Journaling Course: Day 1

[Vanessa Keranovic, Mindfulness Coach] Welcome to this course: Journaling for Beginners. In the next four days, I will talk a lot about journaling: different styles of journaling, why, when, and how you should get started. After the four days are finished, there will be a meditation for gratitude and positive affirmations, "I am..." statements. This meditation is here to inspire you to continue with your journaling journey. After the meditation, there will be various journal prompts for you to try out. Some of them, we'll do during the video. And some of them, you'll get to jot down in your journal and try out later. But before all of that, let's just talk a little about journaling. So if the last time that you journaled was as a kid, you probably remember the dear-me diary entries. Now, this is just one type of journaling that you can try. I will talk about four main categories of journaling there is. Today, I will mention them. And in the next three days, we'll go more in-depth into each of those categories. So the four categories of journaling we will go over. First one, journaling for self-improvement and personal growth. This is your setting goals and setting intentions, visioning your future self. What does your best future self look like? Being more clear in your dreams and hopes, so you can set certain action steps in order to achieve those dreams and hopes. The second style of journaling is reflection journaling. Now, as the name says, in reflection journaling, we reflect on either best events in our life in order to learn something from them and do better in the future. We reflect on the positive aspects of our life to cultivate more gratitude, more joy, more positive emotions in ourselves. We also reflect or write out whatever is going on in our mind, whatever past experience we're trying to work through in order to find closure and deal with ruminating thoughts. Next style of journaling is journaling for organization and tracking progress. Now, this is your to-do list, your habit trackers, your time blocking, and anything about journaling that has to do with organization or tracking any kind of progress, being personal or professional. The purpose of this type of journaling is to create more structure in your life so you can focus on what truly matters. So not spending your mental energy on, when are you going to exercise? When are you going to meditate? And so on, but to spend it on actually meditating and actually exercising. Once we set our intentions and set our goals through journaling for personal growth and self-improvement, we then use journaling for organization and tracking progress to help us actually achieve those goals. And the last style of journaling we'll be covering is journaling to deepen self-awareness and reconnect the mind, body, and soul; or journaling for spirituality. The purpose of this type of journaling is to uncover unconscious thoughts or beliefs we might have. It uncovers a whole 'nother layer that is within us. It helps us understand who we truly are and what do we truly want. It's actually the first step before you work through journaling for self-improvement, personal growth, you first have to understand who you are and what are your true desires, not the ones you think they might be, but the ones that truly are. Examples of this type of journaling is stream of consciousness journaling or using positive affirmations in order to deepen your connection with yourself. In the last part of this course, the journal prompts we will do during the video will actually be these type of prompts in order to dig deeper into ourselves and understand ourselves a bit better. And these are the four main styles that we'll go more in-depth in the next three days. But remember, it's all about listening to yourself. You'll maybe try all four styles or maybe you won't even try one of them. But, at the end, you will find what works for you the best, and you will stick with that. So maybe there will be just one type of journaling, and that's perfectly fine. Maybe you'll do a bit of all of them, or maybe two of them, or three. It's really about listening to yourself, listening to what do you need right now, and how can journaling support that? And just to get you a bit more motivated around journaling, some of the benefits of regular journaling are more clarity on your intentions and your goals, your big picture plans, and, where do you see yourself in the future? We often get caught up in the day-to-day activities and forget about the big picture stuff. So journaling helps us refocus day in and day out where we want our attention to go. Journaling also offers us an outlet for the busy mind, a way to organize our ruminating thoughts, worries, anxieties. It's a great way to learn from our past experiences in order to not always respond from the past, but to learn something from that and to respond from our current selves. And lastly, journaling can be a beautiful spiritual practice you can offer yourself. It's a great way to deepen your self-awareness, get to know yourself better, and reconnect back with your essence, who you truly are, what your true wishes and desires are, and how can you achieve them so that those achievements are aligned with your values. The way I like to think about journaling is that journaling is a link between the subconscious and the conscious mind in a sense that sometimes, we are not even aware of what our limiting beliefs are, or ideas of who we are, or ideas of what do we wish that our future looks like? And journaling helps uncover that and transfers those ideas, thoughts, beliefs into the conscious mind where we actually have a choice, what are we going to do with that? Journaling is a link between our dreams and our action steps. Once we uncover what our dreams are, journaling helps us transfer those dreams, intentions, ideas into action steps, to-do lists, and when are we going to do each step? Journaling offers us a way to see beyond our habitual patterns, our limiting beliefs, and to see into our very essence and who we are. So in the next three days, we'll go over the various styles of journaling. So we can find which ones align with you the best, at the end of which there will be a meditation just to round it all up into a perfect bubble, and after that, journaling prompts to get you started. See you tomorrow.