinating about gratitude to me is the fact that it is physically impossible to feel anger or fear when you’re expressing gratitude. Sounds crazy, but it’s true! The next time you are in a negative mindset and upset about things that may be going wrong, try verbalizing gratitude for the things that are going right and watch all the anger and resentment melt away.
Gratitude is crazy powerful, which is why it’s important to capture something that you’re grateful for every day.
It doesn’t have to be something huge. It could be a conversation with a friend, the beautiful weather that lets you get outside, or how good you feel after a long run. The more specific you are when expressing gratitude, the better.
The second pillar of journaling for personal growth is reflection. This is where we process what has happened throughout the day so that we can turn the page and start fresh tomorrow. Reflecting on what happened gives your brain permission to let go of things by transferring the record of what happened into your journal.
I do this in a couple of ways:
- I use a journaling practice called Daily Questions where I answer some prompts about the intentions that I set for the day, and
- I capture journal entries after significant events so that I have a record of them that I can review at a later time.
As the saying goes, “those who keep a journal get to live life twice.” For me, this is where the real insights come. By looking at things after I’ve had some time and space, I tend to see things a bit more clearly. This then drives a lot of the retrospective questions I answer in my Personal Retreat (about what I should start/stop/keep doing).
The third pillar of journaling for personal growth is consistency. I believe the real value of daily journaling comes after you’ve done it for a while. Just like going to the gym, you won’t see results the next day or even the next week. But over time, you’ll find the regular practice of journaling does a couple of things:
- It produces compound results as you consistently take action (you’ll start to get more clarity and feel more centered), and
- It gives you enough data to see trends so that you can make adjustments to your daily routines where necessary (i.e. your quarterly Personal Retreat.)
The longer you stick with a daily journaling habit, the more valuable it becomes. The value of journaling compounds with each new entry you make.
Benefits of Journaling for Personal Growth
By practicing the three pillars of journaling for personal growth, you can:
- Shift out of negative thinking about your situation (live in The Gain instead of The Gap)
- Dismiss the things that are outside of your control so you can focus on the things that really matter
- Create a record of your accomplishments and victories that you can use to measure your progress
But when you’re crafting your own journaling workflow, make sure that you include all three pillars! Without all three, your journaling habit will lack the support it needs to stand the test of time, and you’ll give up on it before it can provide you any real benefit.
